Ready to turn your mind map into a plan of action? Emma Gray explores how school business managers can transform their ideas into actionable strategies using tools like STEEPLE analysis
f (like me) you followed the first step in our ‘thinking about thinking’ process and created a mind map, you can now be very proud of your big, scribbly page containing all your thoughts and ideas for the year ahead.
Nobody said it had to be beautiful, mine has involved copious amounts of Sellotape, highlighters and crossing arrows, what’s important is that it’s all yours.
If (also like me) you got excited about one area of your mind map, you might have already swung into action and communicated an idea to others in your team. That’s important. The joy of being a SBM is the variety in our role, that we get to do things we love, and that we really make a difference to our pupil’s experience. Don’t lose sight of the joy. It’s what makes you good at your job.
Discovering the Joy
But I want to pull you back into that scheduled thinking time we agreed on. What now? How do we turn all those ideas, tasks and challenges into something we can coherently communicate to stakeholders? How do we develop it into a strategy?
A SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats) analysis is probably one of the most well-known tools used to promote strategic thinking. Your leadership and governance teams may have already had a go at using it to develop their vision, but it tends to show ‘where are we now?’ rather than ‘where are we going?’ and it can be difficult to take the information gathered onto the next step.
Onto the Next Step
Instead, let’s think about this. Do you remember that childhood hand rhyme? Put the backs of your hands together, interlace your fingers and bring your wrists together so your knuckles have formed a flat top with your thumbs at the front…
Here’s the school, then, lift your forefingers upright into a point, and here’s the steeple, part your thumbs, Open the doors, and there’s the people.
Firstly, the most important part of the rhyme is what’s inside, and this helps me remember that. Any (and all) strategic planning you do should keep coming back to the people in your community. Secondly, the steeple in the rhyme, isn’t a physical structure but another tool which is much better at supporting strategy design, opening doors to benefit the people inside.
STEEPLE stands for the factors which influence your school, Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal and Ethical. So, divide a new piece of paper into seven boxes and label them. Then, start thinking about your school’s context, the internal and external influences, and try to link it to what the future might hold.
Social – What is the make-up of your community? Think about affluence, ethnicity, language, special needs, levels of parental education and engagement. How is your admissions area changing?
Technological – What level of technological capability does your school support, and what might your pupils need to successfully enter the local workplace? How cyber aware are pupils, parents, staff and governors?
Economic – What are the challenges for your budget? Falling pupil numbers, staffing costs, SEND funding, inflationary rises. What does the future look like for your budget, how do you know that and what can you do about it?
Environmental – Do you already have a strategy in place? How much buy-in on sustainability is there from staff and pupils? What is the likely impact on the management of buildings, grounds and assets?
Political – It might not feel like politics influences your school directly, but think about the impact on funding, employment law, the curriculum and the direction of travel in the education landscape. What’s changing for your school?
Legal – Think about all those financial regulations, health and safety, GDPR, reporting deadlines, policy compliance…the list goes on and on.
Ethical – Reputation is everything for a school. Think about marketing, income generation, parent relationships, staff wellbeing and alumni engagement.
Phew! That already feels like a lot of thinking, but we now need to join our Mind Map and the STEEPLE into something that builds into a strategy.
Take the six improvement topics from your Mind Map and use the ‘what does the future look like’ thinking, and contextual influences, in your STEEPLE to build six Strategy Headlines.
I’ll give you an example. One of my improvement topics was Financial Reporting, and I’ve identified from the STEEPLE factors which budgets are going to be really challenging next year, so I have created a simple Strategic Headline.
Enabling budget holders to achieve a balanced budget, maximise income and use of resources and achieve best value.
That is, in a nutshell, what I want to achieve. So, I’ll get on with identifying my other five headlines and next time we can use the work we’ve done to attach actions to our strategy.
Enjoy the process and keep thinking!
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