Writing a School Development Plan is simple, right? Look at your data, have a chat with colleagues about what needs to be done, have a look on the DfE website and see whether they’ve got any ideas and off you go! 

20 pages later you have something for everyone; a veritable smorgasbord of important things which need doing. But then you show the governors and they smile weakly. They know they’re supposed see how it all fits together but, if truth be told, they can’t. In fact, if truth be told, so far departed is this document from its original conception that you can’t really see how it fits together either. 

I know that most experienced Headteachers know exactly how to write an SDP, but for those of you who are about to ‘sit in the big spinning chair’ this September, or hope to soon, here are my top 10 tips on writing an SDP which actually improves the school.

I know that most of these ideas are blindingly obvious. But they work. In our last OFSTED ( 109121__5) our strategic planning was highly praised and our outcomes have improved significantly year on year.

1. Your Aims and Values are the start of everything you plan to do.

 

Your values, and the Aims which come from them, should be the cornerstone of your school, and everything which is planned to improve the school should refer back to these. Your values summarise the key attributes which you want your children to have written into their DNA by the time they leave you. In our case our values look like this:

Aims are similar, but provide a bit more detail and are statements of intent, e.g.:

These Aims are crucial in defining the school you wish to create as they should describe the learners which you hope to see walking out of your school at the end of every day, week, month, year and (on a sunny day in July) when their education with you is complete.

Unless your strategic Planning at all levels refers back to these then they really aren’t worth the paper they’re written on and are simply empty words stuck on the wall so that you can point at them when OFSTED arrive.

2. Your SDP should (ideally) be based on a 4 Year Strategic Plan

You shouldn’t be dreaming up your SDP each year. Indeed, if you’ve written your 4 Year Strategic Plan well, three quarters of your SDP’s key aims will have been already written years in advance. Our 4 Year Strategic Plan (blackhorse-strategic-plan-2015-19-v2 ), written and reviewed by the whole school community, contains the 5 big goals which we as a school have set ourselves over a 4 year period, with way-points and strategies for each intervening year so that we don’t get blown off course. These must be clear and measurable so that everyone knows whether you’re making progress towards them. As this video we made to review our 2011-2015 Plan goes to show, if you stick with the program then you’ll get a lot done!

3. Your SDP should (ideally) be based on a Strategic Financial Plan which you wrote back in January.

As I’m sure you’ll have noticed, schools are currently weathering a significant financial storm with cuts to almost every budget (sorry, I mean ‘below inflation increases’…). To counter this, ideally your SDP should have been planned out (in very rough draft form) back in January when your school found out how much money it has for the following financial year.

Early in Term 3, once you know how much money is available, you, your School Business Manager and  the rest of the SLT should sit down and look at what you’ve committed to achieving in the 4 Year Strategic Plan for the coming year. At this point, you may also have an idea of some urgent priorities which weren’t on the original 4 Year Plan but need to be addressed and these will need to be roughly costed as well.

As you can see from our example strategic-financial-plan-2016-17 this is a very rough and ready business with only approximate costings. However, it does allow your SBM to build the budget around the priorities which you’ve identified, not the other way around as is so often the case.

4. Some SDP priorities will appear out of the blue

Whilst some of the school’s longer term goals can be planned in advance, the DfE/ OFSTED/ your SATs Data or a new Government policy can result in a new priority popping up which hadn’t been previously planned for.

It is important not to ignore these pressing priorities but to address them with the urgency which they may or may not demand. For example, if your KS2 Maths SATs nosedived unexpectedly then maths is going to be a priority. If your monitoring suggests that the results were the result of systemic weakness in maths teaching then it will be your top priority and should get top billing on your SDP. However, an LA drive to improve the number of children walking to school, although useful, may not warrant quite such a high billing. It will just have to fit in with your existing goals and priorities.

4. Your SDP should contain ‘Golden Treads’.

Although there will undoubtedly be many things which you want to include in your SDP, it’s useful to consider what 5-6 things are absolute priorities. These will be drawn from the urgent/ pressing priorities which have appeared as a result of issues with performance outcomes, or may be aspects of your 4 Year Strategic Plan which you want to give a boost in the coming year.

These 4-6 priorities are shared at the first INSET of the school year and all staff know that ‘these are the things which we need to improve most urgently this year’. We also ask all Phase or Subject Leaders to include references to the golden threads in the plans which they will write for the SDP so that these urgent priorities are referenced throughout the SDP (not just in, say, the Maths Action Plan).

5. Your SDP doesn’t need an action plan for every subject.

Historically, an SDP was comprised of action plans written by every subject leader – usually in isolation from each other. This meant that there could be twenty or more individual action plans floating around, all competing for time and resources. The usual outcome of this was that English and Maths leaders got their actions through, but  the poor DT subject leader often found that there was no time or money left at the end of the year to make their vision a reality. And as I mentioned at the start, the whole SDP lacked any cohesion.

At most, your school should focus on no more than 6-8 priority action plans in a year (See sdp-summary-2016-17). When my school was going through tough times the number was closer to 4. This is not to say that you forget about RE and just bang on incessantly about English and Maths, merely that you focus on a few key areas each year. Invariably, there will be some subjects/ areas which will have an action plan of their own each year (for us English, Maths, T&L and Vulnerable Groups (incl. SEND). However, the other priorities are drawn from the broader goals in the 4 Year Strategic Plan, with teams of staff working to deliver a strand of the plan in that particular year. For our current 4 Year Strategic Plan these strands are Resilience (incl. PSHE, Healthy choices, mindset etc), STEM, The Arts and Citizenship. Taken as a whole, they cover the full range of the statutory curriculum (and a lot more besides) but by focusing on key improvements in certain areas or subjects we have the time and resources needed to move provision forward.

6. Make sure that individual strand action plans have a format which timetables actions realistically throughout the year.

One of the biggest barriers to effective delivery of a School Development Plan is uncoordinated timetabling of actions and training. In order for everything to get done, training will need to be blocked so that staff have a sustained period of time learning to do a particular initiative before being bombarded with something else.

Our staff therefore use these proforma (English SDP 16-17 updated March 2017 ) to plan their actions. As you can see, they start with the Golden Threads and then contain a very basic summary of the key actions which are to be carried out, followed by very specific success criteria. This is followed by a month-by-month action plan so that leaders can space their initiatives out throughout the year.

7. Your RAP is the main driver of your SDP.

Most schools will be familiar with the concept of a Raising Achievement Plan (or RAP). This is a summary document which shows exactly which actions or tasks are being completed that week.

We have ours in a variety of formats, including a Word document (for reference), a Outlook version (so that we can sync activities with staff electronic calendars) and (for me the most used/ useful) a large version on the SLT office wall made up of post-its.

Once each team have created their own action plans, the SLT sit down for a day at the beginning of T1, T3 & T5 and schedule in all of the actions which need to take place in the SDP. Each action plan has a ‘swim lane’ down the left-hand side with the weeks for the term along the top. (RAP – 2016-17 (T5-6)).

Usually, the SLT has to move some scheduled actions around, as some terms might have been over-loaded when the original plans were written. However, having this overview is invaluable and means that things actually get done.

Its power is in its simplicity: there is one single plan which all other plans feed into and is the single reference point for day-to-day school improvement work. Every SLT or Governors’ meeting starts with the RAP – it is the measure of getting things done.

7. Success Criteria are essential to success.

How disciplined you are as a school in defining exactly what success in a specific area of your SDP looks like will have a huge impact on your ability to meaningfully measure whether the school has moved forward.

All too often success criteria will be merely a statement describing the completion of an action. This is not a success criteria. Success Criteria must describe the impact of the action and be worded in a way that isn’t open to personal interpretation.

Done correctly, Success Criteria will allow you and your governors to measure exactly how well your school is doing in moving towards its goals.

8. Create an ‘Executive Summary’.

Once all the SDP Action Plans are completed, we compile an ‘Executive Summary’ (sdp-summary-2016-17) for staff and governors which includes just the key  strategies/ actions and the success criteria for each strand. This aims to be short, 4-5 pages at the most, so that the key priorities are easy to absorb and understand.

This cuts out the waffle and leaves only the cold, hard essentials: What are we doing to improve X this year? How will we know if we have succeeded?

9. Your Summary is the basis for your evaluation

If the Executive Summary is sharp, then evaluating the SDP throughout and at the end of the year becomes simple.

At the first governors’ meeting of the year, each governor is tasked with monitoring a strand of the SDP. The governors and Subject/Strand leaders are given a simple proforma which links directly to the executive summary (Subject Leader SDP Evaluation 2016-17 – English- END OF TERM 6). They can then ask the Strand/ Subject Leader direct questions as to whether the Success Criteria are being met and look for evidence to prove that this is the case.

At the end of the year, the Link Governor and Subject/ Strand Leader sit down and compare evidence from monitoring and judge whether the desired impact of an action can be evidenced. It gives the clearest evidence I’ve found and, needless to say, when OFSTED visited last they loved it.

10. Give your SDP a title – a ‘big idea’ to hold on to.

Now this, again, will sound a bit like a gimmick – but trust me, it works!

Each year we name our SDP. Last year is was called ‘Purposeful Practise’ around the big idea that anyone can master anything if given the right tuition, feedback and time to practise. We also created a character ‘Practise Panda’ to use as a vehicle for assembly stories, and ‘Practise Panda’ badges for children exhibiting this skill. And a 3m x 3m display in the hall. Nobody was in any doubt what the SDP was about.

In previous years we have called our SDP things like ‘The Power of ‘WOW!” – when we wanted to focus as a school on creating amazing curriculum experiences which motivated children to strive for more. This year we have entitled our SDP ‘Who Cares Wins’ – linked to themes of effort discussed in Angela Duckworth’s excellentt book ‘Grit’.

By giving your SDP a title (and maybe a character) it brings it tot life and tells everyone that – this is what matters most this year.

Finally- a word of warning!

Above is described suggestions on how to create an SDP when you have all the time and resources to do so – including a pre-written Strategic Financial Plan and a sharp 4 Year Strategic Plan. However, many Heads taking over schools may start the year with neither.

My advice to you is to base your SDP around what the school needs most, based on the information which you have available to you are the start of the year. You may have an up-together 4 Year Strategic Plan, you may not. Study the data from the last 3 years and it will tell you something of the priorities which you need to start with. The SLT will have more ideas again.

Remember, a good SDP will guide you through the year and keep you from going  off-track. A bad SDP is like an OS Map – fine if you know how to read it properly, but most people can’t.