“We grew from one school to 15 schools - but we’d never had a strategic vision.”

To those with experience of management, this admission from Sarah Bennett, CEO of the Inspiring Futures Through Learning (IFtL) multi-academy trust of 15 schools, may sound surprising.  

But the speed of the trust’s growth and external factors meant that making time to create and implement an overarching vision never quite got to the top of the to-do list.

“We started the trust in 2016 with one school and quickly grew to six - and then opened two new schools. Then, in 2019, we were asked to take on three more in Corby, which was out of area for us,” Bennett explains. “Then the pandemic happened.”

Getting started

However, in September 2022 the trust published a 16-page plan that set out its key drivers and ambitions for the next three years.

The document centres around four key “pillars” of strategic focus until 2025: Future Focused, Equitable Futures, Leadership in our IFtL Culture and Strong Schools. 

Each of these pillars incorporates specific developments that the trust wants to achieve, such as improving children’s access to technology, creating an inclusive special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) strategy, and offering coaching and mentoring programmes to current and future leaders. 

These four themes were created during a session with senior leaders in the trust - although Bennett admits that working out the titles was not easy.  

“Equitable Futures I first had titled Levelling Up, but then I thought that was too political. Plus, if you get too fancy a title it gets lost in translation, and I wanted each title to clearly represent what it meant.”  

In time, the headings were agreed and the strategic plan was published across the trust, with a series of meetings run by Bennett to share its purpose for schools.

‘Aligning 10,000 iron filings’

Some, though, might be tempted to ask the question: why go through all this work, generating the ideas, formulating the document, having it designed, printed, shared and discussed, if the trust was already growing and schools were performing well?

In fact, experts in the field of management say that it is precisely when an organisation is growing and its complexity is increasing that a strategic plan becomes vital.

An often-cited article in the Harvard Business Review by professors David J Collis and Michael G Rukstad uses the analogy of a magnet to explain why. 

“Think of a major business as a mound of 10,000 iron filings: if you scoop up that many filings and drop them on to a piece of paper, they’ll be pointing in every direction. It will be a big mess,” they wrote. 

“If you pass a magnet over those filings, what happens? They line up.

“Similarly, a well-understood statement of strategy aligns behaviour within the business. It allows everyone in the organisation to make individual choices that reinforce one another, rendering…employees exponentially more effective.” 

Gianvito Lanzolla, professor of strategy at Bayes Business School at City, University of London, elaborates on this, telling Tes that a clear vision ensures employees understand what it is they are trying to achieve in an organisation.

“It is of paramount importance because the purpose of the organisation is the fundamental pillar to engage the hearts and minds of people to drive behaviour,” he says.

“If you don’t have that, people don’t know what the purpose of the organisation is, what their role is, and they become short term in their thinking.”

In the past, individual schools could do this more organically as heads had oversight of what was happening and could set the direction as required. 

However, it is much harder to achieve in a multi-academy trust, as Bennett notes.

“When you’re a headteacher and you see people on a day-to-day basis [you can do that], but we’ve now got 950 people in our organisation and 6,500 children - I cannot have that same influence.”

• Leading and Learning Webinar: Where we go wrong on diversity and inclusion
• MAT funding: Top slicing or GAG pooling - which is better?
• School culture: How to build a school where pupils feel they belong

Antonia Spinks, CEO of the four-school Pioneer Educational Trust, agrees that having a strategic vision with a clear mission is especially important for a MAT - not least because it helps any school thinking of joining the trust to understand the organisation.

“Growing where there is not a culture fit can lead to misunderstanding and unnecessary challenges for staff members,” she says. 

“Part of the strategic vision needs to be a consideration of structural and cultural integration of joining schools so as to support knowledge transfer and the continued evolution of a thriving organisation.”

An anchor in a sea of change

David Clayton, CEO at Endeavour Learning Trust, which has five academies, and formerly of Consilium Academies, concurs.

He says that the “constant change” of education means staff need a “clear plan that can act as our anchor throughout change” to help them remain “focused on the delivery of our purpose”. 

On this point, since taking on his new role at Endeavour, Clayton has begun the development of a strategic plan so that the trust can “communicate with all our stakeholders and create a clear and well-understood approach to bring this vision to life”.

Clayton says that, like Bennett at IFtL, he is planning to base this plan on a few key headings - currently For Our Students, For Our Colleagues and For Our Communities. This will then be elaborated on in a detailed strategic vision document of around 15 pages. 

“The more detailed plan is necessary to ensure that our vision is more than just an ambition but a set of actionable steps,” he says.

“This provides a framework against which we can develop our annual action plans, so that all our work is focused on the delivery of this vision.” 

‘The purpose of the organisation is the fundamental pillar to engage hearts and minds’

The need for actionable steps then opens up the issue of time frames - how much time does a trust have to achieve the aims it has set itself?

Clayton says he does not think it is possible to have a “template” for this; it depends on “the context surrounding each trust”. 

“At Endeavour, we are developing a three-year plan but for other trusts, a five-year plan might be more appropriate,” he says.

This matches guidance from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), which says it can be helpful to have “a clear route map…outlined with time frames and staging posts” to help people across an organisation understand what needs to be achieved and when. 

This, though, should not be overly dogmatic. The CMI says it should be “flexible but focused” so it allows for adaptation in response to any major changes in a trust’s operating environment.

“In today’s complex and turbulent business environment, it is impossible to plan for every eventuality, and strategy making needs to be a more flexible and dynamic process which reflects a way of thinking strategically about the business and the environment in which it operates,” the CMI notes. 

Setting ‘unachievable’ goals

Lanzolla offers another idea: a vision should be “unachievable” so that it always provides an organisation with something to strive for. “If you fulfil your purpose, you basically cease to exist,” he says. 

He gives the example of Google’s vision to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

“That’s unachievable, there’s always more information - but it gives a clear sense of what it is trying to achieve,” Lanzolla explains.

Clayton says there is merit in this view, noting that “a trust’s strategic vision should transcend” constant changes within education. However, this does not mean that it should avoid scrutiny. 

“A strategic plan that sits on a shelf is only marginally more useful than no plan at all - it needs to be reviewed regularly and the trust needs to hold itself to account for its delivery to ensure the strategy remains ‘alive’,” he says.

Samira Sadeghi, director of trust governance at the Confederation of School Trusts (CST), agrees: “It has to be more than a document in a drawer consulted once a year.” 

In short, then, a strategy must be ambitious and far reaching but contain goals and aims that are time-bound and allow room for flexibility - and it must be reviewed regularly. No small ask, then.  

Furthermore, it is, of course, not suitable to simply use a template for a strategic vision because the context of every setting is so different, with focuses ranging from high attainment outcomes to attendance challenges and parental engagement. 

Involving everyone

To get all this right and create a truly reflective vision, leaders say, it is important to include the voices of all stakeholders where possible, to ensure their views are heard and acted on. 

“It’s critical that the plan is collectively owned so that there is buy-in from all our colleagues across the trust,” says Clayton. 

To do this in Endeavour, “stakeholder groups” involving staff, students and parents were set up to gather a “range of views about aspects of the trust’s work that are successful, and areas where we can go further and do more”. 

These responses then formed the basis of workshops with school leaders, local academy councillors, trustees and the trust’s central team to decide on the key visions and plans for the trust. 

‘A strategic plan that sits on a shelf is only marginally more useful than no plan at all’

Bennett says she, too, ensured that staff input was fed into discussions among her executive team when creating the trust’s strategic vision. 

“I regularly visit schools and staffrooms, and these visits are full of open dialogue around what’s next, what is the priority for the children in this school, this community, and for [teachers] as professionals,” she explains. 

“Common threads of these discussions were identified and explored further in other regular development groups such as Sendcos, headteachers, business managers, etc, and our strategic strands reflect these conversations.” 

Spinks at Pioneer has adopted a similar approach, saying there are “multiple opportunities” for staff to express ideas on how the trust’s culture should be formed. 

While this ground-up, democratic approach is admirable, Lanzolla sounds a note of caution.

“The problem with being inclusive is: if you ask my opinion [as staff] and then do the opposite, you have lost me and you create negative feelings.”

Everything flows from culture

There is clearly, then, a lot for trusts to think about when looking to create a strategic vision, and it’s not quick or easy work.  

However, help is out there, most notably perhaps from the CST, which recently released its Building Strong Trusts: assurance framework, which sets out 14 key pillars to build a strong trust - with point one focused on strategy and culture. 

“The framework begins with strategy and culture because everything else flows from that starting point: knowing why the trust exists and what it holds dear,” says Sadeghi.

To help with this, the framework sets out a series of questions for trusts to ask themselves when creating or evaluating a strategic vision: is it anchored in the needs of its community? Does it align with charitable objectives? Does it create a culture for long-term success?

Sadeghi says that by doing this, trusts can ensure that they have the right framework to guide decisions with clarity and long-term purpose, no matter how complex the world is around them. 

“For any organisation, having a clear, well-understood strategy that is aligned with a shared, lived culture is essential to making good decisions - especially in turbulent times.”