Develop a strategy
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So you’re involved in visiting a school, perhaps as the church youth worker or the staff member for a local schools project, and you’re trying to work out what you should be doing. Perhaps the school has already suggested some things you could do, like help with a mentoring programme, or maybe you’re wondering what you should ask if you can do. This guide sets out how a schools worker can develop a clear strategy for their work with the right aims and objectives.
Starting points
For Christian work in schools, strategy is always going to be closely connected to a clear sense of guidance from God. There is no point in having detailed aims and objectives if they are not rooted in a belief that you are doing what God is asking you to do. So, although much of this guide will be concerned with the specifics of drawing up a strategy, being clear about aims and figuring out how to achieve them, all that activity rests on the vital foundation of our belief that we are, as Christians, seeking to do God’s will.
Developing an aim
In its simplest form, a strategy is figuring out where you want to end up and then working out how to get there. It’s the equivalent of planning a journey. To start with, you need to know your destination: where are you trying to get to? Edinburgh? Cornwall? Then, once you have decided your destination, you have to work out what route you’ll take to get there? Notice that there is probably more than one possibility. Some roads may be faster, some may be easier, some may be cheaper… and some will head you in completely the wrong direction. There’s no point in taking a road from London to Brighton if you’re planning to get to Edinburgh!
Strategy in schoolswork is just the same. It starts with the question: where are you going? What do you want to happen? And then it asks: how do you want to get there? But instead of asking what road you want to take, you might ask:
There’s also one other key question: how will you know you’ve arrived. Hopefully, if you’re travelling to Edinburgh, knowing whether you’ve arrived is pretty easy… there are large signs and people speak with a Scottish accent! But often our aims in school are slightly harder to measure, so another key question might be:
We will explore all these issues in more details later in this guide.
Terminology
Commerce is full of talk about strategy, aims and objectives. Delve into the business section of any bookshop and you’ll see literally hundreds of books on the subject. The web is also awash with articles and information. Many of these guides use specific terminology about strategy: words like aim and target have particular meanings… and you may like to note that not all the books agree on what they are!
For the purpose of this guide, it’s worth being clear about what we mean when we talk about ‘aims’, ‘objectives’, ‘outputs’ and other terms. Here’s how we’ll be using them:
Aims
An aim is the change you want to see in the group with whom you’re working. That could be, for example, a Christian young person being more confident about their faith in school, or a young person finding faith.
It’s often easy to confuse an aim with things that you do to achieve an aim. For example, an aim will never be ‘to set up a lunchtime group’ because that’s not describing a change. An aim, in that context, might be ‘to enable Christian students to be more confident about their faith’ or ‘to help students become aware of what Christians believe’.... these are both aims that you might then use a lunchtime group to achieve. But running the group isn’t an aim in itself. Aims are always about the impact you want to have in your target group.
And, although young people will often be your ‘target group’, it does not always have to be so. You might want to see change in a school as a whole: for example, to see the school take the challenge of spiritual development seriously. Or to see Christian teaching staff grow in confidence about the role of their faith. The key is that your aim involves change. Consequently, people tend to use verbs that describe change when setting their aims, such as to increase, to promote, to improve, to reduce, to enable or to develop.
You can have more than one aim. In fact you can have as many as you like. However, most people agree that three main aims are about as much as most people or organisations can manage.
Objectives
Objectives are the practical areas of work you’re involved with to achieve your aims.
So, for example, if your aim is to enable the Christian students in a school to be more confident about their faith and apply it to their school life, you might decide there are three objectives to achieve your aim:
These are all objectives: they are things that you will do to get to the destination you’re aiming for.