Small improvements can make an enormous difference. Take British Olympic sport, for example. We all remember the 2012 London Games when Team GB had one of its best medal hauls to date.

Much of that success was down to inspirational leaders, senior sports administrators and elite coaches like Sir Dave Brailsford and Baroness Sue Campbell (who some will know for her work in education).

Their focus on “incremental gains” - fractional improvements to every aspect of an athlete’s preparation, from bike ergonomics to the type of mattress they slept on - certainly contributed to that impressive tally of gold.

The operational excellence approach

The same philosophy can and should be applied to the business operations of our schools and trusts.

Operational excellence (OpEx) is a business methodology focused on helping an organisation perform at its best and achieve its strategic objectives.

Every organisation is, at its heart, about its people, its processes and how both are managed. By focusing on how people work, what they do and why they do it, it is possible to greatly improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Within education, there’s an enormous opportunity waiting for the vast majority of schools and trusts that don’t currently use the OpEx approach to improve their processes.

That’s because while our education system has quite rightly directed lots of thought and energy to pedagogical leadership, and taken important steps to improve its capability in operational areas such as finance, HR and procurement, these have often been tackled in silos. OpEx aims to address this disconnection by putting the “customer” first on every occasion.

If “customer” jars, as I’m sure it will for some education colleagues, in this context, it refers to anyone we provide a service to. This could be a teacher, a pupil, a co-worker, another department, a school within a trust or federation, a layer of management or an external stakeholder.

By supporting a school or trust to look at what its customers value and need, OpEx aims to make organisational strategy, operating models, people and individual processes work as efficiently as they can to meet their requirements.

Business processes can be inherently inefficient - we’ve all encountered forms that take too long to complete and that have duplicated data entries - and lead people to behave in a particular way. If processes are complex - and indeed sometimes broken - that can inhibit the performance of even the best people.

Time to act

So how can schools and trusts do all of this better?

Earlier this year, the Institute of School Business Leadership, supported by the Association of School Business Officials International, commissioned an industry expert to lead research into how OpEx - increasingly common in business and many other parts of the public sector - could be applied to education settings.

The results will be published in our new report, A Study into the Applicability of Operational Excellence to Education Systems, released later this week (register here to receive a copy).

For our report, we analysed 10 trusts, from small to large and across the country, and a similar mix of district operations in the US.

The research study looked at trust operations in a range of key domains, including its impact on teaching, process and quality, resource planning and deployment, training and development, and performance management and action.

We chose trusts and districts rather than individual schools, not because OpEx is irrelevant to smaller organisations but because the likelihood of OpEx adoption was considered low.

That said, even in the larger, well-established trusts and districts we looked at, there was limited evidence of an intentional commitment to the methodology.

That’s not to say we didn’t see green shoots of good practice, but in most cases, there wasn’t a deliberate attempt to follow an established or recognised OpEx framework.

We hope by using the insights and the rich research findings, we have developed an education-specific operational excellence framework, which will be launched alongside the report at our OpEx conference on 3 October.

How to get involved

We’ll also be launching executive leadership and governor awareness webinars, a pilot OpEx foundation course and a pathway to becoming an accredited OpEx practitioner.

The research is not about judging current practice but about highlighting the opportunity to make improvements. Indeed, we should be careful not to use OpEx to rank schools or trusts because it could quickly become a tick-box exercise and dilute the value of cultural change.

OpEx on its own won’t improve classroom teaching, but we passionately believe that by following the ingredients set out in the framework, we can make those operational processes as effective as possible.

Taken together, those small, incremental changes will create the conditions for teachers to be great educators and for pupils to thrive. That’s even better than a haul of gold medals, surely?

Stephen Morales is CEO of the Institute of School Business Leadership. To receive a copy of the new report, Operational Excellence in Education, on its publication, register at isbl.org.uk/opex

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