The school development plan: a few pages, followed all year

This post is for the principal and the school's development team, when the plan is due to be written, or when it has been written but nobody opens it after it is handed in. (In the US it is usually called a school improvement plan.) The method here does not replace your ministry's or your district's form: if you have an official form, fill it in, and use this post for the thinking before you write and the follow-up after.

In Jordan, the name appears as «الخطة التطويرية والإجرائية للمدرسة», the school's development and procedural plan, in a circular on the website of the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development about a workshop on preparing this plan, issued by the Bani Kinana education directorate in April 2019. We will not describe any official form from memory; ask your directorate, or whichever authority your school reports to, for the approved form.

Definition

School development plan: A document in which a school sets out what it wants to improve over a set period, with a measurable goal, actions, an owner, a date and evidence of progress for each priority.

The method draws on the Education Endowment Foundation's guide to implementation, “Putting Evidence to Work”, in its second edition of December 2019. The guide says schools should probably make fewer, but more strategic, choices and pursue them diligently, and that reviewing and stopping some existing practices may be required before delivering new ones.

What you need before you write

• Last year's data: results, attendance, and any survey of students, parents or teachers. You do not need everything — only what answers one question: where is the problem?
• The official form, if there is one: from your ministry or district, so you know which fields it requires before you start.
• A small team: we suggest the principal or deputy, two or three teachers from different departments, and whoever holds the school's data.

The steps: from data to one page

1. 1

   Read the data, and separate the outcome from its cause

   Weak maths results in Grade 6 are an outcome, not a cause. The EEF guide warns against mistaking the cause of a problem for its outcome, and asks schools to check and challenge their first impressions with data until they are confident the problem is both important and real. So ask “why?” about every weak result until you reach something the school can change.

2. 2

   Choose three priorities at most

   We suggest three at most, and one or two if this is the school's first plan. A plan with ten priorities has none. The EEF guide notes that organisations in every sector tend to take on too many projects at once and underestimate the effort it takes to implement them.

3. 3

   Give each priority a measurable goal

   One pattern is enough: from [the number now] to [the target] by [date], measured by [tool]. If you do not know the number now, the plan's first action is to measure it.

4. 4

   Write the actions, each with an owner, a date and evidence

   An action is something you can see: “a short reading check for every Grade 3 student in the second week of term”, not “improve reading”. The owner is a person, not a department. The evidence is what you look at in the monthly meeting to know the action happened: a register, a table, a sample of student work.

5. 5

   Write down what you will stop

   The EEF guide asks: are there less effective practices that can be stopped to free up time and resources? And it asks schools to treat stopping with the same care as starting something new. Write at least one thing teachers will stop doing for each priority, or the plan becomes extra work on top of extra work.

6. 6

   Test the plan before you adopt it

   The EEF guide suggests a “pre-mortem”: the team imagines the plan has failed, then works backwards to find out why. Sit with the team for half an hour and ask: if this plan has failed by the end of the year, why? Fix what comes up before you hand it in.

A complete example: a one-page plan

The plan below is for an imaginary school, and every number in it is a sample for illustration only. Notice that every box holds a number, an owner or a date.

Every action in this plan goes into the monitoring table below. The second priority, for instance, runs on the weekly review described in how a school can spot absence patterns early.

The monitoring table: one meeting a month

A plan that is not reviewed stays as it was written. The EEF guide says schools should regularly monitor and review data on the progress and quality of implementation, and that data collection which is complicated and needs extensive resources may not be sustained in a busy school, while simple, quick measures are more likely to be accepted by staff. So we suggest one table, reviewed in a 45-minute meeting each month.

1. Minutes 0–10, status: each owner goes through their actions — done, running or late — with the evidence, not a description.
2. Minutes 10–30, only what is late: one question for each late action — what is in the way? — and one decision: carry on, change it, or move it to a new date.
3. Minutes 30–40, the goals: once a term, not every month, look at the goal numbers themselves; they do not move every month.
4. Minutes 40–45, the record: the decision line goes into the table, and a copy goes to teachers the same day.

How to involve teachers: three moments, not a signature

The EEF guide calls for implementation leadership that is distributed across the school, with explicit opportunities for staff to take on responsibility for it. It says implementation is easier when staff feel trusted to try new things and make mistakes, safe in the knowledge that they will be supported.

• In the diagnosis: before choosing priorities, ask teachers three written questions: what gets in the way of your students' learning most? What does the school do that is of no use? What would you need to solve the first problem? The answers to the second question are where “what we stop” comes from.
• In the delivery: each priority has a teacher who shares responsibility for it, from the department it affects. The EEF guide says the implementation outcomes should be agreed and understood by the staff using the approach before the school starts monitoring it.
• In the review: send teachers the monitoring table after every meeting, as it is, late items included. A table everyone can see saves a lot of meetings.

If one of the priorities is a new tool or platform, the first 30 days plan sets out how teachers adopt it week by week. And if that platform is in its free year, put the questions to ask before the free year ends into the monitoring table with a date.

When the plan does not work

• Too many priorities: if the team cannot name the school's priorities from memory, there are too many.
• Goals with no starting number: “raise attainment” cannot be reviewed. If you do not have the number, make measuring it the first action.
• A plan for the file: if it was written to be handed in, nobody will open it once it has been. The monthly meeting is what makes it a working plan.

This method has a limit: it does not suit a large, whole-school change in a single year. The EEF guide notes that it is not unusual to spend between two and four years implementing complex, whole-school initiatives. If one of your priorities is of that kind, make this year's goal one part of it, not all of it.

Written with String's editorial team: we use AI for research and first drafts, and a person checks every fact and every source before anything is published. How we write