stages of strategic planning in education

Ensure your strategic plan succeeds with your educational partners’ input

September 29, 2023

Sarah Mathias

Strategic planning in education – 3 keys to success.

Effective strategic planning is critical for creating positive change in your district. Among the many benefits, strategic plans align educational partners with a shared vision, mission, and values; promote productive decision-making; and help students reach their full potential.

While having a plan in place will usually improve results, strategic planning can present challenges—resulting in endless meetings, countless goal and tactic revisions, and plans that are never fully realized.

In this post, we explore strategic planning in education, touch on some K-12 planning tips, and share three best practices for making strategic planning successful in your school district. With your community’s insights and the right tools, you can win at strategic planning. Here’s how.

In this Article

• What is Strategic Planning in Education?

Strategic planning tips for K12

See thoughtexchange in action — start the product tour, what is strategic planning in education.

Strategic planning is the process of setting goals, deciding on actions to achieve those goals, and mobilizing the resources needed to take those actions. A strategic plan describes how goals will be achieved using available resources.

While the concept initially stemmed from business practices due to people moving from the private sector into educational leadership positions, many strategic planning tools and paradigms have been adapted to focus on engagement and consensus.

This is because effective strategic planning requires community support at the school district level, both functionally and legislatively. School districts of all sizes use strategic planning to improve student outcomes and respond to changing demographics while staying within the given funding box.

In top-performing schools, leaders have proactively shifted their strategic planning process to include their educational partners. They know that their strategic plans are more likely to succeed with community support and the insights that come with community engagement.

Strategic planning is key to setting students up for success in K-12 and beyond. A solid strategic plan articulates a shared vision, mission, and values, increasing engagement while providing a framework to ensure students’ needs are met so they can reach their full potential.

Your strategic plan will benefit from your district’s input. Here are a few effective ways to engage your district in K-12 strategic planning.

Tap into your educational partners’ wisdom

Your educational partners have valuable insights. Consult teachers, staff, students , parents, and community members throughout the planning process, so your strategy aligns with their perspectives.

Whether you’re setting strategy at the district, school, or department level, consulting diverse participants will uncover unbiased insights, enhance trust and buy-in, and ensure greater success with new strategic directions.

Using ThoughtExchange , leaders can scale their engagement to efficiently and effectively include their community in their district strategic plans.

Use climate surveys

Completed by all students, parents/guardians, and staff, school climate surveys allow leaders to collect participants’ perceptions about issues like school safety, bullying, and mental health and well-being, as well as the general school environment.

ThoughtExchange Surveys get you both nuanced qualitative and robust quantitative data with instant in-depth analysis, ensuring your district understands all angles of school climate. Run surveys independently or combine them with Exchanges for faster, more accurate results.

• Collect benchmark comparisons while tracking and measuring improvements over time
• Gather quality quantitative data for reporting to state agencies or funders
• Identify outliers and trends across demographic groups

Put in some face time with town halls, meetings, or listening tours

In-person gatherings like town halls, meetings, and listening tours are effective ways to understand your educational partners’ wants and needs to ensure they line up with your strategic priorities.

When managed effectively, they give staff and other educational partners the chance to closely interact. In-person gatherings can build trust and morale, promote transparency, and help create a sense of purpose.

Leverage community engagement platforms

Community engagement software lets you streamline your community engagement initiatives. It allows education leaders to gather feedback and get tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people on the same page in just days. It also facilitates candid, collaborative community conversations that help districts realize their goals.

A comprehensive community engagement platform like ThoughtExchange allows you to integrate your strategy with your community and take decisive, supported action in less time. It provides planning, scheduling, and analysis tools to help you quickly set strategy and monitor execution.

3 keys to strategic planning success

1. get everyone on the same page.

Make sure your educational partners are on the same page by allowing them to contribute to and shape your strategy from the start. Lack of alignment about what strategy involves can hinder even the best plans. So the first step in creating a successful strategic plan is getting everyone involved to provide their insights and opinions.

Letting your people know you’re listening and that their insights affect decisions, builds trust and buy-in. Your community will be much more likely to support—not sabotage—a strategy or decision.

2. Be a collaborative leader

According to ThinkStrategic , creating a school strategic plan should always be a collaborative process. Avoiding a top-down approach and getting input from educational partners will help minimize blind spots and unlock collective intelligence. It will also ensure everyone is committed to the plan. Get all community members involved in how to make the most of the school’s possibilities.

Commit to becoming a collaborative leader and put a plan in place to ensure you can achieve that goal. That may include implementing technology that can support scaled, real-time discussion safely and inclusively for students, teachers, and other educational partners.

3. Get a holistic view of your district

Getting a holistic view of your educational partners’ wants and needs helps you build more inclusive, supported strategic plans.

Depend on a platform that meets all your engagement needs in one place—from surveys to Exchanges—and allows you to consult more people in an inclusive, anti-biased environment. You’ll reduce the time and resources spent on town halls and meetings, and reach your district’s goals more efficiently and effectively.

Engagement and survey software has been proven to contribute to more effective strategic planning in education. It empowers leaders to run and scale unbiased engagement initiatives where they can learn what the people who matter really think— explore ThoughtExchange success stories to learn more .

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Five steps to planning for improved learning.

Improving educational quality through education sector plans

The techniques of strategic planning in education are well-developed, but students’ actual learning experiences have not always been the central concern. In the context of the new Education 2030 focus on education quality, what steps can planners go through to ensure that their education sector plans give priority to improving students’ learning outcomes?

Developing an education sector strategic plan can be a complex and iterative process. But in its simplest form,  Planning for Learning   involves five basic steps, from analysis of the current situation through to the detailed planning needed to accomplish change. Below, we suggest some of the key questions education planners need to ask in order to focus each step of this process on improving learning outcomes.

1. Education sector analysis: Where are we now?  

The process of planning for improved learning outcomes starts with a diagnosis of the current situation in the education sector, with a specific focus on learning.

Questions to ask : What information about students’ learning do we have, and what are we missing? What are students learning and how well are they learning it? Does their learning match the needs, aspirations, and plans of their parents, communities, and the nation? What are the major learning successes and weaknesses, and what are the causes behind them?

Tools planners can use:   Assessment data ,  Other monitoring data ,  SWOT analysis ,  Problem tree analysis . 

2. Policy and strategies: Where do we want to go?  

A plan for improving learning outcomes should offer a vision of a desirable situation for the education system in the future, and identify the ways to reach this situation.

Questions to ask : What are our end goals for improving learning? What are our medium-term objectives? Which strategies will be effective in achieving these learning goals and objectives?

Tools planners can use : Explore  strategies for improving learning , Convert your  problem tree into a solution tree ,   Complete a  strategic planning grid .

3.  Programmes: How do we get there?  

Once policy priorities and key strategies have been defined, they must be translated into specific actionable programmes.

Questions to ask:  What are the immediate results or outputs that must be achieved in order to meet our learning objectives and end goals? Which programmes and activities must be carried out in order to produce those outputs? How will objectives and outputs be measured?

Tools planners can use : Complete a  Logical Framework Matrix , Develop  indicators and targets .

4.  Costing and financing: How much will it cost and who will pay?  

To be achievable, policy priorities and strategies have to be consistent with the demographic and economic realities.

Questions to ask : What are the categories of costs involved in each of our activities to improve learning? What are the other recurring costs in the education sector? Do we need to account for growth (population growth, increased attendance, etc.) when calculating our recurring and new programme costs? What are our projected sources of funding and does the total match our projected costs?

Tools planners can use:   Simulation models ,  Budget template for GPE grants .  

Once projected costs have been established, policies, strategies, activities and/or targets may have to be revised in an iterative process until the plan is feasible in all respects.

5. Action plan: Who will do what and when?  

The action plan is sometimes referred to as an implementation plan or operational plan. It outlines the detailed activities for a specific period of the plan, with information on timing, roles, responsibilities, and costs.

Questions to ask : Which institutions and departments are responsible for each activity to improve learning outcomes? When should each activity be accomplished? Will the financial resources be ready on time?

Tools planners can use :  Action plan template ,   Gantt chart .  

The Next Step: Monitoring your plan

Once an action plan has been determined, planners need to ask themselves: How will we monitor whether these activities, outputs, and objectives are accomplished? What kind of data will we collect in order to see whether we are improving our education quality and students’ learning outcomes? and, How and when will this information be collected and analysed? For a more in-depth look at the education sector planning process, two helpful resources are the GPE/IIEP   Guidelines for Education Sector Plan Preparation  and IIEP’s  Strategic Planning: Techniques and Methods .

You can also learn more by reading our  Plan for Learning articles  and searching for resources in the  IIEP Learning Portal Library.

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In education, evolution and adaptation are constants. Academic institutions must stay up to date with technology and teaching methods to succeed, while also managing students' social, emotional, and academic needs. With all of these considerations in addition to budgetary constraints, It's easy to see why ensuring student and institutional success requires a dynamic strategic plan.

This blog post will outline the best practices academic institutions should consider when developing an effective strategic plan to address these challenges. To create an effective strategic plan, we need to eliminate the disconnect between leadership's high-level vision and employees' tactical work. Leading academic institutions, growing companies, and organizations adapt to change through dynamic strategic planning. 

A dynamic strategic plan breaks down an organization's long-term vision into short-term goals and then builds a roadmap to achieve those goals. As part of this process, the organization's plan should be reviewed and revised regularly to ensure relevance and alignment with its mission. Academic plans are typically written as multi-year plans and organizations often face challenges in developing effective strategic plans that are easy to understand and execute. Here are a few suggestions to help address these challenges:

• Clearly define your vision: The first step in developing an effective strategic plan is to define the vision for the school. This should be a clear, concise statement that articulates what the school hopes to achieve. 
• Identify key objectives: Once you have a clear vision, identify the key objectives that will help you achieve them. These should be specific and measurable goals that align with your vision.
• Create measurable, outcome-focused key results: With your objectives in mind, it is important to focus on creating key results that drive outcomes, not outputs to help you reach your targets. Schools that focus on driving actionable objectives with outcome-based key results will ensure they stay aligned on what truly matters.
• Prioritize and allocate resources: It's essential to prioritize your strategies and allocate resources accordingly. Determine which strategies are most critical to achieving your objectives and ensure that you have the resources (e.g., time, budget, personnel) to implement them effectively.
• Monitor and evaluate progress: Finally, monitor and evaluate progress regularly to ensure that you are on track to achieving your objectives. This will help you identify areas where you may need to adjust your strategies or allocate additional resources.

By following these steps, academic institutions can develop a strategic planning framework and process that is effective, simple, and links vision to tactical execution. So now that we have the steps needed to build our strategy, let's start to bring it to life.

Take a field trip: host an annual Strategic Planning Offsite 

Before each academic year, we recommend holding a strategic planning meeting offsite with your leadership team. This is dedicated time to focus on the priorities for the upcoming year. Before diving into where you're headed, set aside time for a retrospective to discuss the previous year. In addition, discuss the current education landscape.

To build a future-focused and tailored plan for your academic institution, the team should reconfirm your mission and values, set your vision, and define your top strategic priorities. 

As you head into your offsite, we recommend the following best practices that lead to success:

• Get Outside of the Office : Find space outside of the work environment to reduce distractions and encourage collaboration.
• Set a Clear Agenda : Agree ahead of time on the purpose of each day, the deliverables, and actionable next steps. 
• Make Space to Think: Carve out time for free thinking vs. relying on group thinking to encourage new ideas. If you need a template, we recommend using this worksheet to guide the conversation .

Simplify the strategic plan: align your high-level strategy with tactical execution

Academic plans are typically written as multi-year plans (5-year plans are most common) which can lead to a very detailed and dense plan. Given the complexity and length of the strategic plan, it can feel overwhelming and difficult to break the plan down and prioritize what’s most imperative to execute and focus on. We recommend breaking the larger multi-year plan into digestible annual plans that are more manageable. 

We recommend identifying 3-5 main themes in your strategic plan, often referred to as pillars or rallying cries. Once you have core themes, you can prioritize and bucket the most critical initiatives and objectives. Every theme will have specific supporting objectives and key results. We recommend using consistent nomenclature when creating themes, objectives, and key results so any team member can easily understand why the work is significant. 

Once we have the multi-year plan broken into annual plans and themes identified, we recommend defining short-term objectives (quarterly or semi-annually) and measurable metrics to drive key results. Breaking down the plan into quarters will feel more approachable and attainable. In addition, it will provide clarity and transparency for the executing team. When the strategic plan is broken down into actionable items, small wins can be celebrated along the way. This boosts motivation, engagement, and morale.  

Consistency is key to a successful strategic plan

When individuals understand how their work aligns with the high-level strategy and vision, they can prioritize their initiatives. Establish clear, measurable objectives and key results that are easy to track and provide consistent nomenclature. Keep these three tips in mind when writing your strategic plan objectives:

• Objectives should be aspirational and push people outside their comfort zone.
• Each objective should have 2-3 measurable and quantifiable results.
• Have a clear, defined owner responsible for recurring status updates. 

The best way to write objectives is to start by asking, “Why is this initiative important?” When you understand the why, you can create measurable outcome-driven results. Let’s walk through an example objective with key results laid out in Elate.

Theme: Develop and retain a diverse educator workforce.

Objective: Strengthen and diversify the educator pipeline and workforce.

Objective Purpose Statement: Increase mentoring and leadership development programs to retain educators, particularly educators from under-represented backgrounds. 

Key metrics: 

• Increase mentoring program engagement by 50% 
• 96% educator retention rate 

Implement rituals and track success with dynamic strategic planning

After your plan is built, it is imperative to establish rituals to stay on track and measure progress against the strategic plan. Rituals are defined as a rhythm, cadence, and process for reviewing objectives and strategic plans. Establishing strong rituals allows critical conversations to happen proactively. When objectives are stuck in limbo or fall off track, proactive discussions can happen. However, many academic institutions have different rituals for different teams. Implementing consistent rituals regularly will help you stay aligned, measure progress, and ensure you’re having the right conversations at the right time.

To keep everyone on the same page and connect tactical execution to strategic vision, we recommend objective owners provide bi-weekly updates. Across many academic institutions, strategy, and operations leaders spend countless hours tracking down updates that become outdated quickly. With Elate, reminder notifications are automatically sent to team members so they can focus more on execution and less on chasing down updates. 

We recommend spending a few minutes in executive team meetings reviewing objectives that are off-track or not making progress to create an action plan moving forward. This ritual of reviewing the plan early often brings awareness to the leadership team about objectives that need attention or are falling behind. It also allows space to celebrate accomplishments and wins. 

This makes it easy to ensure the strategic plan lives and breathes. Setting and clearly defining rituals for how the plan progresses, updates are made and reviewed, and addressing red flags is key to success. 

Focus on the right metrics to measure your strategic plan's success

With key results, objectives, and business-as-usual metrics all in one place, Elate keeps the strategic plan organized with a consolidated view. In Elate, scorecards provide an essential view of business-as-usual metrics and progress. Create specific scorecards for the board, enrollment, grant, and donor activity. 

Elevate your strategic plan with Elate

Strategic planning is critical for academic institutions that want to stay competitive, adapt to change, and achieve their goals. By following these best practices, higher education and academic institutions can achieve their goals and stay competitive in an ever-changing environment. 

Strategic planning has never been easier with Elate. Our platform simplifies and streamlines the strategic planning process, taking the stress out of it. We make it easy to stay on track with transparent reporting, simple collaboration, and one-click integrations with Salesforce, Google Sheets, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Your vision can finally meet your strategy.

Learn more about our strategic planning tools and services, or contact us today to learn more about how we specifically work with other Academic Institutions!

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Future-focused strategic planning for schools: the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ need a ‘how’

10 Sep Future-focused strategic planning for schools: the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ need a ‘how’

The most important skill in today’s world, individually and as an organisation, is focus. In a world of information overload and one distraction after another, it takes focus to achieve anything valuable. Just like individuals, schools have all sorts of different priorities being brought to their attention day to day, but to truly be effective, they must have a clear sense of direction and purpose. This means they must know:

• WHAT they want to achieve (their goals)
• WHY they want to achieve these things (their philosophy, vision and mission), and
• HOW they will achieve it (their strategic plan).

It’s this third thing that we are focused on today: strategic planning establishes how a school will reach its goals and uphold its vision and values. Without a plan to achieve these things, they remain abstract and unattainable, and it’s unlikely progress will be made. A strategic plan is like a road map that gets you where you are aiming to be.

Why a strategic plan is crucial in any school

A strategic plan is a key guiding document for any school, and can have far-reaching effects. Some of these effects include:

A strategic plan can inspire & unite the whole school community

A strategic plan allows you to inspire your whole community to take action and make change. By making your school’s goals or vision achievable with an actionable plan, rather than completely abstract, you engage people and help them own their role in the process. Your strategic plan can capture the hearts and minds of everyone in your community and allow them to be part of something bigger, providing a purpose and process. It’s powerful to commit to something bigger than yourself, and is a significant predictor of happiness. This inspiration can be a vital ingredient to a thriving school community and can lead to positive outcomes like high teacher retention and student engagement. Even the collaborative process of creating a strategic plan alone can have powerful effects on your school community.

A strategic plan helps people keep focus on the big picture

It’s easy for principals, school administrators, teachers and other members of the school community to lose sight of the big picture in the day-to-day demands that come from all sides, from students and parents right through to governments. A future-focused strategic plan helps to lift vision from the present and keep their focus on the things that truly matter most. In an increasingly busy world, focus is everything, and a strategic plan facilitates this in a school setting.

A strategic plan can help schools keep pace in a changing world

We live in a world of rapid change and all sorts of problems, from rising socio-economic inequality to terrorism, environmental challenges to mental illness and lack of wellbeing across all areas of society. These things affect everyone in our schools, from students to school leaders, but strategic planning as a school can help us harness education as a power to change the world. By nurturing a love of learning, goodness, creativity and ingenuity, we give our students the tools they need to make their way through the many challenges we face. In the words of Nelson Mandela, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.

What a school strategic plan should be

It’s clear – strategic planning for schools is absolutely crucial to their futures, on many levels! But what does an effective strategic plan actually look like? What should it include and focus on? What principles should guide the establishment of a strategic plan? A school strategic plan should always be:

Future-focused

Any strategic plan should be truly focused on the future. This requires intention: when asked what should be in the strategic plan, many people just talk about what they’re already doing. It’s hard to see the future when you’re focused on what you’re currently busy with, but a plan based solely on what you’re already doing will lead to a remake of the same school you already have. Help those involved in strategic planning to be future-focused by sharing resources to inspire them and help them see beyond their current concerns in the lead up to your planning meetings.

Collaborative

Creating a school strategic plan should always be a collaborative process, not something imposed from the top down. Input and buy-in from all stakeholders will not only minimise the chance of blind spots and unlock collective genius, it will ensure that everyone is committed to the plan. Get all members of the community – including students! – involved in considering the possibilities and opportunities the school has, and how you can make the most of them.

Rolled out in stages and reviewed regularly

An effective strategic plan should be concise and actionable, and rolled out in stages so that it’s clear what the focus is at each stage. This might mean a three-year plan, with twelve month action plans in place within that, and ninety day reviews built in. Each of these reviews is an opportunity to celebrate short term wins, recommit to the plan, and of course, to revise the plan. You might even remove some things from the plan, or replace some elements with something new! Don’t be afraid of an agile, dynamic plan that responds to change as it occurs.

There’s no one school strategic plan template that will work for every school: your plan needs to be tailored specifically to your legal, historic and cultural circumstances. The only way to succeed is to align your strategy to the unique challenges and opportunities of your school. A school in the inner city will likely have a very different strategic plan to a rural school, and a brand new school will have different considerations from one that has existed for generations. Even within a single school district strategic plans should look different at each school, based on their own unique context.

Your school’s strategic plan should be consistent with all other guiding documents and ideals of your school, including any sort of vision, mission statement, values or philosophy. Together, these documents set the vision for your school – the ‘what’ and the ‘why’! Your ‘how’ needs to line up with the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. If you look at these and they aren’t in step with the strategic plan you want to write, it’s probably time to review these documents as well. This can be a big task, but it’s worth doing. These documents are only valuable if they reflect the current vision, mission, values, goals and philosophy. If you’re moving in a direction that’s no longer aligned with your old documents, they can’t help you get to where you want to be.

All strategic planning schools need to plan for the practical side of things as well as the broader vision. A strategic plan should always take the triple bottom line into account – People, the Planet & Profit (the three Ps). None of these practical concerns should be neglected. Remember, even if your school is the best in the world, it needs to be financially sustainable to keep reaching students. All your other goals and plans rely on the school existing and being able to afford to do its work. No matter what lofty vision you have for the future, financial sustainability should always be a consideration.

Socially responsible

Schools have a corporate social responsibility, and any sample school strategic plan that doesn’t take this into account is lacking. As you approach your planning, keep in mind ways that you can build trust in the community – both within the school community and the broader community – and promote responsibility, respect and accountability. Schools have a role to play in shaping the future of our world, and that’s a big responsibility! Always consider things like sustainability and wellbeing: a holistic view of people and your plans will help foster social responsibility as a school, and among your teachers and students.

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There may not be one strategic plan template for schools that will work in all contexts, but there are some things that any school will benefit from considering as part of their plan. Some of the things that you might specifically address in your strategic plan include:

• Talent development – empowering and inspiring teachers and students
• Celebrating diversity – across cultures and generations
• Global context
• 21st century skills – the four Cs! Communication, creativity, critical thinking and collaboration
• Asia literacy, and
• Student voice and student agency.

An effective, future-focused strategic plan can be instrumental in your school, inspiring and uniting the community, keeping focus on what matters, and preparing teachers and students alike to be change agents in a world of challenges.

If you would like to talk with someone who understands just what you are going through contact Maxine at [email protected]  for a collaborative, creative and constructive conversation about your next steps.

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