Strategic planning, leadership and management

If you or your school are considering working in partnership with other schools, colleges or other organisations once you are started you need to think about:

• strategic planning, leadership and management
• identifying appropriate and relevant partners
• partnership agreements and contracts.

For any partnership or working relationship, the characteristics identified in the Partnership Working section - aims, team-working, trust and benefits - are relevant no matter the scale of activity.

Maintaining some continuity as you introduce change can bring about improvement. You may want to take an incremental approach to partnership working, building on current small-scale collaborative activities rather than embarking on a large-scale formal partnership.

Although some of the topics in this section (DfES 2000) will be more relevant to formal partnership arrangements, such as service-level agreements and transport arrangements, most of the processes will apply to a greater or lesser extent.

Try the audits … available at www.triplescience.org.uk

 

Auditing existing arrangements and aspirations

One of the early stages of partnership planning is to establish what arrangements and resources individual members have in place to deliver the science curriculum content. The set of audit documents on pages 53–55 may provide relevant information across the partnership, and help to prioritise areas for common development.

Electronic versions of these documents, which may be customised to meet the partnership needs, are available at :

www.triplescience.org.uk/search/Resource-30917.aspx

Audit 1
Current provision of Triple Science and other science qualifications at Key stage 4

Audit 2
Curriculum entitlement

Audit 3
Staffing – management, teacher and technician

Audit 4
Laboratories, equipment and facilities

Audit 5
Timetable arrangements

Audit 6
Affiliations, collaborative arrangements, support mechanisms and CPD

 

 

 

Related links

Curriculum planning
For details of the secondary curriculum review and the new secondary curriculum, see
www.qca.org.uk/qca_13575.aspx

The QCA 14-19 learning website includes discussion and case-study examples of many aspects of curriculum planning, see
www.qca.org.uk/14-19/

For the advantages and disadvantages of organising a Key stage 4 curriculum into different pathways see
www.qca.org.uk/14-19/
6th-form-schools/index_s2-2-pathways.htm

For various aspects of collaboration see
www.qca.org.uk/14-19
/6th-form-schools/68_91.htm

For guidance on delivering and developing the Diploma see

www.qca.org.uk/qca_10449.aspx www.qca.org.uk/qca_13909.aspx www.qca.org.uk/qca_13949.aspx

The Secondary National Strategies are available at
www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/
keystage3/subjects/science/