The challenge of strategy in education

Simon Garrill, Chief Executive Officer, Education for the 21st Century

I was lucky enough to watch the recent CST CEO Professional Community presentation by Lena Koolman, Partner at McKinsey & Company on strategic growth. The timing for us was interesting as it comes as we are pulling together our work to develop our strategy for the next three years.

Education for the 21st century is a medium-sized multi-academy trust of eight schools based in London and the south east, with over 6000 pupils and 800 staff. The trust has been on a journey of transformation following a financial notice to improve in 2019.

My thoughts on strategy here are not intended to be a template of excellence. We have made plenty of mistakes along the way, and will continue to do so. They are purely my reflections, emerging from an initial discussion with our Chair, James Toop.

The challenge of strategy in education

As I see it, strategy in schools has typically been characterised by being:

• Based on legacy models of school improvement planning
• Over-long and rarely connecting effectively with stakeholders
• Taking a narrow approach to growth

There are three main problems with the legacy models of improvement planning.

1. They may have lofty mission statements, but the objectives and goals don't always meet the mission.
2. They are often incremental and roll over from one year to the next, but do not step back and focus on the bigger, longer-term picture.
3. School strategy is often done in the last few weeks of term in a rush by a small group of the leadership team and not shared widely with buy in.

This is captured well by Dixons’ CEO, Luke Sparks, who has reflected on the weaknesses of legacy models of strategy in education.

The arrival of the cycle of strategic planning and self-review in any given calendar year is often met with sighs of despair. Improvement becomes a singular one-off event rather than a continuous cycle.

Often, because these plans are a bureaucratic exercise and because of time pressures, trusts fail to consult meaningfully with stakeholders. Rarely do we take the time to ask parents, communities, businesses, and partners how well they think we are doing and what we could be doing better - yet this engagement is crucial. Instead, we create lengthy plans, written for trustees, executives, and Ofsted.

For trusts of a small to medium size, growth may often feel outside of our control, looking primarily externally. These kinds of inward-looking plans further consolidate this. How can we seek to take control of growth and make it an integral part of our strategy?

The opportunity

The conversation that the chair of our trustees and I had, at the beginning of this year, was about how we might improve the process and our strategic approach.

I had already been influenced by the work that Dixons has done on strategy and bold moves, contrasting with the way organisations of all types tend to roll over strategies from previous years, "peanut buttering” resources and spreading them too thinly. McKinsey argues that big strategic moves correlate with success and those five biggest moves are:

• Resource allocation
• Programmatic mergers
• Capital expenditures
• Productivity improvement
• Differentiation improvements

In her presentation, Lena Koolman provided a "10 timeless tests of strategy model” as a similar tool to review strategy.

What’s interesting about these approaches is that growth becomes an integral part of the long-term strategy. It required a different approach from us and so we:

1. stepped back and thought about the longer term
2. identified the key challenges facing our young people and trust
3. identified three key priorities, and some bold moves and investments opportunities
4. integrated growth into the overall strategy so that it focussed on growing impact - improving the quality of what we do as much as how we grow, and our wider influence in the system
5. ensured that we consulted widely with as many stakeholders as possible
6. made sure the strategy was communicated widely
7. circled back and reviewed our work.

We thought carefully about the relationship of the strategy to our mission and values. Importantly, we worked on several versions, simplifying what we were doing at every stage. We started with our vision, we reflected on our biggest challenges. We considered our greatest strengths and then we set about defining our priorities.

Early in the process two trustees had come forward to work with me more closely on the strategy. Their expertise and challenge was invaluable. The CEO will often drive the strategy, but the trust board is ultimately responsible for it – it is crucial we are all in step.

Our solution

We emerged with a strategy built around our three biggest challenges of:

• social mobility
• mental health and resilience
• recruitment and retention

Our three priorities were based on these on these challenges, and they included big moves like Reach’s Cradle to Career programme and StepLab’s instructional coaching programme.

Part of the work that we did this year in preparing the new strategy was building up a base of delivery partners to ensure that it had the biggest impact. In addition to stakeholder events we worked on developing three to four key delivery partners - a mix of charities and businesses. As a medium-sized trust, these partners are crucial to meeting the challenge of delivery.

We are at the beginning of this journey. Partnerships with charities, health services and businesses are hard to make. However, if we are to deliver a vision with civic duty at its heart, it is essential that we do form these meaningful partnerships.

Reflecting on the process and the voices that we heard in the CST professional community recently, our approach this year benefited from:

• seeing the process as a continuous cycle of review and planning
• investigating challenges and context carefully
• designing a strategy that is easily understood and easy to communicate
• involving partners and stakeholders throughout the process
• seeing growth as an integral overall part of our strategy
• making bigger moves and committing more resources to deliver them.

We are by no means at the end of our journey, but it feels like our first few steps have been taken on firmer ground.