On my travels I meet so many great people wrestling with the challenges of school development. At times. their ambition and enthusiasm exceed their capacity – there’s a lot going on; lots of initiatives on the go – and it seems to me as an outside observer that they’d do better to calm thing down a bit and focus on fewer things, giving them the time and commitment they need to succeed – and then to be brilliant. You can spread your time and energy so thinly that nothing really gets much better at all.
So, looking at the year ahead, what might be good contenders for things to focus attention on? They have to be things you do a lot of – so the time invested in CPD has maximum impact. Some things can have immediate impact on lessons across a school right away; others need time invested in developing resources so you’re doing the work now with a pay-off that might not be realised for a few months.
My list of possible things – based on my school visits and my general sense of gaps in practice – would include the following: (And rather than go into each area, I’m just sign-posting blogs for further reading.) As you can see – there are a lot of contenders. The trick is to isolate specifics and properly focus on them. Just getting one of these areas right is a big win – and of course they all overlap; doing one thing well now will help with the other agendas later.
