Operational Excellence Framework for Schools and Trusts

In his new digital series, Andrew Blench explores the ten domains outlined in the ISBL Operational Excellence Framework, starting with the first domain, “Impact on Teaching and Learning,”

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”1 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 upon 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 it’s here for us the ‘enablers’.

I must admit that having worked in operational roles in other sectors (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

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

Impact on Teaching and Learning

The OpEx report says this for Impact on Teaching and Learning (the first of the 10 domains):

‘What good likes like – Central functions understand that their main reason for being is to enable the schools to achieve educational excellence. They adopt a sophisticated “customer first” mindset and continually seek to provide exactly what is needed in the most efficient and effective way. The customer experience or customer journey is understood and drives the improvement of processes and ways of working’.

As a consultant who visits several trust and schools it often puzzles me when I am in conversation with operational staff in some settings how little they appear to know about how their own school/trust is fairing in teaching and learning!

By that I mean, what to me are simple things – what were last summer’s results like OR how is pupil attendance now. It’s almost as though these things are mysterious things which go on over there, which we have no understanding of or interest in. ‘We leave education to the teachers, and we do our thing over here’!

Having said that I have also seen examples of good practice where operational staff attend public events in the schools they support and are seen as part of the teaching team (even though they don’t teach). To me this domain is about mindset. Whilst we will never have the depth of knowledge that our teaching colleagues have or the need for that depth of knowledge, we will hopefully be fully invested in its success because without that we don’t have a job. Also, it’s not much fun working very hard and not seeing positive impacts.

The concept of ‘customers’ can be a difficult one to grasp as no one is buying anything or exchanging cash for a service or product. But it is still a valid and helpful concept as it illustrates the dependency in the relationships. Perhaps we can accept more easily the idea that young people and parents are customers as they are service users and could take their business (child) elsewhere if not satisfied. But operational excellence is also about us understanding that we have internal customers. Our teachers and other staff who need the services we provide so that they can be freed up to deliver in the classroom.

I hope that this will spark some conversations in your setting. How do you measure your impact on teaching and learning? Who do you consider to be your customers?