School development planning: moving from the amorphous to the dimensional and making it your own

Abstract

This paper offers findings and discussion based on the detailed analysis of 100 primary school development plans (SDPs) from English primary schools in three local education authorities. The findings show that a majority of schools continue to remain overwhelmingly multi‐focused in their continuing target setting. The paper considers the extent to which this might undermine subsequent development and improvement. However, some schools are evidently making focused and crucial decisions at the design stage of the plan and it seems useful to understand more about the processes involved. These decisions, identified and explored within the paper, seem to have subsequent and important implications for the implementation and development process in relation to the whole‐school issues of collaboration, ownership, prioritizing development, and levels and types of staff involvement. The paper concludes by briefly outlining a dimensional approach to SDP currently being further refined within the continuing project. It considers the potential of such an approach in enabling schools to respond to the need for change in a way that empowers rather than debilitates and in a way that allows teachers and managers to focus on pupil learning as well as on organizational need. Organizational need is, most strikingly, the current preoccupation in responding primary schools whilst pupil learning, seemingly, has little significance within current approaches to documentation and within procedures for bringing about changes and developments.