Organise your school development plan with three levels of structure and detail.

School Development Planning can be approached in many ways but generally all methods share some common features which our system can accommodate. At the highest level there will be a few themes that activities are grouped into. Some schools organise these to relate to inspection categories but there is no requirement to do so - you choose the groupings!

Within a theme or area there will be one or more projects or initiatives aimed at improving practice in a specific way (typically these initiatives will be led by a subgroup of the Senior Leadership Team). Each initiative will require a range of people to complete a series of actions that can be monitored by the initiative leader and governors.

The impact of initiatives and the actions taken to implement them is evaluated using success criteria at appropriate points in the year. Additionally, high level targets can be set for the school that collectively, the actions, initiatives and themes are aimed at achieving and improving.

Assign elements to individual members of your staff and leadership team and report progress to governors.

Each action, initiative and theme is allocated to an individual member of staff who takes responsibility for it and for reporting back on completion and impact. Responsibility for initiatives and themes can be shared with a co-owner/supporter.

Owners and supporters are automatically reminded of actions as they approach their due date. Every summary page contains a visual representation of the current state of the plan.

Cascade plans to other teams.

Most schools find it helpful to separate department/subject plans from the whole school plan but generally there are overlapping or shared initiatives. Once the framework for the whole school has been written it can be cloned so that common features are contained in all sub-plans where they can be developed for individual team needs and priorities.

For groups of schools, it is possible to create a central development plan and cascade features of this to each school for further development.