Defining Your Guiding Principles

Your vision will communicate your direction of travel and help create alignment with your staff, students and community.

However, there will be times when a new opportunity that you haven’t yet thought of presents itself.  If this isn’t a specified aspect of your vision and strategy, it would be easy to either discount it without consideration or be distracted by the opportunities you see in it.  That is when a long term set of guiding principles will support you in making the decision to explore a new opportunity or keep your focus on the plans you have already devised. 

Here are some examples of guiding principles that may help in shaping what you would like to include in yours.  These could entail:

• Defining the key groups who are at the centre of your digital strategy – are you focused on teaching, learning, management or administration in your current strategy?
• How will users with different learning needs be supported and how will your technologies be inclusive and equitable?
• How will your solution change to meet the requirements of different age groups?
• Will there be consistent expectations for use across your teams and how much flexibility would you like to include?
• How integrated is your vision for technology?  Will this be based on a consistent hardware and software platform or are you choosing the best of breed in each type of solution?
• Do you want a fully cloud-based solution or one that uses on-site servers and local software?
• How will you build on your existing foundation – will coherence be maintained over time or are you starting with a completely blank slate?
• How will you build the requisite skills in your users over time?  Will all training be online or face-to-face, synchronous or accessed when needed?
• How will you ensure sustainability of your solution over time?
• What level of technical support do you have and how will your decisions reflect this?
• How will you manage e-safety, data protection and safeguarding and how will these requirements be incorporated into all decision-making?
• How will you roll out new technologies – e.g. pilot classes/groups, evolving use of a platform over time, sharing good practice etc?

Activity

Start to draft a set of guiding principles that will support your vision going forwards.  You can either use our questions as prompts or shape your own from scratch.

Choice:  Use prompts/Write my own

Prompts:

• Who is this strategy focused on?
• How will you support inclusion and equity of access?
• What level of consistency is expected across the ages of students you educate?
• Consistency vs flexibility for staff?
• An integrated platform or a combination of different solutions?
• How much of your solution will be in the cloud?
• How will you evolve your solution over time?
• What needs to be in place for CPD and training?
• How will new technologies be introduced?
• What sustainability goals do you want to consider?
• What are your expectations for technical support requirements?
• How will you manage e-safety, data protection and safeguarding?