Strategic Management for School Development Leading your School’s Improvement Strategy

Abstract

In 1991 Geoff Bowles and I with the help of John Hart produced the Effective Local Management of Schools Workbook: Planning Your School’s Strategy as an aid to schools that wished to engage in longer term thinking about their future. This was a companion to the book Effective Local Management of Schools (Fidler and Bowles, 1989) which contained theoretical ideas and case studies of the constituents of school based management as applied in schools in England and Wales following the 1988 Education Reform Act. The workbook contained our ideas on formulating and implementing strategy in schools and it also contained activities on a variety of school management processes. We intended that either individuals or groups of staff in schools could work on them to apply our general ideas to their particular school and its context. The present book is a development of that workbook. I have continued to work on strategy in schools and develop my ideas about how to incorporate strategic ideas into school planning. My thinking has been expanded by my increased study of the literature on strategic planning in business organisations and by teaching a course on strategic and school development planning on the part-time MSc Managing School Improvement degree at the University of Reading. Succeeding student groups have helped me better understand the theoretical ideas and they have also worked on activities based on the workbook and have applied the ideas of strategic analysis to their schools. Since they are all senior staff in schools, my ideas have been ‘reality tested’ by their attempts to work out what strategy would mean and its practicality for their own schools. The original workbook has gone out of print and there have been substantial changes to the school context in England so that the activities needed updating. This combined with my evolving understanding of the difficulties of formulating and implementing strategy suggest that a new book would be timely. This brings together a comprehensive presentation of the theory and additional and updated activities to help apply strategic thinking to school improvement.