Is a strategic plan necessary if a school is to be transformed?
The Australian Education Research Organization (AERO) has released in four parts its evidence-based guide to strategic planning in schools (available on the AERO website). AERO worked with Learning First to develop the guide. A review of literature accompanied it (Chiong & Pearson, 2023). AERO notes on its website that “These guides were developed with input from school leaders, school system and sector officials, a principal peak body and a school strategic planning expert.”
This paper provides a summary of key features of the AERO guide; identifies errors in the review of literature; highlights the need for agility in strategic planning; and illustrates how studies of transformation demonstrate the importance of a broader view of strategic planning than described in the guide, referring in particular to leadership and context. I conclude that the question posed in the title of this paper should be answered in the affirmative.
Review of literature
The review of literature contains two helpful definitions/descriptions, each of which suggest that the focus of a strategic plan is school improvement:
School strategic plans refer to multi-year and annual plans produced through regular school review cycles. These plans communicate a school’s intentions for improvement and are often created in consultation with the school community and, where relevant, system‑level staff who work directly with the school in a support role. Following their creation, school strategic plans can then be shared with key stakeholders (such as students’ parents or carers).
An effective school strategic plan (or school improvement plan or agenda) is a critical part of school improvement. School strategic plans refer to multi-year and annual plans produced through regular school review cycles.
The template for strategic planning in the guide is in five parts:
- Compelling mission and vision statements
- Specific, sharp, and select goals, approaches and practices
- Content of goals, approaches and practices that is aligned with the evidence base
- Defined processes for monitoring and evaluation
- Coherence within and across documents
Of 30 references in the review, four are from Australia, with three from New South Wales where, along with most other references, the focus is on school improvement, and one is from the Grattan Institute, which reports findings of a survey of the working conditions of teachers in Australia. For research on schools, there is reference to a 2011 study in Clark County, Nevada (Los Vegas) and a 2022 study of developments in Portugal.
The authors wrote a short article for ACEL’s Australian Educational Leader (Pearson & Chiong, 2023) drawing from their review of literature. Their only reference to research on strategic planning in school settings was to the aforementioned studies in Los Vegas and Portugal and the first author’s experience as an assistant principal in one school in Melbourne. They acknowledged that they drew on conversations with school leaders in AERO’s work on school improvement. They reproduced the five-part template.
The AERO guide is indeed a framework for school improvement. This is evident in the titles: 1. Setting goals and targets for student learning, 2. Prioritising approach to achieve each goal, 3. Selecting practices to deliver improvement, 4. Evaluation for continuous improvement. The guide connects strategic planning to two items in the Australian Professional Standard for Principals: Leading improvement, innovation and change and Leading the management of the school.
I am concerned about the reference in the review to a paper (Mintzberg, 1994) by a critic of strategic planning. The list of references indicates that the title of that paper is “The fall and rise of school strategic planning.” However the paper was not concerned with developments in schools, indeed, school was not in the title. This error is compounded in the text where the authors state that Mintzberg “argues that school strategic plans simplify reality and form a tick-box exercise that hinders true innovation.” There is no such statement in the paper. I drew the attention of the CEO of AERO to these errors.
Mintzberg suggested that the label “strategic planning” should be dropped.
While certainly not dead, strategic planning has long since fallen from its pedestal. But even now, few people understand the reason: strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers. And this confusion lies at the heart of the issue: the most successful strategies are visions, not plans. Strategic planning, as it has been practised, has really been strategic programming, the articulation and elaboration of strategies, or visions, that already exist. (Mintzberg, 1994)
Mintzberg referred to programming but it is in fact planning, if planning is determining what is to be done, how it is to be done, who is to do it, and with what resources, along with a specification of how success in implementing the plan is to be assessed.
The review cited recent studies that reported an association between strategic planning and organisational performance in public and private sectors and in US and non-US settings. These well-researched studies suggest that strategic planning, variously conducted, is practised widely so, in this respect, Mintzberg’s critique has not held up. He considered strategic thinking to be essential to the formation of strategy, a position that has held up. The review does not deal with strategic thinking and the guide does not illustrate how good leaders practise it.
Mintzberg (1995) described strategic thinking as “seeing.” I paraphrased his description in the approach I took in Caldwell (2023):
[The process of strategic thinking] involves describing what has occurred in the past (seeing behind); reviewing what policymakers have designed and implemented (seeing above); exploring the impact of policies at the level where intended outcomes were or were not achieved, or how they were experienced (seeing below); noting what other countries or systems are doing or have achieved (seeing beyond); and identifying how favourable outcomes have been sustained, or proposing how this may be done (seeing it through). (p. v)
Mission and vision
Critically important is the foundation of strategy in the mission and vision of the school and this is made clear in the AERO template. Determining these and their underpinning values should not start when a decision is made to construct a strategic plan – they should already be in place. The mission should be known, understood and embraced when the school was established or when transformation or reimagination is intended.
AERO pairs the concepts of mission and vision, defining the former but giving little attention to the latter. A school can have an enduring mission, but vision is important – a mental image manifested in various ways of what the school will or should be like some time in the future. The strategic plan specifies the strategies that will help the school realise the vision, consistent with its mission. Different visions may be articulated at different points in time or for different functions even though the mission may not change. These may be an outcome of the successful implementation of strategies in its strategic plan.
Incorporating an agile approach
A strategic plan can be a static document that may not be sensitive to changes in the context of the school. David Loader and I called for “strategic navigation” in a more agile approach to determining strategy that calls for responsiveness, adaptability and sustainability:
For the school’s leaders and their colleagues it is the very core of their daily work, and the essential lens through which they evaluate and prioritise … what schools need is a community of leaders who understand the social and political trends, who share a desire to deliver an agreed possible future and who are therefore able to be responsive and innovative within a strategic framework. The goal of strategic navigation is to engage the whole community, including those partnering with the school, in a continuous ongoing process that will address complexity and manage uncertainty. (Caldwell & Loader, 2009, p. 48)
Strategic navigation is one manifestation of strategic thinking in action. Examples of the need for navigation include the emergence of data that show the school falling far short of intended levels of achievement; the availability of new technologies that have the potential to lighten the work of teachers, or provide new opportunities to enrich the learning of students; the loss of or unexpected availability of new sources of funds; or a new system-wide expectation in respect to the curriculum.
Illustrations of strategy in transforming a school
An update on this book’s website was titled “A classic case of reimagining a secondary school.” The case is Albert Park College (APC) in Melbourne, opened in 2010, now with over 1,500 students on five sites, and Australia’s School of the Year in 2021. It replaced a failed school of the same name that was bulldozed. These illustrate the importance of mission, vision and values.
The school has strategic plans for three-year periods that are consistent with the AERO template but are more complex than illustrated in the four-part guide. They describe how APC has/will address the range of learning outcomes that are consistent with its mission and vision, for example, acquiring five sites that deal in different ways with how a range of curriculum priorities have/will be delivered. How the school has done this is described in From the ground up (Cook, 2023) written by foundation principal Steven Cook. Cook explained the role of the principal and other leaders in the school’s community. Leadership is not considered in the AERO guide, nor are differences in scale and scope.
Other examples of the relationship between strategy and mission and vision are contained in the case studies in Caldwell (2023, pp 143-153), each of which involved transformation or reimagination. For example, Templestowe College (pp 145-146) was transformed from a failing secondary school through the adoption of a new sense of mission and a vision of what it would be like if that mission were honoured in policy and practice. The role of the principal and other leaders is explained by transforming principal Peter Hutton in Turning around a troubled school (Hutton, 2022). The school’s current website contains the following:
Our new strategic plan sees the school looking to build on our strengths, identifying what an empowered learner is and using this as a framework, as well as focusing in on new assessment measures that go beyond the narrow measures of test scores and grades. These are our Expanded Measures of Success.
The AERO guide deals with “measures of success” in its template. Aspects are well-known in many schools and school systems in Australia. For example, there is reference to targets that are SMART, that is, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely. A “traffic light” approach in reporting progress is described and illustrated: green, amber, red. As recognised by AERO in its publications, some system-generated documents describe well how school improvement can be achieved, for example, the Framework for Improving Student Outcomes (FISO) in Victoria.
The importance of context
The guide provides illustrations that are targeted almost exclusively on measures of student achievement. It is correct to expect that strategic plans have such a focus in honouring a school’s mission and vision. These plans should also deal with matters that contribute to or enable this goal; as evidenced in approaches in successful schools in different contexts. There are, for example different approaches in large schools in urban contexts that have been turned around, successful small primary schools in regional settings, and schools that are now improving the achievement of Indigenous students in remote settings. Good leaders and others in a school’s community engage in strategic thinking in formulating strategy, drawing on evidence that AERO is assembling so well.
While I conclude that strategic planning is necessary for transformation, I hope that AERO will correct the errors in the review of literature and illustrate in the four-part guide a broader view of the process in different contexts and for different functions, highlighting the importance of strategic thinking and the role of leaders.
References
Caldwell, B.J. (2023). Reimagining schools and school systems. Victoria, BC: Tellwell.
Caldwell B.J. & Loader D.N. (2009). Our school, our future. Book and workshop package. Melbourne: Education Services Australia.
Chiong, C. & Pearson, E. (2023). The features of an effective school strategic plan: Literature review. Australian Education Research Organisation. https://www.edresearch.edu.au/resources/features-effective-school-strategic-plan-literature-review
Cook. S. (2023). From the ground up. Melbourne: Black Inc.
Hutton, P. (2022). Turning around a troubled school. Published by Peter Hutton.
Mintzberg, H. (1995). The rise and fall of strategic planning. New York: Free Press.
Mintzberg, H. (1994).The fall and rise of strategic planning. Harvard Business Review. January-February.
Pearson, E. & Chiong, C. Strategic plans shape the future. Australian Educational Leader. Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 52-53.