Development Planning For School Improvement

This text represents the experiences from six English speaking countries in the field of school development planning. There are chapters discussing staff development, quality reviews and school organization and effectiveness.

Developing and updating school improvement plans is an annual ritual for virtually all school principals and their school improvement committees. Still, large numbers of schools continue to produce disappointing outcomes. The authors believe that part of the problem is the result of plans that focus on the wrong targets and that rely on ineffective strategies for improvement. To help principals and their school improvement committees develop and implement plans with a greater likelihood of success, the authors offer a step-by-step process for school improvement planning. They go on to pinpoint specific school improvement goals, including raising reading and mathematics achievement, building robust school cultures, addressing the needs of English language learners, improving instruction, and reducing absenteeism and dropouts. For each goal, a variety of objectives and proven strategies is presented along with sample school improvement plans. The book addresses the differences in planning to turn around a low-performing school, planning to sustain improvements over time, and planning to move a good school to a great school.

This text represents the experiences from six English speaking countries in the field of school development planning. There are chapters discussing staff development, quality reviews and school organization and effectiveness.

Classroom teachers moving to positions of increased responsibility often have very little formal training for their new role. This book provides guidelines for best practice in the necessary skills for success - planning, management and accountability.

Written at a very accessible and practical level, this book introduces strategic management and provides self-development activities to help educators develop a strategy within their own organizations.

This text represents the experiences from six English speaking countries in the field of school development planning. There are chapters discussing staff development, quality reviews and school organization and effectiveness.

Schools will not be able to continue to improve unless they move away from an over-concentration on the short-term and focus on the strategic nature of planning and development. The more targets, the less the effects - what we need is strategy and sustainability. This book links school improvement planning and strategic development for leadership enhancement as well as for management accountability. Short-term planning, in the form of target-setting plans aimed at improving standards, has gained increasing importance. While the book agrees that this is necessary, it puts forward the view that short-term planning is not sufficient for the longer-term development of the school. Sustainability and strategic development are of critical importance and for these the authors believe that a more holistic approach to planning is necessary. To that end, this book links short and longer-term planning in a framework, which supports the strategic development of the school. The authors are national experts in the field and in preparing this text have worked extensively with headteachers, deputy headteachers, governors and those participating in NPQH and masters programmes in educational leadership and management.

School development planning was adopted as a strategy to improve teaching and learning, school management and governance, and community participation in education under the UPE programme in Uganda. The success of SDP is underpinned by three factors: intellectual capital (resides with the head teacher as a change agent and at the centre of the process of school development and improvement), social capital (resides in the school contexts) and political capital (resides in the socio-political climate). The ability of the head teacher to optimally blend the three types of capital in a given context with focus on a right area may provide the opportunity to produce the expected results. The purpose of this book is to explore the perceptions and experiences of stakeholders about the process, practices, and impact of SDP. It also examines the contribution of SDP towards improvement of the quality of education in primary schools in Uganda. This book provides head teachers, local and national leaders practical suggestions to improve and sustain SDP such as the use of locally generated strategies to tackle school challenges and sharing of effective teaching practices.

As societies continue to set educational goals that are, on current performance, beyond the capacity of the system to deliver, strategies for enhancing student learning through school and classroom intervention have become increasingly important. Yet, as David Hopkins argues in his book, many of the educational initiatives recently developed under the umbrella of school improvement are inadequate or unhelpful. Simply blaming teachers and delegating financial responsibility, he maintains, has little positive impact on classroom practice. This is the bleak context within which school improvement has to operate today. School Improvement for Real offers a genuine alternative: a strategy for educational change that focuses on student achievement by modifying classroom practice and adapting the management arrangements within the school to support teaching and learning. It outlines an approach to school improvement that has a medium term, systemic orientation, providing both principles and suggestions for better practice. The author's experience in the field of school improvement ensures that the text is informed by a practical wisdom that is so often lacking from the more typical managerial texts on improvement and effectiveness.

This book examines the powerful concept of implementation - or what actually happens in practice when innovations or reforms are attempted - by demonstrating its uses in a variety of policy and programme applications.