Andrew Blench highlights the role of school business professionals as enablers and examining the significance of process and quality control in driving efficiency and educational success
The Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL) and Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO) published their Operational Excellence Framework for Schools and Trusts in 2024. The paragraph below is taken from the Executive Summary of the report.
This paper focuses on the importance of Operational Excellence (OpEx) as a discipline for the non-teaching “central functions” of school trusts (trusts). It is positioned as an enabler of excellence in the delivery of teaching and learning, which this paper calls Educational Excellence, by helping to create the conditions where schools can focus on education.
Enablers
I love the use of the word ‘enablers’ because that is what we are as school business professionals. We put systems and processes in place to enable colleagues who work directly with young people to focus on teaching and learning. Whether you are in a trust central team or a school business manager in a primary school, you are the enabler!
10 Domains for Excellence
The paper sets out 10 domains of excellence in all things operational and suggests descriptors of what excellent looks like in that area. For me, this is a welcome and long overdue development. Our teaching colleagues historically have had excellence defined for them in many ways with clearly defined targets for attendance, pupil progress and attainment and classroom practice. They have had various frameworks to refer to for a long time, now its here for us the ‘enablers’.
I must admit that having worked in operational roles in other sector (NHS, Civil Service, Financial Services) I was shocked to discover that there were relatively few, if any, measures of success for the operational areas I was responsible for as an SBM in a large secondary school. How did we know if we were doing a good job (that wasn’t really defined) or if what we did was enabling education as well as it could? So, for me this is a welcome development which will help us all to fine tune our operational processes and their impacts.
The 10 domains identified are:
Impact on Teaching and Learning
Process and Quality Control
Resource Planning and Deployment
Data, Performance Measurement and Action
Skills and Human Performance
Operations Management Capability
Operational Risk and Quality Assurance
Productivity and Cost Control
Technology Effectiveness
Continuous Improvement
In this series of posts, I am going to delve into one of the domains at a time. Today we are looking at process and quality control.
Trusts typically have developed process maps for a few processes but only in a subset of functions. Written procedures often exist, but they are sometimes out of date or too wordy/detailed for practical use. There is confusion about the difference between “policy” and “process”, with even senior leaders discussing the former when asked about the latter. A real opportunity is to better understand end-to-end processes, particularly more complex ones such as recruitment and procure-to-pay. Implementing quality control is a big opportunity in all trusts that were visited.
Do You Know Your Processes?
A lot of administrative processes in schools and trusts happen behind closed doors, with little awareness from senior colleagues of what is involved. But the impact of getting these wrong or falling can be significant in terms of safeguarding, financial or reputational risks. In an ideal world routine task in a school or trust should be documented in a process map.
The advantages of this are manifold. From a training and induction process for new admin staff we can give new recruits a process map to follow. In emergency situations the process map can, in theory, be picked up by someone who has no prior knowledge of this area of school operations to ensure business continuity.
An example of this could be the recording of pupil attendance and absence. It’s a sobering thought that in 40% of the cases involved in the Rotherham sexual grooming scandal the pupils were absent from school at the time the offences were committed. A robust system which tracks absence and generates the appropriate responses to pupil absence in a timely fashion can mitigate some of these risks.
So how well are your processes documented? Whilst it may be too resource intensive to process map all your activities, I would certainly recommend doing this for high volume tasks which are repetitive and critical to the success of the trust and school.
The Elephant in the Room
By undertaking a process where we document each stage of the process, we can often be surprised to see steps which add no value at all to the organisation. One such example was from my student services team at my last school. They produced a report every week for governors on the number of items confiscated from pupils during the school day. Upon closer examination no one could identify why this report was needed and in fact no one was reading it anyway! The report was stopped and saved about an hour a week in process time.
Quality Assurance
Having a process map which describes each step of the process also creates the opportunity for us to define what ‘good’ looks like in that process. By adding a timeline to run alongside the process map, we can then measure the % of steps taken within the agreed key performance indicator for that task. If we are regularly not achieving our KPIs we can also use a process map to identify steps which can be removed from the process to bring things in on time.
Where are you with your process maps and quality assurance? Stay tuned as we continue exploring each of the 10 domains of operational excellence, helping school business professionals refine their processes and enhance their impact!
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