A few years ago, I encountered a school that was wrestling with what appeared to be a relatively straightforward curriculum problem on the surface.

It was continuing to offer Latin to a class of just three students.

Economically, the decision was difficult to justify. The cost of providing a specialist teacher for three students was considerable, particularly when that same investment could have supported something new, different, or potentially valuable to far more students.

But there was another consideration.

This was a traditional, top-tier school. Latin was part of what schools like this are expected to offer. Removing it risked saying something that the school wasn’t prepared to state.

I remember thinking that the real question wasn't whether Latin was educationally worthwhile. It was whether the school was making a decision about education, or protecting its idea of schooling.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Rita McGrath's Harvard Business Review article, The Power of Strategic Centering.

McGrath poses a deceptively simple strategic question:

What are we really about?

For schools, I think that question is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

Are we in the business of schooling?

McGrath builds upon Theodore Levitt's famous challenge to railway executives: were they in the railroad business, or the transportation business?

The distinction matters because defining yourself by the existing product creates very different possibilities from defining yourself by the problem you are trying to solve.

I wonder whether schools face a similar dilemma.

Are we in the business of schooling, or are we in the business of education?

Schooling comes with an established architecture. Students are grouped largely by age. Teachers work with classes. Learning is divided into subjects. Days are divided into periods. There are classrooms, campuses, terms, year levels, examinations, and qualifications.

These are the standard artefacts we hold onto when we refer to a school.

But they are a particular way of delivering education, rather than education itself.

That distinction becomes more important as AI, online learning, workplace partnerships, flexible pathways, alternative credentials, and different employment models begin challenging assumptions that have remained largely untouched for decades.

If I believe I am running a school, my strategic question is likely to be: How can we improve our existing model?

If I believe I am responsible for educating young people, another question arises: What is the best way to do that now?

Those questions may occasionally produce the same answer.

Increasingly, I suspect they won't.

This connects with something I have written about previously when considering why schools need an innovative strategy. Innovation disconnected from strategy can simply bolt new programs onto an old model. Strategic centering for schools asks the more uncomfortable question of whether the old model should determine what is possible in the first place.

Purpose doesn't necessarily help us choose

McGrath distinguishes a strategic centre from purpose and vision. Purpose can become so broad and aspirational that it offers little guidance when difficult choices must be made. Vision can describe a destination without necessarily telling us how to navigate towards it.

I think schools are particularly susceptible to this.

Consider a perfectly plausible school aspiration:

We want every student to achieve their potential.

Few people would disagree.

Yet I have watched the word their carry an extraordinary amount of weight.

For some staff, allowing students to achieve their potential means recognising individual progress, celebrating participation, and ensuring every student experiences success. Taken too far, this can drift towards rewarding students simply for turning up.

Others interpret the same words very differently. To them, potential means intellectual challenge, high expectations, academic rigour, and pushing students towards the highest standard of which they are capable.

Neither interpretation necessarily violates the purpose statement.

Yet each could produce a very different school, because they affect curriculum, assessment, recognition, yada, yada…. Ultimately, it affects students' experience.

That is the strategic weakness of broad statements of purpose and values. They tell us what we care about, but they don't always help us decide between competing priorities.

A useful strategic centre needs to do more.

It needs to make some choices easier and others harder.

Finding the centre

McGrath identifies five possible centres: mission, customer, technology, national or regional ecosystem, and friction erasure. Importantly, she does not argue that every organisation should choose the same one. The power comes from selecting a dominant organising principle and allowing it to shape subsequent decisions.

Some translate into schools more naturally than others.

Mission centering is perhaps the most obvious. What enduring problem is this school particularly committed to solving?

Customer centering is more provocative because schools have never been particularly comfortable with the language of customers. Yet asking whose needs do we understand better than anyone else? could produce a powerful strategy. A school designed specifically around disengaged adolescents should probably make very different choices from one centred on highly able students seeking exceptional academic challenge.

Technology centering worries me more. Becoming an “AI school”, for example, risks making the technology itself the strategy. McGrath describes the danger as technological narcissism: becoming enamoured with a capability rather than the problems it should solve.

The national ecosystem centre seems less applicable to an individual independent school, although I can see considerably more potential for Catholic, Uniting, Anglican, or other school systems. Their collective scale allows them to think about the educational ecosystem they are helping to create in ways an individual school probably cannot.

But the centre I find particularly interesting is friction erasure.

It asks:

What is still unnecessarily hard?

What if a school organised itself around systematically removing the things that make education harder than it needs to be?

Why does a student have to wait until the following year to progress?

Why are teachers spending hours performing administrative work that contributes little to learning?

Why do vocational and academic pathways need to sit so far apart?

Why does expertise have to reside physically on the same campus as the student?

Why does the timetable dictate the education rather than the education dictating the timetable?

Suddenly, friction erasure takes us straight back to the distinction between schooling and education.

It doesn't require us to abandon school. It simply stops the existing school architecture from automatically winning every argument.

The leader must maintain the centre

Another part of McGrath's argument particularly resonated with me.

She expected leaders in successfully centred organisations to resemble the servant-leader ideal: appoint excellent people, empower them, and get out of their way.

Instead, she found leaders who remained highly visible and deeply engaged.

They weren't micromanaging. They were maintaining the centre.

I know a Principal who does this instinctively.

They will question why a meeting needs to exist rather than accepting another hour disappearing from people's calendars. They actively protect staff from additional activities that do not contribute to the desired outcome. Recruitment decisions are challenged against the school's strategic position rather than allowing a candidate to succeed simply because they are highly qualified, personable, or known to someone already inside the organisation.

The same question keeps appearing in different forms:

Does this help us become what we have decided to become?

I find that a compelling conception of strategic leadership.

Maintaining the centre is as much about stopping work as it is about starting it.

Counterintuitively, it may also make distributed leadership easier. McGrath argues that a clear centre creates the possibility of what she calls “permissionless action”. When people genuinely understand the organising principle, they need less approval because they have a framework for making choices themselves.

Perhaps autonomy without a centre creates fragmentation.

Autonomy with one creates speed.

So, what are we really about?

I don't think schools suffer from a shortage of purpose statements.

Nor do I think they need another round of workshops to find three better adjectives for their values.

The more demanding question is whether those statements provide sufficient guidance when something valuable must be sacrificed for something considered more valuable.

Would we still offer Latin to three students?

Would we retain the timetable?

Would we build another physical classroom?

Would we hire this person?

Would we run this meeting?

Would we introduce AI here?

Would we stop doing something that has existed for 50 years?

That, for me, is where strategic centering for schools becomes useful.

The challenge isn't simply to articulate what we believe. It is to decide what sits at the centre strongly enough that we can also recognise what doesn't.

And perhaps that begins with the simplest question of all:

Are we trying to preserve a better version of school? Or are we willing to explore a better way to educate?