School strategic plans are multi-year and annual plans produced through regular school review cycles to communicate a school’s intentions for improvement. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) conducted a literature review to understand the features of effective school strategic plans.

Key findings:

• Plan quality is positively associated with student performance and achievement.
• There are 2 important aspects to effective plans: form (structure) and content (goals, approaches and practices). Schools need to pay attention to both when constructing a plan.

Overall, the features of an effective strategic plan are:

1. Compelling mission and vision statements
2. Specific, sharp and select goals, approaches and practices
3. Content on goals, approaches and practices aligns with the evidence on ‘what works’ for school improvement  
4. Defined processes for monitoring and evaluation that are data-informed, and contain clear performance measures and time frames
5. Coherence within and across documents (for example, across multi-year and annual plans).