What does excellent look like? Andrew Blench continues his ongoing series by exploring the Operational Excellence Framework for Schools and Trusts, focusing this month on resource planning and deployment
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. See OpEx for Education — ISBL
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.
In this series of blog posts I am looking at each of the 10 domains in turn as identified in the OpEx Framework for Schools and Trusts.
Today I am looking at ‘Resource Planning and Deployment’.
This is defined as:
how to understand demand and create efficient and effective central-function resource plans; how resources are deployed to carry out tasks in the most efficient and effective way; how best to manage real-time changes to the plan.
The Framework states that Resource Planning and Deployment is working well when:
Every team or function always has exactly the right amount of resource: not too much, not too little. Resources are deployed to maximise efficiency and effectiveness. There is active flexing of resource to meet varying demand. End-to-end processes work well across organisational boundaries. Planning actively encourages investments in the people and the organisation, ensuring they happen as part of business as usual.
There is a strong link between this domain and the ‘Process and Quality Control’ domain which I addressed in my last post. This is because if we do not understand our processes properly, we will always struggle to be efficient in resource allocation.
Planning
The main resource we use in the business function of schools and trusts is people. To use people in the most effective way (right people, in the right place, at the right time) we need to plan our work across the academic year. One of the positives of working in education is that 90% of the processes are cyclical and repetitive, year on year. So, when are your pinch points across the year? The times when several deadlines collide or when staffing dips. You will not always see this unless you meticulously plan tasks into weeks across the year. This can be done manually or using spreadsheets or other tools. They key thing is to do it!
Deployment
Deployment is the other keyword in this domain. Now that you have mapped your tasks and processes across the year, deployment comes into play. This is about where tasks fall as much as when people are available. Things to consider – have you got people in work at the best times to deliver the work? For staff with term-time plus two weeks contracts, are you using the two weeks at the best point? If not, what can you do about that? For 52-week contracts how is annual leave planned in relation to your processes and pinch points across the year. As you think this through you may form the conclusion that there is no flex in your staff team contracts. Whilst you can flex when a piece of work is done, contracts are so tied down that it is unhelpful. How might you address this going forwards?
Organisational Boundaries
Of course, we can’t and don’t plan our work in a vacuum. We are interdependent and rely upon other roles and departments in our schools and trust to work with us towards shared goals. So how does your planning sit with wider activities across the school or trust? Sometimes this is as simple as knowing when SLT meetings or governors’ meetings are scheduled and working backwards from those dates. What is your input into those meetings (reports/data) and how will that be planned and deployed effectively?
The domain description describes having the right amount of resource. It uses the phrase ‘not too much’ and I can guess the response which that phrase might evoke. ‘You must be joking; staffing is always at the bare minimum’ will be the cry. If after having mapped our processes and resources, we know this to be the case. That all staff are working at 100% of capacity all of the time then clearly that is a recipe for burnout and needs to be addressed. But I suspect that this is the received wisdom, and we might not have done any analysis to support that statement. So how do you know this is the case?
For those of us who have worked in the private sector resource planning and deployment as a management approach is not something new. For other colleagues it may be unfamiliar. Whatever your experience there is help at hand. See OpEx for Education – Training & Support — ISBL
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