The ultimate guide to creating an unorganised, unprofitable and confused school community — in one year or less
Running a school is easy, right? You simply buy a building, fill it with desks, hire a few teachers, and open your doors to a flood of excited new students. At Cole School Experts, we talk to enough caring, engaged and talented school staff members to know that running a successful school is a walk in the park.
Here’s the hard bit: running it into the ground.
Our secret weapons? Automation and leveraging best practices.
At Cole School Experts, we felt there was a gap in the market for some clear, no-nonsense advice about destroying your school community, one step at a time. In our experience, we know that it can be done… you just need to take a strategic approach. Here is our six-step guide to failing at the business of school.
Step 1: Start running your school like any other business
The first step on your fast road to failure is to stop treating staff, family members and students as treasured individuals who make up the rich tapestry of your school community… and instead begin to treat them like customers.
You’ll want to focus entirely on squeezing every possible dollar out of each enrolment. We recommend regularly bumping up your fees without warning while cutting costs wherever possible. Think: slashing staff salaries, removing wellbeing and pastoral care initiatives and replacing all important communication channels with automated, pre-programmed chatbots. And remember to leave any ounce of compassion for families and their unique circumstances at the door.
In short, any and all cost centres without a significant and measurable ROI should be abandoned — and the faster the better. Once you start viewing your team, customers, facilities and curriculum in terms of revenue and efficiency alone, you’ll be well on your way to failing at the business of school.
Step 2: Ignore your Accounts team (especially when they have bad news)
Next, you’ll want to start tuning out the advice from your Accounts team.
Accounts teams will often insist on keeping transparent records by performing regular health checks and ensuring every transaction is above board. When a school has a culture of transparency, it’s really hard to get away with financial mismanagement, embezzlement and bribery — three essential ingredients in the recipe of school destruction. For this reason, we recommend discouraging your Accounts teams from establishing regular review periods wherever possible.
Step 3: Don’t set payment of fee parameters
Here’s something every failing school needs to understand: building a payment culture at your school is a huge waste of time. Some schools invest valuable resources into positively encouraging parents to pay their fees on time, reminding them when they’re due and gently enforcing their guidelines through payment plans and the like.
On the other hand, we recommend you allow families to pay their fees whenever they like. Sure, you might have a few (or a lot!) of families fall through the cracks, never paying their fees and racking up years and years worth of overdue interest. But should that be your problem? All failing schools know that time and resources are best spent in fixing disastrous situations rather than proactively preventing them in the first place.
Step 4: Introduce big changes fast and without consulting all the necessary stakeholders
If someone in your leadership team wants to shake things up in your community, they should go for it. Everyone knows that families enjoy change, especially when it comes seemingly out of nowhere and without any warning.
Forget best practice processes (they’ll only slow you down), and definitely don’t consult with key stakeholders, like your governing board — particularly when they might put a stop to your plans. Failing schools don’t bother with workflows, approvals and systems, and instead jump straight into the action. It’s the best way to get things done!
Step 5: Add as many clunky, manual processes as you can
If you’re looking to really slow things down at your school, our top recommendation is to add as many manual processes into your workflow as you can. Automation only speeds things up and eliminates human error — why streamline, when you could take the scenic route?
Make sure you savour each repetitive, manual step, from retyping data, rediscovering files, and printing, filing and misplacing as many documents as you can. With each step forward, you’ll find a whole new appreciation for just how thrillingly unpredictable your workday can be!
Step 6: If something goes wrong, find someone to blame
Here’s the truth: if you’re looking to achieve real school failure, you will likely experience mistakes, mismanagement and full-blown disasters along the way. It’s an inescapable part of the journey. The good news? There is almost always someone else who can take the hit. Blame them and discipline them fast — this is the best way to keep the heat off you.
Now, unfortunately, once you implement a blaming and shaming culture at your school, your staff will start to try and hide their mistakes. To address this, encourage your leadership team to start micromanaging them as much as possible. This will help them to spot mistakes, and make it easy for you to pin the blame on someone else.
Getting started
We hope we’ve been able to provide you with a succinct and practical guide to destroying your school, one step at a time.
At Cole School Experts, we realise that failing at the business of school isn’t for everyone, and should be a considered and deliberate choice.
Because, the reality is, you have options. If, instead, you’d like to create a happy and thriving school business environment, we’d love to help you do just that. Our consultants are experts at supporting your team to make strategic decisions today that will impact the health of your school team, finances and broader community over the long term. No failure required.
Want to know more? Let’s chat.
Contact Cole School Experts today
