Strategic Planning

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Strategic planning and school management: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
Centre for Educational Leadership and Management, School of Education, University of Leicester, Northampton, UK
Keywords Strategic planning, Schools, Improvement, Leadership, Management Abstract Strategic planning, in the form of school improvement planning, has become the dominant approach to school management in English schools. This has evolved from earlier forms of strategic planning and has significant inherent weaknesses that undermine the extent to which school improvement planning can contribute to the effective management of schools. The development of school improvement planning is examined in this article and its weaknesses analysed. Implied models of school management and leadership, the legacy of school effectiveness and improvement research and the role of the school principal are considered. Based on this analysis, an alternative approach to planning in schools and to school organisation and a more flexible approach to school organisation and leadership is proposed that is grounded in a shorter planning time scale and the development of structures that facilitate involvement, cooperation and collaboration.

Strategic planning and management 407
Received February 2002 Revised April 2002 Accepted April 2002

Les Bell

Introduction
Fair is foul and foul is fair (Macbeth, Act I, Scene I).

This article will develop a critique of one aspect of school management that has emerged in a large number of countries in a variety of different forms over the last two decades, namely strategic planning. It will deal largely with one approach to strategic planning, namely that found in schools in England. Strategic planning, in the context of English school management, has come to encapsulate a range of activities associated with planning that are now required of

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