Insights
We regularly produce articles that we hope will inform, inspire, and provide insights into school strategy and leadership.
Show Me Your Budget
A school’s budget reveals more than what it can afford. It shows what leaders are willing to prioritise, reject, and stop. True resourcing strategy begins when worthwhile requests are declined so the school’s primary goal receives the money, time, and attention it requires.
How Schools Should Celebrate Earned Wins
Schools often move too quickly from one goal to the next. This article explores what makes a win earned, why celebration matters, and how schools can recognise success meaningfully.
Business Strategy in Schools: Who Should Be at the Table?
Who should shape business strategy in schools? Explore the pros, cons, and risks of too many decision-makers at the strategy table.
Strategic Misalignment: When Busy Schools Stop Moving Together
Strategic misalignment rarely starts with bad ideas. It starts when too many good ideas compete without a clear strategy to order them. Schools don’t need more activity. They need shared language that separates strategy, planning and execution so everyone can move in the same direction.
Your School Strategic Plan Is Probably an Action Plan
Many schools have a school strategic plan. Far fewer have a strategy. If your plan is a list of actions, pillars and review dates, it may be organising activity rather than clarifying choice. And without choice, strategy becomes little more than a well-designed action plan.
Fixing School Strategy
School strategy cannot remain a polished document that gets admired, filed, and quietly forgotten. The schools best placed for the future will be those whose leaders build the imagination, courage, discipline and shared language to keep making strategic choices when the landscape shifts.
The Art of Managing Expectations
Executive teams rarely fracture because people care too little. More often, they strain because leaders carry private expectations about excellence, urgency, and capacity that were never made explicit. Strategy becomes personal when shared language hides different standards.
Open Book Management: Why Good Ideas Get Said No To
Schools don’t lack good ideas. They’re drowning in them. Open book management gives middle leaders the context to see trade-offs, understand constraints, and shape ideas that actually land, not just sound good.
Schools Are Brilliant at Red Flags. Green Flags… Not So Much.
Schools are quick to spot what’s wrong and what needs to change. But what if the most important signals aren’t problems at all? Green flags are already there, quietly gaining traction. The question is whether we notice them early enough to do something about them.
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