How Do Schools Win? First, Stop Playing Everyone Else’s Game.

How do schools win — without anyone else losing?

Winning is a loaded word in schools.

Let’s address the discomfort head-on. Schools tend to recoil from the idea of winning. It feels commercial. Competitive. Zero-sum. Someone must lose.

That is not the definition we are using here.

In a school context, winning does not mean outperforming neighbouring schools, topping league tables, or attracting attention at someone else’s expense.

Winning, properly understood, means this:

A school is winning when its choices, resource allocation, and leadership effort consistently advance what it has deliberately chosen to value most.

No rival required. No comparison necessary.

Winning is internal coherence over time. It is strategic alignment made visible in behaviour, not just documents.

Strategy forces a school to decide what matters most now, and therefore what will matter less — even if temporarily. That is uncomfortable in cultures built on inclusion, consensus, and goodwill.

So instead, many schools chase everything.

The result is dilution.

Initiatives multiply. Priorities blur. Middle leaders absorb the friction. And senior leaders feel the quiet anxiety of motion without momentum.

You cannot win every game.

Every school is playing multiple games at once:

Educational outcomes
Staff sustainability
Financial viability
Enrolment growth or stability
Community trust
Identity and ethos

Winning does not mean dominating all of them simultaneously.

It means choosing which game you are intentionally optimising for — and being honest about the trade-offs that choice creates.

As one uncomfortable but necessary truth puts it:

“You can't be everything to everyone. At some point, you need to choose what truly matters to you and why.”

Leadership teams often know this but hesitate to say it aloud.

Borrowed scoreboards create false wins

Another quiet trap is the borrowed scoreboard.

When a school has not defined its own version of winning, it defaults to external measures:

Rankings
Awards
Marketing metrics
What peer schools are celebrating

These indicators are not useless. But they are dangerous when they become proxies for strategy.

If you did not choose the scoreboard, you did not choose the game.

And if you are chasing someone else’s markers of success, you may be very busy — and still losing ground on what actually matters to your community.

Winning requires coherence, not consensus.

Strategic leadership teams often overvalue agreement.

Consensus feels healthy. It signals trust. It avoids conflict.

But winning rarely emerges from consensus alone. It emerges from coherence — when decisions across finance, staffing, pedagogy, facilities, and culture reinforce the same strategic intent.

Coherence can feel uncomfortable at first. It introduces constraints. It says no. It exposes misalignment.

Ironically, coherence is what ultimately reduces workload and fatigue. When priorities are clear, effort stops leaking sideways.

What winning looks like over time

Winning in schools is rarely dramatic. It does not announce itself loudly.

It looks like fewer initiatives, better supported.
It looks like leaders making similar decisions for the same reasons.
It looks like staff understanding not just what is changing, but why.
It looks like a community that may not agree with every decision, but recognises consistency.

Most importantly, it looks like a school that knows what it is willing to protect — even when pressured to chase the next version of excellence.

The quiet question every leadership team must answer

Before the next strategic plan, the next initiative, the next push for excellence, there is a simpler and harder question:

What does winning mean for us — really — and what are we prepared to stop doing to achieve it?

Until that question is answered, schools will continue to work hard, care deeply, and chase excellence — without ever quite knowing if they are winning.