Six continuing professional development (CPD) activities to help your school build a shared understanding of how strategic planning can drive improvement and how your single plan can lead to sustainable changes in structures, systems and practice. Find the objective of the activities, resources you will need and a step-by-step process that you can follow.
Use these activities with the Quality Standards and the 'Single plan in action' section of Element 3 of Primary Stronger Management Systems (SMS).
You can adapt the activities to reflect the structure of your school and intended outcomes. This could involve cross-school collaboration to share and broaden expertise beyond your own school context.
Select a heading to read an activity and create a sequence of professional development over time.
- Planning for change
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Reflect on a recent achievement either in or away from school. Consider the following questions:
- Why was it positive?
- How did it come about?
- How was it planned for?
- Do you intend taking this achievement forward and building on it?
Share the following statements for consideration:
You need to plan to get what you want.
A clear and relevant plan helps you to get what you want.
A change often comes about as a result of a series of smaller changes.
In relation to your recent achievement, to what extent do these statements concur or conflict?
Consider the following questions:
- What has been learnt from this activity?
- How can it be applied to your short-term planning and next term's operational single plan?
- Developing outcomes
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Download Writing effective outcomes (PDF-24 KB) Attachments for use with this activity. Share and discuss this handout with participants.
Select one aspect of your current single plan and consider:
- Does the intended outcome show a clear difference between current practice and the expected difference?
- Does it relate to improved outcomes for children?
- How will this be measured?
- How will impact be explicitly monitored?
- How could be this be made more robust?
Explore the implications of any adjustments for this and the other sections of the plan including:
- success criteria
- timelines
- resources
- roles and responsibilities
- school systems
- performance management.
- Effective success criteria
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Download Writing effective outcomes (PDF-24 KB) Attachments for use with this activity. Share and discuss the handout with participants.
Reflect on one positive change they have led over the past term, considering:
- What actions facilitated this change?
- What was different? How did you know when the change had been successful?
- Did the change in practice match your intentions?
- What improved for the children as a result?
Share out aspects of the current single plan. Grade on a scale of 0–5 the relevance of the success criteria in relation to the priority.
- What modifications are needed so that the intended change is more explicit?
- What implications does this have on other sections of the plan?
- What differences will it make to future planning?
- Evidencing priorities in action
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Invite an external colleague to carry out a Learning Walk evidencing the priorities of your current single plan in action.
- Are your current priorities explicit around the school?
- Do all staff know what the current priorities are?
- Is there consistency of practice?
- Deployment and the single plan
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Explore to what extent roles and responsibilities support the effective implementation of your current single plan. This may include reviewing:
- job descriptions
- deployment of resources (including staffing)
- professional development
- alignment of single plan, deployment and performance management cycles.
- Ensuring an effective single plan review
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Print out the page Reviewing the plan for use in this activity. Using the handout, reflect on your current single plan reviews. Agree next steps to make the review process (before, during and after) more effective.
