Most teachers and many school leaders have never been taught how to do strategic planning. This quick guide to strategic planning could help you to achieve your professional goals. My interest is in promoting career education but you can use the process on any subject area.
Strategic planning is about clearly identifying what you want to do and how your are going to do it.
If you work for DoE, the priorities have already been set for you in the Building on Strengths document.
- Schools use those priorities to identify their own strategic plans.
- Each learning area will then create a plan based on those school strategic plans.
- Each staff member will develop their personal plan based on their learning area plan.
DoE Priorities
- Provide every student with a pathway to a successful future
- Strengthen support for teaching and learning excellence in every classroom.
- Build the capability of our principals, our teachers and our allied professionals.
- Support increased school autonomy within a connected and unified public school system.
- Partner with families, communities and agencies to support the educational engagement of every student.
- Use evidence to drive decision-making at all levels of the system.
Career Education Learning Area Strategic Plan – based on DoE and School Priorities
Your school will identify local strategies against each of the 6 DoE priorities.
There are the 3 priorities for career educators to focus on. Check out your school plan. See what strategies you can add.
| DoE Priorities | Career Education Strategies aligned with school KPIs |
| Provide Every Student with a pathway to a successful future | This is the big one for career educators. Building on Strengths talks about career skills in this priority. If you have a reference or advisory group you could do a SWOT and USED analysis with them to identify key strategies. – Check back copies of the In Focus Careers newsletter for ideas against STEM, Aboriginal priorities, future work directions and skills, entrepreneurial projects. – Look for advice from the DoE career education leaders and to CEAWA – Use Job JumpStart resources to build employability skills. – Work experience would go in here. – Check the Magic Happens Handbook for ideas |
| Strengthen support for teaching and learning excellence in every classroom | This priority doesn’t specifically mention careers but you can support this strategy by: – directing teachers to jobs in their subject area – establishing a career hub in the library – putting information about events from the In Focus Careers newsletter into school notices – creating career notices for each learning area each month. – developing a database of subject area career experts that teachers can call on |
| Partner with families, communities and agencies to support the educational engagement of every student | This is a priority where career educators can shine. – Check out the Future Jobs, Future Skills STEM strategy to see who you can work with and opportunities that are available. – Your school’s Parents and Friends Association and past students are a great source of support as speakers, work experience providers and mentors. – Opportunities to engage with people outside school are identified every month in the monthly In Focus Careers Newsletter. – Establish partnerships and MoUs with local governments, businesses, organisations like WITWA and get them to support your students. |
That’s it! It isn’t tricky.
The next step is to put your strategies into a project plan. You can find a project planning proforma here. The Medium Project Business Plan is probably the best one for a project of this size.
Strategic Planning Help
Your school can delight families, achieve better educational outcomes and become a leader in 21st century education through the design and delivery of a well designed strategic plan.
In Focus Careers can:
- Analyse your school strategic plan against system wide plans and report on what is going well and where there could be improvements.
- Run strategic planning workshops.
- Run professional development for staff on how to do strategic planning
- Draft a strategic plan for your school.
- Create a business plan based on your strategic plan.
- Design a performance management template for staff to use as they plan their activities against the school plan.
- Ensure that career education is a key consideration in your school planning.
Bev.J@infocus-careers.com.au
