Saturday 14 April 2012

Do private secondary schools in Kenya need a strategy

Private secondary schools in Kenya need a strategy in order to ensure that they offer value to the community they serve. The schools are also driven by results and the performance of their students and this means that they need to implement some strategy to ensure that they meet these objectives. It is through meeting these objectives that they are able to gain their competitive advantage. Private secondary schools in Kenya cannot base their performance or expect results without implementing a strategy that gets them to where they want to be. If it is the case that these results are achieved through guesswork then this makes them unstable and unsustainable which eventually reflects negatively on the stakeholders.
Strategy ensures growth and development in private schools in terms of enrollment, improvement of learning equipments and facilities. Private secondary schools need strategy to ensure that there is a low student to teacher ratios in order to improve the effectiveness of their service and enable them address the different needs of the students with a personalized touch. Strategy in the private schools will also guide professional development of the staff this will in turn translate to better overall performance. This will ensure that the private schools are able to retain excellent and differs faculty.
Strategy will ensure that the private secondary schools utilize their resources adequately through appropriate allocation. This ensures that all resources allocated for educational or administrative purposes are utilized as such. For example the school bus may not be used to run the principals private businesses instead of taking students and teachers on educational field trips. This represents misuse of the resources which were to be used for purposes of improving the schools performance.
Private secondary schools need a strategy to ensure they remain focused on their objectives. Just like any other entity private schools can also lose focus of their goals in the long run. A strategy helps ensures that the stakeholders are constantly reminded of what they are required to achieve. For example if the institution’s vision is to offer world class standards of education or increase the level of diversity or improve performance to be the top school nationally. Then all actions by the institutions should be in support of that vision. This means that private schools need a strategy to govern their actions in order to work towards achievement of the vision.
Private secondary schools need a strategy to help them in dealing with the external and internal environments. Just like any entity, private schools also exist within an environment which is unpredictable and can wreak havoc if the entity is not prepared. So the strategy helps in forecasting and predicting some of these events and if they are noticed earlier the negative impacts from the environmental changes can be minimized or avoided altogether. Strategy also presents opportunity for adaptations to the environment for private schools.

In conclusion, private secondary schools in Kenya need a strategy as illustrated. It would be risky for private secondary schools to operate without a strategy and miss out on the benefits that it offers.