Sharing Good Practice
HOW TO ENSURE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY WHILE KEEPING THE HIGHEST ACADEMIC AND QUALITY METRICS BY: MR. ATAULLAH PARKAR
my mind. I defined the school through projects, including assessment, wellbeing, and health & safety (and many more!). I then listed all of the tasks that I had to complete in relation to these projects, splitting my thought process into one of two strands:
T
he roles of principals and their senior leadership teams continue to evolve, particularly as schools become larger institutions, either running more populated schools or part of a consortium of schools. Executive leadership in education now calls upon school leaders to have a stronger grasp of business processes, financial strategies, and economies of scale to ensure they are achieving the best outcomes more consistently across the organisations they serve. The conundrum that many leaders face today, is the pressure to deliver a system of high-quality education, whilst delivering a profitable business. Balancing these spinning Greek plates, pulls at the moral chords of educators. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted how dependent and vulnerable the continuity of the education sector is on the economy, and the need for principals to act as CEOs, keeping staff and the business afloat whilst waving the flag of outcomes for young people. This requires a set of competencies not always readily available in the arsenal of education leaders. This challenge isn’t limited to educators operating in the private sector. The increase in multi-academy trusts in public systems of education also operate
16
Term 1 Sep - Dec 2020
with similar pressures. Answering questions relating to ‘why’ is critical for individual leaders to flourish. Every leader needs to start (and constantly reflect) with the question ‘Why am I an educator?’ and as their role becomes more executive in nature, the question turns to ‘why am I looking to optimise and refine my school?’ and ‘why am I learning lessons from other businesses to deliver efficiency in my services?’ Reflecting on these questions helps contextualise their intended outcomes as leaders, using operational efficiency as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. The risk of poor reflection, results in misguided educators who get trapped into making the economy that they function in, into the primary source of their motivation. Being a Meta-Thinker Schools can be extremely exhausting places because individuals are responsible for so many processes and projects at a single moment in time. Leaders must take out the time to be meta-thinkers, that is, to think about all the thinking we do! One of the most useful exercises I’ve done is conduct a brain dump (more on what technology to use later!) separating all the strands of thinking that goes on in
Class Time
1. Back-Burner Projects – Projects and tasks that every school does every year. A road map of repetitive processes that take place with very little change. This counts for approximately 70% of activity at the school. 2. Live Projects - Projects and tasks that relate to school improvement and are new into the school environment. For example, becoming an Apple school, Health & Safety protocols relating to COVID-19 or implementing a new phonics programme. These typically account for 30% of activity of my leadership team. Defining live projects is a typical practice for most organisations. However, though defining backburner projects is atypical, it has major benefits. Firstly, it helps leaders who exhaust their staff with initiative overload appreciate how much effort actually goes into sustaining the quality of provision already embedded in the school. Secondly, it ensures that leaders are never taken off-guard, using project management tools to prompt them with upcoming activities in the school or across schools in the group. If the tasks are fully articulated, the budget and human resource implications will also become far more predictable. Often, leaders never break out of the firefighting cycle, exhausting themselves before they even get round to implementing their new projects. Ironically, there is nearly always a focus on developing plans for the future, but the relentless efforts required to sustain unscheduled tasks that should have been pre-defined and optimised, stifles innovation. The standardisation procedures that need to be developed extend to the academic as much as they do to operational. In schools that operate in clusters, traditional centralised
