Creating School Plans

The Creating an Action Plan/Single Plan programme mainly supports Senior Leaders – Heads and Deputies – to help achieve school improvements in key areas such as raising attainment, accelerating progress, improving the quality of teaching and learning, improving the conditions for learning and developing the school as a professional learning community.

The initial phase generally starts with an audit process which takes an in-depth look at what is currently being achieved in the school. The audit not only helps Education Works to gain essential insight but also helps the School’s Senior Leaders to pinpoint issues and establish priorities.

The Single Plan is then created by distilling the audit’s findings and clearly setting out the objectives for school improvement, defining the success criteria, describing the expected impact and then recording the actual impact of the activities.

The plans are readily available to all staff so that everyone knows what is being done, who is involved and how successful the programme is. The plan includes a chart that ‘maps out’ all the data across the school which means that all teaching staff know the data picture for their own cohort, Key Stage and the entire school.

A key feature of the Plans is that they include a ‘priority cover note’ on the front so that the areas that need to be addressed can be seen at a glance, plus who is responsible, and milestones in the form of a diary at the back which can be colour-coded to identify who is doing what and when.

Measuring the impact of a plan is a vital stage in the programme. All plans include an impact column that focuses on recording the extent to which objectives are met, measured against agreed success criteria. Education Works have found that focussing on the actual impact is a far more powerful tool than simply recording what was done. Local Authority Officers who have been part of school review meetings have commented positively on Education Work’s focus on impact.