ARTICLE

5 insights school boards can use to de-risk their organisation

Picture this. It’s late on a Wednesday night and you are almost at the end of another board meeting. While the monthly school board meeting for your daughter’s independent school is a privilege, there’s concern growing that you don’t have enough data to manage the risks you’re responsible for and help the school prepare for future opportunities. The meeting agenda was packed, as always, and the board pack contained about four hours of reading that you scanned over as best you could in the lead up. You begin to wonder, “Could the board be provided with more visual insights to speed up reporting and allow better evidence-based decision making?” This would really help on strategic topics like enrolments and cashflow forecasting. It would also help you determine, for example, whether you can attract the two new streams of year 7s needed in the masterplan to afford the new technology building you’ve been advocating for.

Although this situation is hypothetical, it’s based on many real conversations we’ve had with school board members and strategic decision makers. And so, here are five types of insights that we have that can help school board members.

Five types of insights for school board members

1) External disruptors to education

The 7 disruptors shaping the future of education is one of our most downloaded infographics and has an accompanying full report. Why is this helpful? Because a school board needs to be across the risks/opportunities shaping the whole sector. External trends are constantly changing, therefore a board should be doing at least an annual scan of the horizon and trends to see what’s happening around them, so they can future-proof the school by identifying risks and opportunities amidst disruption.

2) Demographic insights

This refers to updates featuring enrolment maps, population projections and competitor analysis. School demographic studies should be updated at least every five years when the Census is done, but mapping enrolment trends and optimising bus routes should be done at least annually.

3) Stakeholder insights

The school community has a voice and if it isn’t being engaged effectively, then the health of the whole organisation could potentially be compromised. Great leadership teams and board have independently managed research studies to collect, analyse and visualise the findings. Too many schools generate in-house in(sider)sights that aren’t robust or allow for honest feedback in an anonymous, aggregated way. Great research will collect quantified insights from each key stakeholder group such as staff, parents and students. Boards don’t want a 70 page report to read, and that is why, in our Thriving Schools Index , we provide a simple visual insights report – reach out here to obtain a copy of an example report.

4) Thinking like a futurist

Each year we provide the trends of the year, see our 2025 infographic snapshot here which stimulates conversations in board rooms and leadership team meetings across the globe. Our trends are based on fresh insights and trends analysis to help leaders shape the future, not be overwhelmed by it. We encourage agency, positivity and creativity in responding to the trends of the year. We recommend a trends update each year, as well as an upskill of how to ‘think like a futurist’. This is more than learning about the trends, it’s learning how to spot trends and shape them as a futurist. We believe every great leader is first a futurist as leadership is about anticipation, seeing things as they will be, not just as they are now.

To help equip your leaders as futurists, we provide strategic thinking workshops and even have a masterclass on this topic, also available in McCrindle Plus . This is a great session to do with your board once every three years as your board shifts personnel and allows for a strong foundation of strategic thinking, not operational management. We help set the right expectations for your board when it comes to responding strategically, not getting involved operationally.

5) Generational insights

We believe in empowering generational intelligence, particularly in school boards, to help you understand your students, parents and staff cohorts, which are constantly changing. By 2030, you’ll be teaching Gen Beta, raised by Gen Z parents, with Gen X approaching retirement age. School boards might be made up of multiple generations, however learning about all the generations is encouraged to foster great communication, collaboration and creativity in responding to demographic, stakeholder and futurist trends.