School strategic plans are multi-year and annual plans produced through regular school review cycles to communicate a school’s intentions for improvement. AERO conducted a literature review to understand the features of effective school strategic plans.
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About this literature review
School strategic plans are multi-year and annual plans produced through regular school review cycles to communicate a school’s intentions for improvement. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) conducted a literature review to understand the features of effective school strategic plans.
Key findings
- Plan quality is positively associated with student performance and achievement.
- There are 2 important aspects to effective plans: form (structure) and content (goals, approaches and practices). Schools need to pay attention to both when constructing a plan.
- Overall, the features of an effective strategic plan are:
- Compelling mission and vision statements
- Specific, sharp and select goals, approaches and practices
- Content on goals, approaches and practices aligns with the evidence on ‘what works’ for school improvement
- Defined processes for monitoring and evaluation that are data-informed, and contain clear performance measures and time frames
- Coherence within and across documents (for example, across multi-year and annual plans).
These findings inform AERO’s practice guides to support school leaders to develop and apply effective school strategic plans.
Keywords: practice implementation, educational strategies, school improvement