Why 'we'll fix it next term' is the most expensive sentence in your school

The phrase comes up in nearly every school I work with. Usually it is said by someone who has been carrying a clipboard for nine days straight, who can see the problem clearly and has neither the time nor the political room to fix it now. The intention is good. The result is structural.

Here is what tends to happen between today and the term that "we'll fix it next" eventually points to.

The person who could explain the workaround is on long service leave. The form that was meant to be temporary has propagated into three Google Drives. The data that was going to be cleaned up is now load-bearing for a Year 9 reporting decision. And the only person who really understood the workflow has moved schools.

I watched a Year 11 VCE VM coordinator carry the same set of issues for six terms in a row. She kept the show running. She also burned out twice. The school eventually fixed the issues and discovered the unbilled work she had been doing was equivalent to about half a teaching load. Half a teaching load that could have gone to actual teaching.

The cost of "we'll fix it next term" isn't usually visible in your budget. It shows up in the term-by-term hidden tax: the manual data re-entry, the extra phone calls, the second weekend a year that someone gives to making compliance work, the slow erosion of the people who carry the operational weight.

What the schools that get this right do differently is brutally simple. They name the issue out loud, in writing, with a small budget against it. Not a project plan. A budget. Even fifty hours of someone's time, or a small consulting engagement, or three Wednesday afternoons. The point isn't the size. It is the commitment that the next iteration will not just absorb the workaround.

If you can name three things in your school right now that fall under "we'll fix it next term", I'd encourage you to write them on a single page. Then put a date next to each one that is not a term name. A real date in the calendar. You will be surprised how much pressure that one act takes off the people quietly carrying things.

The rest tends to take care of itself.