The Challenge of Strategy in Education

Strategy and Growth

Education for the 21st century is a medium-sized multi-academy trust of eight schools based in London and the Southeast with over 6000 pupils and 800 staff. The trust has been on a journey of transformation over the last three years, following a financial notice to improve in 2019

I was lucky enough to listen to the CST Professional Community presentation on strategic growth recently. The timing for us was interesting as it comes at a point where we are pulling together the work that we have done in developing strategy for the next three years.

The session, delivered by Lena Koolman, Partner at McKinsey & Company focussed on growth

My thoughts on strategy here are not intended to be a template of excellence. We have made plenty of mistakes along the way, continue to do so, and they are purely my reflections; emerging from an initial discussion with our Chair James Toop, and then reflecting on what we did and how we changed the way we approach strategic planning in our trust.

The Challenge of Strategy in Education

As I see it, and for all sorts of reasons, strategy in schools has typically been characterised by being.

• Based on legacy models of school improvement planning
• Overlong and rarely connecting effectively with stakeholders.
• Taking a narrow approach to growth

Based on legacy models of school improvement planning in education

There are three problems with the legacy models of improvement planning.

1.      They may have lofty mission statements, but the objectives and goals don’t always meet the mission.

2.      They are often incremental and roll over from one year to the next, but do not step back and focus on the bigger, longer-term picture.

3.      School strategy is often done in the last few weeks of term in a rush by a small group of leadership team and not shared widely with buy in.

This is captured well by Luke Sparks CEO (Chief Executive Officer) at Dixons as he reflects on the weaknesses of legacy models of strategy in education[i].

In fact, the arrival of the cycle of strategic planning and self-review in any given calendar year is often met with sighs of despair. Improvement often becomes a singular one-off event rather than a continuous cycle of improvement.

Overlong and rarely connecting effectively with stakeholders.

Often, because these plans are a bureaucratic exercise and because of the pressure of time, schools, and MATS (Multi Academy Trusts), fail to consult meaningfully with stakeholders. Rarely do we seek to understand the context in which we are working, or take the time to ask businesses, parents, communities, and partners how well they think we are doing and what we could be doing better. Instead, fewer, and fewer people became involved because of the pressures of time and the results are often lengthy plans, written for trustees, executives, and Ofsted. How we engage stakeholders in the strategy of our MATs and schools is crucial. In education we are good at talking ‘at’ our stakeholders. How often do we really listen to what they have to say?

Taking a narrow approach to growth

Over the last ten years I have become just as concerned with the challenge of growth in small and medium sized MATs and how this relates to strategy. I do not know if I am alone in feeling a nagging sense of guilt that the growth strategy we had produced felt like a bolt on. It was carefully thought through in terms of region, resources, and timing. However, for growth it looked externally. For MATS of a small to medium size, growth may often feel outside of our control. These kinds of plans further consolidate this. How can we seek to take control of growth and make it an integral part of our strategy?

The Opportunity

The conversation that the Chair of our Trustees and I had, at the beginning of this year, was about how we might improve the process and our strategic approach.  

Reviewing our approach to strategy

I had already been influenced by the work that Dixons had done on strategy and bold moves[ii]. It had long been the case that schools, MATs and businesses had rolled over the strategies from previous years, peanut buttering [iii]resources and spreading them too thinly. [iv]Mckinsey argues that big strategic moves correlate with success and those five biggest moves are;

• Resource allocation
• Programmatic mergers
• Capital expenditures
• Productivity improvement
• Differentiation improvements

Similarly, Lena Koolman provided with a 10 timeless tests of strategy model to review our strategy at the recent CST professional community[v]. Both provide an important and different lense through which to consider our work

What’s interesting about these approaches is that growth becomes an integral part of the long-term strategy. It required a different approach from us and so we.

1. stepped back and thought about the longer term.
2. identified the key challenges facing our young people and trust and used that to inform our priorities.
3. identified 3 key priorities and some bold moves and investments opportunities.
4. integrated growth into the overall strategy so that it focussed on growing impact – developing as much on improving the quality of what we do now as how much we grow and our wider influence in the system.
5. ensured that we consulted widely with as many stakeholders as possible.
6. Made sure the strategy was communicated widely.
7. circled back and reviewed our work.

We thought carefully about the relationship of the strategy to our four critical questions: our mission and values. Importantly, we worked on several versions to simplify what we were doing at every stage. We started with our vision, we reflected on our biggest challenges. We considered our greatest strengths and then we set about defining our priorities.

Early in the process two trustees had come forward to work with me on the process. This expertise and challenge were invaluable. The CEO needs to drive that strategy. I am lucky enough to have trustees who helped to ensure that happened while offering support.  Mckinsey talks about the role of the CEO–that the company’s biggest moves-account for 45% of a company’s performance. The role of the CEO is essential, they need to make the final call on the overall vision and set the strategic moves. [vi]

Our Solution

We emerged with a strategy built around our three biggest challenges of

• social mobility
• mental health and resilience
• recruitment and retention

Our three priorities were based on these on these challenges, and they included big moves like organisation wide instructional coaching and a ‘Cradle to Career’ programme.

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Develop partnerships that support you in delivery  

Part of the work that we did this year in preparing and designing the new strategy was also about trying to build up a base of delivery partners to ensure that it had the biggest impact.  In between the various stakeholder events we worked on developing three to four key delivery partners. In some cases, these are companies, and, in some cases, they are charities However, whether it is the Cradle to Career programme with Reach foundation or Steplab’s instructional coaching programme they are delivery partners that are central to helping us meet the challenge of delivery. As a medium sized MAT these partners are crucial.

Once again, we are at the beginning of this journey. Partnerships with charities, health services and businesses are harder to make. However, if we are to deliver on a vision with civic duty at its heart then it is essential that we do form meaningful partnerships, and this is core to delivery.

Conclusions

Reflecting on the process and the voices that we heard in the CST professional community recently, our approach this year benefited from

• Seeing the process as a continuous cycle of review and planning
• Investigation challenges and context carefully
• Designing a strategy that is easily understood and easy to communicate
• Involving partners and stakeholders throughout the process
• Seeing growth as an integral overall part of our strategy
• Making bigger moves and committing more resources to deliver them

We are by no means at the end of our journey, but it feels like our first few steps have been taken on firmer ground

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[i] [i] Strategic planning – Live event – Dixons Insight (dixonsos.com)

[ii] How to make the bold strategy moves that matter (mckinsey.com)

[iii] Why your strategy needs bold moves, not just bold forecasts (mckinsey.com)

[iv] ‘Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick’  Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit

[v] Ten ways to test your strategy is working – Leadership Review

[vi] Mindsets and practices of excellent CEOS. Caroline Dewar, Martin Hirt, Scott Keller