Strategic Schools
Get simple and practical ideas to enhance your educational leadership in under 20 minutes. Join educational researcher and author Dr Simon Breakspear as he shares key insights and practical tools that can help you to find greater focus, flow and impact in an increasingly overwhelming educational landscape.
Each year Simon Breakspear works with hundreds of schools and thousands of educational leaders. He received a degree in Psychology from The University of NSW, a Master of Science from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Education from The University of Cambridge.
Strategic Schools
Ep. 26: Streamlining Improvement Plans through Pruning
Many school improvement plans are overloaded from the start. In this episode, Simon explores how to integrate The Pruning Principle into your planning cycle - by subtracting before you add. Learn how to reduce unrealistic commitments, embed subtractive strategies, and create space for what matters most. A practical guide to shifting from planning theatre to focused, sustainable improvement.
Explore the Book and Resources
📘 Get The Pruning Principle book - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningbook/
🔧 Download free tools - https://simonbreakspear.com/pruningprinciple/
Well, hello and welcome to the Strategic Schools podcast, the show designed to give busy educational leaders the most practical value in the least time. I'm your host, dr Simon Breakspear, and in each episode I unpack one key idea or tool and outline practical steps you can apply with your team, all in under 20 minutes. Well, hey everyone, it's Simon, and I want to explore a little bit here about what I'm learning, both in my work implementing the Pruning Principle and my my longer term work with schools in improvement planning and implementation. Most of my longer term projects last for multiple years. I'm often working in a system where the government system or a large Catholic system that we're working with somewhere between 25 and 80 schools over multiple years where they will do their planning and whatever that system template is their four or three year plan and then their one year plan, and then we'll work with them over time to help them try to break that down into a termly cycle of work and then monitor impact and adjust. But I've got to say the biggest problem we face is that actually quite regularly they are over committing to something in that yearly plan. That is utterly unrealistic, and so I wanted to pick up just on a couple of things I capture in chapter nine of the pruning principle book on pruning improvement plans, and I wanted to pick up on some of the core ideas there and help you start to think about whether the way we're doing our improvement planning is really helping us get on with the complex work of sustainable improvement.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to say firstly that there's a real pitfall to keep building overloaded plans. You know, when we're considering educational pruning, I've got to say one of the most important areas of focus is that of improvement priorities and plans. All of us have annual improvement plans and most of the time we'll have also that kind of three to four strategic plan that most schools that I work with in most systems will do, coming out of some type of school review. Now, the standard intent of these plans is to make clear decisions about which areas of improvement we'll prioritise. You're meant to outline the implementation strategies that'll get you there and maybe also map out some of the evidence, but, as the strategist Michael Porter says from Harvard, the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Indeed, strategy is what you say no to.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, the live reality of educational improvement plans shows us that these documents often end up completely overloaded, weighed down with unrealistic expectations, even when planning templates suggest having a short, sharp, narrow focus on one to three priority areas. To be honest, when I open up these plans and when I talk to leaders, they end up not having sharp focus but broad themes. Broad themes like improving learning and teaching, well-being, community, and underneath those they end up grouping a whole range of other activities and initiatives. Suddenly those one to three priority areas feels very blurry. So I've got a couple of ideas here and I want to see how they land with you. The first is I want to suggest that we need to establish a rhythm of pruning before planning. Whenever your major planning period is for the year ahead and that'll depend on whether you're Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere school I'd love you to go in your calendar, have a look at when that period is coming up and about five weeks before, six weeks before, pull out and actually map out a pruning time. But actually we need to systematically think about pulling back, reducing refining subtraction ahead of any period where we're asking questions about what's next.
Speaker 1:Secondly, I want to suggest that when we are doing our plan, that right at the top, even if our system doesn't give us this, we should add a little box so we can have our own document that says hey, here are the things we're going to cut back on or stop doing in order to create the space for the things in this plan we're mapping out, if you want. I want to say the new order of operations for school improvement is subtraction before addition. The new order of operations for school improvement is subtraction before addition, and we need to have this regular rhythm where we say look, our school is already at full capacity, we're using all of our human resources and time, and so it'd be really quite silly to just Build a plan that says here's all the additional things we're going to do before first, strategically subtracting, actually pulling things back and calling out where we're going to save some time and capacity to do the things that might be in this plan. Thirdly, I want to say don't overlook that some improvement strategies could be subtractive. Strategies could be subtractive.
Speaker 1:I was having this conversation last week in a network gathering I was at for a wonderful group of principals from Monash, manningham in Victoria, terrific leaders engaging deeply with the pruning ideas and over morning tea we're having a coffee and, sorry, afternoon tea, actually we're having a coffee and people were talking with me about. You know the language of improvement and change. And I said you know improvement just means to make something better, or change means to make something different. Neither of the words implies that that making something better or different has to be done through an additive lens. Indeed, improvement strategies should sometimes be subtractive, as I write in the book.
Speaker 1:Believe it or not, in educational settings, pruning itself can be the short-term strategy. Subtractive changes can improve the outcomes in and of themselves. And sometimes, holding ourselves to this kind of pause and say how might we improve attendance, how might we improve mathematics, how might we improve teacher well-being? Through subtractive changes only. And it would be normal and right to find opportunities in your improvement plan to add subtractive strategies, not just to create space but to be the solution in and of themselves. Implementation improvement strategies do not always need to be additive. They could be de-implementation strategies, or they could be de-implementation strategies or they could be subtractive improvement strategies.
Speaker 1:And lastly, I think, as we've written the plan, you should assume that your first draft will be at least 20 to 40% too long and coming back to it a few weeks later, or sometimes after the summer break, when you're actually getting to the year, you'll say what was I thinking. The break when you're actually getting to the year you'll say what was I thinking? And I think, as a team, being really used to seeing your first draft is just the early hypothesis where you're trying to get all these things in. But we should be really open to iteration, particularly iteration that's about streamlining and refining over time. So I suppose what I'd love you to be thinking about is this ongoing rhythm we have of improvement planning over four yearly and then yearly kind of cadence and just reflect. Is this really leading us to getting precise and sharp direction? Is it actually helping us move things forward, or do we feel like we're involved in some improvement planning theater? We're getting lost in template thinking, where we're involved in some improvement planning theatre. We're getting lost in template thinking where we're just filling out things and then, once we get it signed off in our system, we move on to just carrying on with business as usual.
Speaker 1:I think the notion of pruning could be really helpful here, as I map out in the book and as I've been teaching in different programs, and I think if we could start to think about bringing together pruning with improvement planning, we might be in a situation where we could plan a pruning season a couple of weeks out before our planning season, where we could really commit at the front end of any plan to what we're going to stop or reduce, to create capacity, where we could take seriously the idea that some of our improvement ideas and our implementation ideas might be subtractive and, of course, that we'd be open to iteration, knowing often our first draft will be a little too full.
Speaker 1:But with a bit of distance and as we actually hit the implementation work, we often get a moment of clarity about thinking okay, what is it that we're really trying to do? Okay, what is it that we're really trying to do? Well, thanks for joining me. I hope you're getting a huge amount of value out of these ideas. One last request before you go I genuinely appreciate it if you could subscribe, rate and review this show. It's one of the easiest ways for us to get these ideas into the hands of even more educational leaders.