Lean Six Sigma in education

The administrative load around teaching is where the waste lives. An enquiry to enrolment cycle that takes six weeks and loses applicants at three separate handoffs. A support referral that sits for a fortnight before anyone sees it. A data return collected three times by three departments because none of them trusts the others.

Marking turnaround is the classic, and it matters educationally rather than merely operationally: feedback loses most of its value once the learner has moved on. Treating it as a flow problem, with visible work in progress and a realistic cycle, does more for the quality of feedback than exhortation ever does.

The third is consistency of assessment. Give the same piece of work to five markers and the spread in the grades is the institution measuring its own reliability, usually for the first time. That is variation in an outcome which is supposed to be comparable, and it is measurable, publishable and fixable through moderation designed as a process rather than performed as a ritual.

Define in education has to respect the calendar. A cycle that happens once a year gives you one observation a year, so the first projects should be chosen among the processes that repeat weekly or termly, where the measure phase can actually finish.

Measure usually means asking staff to record something for a fortnight, which is itself an imposition, so it has to be small, and it has to come back to them as a finding rather than disappearing into a report.

Analyse looks for the waits and the rework loops, and in education the largest rework loop is almost always data being collected more than once. Improve tends to be unglamorous and popular: one form, one owner, one deadline, one place the information lives. Control belongs to the team that does the work and is reviewed at an existing meeting, because nobody in a school has room for a new one.

Teaching is not a process to be standardised, and this is the line that matters most. A lesson is a skilled, adaptive act, and the variation between two teachers reaching the same class differently is the profession rather than a defect in it. Standardise the paperwork around teaching and defend the teaching itself.

The second limit is measuring the outcome. Learning is contested, delayed and partly unobservable, and any project promising to raise attainment through process alone is overreaching. Improve the things that plainly get in the way, and be honest that the link to results is an argument rather than a proof.

The third is seasonality. A school year is a series of peaks, and treating September as a special cause to be investigated wastes a term. Measure across comparable periods or not at all.