How do you update your educational policies to meet evolving student needs?

Assessing current educational policies is an indispensable starting point for updating them. This involves scrutinising their alignment with your institution's vision, mission, and objectives. It's not just about regulatory compliance but also about ensuring the policies reflect the unique ethos, values, and culture of your educational setting. Utilise a multidimensional approach, deploying surveys, focus groups, and data analytics, to understand how the policies are serving the academic, emotional, and cultural needs of your diverse student body. This exercise also includes reviewing their adherence to state and federal legal norms.

Assessing your current policies is usually not a small job, because you likely have a lot of policies, to be compliant with your regulations, accreditation, etc. So often it is best to take things in chunks, with either certain teams looking at policies related to them, or focus on one area of policies at a time.

The stated reason for policies is to have rules to help make the organization better. But, does anyone, including lawyers, really know all your policies???? So why have policies? First, there is CYA (Cover Your A...ctions) Policies reduce legal liability and have "paper" compliance with regulations. For this purpose it is easy to identify areas to improve: when a law changes, you update your policy. But, policy SHOULD be about what is actually done in the organization. So if you want to improve your policies, see what is actually being done, and compare that to the policies, and then either change the policies to reflect the reality, or change the policies so that they actually can change the current reality

Engaging your stakeholders is critical. But it should be done strategically to get the most value for all involved. First, consider what policies will be important to your stakeholders. If there is a controversial policy, the worst thing you can do is to try and hide it from your stakeholders. You need to be able to sell it to them, or at least to a sufficient number of them. If a policy is very technical, but will likely have effects on people, make sure you explain the potential effects. Do not expect stakeholders to draft policies. This is usually a lesson in futility and fights. It is most important to understand what their concerns are, and then you can work to ensure that those concerns are addressed.

If your policies are important enough to be followed, then they are important enough to ensure that people understand them. It is surprising to me that when facilitating learning is considered a core competency of schools, schools often really are bad about facilitating learning of their policies for those who need to follow them. So think about how you can communicate these in a way that people will remember them. And also think about how you will communicate if they are broken by someone. It is best to have a teaching mentality at first, so that if a policy is accidentally broken, it is used as a teachable moment.

Beyond communicating your policies well, the following are other practices that can help lead to successful implementation: 1. Have the intent of the policy be clear, so that others can follow the "spirit of the law" and not get as bogged down in the "letter of the law" 2. Have examples of how to implement the policy in different scenarios. 3. Have "rules of thumb" that can be used most of the time when using the policy. 4. Have procedures supporting your policies. In some cases these need to be very detailed, but often it is best to have flexibility to handle "edge cases" on a case by case basis. 5. Have diagrams for procedures to make them easier to understand.

Once you implement your policies, be ready for a bumpy ride. We expect too much for perfection at our first try. To ease getting over initial hiccups, the following can help: 1. Set expectations ahead of time that there will likely be some unintended consequences, and unforeseen problems. 2. When the policy is first implemented, make sure you take extra time to see how it is going. Have empathy for all involved, and don't assume malice on anyone's part. Don't take things personally. 3. When problems arise, don't focus on the people, but focus on how the system can be changed. Often only little tweaks need to occur to fix things, and the more flexibility the policy has, the easier it is to do these without amending the policy.

In most jurisdictions, there tends to be a lot of laws/regulations/rules that your educational institution needs to comply with. For example in the U.S. there are federal laws/regulations, state laws/regulations, and often accreditation requirements. Then there are court precedents and sometimes global treaties :-) While this can make your head spin, taking the time to really understand these can really help out. And you may be surprised that they provide more flexibility than you might think. If you are to build a school for the future, you must use this flexibility, because the laws and regulations tend to address past problems, not what is needed for your students' future.