What is the role of the board in school strategy?

There have been plenty of conversations with principals and boards regarding each party’s role in developing and implementing school strategy. This area repeatedly perplexes both governance and management, and a quick Google search is unlikely to alleviate the confusion.

Some experts profess that this is the sole domain of the board, while others argue that the principal and their executive should lead the way. In the education sector, many school boards consider strategy to be the scope of the principal.

Who’s right? And how should the entwining complexity of governance vs management manifest through crafting and executing strategy?

In an article by the Corporate Governance Institute, author Jo Ellis outlines some of the board’s key responsibilities regarding strategy formulation and execution. In essence, their role is to govern and provide oversight—that’s what governors do. The board also sets the school’s mission, vision, and value statements.

However, the principal should craft and execute the strategy, aligning it with those tenets while collaborating with the board and stakeholders.

The Board Defines the ‘Paddock’

By its very nature, the role of oversight is risky. It demands a level of trust and accountability bestowed on others—in this case, the principal—to accomplish the board's desires without micro-managing the details. Therefore, limits need to be put in place.

A farmer will define a paddock with fences. They set the parameters for their livestock to graze freely without fear of wandering off or drifting outside their boundaries. It provides the farmer with certainty and assurance that their animals don’t get lost or steer off in dangerous directions.

So, it is essential to define a paddock for management. They don’t need to be told what they can do. They need boundaries only to determine where they can operate.

What Does the ‘Paddock’ Look Like?

Here are several examples of what a paddock might look like for school management:

• Limiting the geographical span of the school. A regional school may sense competition creeping into its ‘patch’ and feel the need to enlarge its intake area or build another campus. This may be counterintuitive to the board’s desire to deepen the school’s growth (curriculum, pastoral care) rather than increase numerically.
• Remain a single-sex school. The school board may see this as a non-negotiable, forcing management to stay in this realm even when it would be easier to venture out.
• Define a flagship offering. Many schools opt to create flagship services to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Music, theatre, arts, IT, STEM, and sport are just a few, and it's very possible to create niches within these. However, the temptation is to offer them all, or at least as many as you can. Defining the paddock in this instance may limit the school to a few, and even just one.

What Does the Board’s Involvement Look Like Over Time?

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, in his book The One Hour Strategy, highlights how one hour per day, week, or month, based on the individual’s role, keeps the strategy functioning dynamically.

This would include reports from management and feedback from stakeholders. It would prioritise board time to interrogate management’s strategy execution critically. The board could assess management’s handling of upcoming disruptions and offer guidance on matters where the board may have specific expertise. This is where the board can comprehensively add value to the school community.

The Relationship Nexus of School Strategy

The final role of the board in strategy is to provide direction for all the players within the school community and how their relationships interconnect.

Three relationships are incredibly pertinent to successful school strategy: the board, the principal, and stakeholders.

The Board holds a governance lens. The Governance Institute of Australia (GIA) provides a useful definition as, “Governance encompasses the system by which an organisation is controlled and operates, and the mechanisms by which it, and its people, are held to account.” The key phrase here is “are held to account”.

The Principal has a management perspective. While there are many definitions of what management is and does, I prefer organisational theorist Harold Koontz’s view. He surmises that “Management is an art of getting things done through and with the people in formally organized groups". It is the art of creating an environment where people and individuals can perform and co-operate towards attaining group goals.”

The third relationship is with Stakeholders. This group combines service providers (teachers, contractors, volunteers), consumers (students and parents), and those with a stake in the entity and its outcomes (alumni and the wider community). Their perspective is a lens on operational matters.

The Engagement Level of These Relationships

Obviously, the three main parties are all driven by the school strategy, which is at the centre of everything they do.

However, each has a specific level of engagement that underpins their connection to the strategy.

The Board – Principal engagement is based on risk. The Board, from their governance lens, believes that the Principal must be held accountable for the strategy and its implementation. This creates a level of risk. They desire to mitigate this risk and will utilise tools to help govern the outcomes they seek (balanced scorecards and KPIs are typical applications).

To counter this risk, the Principal – Stakeholder engagement resides upon good systems. Policies and procedures set forth the successful implementation of the strategy. While the Principal monitors the systems through continual change processes stakeholders should also be immersed in owning, adapting, and improving the systems based on their learning and relevant data.

Finally, the Stakeholder – Board engagement occurs through networks. The Board, as a natural composition of stakeholders, interacts with other stakeholders to ascertain the relevance of the current strategic direction and its successful execution. The network via formal and informal channels provides feedback to each party. These highlight the progress being made and possible disruptions on the horizon.

Conclusion

To wrap this up, the board’s role in school strategy development and implementation is to provide oversight and governance. They don’t need to craft or execute the strategy, but they are responsible to define its boundaries, make strategy a priority, and direct the relationship nexus of all parties.