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Strategic planning

Achieving Strategic Governance

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Training & development

12/06/2023

At a glance

Every governing board needs strong strategic planning and leadership. This session explores how to strengthen your board’s strategic approaches.to meet your vision, shape the practice and culture of its school or trust effectively, achieve improvements and monitor compliance.

This session will cover:

What does being strategic mean?

The distinction between strategic oversight and operational management, and how to maintain an effective strategic focus.

Setting strategic priorities

Explore how boards can move from vision to strategy in practice establishing clear strategic priorities.

The strategic planning cycle

Understanding how to plan monitoring and evaluation and build a monitoring plan.

Providing effect challenge

Develop approaches to asking constructive questions, testing assumptions and supporting better-informed decisions.

Use information and data effectively

Consider what information boards need to understand performance, identify issues and provide appropriate challenge.

Managing risk

Understand the importance of risk management to successful strategic planning and board decision making.

Fully bespoke

This session can be tailored to the circumstances of your school or trust.

2 hour session

Focus on impact and improvement

Consider how effective strategic governance can support continuous improvement and better outcomes for pupils.

Overcoming obstacles to being strategic

Exploring why boards sometimes find it difficult and ways of overcoming this.

about this course

Who is this suitable for?

The session is suitable for the following and will be contextualised for each setting:

Governors
Trustees
MAT academy committee members (local governing body)

This course may also be of interest to:

Governance professionals
Seniors leaders
Other executive leaders

about this course

What are the benefits?

Unpicking what it means to be strategic in practice can be a challenge. By the end of this session, your board will have a clear understanding of how strategic thinking should inform decision making, planning cycles, monitoring and holding to account.

It can be tailored to meet the particular circumstances and training needs of your organisation and participants.

This is important to meet the expectations set out in the DfE’s Governance guides for maintained schools and academy trusts which make it clear that effective boards should provide confident, strategic leadership to their organisations, lead by example and set the tone from the top.

about this course

How will you learn?

This session can be delivered via face-to-face or online workshop
It will be facilitated by a quality-assured NGA consultant with relevant governance and training expertise
The session will be interactive with a mixture of participant activities and facilitator-led explanation and discussion
It will be supported with session materials including a resource toolkit to help with next steps