The sun is setting on yet another school year. With that comes the diminishing timeframe to ensure your strategy is implemented as you hoped it would. Of course, it's highly probable you didn't reach all your goals — the more aspirational ones are likely still on the horizon.

But what if you didn’t reach any? Or did the activities you pursued have little impact?

That’s the quiet frustration of strategic execution in schools: you know what you want to achieve, but you can’t quite tell what’s moving and what’s merely noise. You’ve written the goals, communicated the plan, and inspired the staff — yet the outcomes still feel distant. It’s not that your strategy is wrong.

Lead Indicators

The issue is that your lead indicators aren’t doing their job.

In the corporate world, leads are sharp and transactional, characterised by phone calls, conversions, and response times. There’s a clear chain between effort and result. But in schools, the link between activity and outcome is slower, softer, and deeply human. The dials don’t move easily when they’re connected to culture, clarity, and care.

The irony?

Schools are better placed than most organisations to use lead indicators well. They live in a world built on formative feedback. Teachers know what it means to adjust the course mid-lesson. Yet, when it comes to strategy, most schools are still running summative evaluations — lag measures that arrive long after the learning is done.

The Corporate Advantage vs The School Reality

In business, performance is predictable. The systems are tight, the metrics are direct, and the incentives are aligned. Leads like “number of sales calls” or “production errors” can reliably forecast profit. The rhythm is daily, and the review cycles are short. When something drifts, it becomes visible within a week.

Schools don’t work that way.

They are open systems, shaped by relationships, values, and culture. You can’t just measure “trust per fortnight” or “collaboration per term.” The work of education takes time to reveal itself, and even then, causation is complex. Did engagement rise because of improved teaching, a new wellbeing program, or the excitement of an upcoming camp? In schools, everything is connected, and that’s both beautiful and difficult.

Compounding the challenge is the tension between altruism and accountability. Schools exist to grow people, not profit. They are wary of reducing the human experience to numbers, and rightly so. But without measurable rhythm, strategy drifts into aspiration: noble, heartfelt, and static.

The goal isn’t to make schools more corporate. It’s to make them more conscious and aware of the actions that are likely to create better outcomes tomorrow. That’s what a lead indicator really is: a conscious feedback loop.

The Measurement Paradox

Most schools measure plenty, but they measure the wrong things.

They count programs run, PD hours logged, and surveys completed. These are inputs, not indicators. They show activity, not movement.

The deeper issue is that schools confuse evidence with impact. Evidence tells you something happened; impact tells you something changed. Without the right indicators, schools end up tracking what’s visible instead of what’s valuable.

Here’s the paradox: the more complex your mission, the simpler your measurement must become. Lead indicators work best when they describe behavioural signals — things staff can control in short cycles.

The art lies in identifying the actions that most reliably predict the lag outcomes you care about.

The Bridge: Redefining Leads for Schools

In practical terms, good lead indicators in schools share three traits:

1. Behavioural – They describe what people do, not what they achieve.
2. Predictive – They forecast change before results appear.
3. Controllable – They can be influenced by the team’s choices and effort.

That’s why “staff turnover” isn’t a lead; it’s a lag.

But “number of stay conversations per term” reflects something within control that likely affects the lag later.

This behavioural focus turns vague ambition into a visible rhythm. When leaders can see progress in short intervals, strategy becomes a learning system, not a performance review.

The Lead Indicator Design Toolkit

Here’s a practical checklist for designing lead indicators that move your school’s strategy forward.

1. Start with the Lag
Define success before you measure progress. Your lag indicator is the long-term result you’re aiming for, the visible outcome that signals the strategy is working. It’s your “north star,” not your daily compass.

2. Find the Levers
Identify the behaviours and actions that cause the result. An accurate lead indicator reflects something within your control, what your people can actually do next week to influence the lag.

3. Make it Rhythmic
Leads only matter if they move often. Set a regular review rhythm: weekly, fortnightly, or monthly to see real change. Annual data is too slow to steer with.

4. Define the Signal
Establish a clear cause-and-effect link. Ask: If this improves now, will our result improve later? The more precise the signal, the more confident your decisions become.

5. Choose the Data Source
Every indicator needs a home. Attach each measure to a reliable system, person, or artefact, somewhere it will actually live and stay visible, not buried in spreadsheets.

6. Check the BASE
Test each lead for being Behavioural, Actionable, Specific, and Evaluative. If it fails any of these, refine it. Weak indicators create noise; strong ones create clarity.

7. Pilot and Iterate
Treat indicators as hypotheses, not truths. Run short pilots, review the results, and adjust. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s learning which dials truly move your strategy forward. 

Quick-Start Template

The Flight Deck of Strategy

Think of your strategy as a flight deck.

The lag indicators: enrolments, satisfaction, and retention are the altimeter, showing where you’ve arrived.

The leads are the dials you adjust mid-flight. They’re small, often unglamorous, but they keep you flying straight.

The trick is to resist overloading the cockpit. You don’t need a hundred indicators; you need a handful of living dials that speak to what matters. Check them regularly. Talk about them often. Adjust the course before turbulence becomes a crisis.

When your indicators work, your conversations change. Staff should stop asking, “Did we meet the goal?” and instead ask, “What’s changing that tells us we’re on track?”

Closing Reflection

Strategy execution in schools will always involve ambiguity. You can’t predict everything in a human enterprise. But you can design rhythms that make progress visible, tangible, and hopeful. That’s what lead indicators offer—not control, but clarity.

Because strategy doesn’t fail due to a lack of vision.

It fails due to a lack of feedback.

And feedback — the kind that shapes tomorrow — is a habit worth leading.