Measuring a school’s progress and impact continues to be a difficult task for many principals taking part in our strategic leadership programmes. Deciding what to measure, how to do that, and the best way of reporting on it all depends on your unique school, community, team and of course your strategic plan.
The Balanced Scorecard for Schools (BSCS) is a pilot initiative from Springboard Trust designed to tackle these challenges head-on.
2022 Expressions of Interest now open here for Balanced Scorecard for Schools
Based on Kaplan & Norton’s framework, BSCS helps schools understand their goals and begin developing a measurement framework that is unique to their school and strategic plan, and that presents your impacts and progress in a way that is clear to all stakeholders.
“This is a completely new way of thinking – it has connected and aligned our leadership team and given them a wider appreciation of the strategic priorities of our school”
How Balanced Scorecard for Schools works
Through BSCS, principals will take their strategic plan and work with our team and cross-sector volunteers to identify, capture and utilise the most important information in your school – much of which already exists. Broadly speaking, it will focus on five areas:
Teaching and leadership. Your team’s abilities, skill sets, needs and capacity to grow, including whether they have the right support, current classroom practices and ongoing development.
School culture. In particular, the degree to which the school environment is a safe space for students, physically, socially and emotionally.
Resources. The adequacy of your facilities, personnel and curriculum and the degree to which the community supports these.
Academic learning. Students’ academic identities, progress, performance and readiness for further education.
Community and wellbeing. Civic engagement, work ethic, creative and performing arts, and health – elements that shape students’ overall sense of wellbeing, health and belonging.
Together we will look at these areas, how they intersect with your strategic plan’s goals and initiatives, and develop a clear theory and framework to measure and demonstrate your school’s progress.
“Balanced Scorecard has identified gaps in practice between what the school says it values and the actual ability to measure this and demonstrate achievement”
Who can take part in the Balanced Scorecard for Schools?
This programme is currently in the pilot phase, and principals can participate at no cost thanks to our partners at the Aotearoa Foundation. It is open to principals who:
Have completed the Strategic Leadership for Principals Programme or the Strategic Leadership for Rural Teaching Principals Programme.
Are committed to the measurement aspects of their strategic plan.
If you would like to participate in this groundbreaking programme in 2022, please fill out our expression of interest form here – or contact the Springboard team to find out more!
