Securing a middle leadership role is one thing, but coming up with the right strategy for your area of responsibility once you’re in post is quite another.

There are big questions to answer: how far ahead should you be looking? How extensive should the planning be? And how can you ensure that your ideas fit in with the wider plans already in place?

The lowdown

Creating a strategy for your department or area of responsibility is essentially building a blueprint that everything you do in your role will be checked against. It shouldn’t be a prescriptive instruction manual, but it should be the guiding document from which all departmental decisions are made.

In short, your strategy is a big deal. It should fit with the wider objectives of the school and the reality of the resources you have, and, above all, it should have a clear objective directly linked to pupil outcomes.

What we know about what works

The first consideration in any strategy planning is identifying the issues to be addressed. Has the department or area of responsibility been struggling? If so, you need to find out how and look at ways to address that.

If it is performing well, your focus will instead likely be on how to hone areas of strength and make them even stronger, building in contingencies for the future in case things become more difficult.

Peter Hughes, the CEO of Mossbourne Federation and author of the forthcoming book Outstanding School Leadership, says it’s key to remember that removing elements can be as powerful as adding them at this point.

“Writing a strategy means thinking about what you are trying to achieve,” he says.

“That means asking what systems you can put in place to make it better, but it also sometimes means looking at the existing system to see what you need to get rid of.”

Alma Harris is professor emeritus at Swansea University specialising in education policy and school improvement. She says that it is useful to keep Michael Fullan’s Triple I model of change management in mind when composing strategy, from idea generation in the initiation stage to longer-term planning for implementation and institutionalisation.

More from Middle Leadership Essentials:

• How middle leaders should implement strategy
• What should an effective team meeting look like?
• How to manage change as a middle leader

There’s also the question of how much research should be included in the strategy: while you may be guided by a particular piece of evidence, it doesn’t necessarily need to be referenced in the document.

Harris argues that the only real consideration should be what impact an approach will have on learning because “that’s a really good test of any idea, whether it’s research evidence-based or not…If it won’t make a difference, do something else”.

Middle leaders need to ensure that they are “fitting into the overall school plan” and “bringing people with them” from both directions, Harris adds. That means talking to leadership during planning about how your strategy will dovetail with theirs, as well as confirming technical elements, such as realistic budget and resource availability.

It also means ensuring buy-in from staff in the area of responsibility, finding out what has worked before, what hasn’t, what skills are available (and which are in need of development) and, crucially, what the mood and morale of the department is like.

In terms of scope, while it can be useful to think aspirationally with a five-year plan, or speculatively for the next couple of years, Harris advises only planning in detail for one year ahead at maximum, possibly even shorter, as “things change so rapidly” in schools, from staff to curricula to external policy.

The finished product should be kept in a document that is easily accessible for staff, with the option to update and evolve as the year progresses.

The experienced leader view

Jon Hutchinson is director of curriculum and teacher development at the Reach Foundation. He writes:

People don’t like surprises.

This is especially true in schools, which are often volatile environments. Teachers have enough uncertainty and more than enough curveballs to keep them spritely without a cool new initiative being introduced out of the blue on Monday morning.

As a middle leader, then, a big part of your job in developing and communicating a strategy is to minimise the number of surprises that your team encounters.

A solid, simple strategy can achieve this, but there are a few things to keep in mind.

First, get clear on the differences between objectives, strategy and tactics. Alastair Campbell famously ran the New Labour machine by focusing on these distinctions. While the objectives are likely set by, or in close concert with, senior leadership, developing the strategy to achieve these is the middle leader’s job. As far as possible, leave the tactics to the teachers.

This means that middle leaders have to serve a kind of dual role of both translator and guardian. If senior leadership would like a focus on retrieval practice to boost pupils’ knowledge retention, you’ll need to consider what this looks like in your subject or your phase. This can be hugely intellectually gratifying, and is often the most fun part of the job.

But there will also be times when an overarching objective or initiative simply doesn’t work for your area of responsibility.

For example, it may be that a decision has been made to map out the progression of disciplinary knowledge, which is largely irrelevant to your maths or music department.

Or it might be that the whole-school objective of multiple-choice quizzes at the start of every lesson is not appropriate for you to roll out as the early years lead. Speaking truth to power here is a difficult but important part of the role.

Perhaps the most challenging part of developing a strategy in a school is leaving it alone once it’s live. While it is important to stay nimble and respond to the reality in classrooms, it’s also important to guard against constantly switching things up. This can be a real risk for middle leaders in a position where it’s easy to get restless or bored.

So, while failure to adapt to new obstacles or challenges can render a strategy ineffective, it’s also worth bearing in mind that if you have to keep changing your strategy, people will start to believe that you haven’t really got one.

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer