How’s your current school development plan looking? Is everything up to date on your subject action plan? Or your appraisal, for that matter? 

Even though we knew the year ahead was likely to be a bumpy one, there was no way of writing a suitable plan in September that would see us through this academic year. 

Chances are, any plan you were involved with has long since been abandoned - or at the very least delayed - while focus has switched to operating in the strange twilight zone of remote learning and key-worker schooling.

Coronavirus and schools: One single objective - get through it

If anyone was writing a genuine action plan for 2020-21, they’d probably have been wise to have had little more than one overarching objective: get through it. The long-winded essays of years gone by must have been out of favour this year, surely?

The question we should now ask ourselves is: do we need those back? If schools have managed to operate - and not just operate, but excel - under such trying circumstances, without a 40-page development plan, then maybe it’s time to drop the detailed planning completely.

That’s not to say we should abandon any sense of preparation or forethought - just that we should reflect on how useful the detailed documents that outline what we’re expecting to do actually are. Just because computers now allow us to create lengthy documents with tables and headings, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s helpful to do it.

So often, these plans list out every action that might happen throughout the year - even when the actions would naturally have happened, with or without the plan. What’s more, the completion of columns and reviews can become a burden in itself, and take up valuable time that could be better spent on the actions that make a difference.

School development plans: What can we live without?

The year ahead could be a perfect time to look at everything we do again, and work out what really matters. Already we’re talking lots about adapting the curriculum to account for all the lost time. But if we find things in the curriculum that can be squeezed, combined or deleted altogether, then why would we not just do that, anyway?

Lots of schools have looked again at uniform and begun to wonder whether the simpler, stripped-back approach they’ve used for lockdown might be worth keeping. There’ll be plenty more things that schools have either not had time for, or chosen to put to one side for the duration of the past year - so what else could we leave behind us?

School reports have long been ripe for review in many schools. If you’re still writing in great detail about every subject - or, worse, replicating a summary of the curriculum in every child’s report - then maybe a new slimline approach can be brought in now. This could provide the key details that parents want, without taking up whole weeks of teachers’ holidays.

Perhaps schools’ self-evaluation documents can be simplified to focus only on the things that really matter to them, and make a difference to where they go next. And certainly much of the data that we’ve lived without can probably be lived without in future, too.

Whether it’s planning formats, governors’ reports, appraisals processes or even parents’ meetings - the aftermath of Covid is the perfect time to reflect on what really matters and what we want to prioritise for the benefit of the children we teach. And then to discard those things that don’t fit our plans. 

Who knows? Maybe the profession will come out the other side of this chaotic year glad of what we’ve learned from it, and with a renewed zeal for the bits of the job we came into it to do.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979