Lean School

The First UK All LEAN School

Our team has been working with LEAN to improve education for 5 years, running pilot work and leading change through LEAN. CIS was the chance to do this even better with a brand new school.

Simply, LEAN means creating more value for people by concentrating on value added activity and eliminating waste. LEAN organisations understand what their customers (our students) value and focus their key processes to continuously increase value.

To do so we regard our people most highly, understand their work and use LEAN processes to constantly reflect and improve. We believe that the teachers, coaches and students who are doing the job are the best at designing improvement. To continuously improve we need knowledge, understanding, trust and clear processes with measurable outcomes.

LEAN in action at CIS

1. Adding value Students, staff and parents are asked to be clear about why and what we are learning. This then enables us together to look clearly at how we learn best and ensure that our school concentrates on this
2. Muda; eliminating waste Designing a school afresh we have already cut out many of the wastes in traditional schools by concentrating on the learning and simplifying the many systems. We are paperless from the start, we have talented staff, clear jobs, and almost no management or administration
3. Gemba; go and see Gemba is about going to the place where the transformation takes place. In industry this is in the factory, in CIS it is in the classroom
4. Strive for perfection We always want to learn and improve. A piece of work done badly or hastily will pass forward problems which can worsen. A piece of work done well and to the best of our ability leads to confidence through competence and will help ourselves and others

Useful links

• Lean Enterprise Institute
• What is Lean?