It was Dwight Eisenhower who popularised the military maxim that “plans are worthless but planning is everything”.

This sentiment is, of course, something that our schools are familiar with given the course of the past two years. 

Guidance has changed at short notice more than a few times during the pandemic, and schools have found themselves having to adapt, re-plan and implement at breakneck speed.

As education secretary Nadhim Zahawi rightly pointed out in his recent open letter, schools have “done an outstanding job in implementing measures that have helped to keep children and young people in face-to-face environments.” 

But we have to wonder, perhaps paradoxically, for how much longer policymakers’ response to this crisis can continue to be a “crisis response”, something that manifests primarily in short-term firefighting.

Looking to the future

We urgently need the horizon of policy planning to lift further ahead to look to the medium-term, not necessarily because they can put in place firm and foolproof plans (as per Eisenhower’s advice) but so that the process of policy planning itself becomes better at anticipating issues, making adaptations and developing contingencies.

For understandably human reasons, the discourse of Covid-response has oscillated between two poles: on the one hand the urgent need to implement short-term and sudden change, and on the other a steadfast belief that things will eventually return to normal, and thus to play down the necessity of further adaptation.

Of course, both positions have a role to play, but curiously both present a similar risk. 

Focusing only on what’s right in front of us now makes it hard to anticipate what may come and therefore we miss opportunities to make fuller, deeper adaptations.

It also means we are more likely to adopt solutions that are less elegant - we can end up with policy decisions that feel abrupt or sub-optimally designed. 

However, placing too much faith in the “everything will return to normal” position may lead us to fall into the Groundhog Day trap of thinking that tomorrow will be better only to find out it never quite arrives as we expected and opportunities to adapt have been missed.

An evolving world 

The pre-Christmas emergence of Omicron was sobering in this regard as it suggested that Covid-19, in its variant forms, may yet have some time to run.

We can explore the planning problem with a tangible example: Ofsted inspection. 

While it is welcome that Ofsted has taken a much more positive and proactive approach in deferring inspections, one can’t help but wonder for how long this will be a viable solution to what has been an ongoing policy problem since Covid-19 first took hold.

Stopping or deferring inspection has undoubtedly been the right call at points during the pandemic, including right now, but what happens when, inevitably, inspections must restart?

The inspection problem is certainly, but not only, about the strain that inspection places on schools at an already arduous time. We might also consider whether judgements issued in such circumstances can be validly compared with those judgements secured during more “normal” times.

These considerations speak to the need for planning to move beyond a binary question of, “Should Ofsted inspect or not?” towards something more helpful over a longer planning horizon. Something more like, “When is it right that Ofsted inspects, and how should it inspect over the medium-term?”

But the discourse around inspection has often become unhelpfully polarised between “turn inspection off completely” and “carry on as normal”. Both of these positions could be said to represent plans but I’m not sure either show sufficient planning. 

‘A richer level of planning’

To be fair to Ofsted, there have been adaptations to inspection practice over the past two years. For example, in autumn 2020 when it visited schools to undertake research-like visits.

But when we look back at Ofsted’s relaunch of a more normal schedule of inspection in 2021, we might wonder whether there was a missed opportunity for an inspection framework more suited and sustainable within the pandemic context. 

To return to Eisenhower’s warning above, the lesson from this is not that we should expect Ofsted to have created a foolproof plan for inspection - arguably such things don’t exist in crises - but we should perhaps expect now to see a more fundamental appraisal of the likely inspection challenges and methodological adaptations required over a longer planning horizon.

Happily, Ofsted’s handbook already signals a review of what it calls the current “transition period” ahead of March 2022.

A deeper evaluation of inspection policy and practice over the medium-term would represent a richer level of forward planning and would be welcomed by many in the sector. 

But the need for medium-term planning is not only about inspection. This is a challenge that reaches right across education and wider society.

Increasingly we hear the sentiment “we must learn to live with Covid-19”. This may well be true, but it also comes with a responsibility on all of us to craft effective and sustainable ways to do so. 

There have, of course, been green shoots in this regard. The Teacher Assessed Grades (TAGs) contingency plan for qualifications is difficult and potentially contentious, but it does show the desire of policymakers to engage in planning for the medium-term, to entertain the notion that Covid-19 could be here longer than we hope, and to adapt accordingly.

We need more of this. 

As we stand at the start of 2022 looking at what lies ahead of us, we need policymakers to lift their gaze a little further.

It’s long past time to bring the medium-term into view.

Steve Rollett is deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts