If you’re in charge of something in school, it’s likely you’ve been asked to write an action plan. I have a number of issues with these that I think detract from good leadership. Leaders can easily make fundamental mistakes when delegating or distributing leadership and here are 3 of them when it comes to action planning.
Mistake 1: Lack of clarity in language used
Solution: Ensure a shared language
Targets, outcomes, actions, success criteria, milestones, KPIs, objectives, priorities – so many words often used interchangeably.
At worst, there might be multiple columns all asking for similar information that you’re asked to replicate. If action plans are to be useful, everyone needs to know what each other means when they say these words. An example from years gone by that always baffled me was the idea of milestones. I remember having to work towards 100% good or better teaching as a subject leader. In the milestones it was broken down to something like:
- Autumn term milestone: 67% good or better teaching and 15% outstanding teaching
- Spring term milestone: 83% good or better teaching and 25% outstanding teaching
- Summer term milestone: 100% good or better teaching and 33% outstanding teaching
I’m sure you’ll agree that this hasn’t aged well. This is what happens when the plan is driven by management speak and not concepts.
The solution is simple – don’t start with these management speak words, start with what it is that everyone needs to understand, for example:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- What will we do to achieve it?
- How will know we’ve achieved it?
Once it’s been agreed conceptually, you can call it what you want as long as everyone understands what the words represent.
Mistake 2: Poorly formatted documents
Solution: Choose a sensible format for recording
Landscape Word documents with columns that are no more than 2cm wide. Documents several pages long but full of white space because some columns have lots of text and others don’t. Text alignment issues that jar the soul. Adjusting one column width seems to make other columns disappear.
Poorly formatted documents really bother me but this is only part of the issue. A table in Word seems to be the default format but it doesn’t have to be. The question to ask is: what needs to be recorded and why? If you feel that the most important thing is a description of what is trying to be achieved, it make sense to keep this at the forefront of people’s minds. Writing it on a document that only one or two people will actually look at won’t satisfy this. Maybe it needs to be in the staff room / training room / meeting room so that people talk about it more.
If you feel that the most important thing is the list of actions that need to be completed, a table in a Word document is probably the least effective way to do this. There are countless To Do List apps that can be shared between necessary colleagues. My preference is Microsoft Planner and To Do – type the action, assign a colleague and set a deadline. It is saved in the cloud and available to all that need to see it when they log into the school system.
Mistake 3 – Prioritise the plan, not the work
Solution: Work with middle leaders on the plans
Thanks for agreeing to lead maths. We need to raise attainment at KS2. Can you have your action plan on my desk by Monday morning?
The first way that middle leaders get to develop the expertise needed to drive improvement is the model that is demonstrated to them in their school and the support they receive from senior leaders. It is a mistake to assume that middle leaders naturally have this expertise. If through our conversations, we show that we value the plan over the work, the plan becomes the toxic focal point.
Senior leaders need to prioritise the work and that starts with ensuring that the middle leader has the knowledge required in the area that they are leading.
The formal knowledge that middle leaders need to drive improvement is often bound up in the subject that they are leading. It is an area that can always improve though. One thing that I did with new middle leaders was to set expectations from the outset that the first thing that they needed to work on what making sure that they were knowledgable. At some point in the future they would be tasked with influencing others and that can only happen from a position of credibility, backed up by their expertise and what they do in their won classroom.
The knowledge needed to lead well isn’t restricted to formal knowledge though. The hidden knowledge of our own school contexts and the people that we work with needs to be combined with that formal knowledge in order to make good decisions. Just like I asked new middle leaders to develop their subject expertise, I also asked them to make sure that they knew what was going on in classrooms around the school. Not to change anything, but to develop the expertise needed to make changes in the future. Who would be your early adopters? Where is practice the strongest? what are the curriculum decisions throughout the key stage? Why? Trying to lead improvement without knowing any of these things would be futile.
Which brings us back to the idea of actions plans. Was there any point in writing any of this on an action plan? No. Everyone that needed to know what had to be done knew and lived it in day to day conversations.
In my view, a good central strategic plan can be used by middle leaders and there is little need for them to replicate that work. We can then allow middle leaders to focus on what it is that makes them effective – driving improvement from the classroom and supporting colleagues to continually improve.
MrNickHart 