Why this checklist exists
Most trusts do not have an operational problem in the sense of effort. They have a coordination problem: work is happening, but nobody can see the whole of it at once. These questions are deliberately uncomfortable.
The twelve questions
If the honest answer to a question is “it depends who you ask”, that is the answer.
- Can you name the person responsible for each operational area in each school?
- Could you produce evidence for a recent policy review within one hour?
- Do you know which contracts renew in the next 90 days?
- Are risks described consistently across your schools?
- Do overdue actions appear anywhere a leader actually looks?
- Is your board report assembled from records or from memory?
- Do schools receive the same request more than once from different central teams?
- Do you know which AI tools staff are using?
- Is there a shared definition of “done” for improvement actions?
- Can a new school be onboarded from a documented process?
- Do you know where duplication exists between school-level purchases?
- If a key person left tomorrow, what would stop?
What to do with the answers
Pick the two questions with the weakest answers and fix the record first, not the tooling. A dependable register beats an elegant dashboard built on guesswork.
General guidance only. It does not constitute legal, regulatory, safeguarding or data protection advice, and it does not describe any real trust or school.