029: What's your vision? Strategic question #1

This first episode of the third season is the start of a series of episodes exploring six essential questions that you need to answer to help you to clarify your strategy and secure your school's future. These questions are intended to help senior leaders structure their thoughts when it comes to planning their school strategy.In this episode, I look at the first of these strategic questions: what is your vision? I explore how, whilst the question of your vision might be superficially simple, answering this involves digging down a little. To this end, I unpack three approaches to the question of vision.The first approach is considering the big picture effect that you aim to have as a school: the long term impact that your school seeks to have both on the individual pupils that are going to come out as alumni but also the big picture impact that you're looking to have on society.The second approach involves treating decisions as part of a business model intended to diversify your income streams across a range of areas. This is not just about what's worked for you historically, but what's going to work for your school going forward to secure it financially.The third and final approach to understanding your vision gets into the detail of what your school is doing within each of the areas of your school, from your academic vision, your vision for the best possible outcome for your pupils academically, to the pastoral care or well-being provisions you have in place and the extra-curricular activities that you offer.Over the course of the episodes in this series, I'll continue to reveal and explore further questions that you may need to consider to help shape your school strategy.Episode HighlightsIntroducing the first strategic question (03:13)The big picture impact that you seek to have as a school (02:17)The business model for diversifying income streams (06:07)The areas of the school operation you need to consider (09:00)References and resourcesSign up to Juliet Corbett’s newsletter at www.consultjuliet.co.uk/signup to find out about upcoming School Fundraising Q&A sessionsFind out more about Juliet Corbett’s work and discover a host of free resources at www.consultjuliet.co.ukThank you so much for listening to The Independent School Podcast. I would be grateful if you could spare a couple of minutes to send me some feedback here. This helps me make the podcast as helpful as possible to listeners. Thank you!