Why do so few school improvement initiatives achieve their stated goals?
The first of two posts on this all-important head-scratcher
Before we dive in to today’s post, I hope you’ll indulge me in sharing the fact that I just got my hands on ***the actual book***!!!
It’s out on January 24th - you can pre-order a copy here.
Also, yesterday I had a super lovely chat with the amazing Rachel Macfarlane, who will interview me at the online book launch on Saturday 25th January (11am-12pm UK time).
There will be some ***amazing prize give-aways*** at the launch, including:
A 3-year subscription to the Making Change Stick online training suite for your school or organisation (worth up to £3950 - Ooooh!)
A 1-hour implementation coaching Zoom session
5 signed copies of the book
To be in with a change of winning, you need to
a) Share one of the following social media links (shameless, I know)
b) Sign up to the launch (you can do so for free here).
I hope to see you there! And don’t worry if you can’t make it at that time, you can catch the recording afterwards. And you can still win a prize if you don’t attend live :)
OK, let’s do this…
Why do so few school improvement initiatives achieve their stated goals?
In my last post, we looked at the mind-blowing question that opens the book:
What proportion of school improvement initiatives actually improve pupil outcomes?
It’s mind-blowing because a) the figure is really low, b) everyone knows it, and c) this doesn’t seem to stop people from rolling out the next thing… and the next… and the next…
The question is, why? Why do so few improvement initiatives actually improve anything?
I think there are many answers to this problem, but in this post (and the next) I’d like to explore what I see as the two main reasons:
Teachers and school leaders aren’t taught how to implement change effectively.
There are many problems associated with top-down change – and top-down change is our default model.
In this post we’ll look at reason #1. Next time we’ll look at reason #2.
Reason #1: School leaders aren’t taught how to implement change effectively
This is self-evidently the case. As we’ve seen, most school improvement initiatives fail to achieve their stated goals – and most school improvement initiatives are driven and overseen by senior leaders. If school leaders were taught how to implement change effectively, we would expect to see a much higher success rate. But we can also see this is true by looking at the training teachers and school leaders receive.
To become a school leader in England and Wales, you must complete a National Professional Qualification (NPQ). [1] At the time of writing, there are five leadership NPQs (senior leadership, headship, executive headship, early years leadership and one for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) coordinators) and five specialist NPQs (leading teacher development, leading teaching, leading behaviour and culture, leading literacy and leading primary mathematics). This suite of qualifications was introduced in 2021, replacing a pre-existing set of four NPQs (middle leadership, senior leadership, headship and executive leadership).
Under the old NPQ system – the training that the vast majority of current school leaders in England and Wales received – there wasn’t much of a focus on change management. I know this because I used to work at the UCL Institute of Education, and part of my job was to facilitate NPQ programmes for groups of aspiring middle and senior leaders. We would touch upon a few key theorists and frameworks, such as:
Kotter’s eight-step process of change.
The Kübler-Ross change curve, based on the ‘stages of grief’ model.
Fullan’s ‘three keys for maximising impact’.
All good stuff, by the way. And both the old and new NPQs require each participant to implement a school improvement initiative and evaluate its impact. But under the old NPQs, aspiring leaders weren’t provided with explicit guidance on how to do this. They were just told about a few high-level models for understanding change and then expected to lead an implementation project – and hopefully to do it well.
There’s also a structural reason why the NPQs don’t teach school leaders how to implement change effectively. Both the old and new qualifications take around 12–18 months to complete. However, if the literature on change management is clear about one thing, it’s this: it takes a lot longer than 12–18 months to bring about lasting, positive change.
For example, in a longitudinal study of 411 UK school leaders, the researchers noted that:
In our study, it took at least five years to engage a school’s community, change its culture and improve its teaching. The most successful leaders stayed for the whole of this journey, and often longer, with test scores increasing by an impressive 45–50 percentage points in the first eight years after they took over. [2]
In a similar vein, Kotter writes:
‘Until changes sink deeply into a company’s culture, a process that can take five to ten years, new approaches are fragile and subject to regression.’ [3]
The short-term nature of school leadership training also undermines the very projects that participants undertake in order to gain the qualification. Over the years, I’ve heard many teachers dismiss a school improvement initiative led by an aspiring senior leader because ‘they’re just doing this so they can pass their course. I bet nobody will even mention this next year.’ (‘This too shall pass’ syndrome strikes again!)
The new suite of NPQs do have more of an explicit focus on implementation, which we’ll examine shortly. To set the scene, we need to take a brief diversion.
The EEF implementation guidance
In 2018, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) published a guidance report titled Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation. An updated version, titled A School’s Guide to Implementation: Guidance Report, was published in 2024. [4]
The EEF implementation guidance has been widely embraced by the teaching profession – reportedly, the document has been downloaded ‘more than 100,000 times a year’ since its launch. [5] This is hugely encouraging since it reveals a hunger within the teaching profession for guidance on how to implement school improvement.
The updated guidance report centres around three recommendations:
Adopt the behaviours that drive effective implementation. This centres around three core behaviours: engage, unite and reflect.
Attend to the contextual factors that influence implementation. This focuses on three such factors: what’s being implemented, systems and structures, and people who enable change.
Use a structured but flexible implementation process. Here, the implementation process is presented as a four-stage cycle: explore, prepare, deliver and sustain.
The EEF guidance report includes a number of useful insights about change implementation, such as:
Implementation is fundamentally a collaborative and social process driven by how people think, behave and interact.
Schools can use implementation teams that include a range of stakeholders to plan, manage and review implementation of an intervention.
Where possible, aim to repurpose existing systems and structures rather than bolting on new ones. [6]
However, there are many practical ideas and strategies for implementing school improvement that the EEF guidance either overlooks or oversimplifies. There’s no need to enter into a detailed critique here – anything that appears in the Making Change Stick programme that does not appear in the EEF guidance should be viewed as an important omission. This includes things like:
How to appoint an implementation team and how the team should operate.
The importance of communications planning (often overlooked in schools).
How to use backward design, i.e. starting with the end in mind and working towards it in a systematic way.
How to write impact goals that specify the difference you would like to make, for whom and by when.
How to understand the problems you currently face by conducting a root cause analysis.
How to build and refine an improvement strategy over time.
How to use a theory of action to understand the difference between the status quo and an alternative (desired) future.
What ‘tight but loose’ implementation looks like in practice.
How to build a shallow ‘on-ramp’, rather than viewing school improvement as a series of on–off switches.
How to plan for diffusion (i.e. how to spread effective practice throughout the school over time).
The crucial importance of planning for habit change.
How to write a data collection plan that captures evidence at three levels: baseline, impact and side effects.
How to create an implementation timeline to minimise workload and avoid ‘pinch-points’.
How to use a pre-mortem to anticipate problems and solve or mitigate them in advance.
The importance of project management – and how to do it.
The need to create individual as well as whole-school improvement plans.
How to use PDSA cycles (plan, do, study, act) to iterate and improve practice – a cornerstone of improvement science.
How to combine data and dialogue to inform decision-making in an ongoing way.
How to embed and sustain improvements for the long term.
To summarise, in putting implementation on the map, the EEF guidance is a welcome step in the right direction. However, it misses out many important steps and does not adequately guide school leaders through the complex process of implementing a whole-school improvement initiative.
Meanwhile, back at the NPQs…
As we saw earlier in this chapter, the new NPQs do have more of a focus on implementation – each of the 10 frameworks has a section on implementation at the end. [7] However, the authors essentially just copy-and-pasted the four-stage EEF cycle and bolted it on to the end of each framework. The language used in these frameworks is almost identical to that used in the EEF guidance report.
To recap, the vast majority of current school leaders were trained under a system that did not provide them with explicit guidance on how to implement school improvement effectively. The training currently provided to aspiring school leaders does provide some guidance on how to implement school improvement. However, this guidance overlooks or oversimplifies many important ideas and strategies from implementation and improvement science.
This point was made forcefully by Alasdair Kennedy, the headteacher at Trinity School in Croydon, upon completing the Making Change Stick programme:
People don’t talk enough about the science of implementation, and equally the training is very scarce. And yet it’s such a key area of understanding for a school, or any institution, if they are going to attempt change. That’s why [the Making Change Stick programme] is so valuable – because it’s something we’re doing all the time, but we’ve never really been trained in it.
So, teachers and school leaders aren’t taught how to implement change effectively. This is rather an important oversight, since ‘implementing school improvement’ is essentially a school leader’s job description.
In my next post, we’ll explore the second major reason why so few school improvement initiatives meet their stated goals - the fact that we default to top-down change…
Until the next time! (Oh and don’t forget to sign up to the launch!)
Footnotes
[1] Technically an NPQ is voluntary, but most job descriptions for leadership positions cite them as an essential requirement. NB the account of current and historical leadership training in this chapter relates mainly to England and Wales, although much of the content will also be relevant to other countries.
[2] Hill, A., Mellon, L., Laker, B. & Goddard, J. (2017). Research: How the Best School Leaders Create Enduring Change. Harvard Business Review, September 14. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2017/09/research-how-the-best-school-leaderscreate-enduring-change. Emphases added.
[3] Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-whytransformation-efforts-fail-2. Emphasis added.
[4] EEF (2024). A School’s Guide to Implementation: Guidance Report. London: Education Endowment Foundation. Retrieved from: https://educationendowmentfoundation. org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/implementation.
[5] Henshaw, P. (2024). Getting interventions right: Popular EEF implementation guidance is revamped and updated. Headteacher Update, April 24. Retrieved from: https://www.headteacher-update.com/content/resources/getting-interventionsright-popular-eef-implementation-guidance-is-revamped-and-updated/.
[6] EEF (2024). A School’s Guide to Implementation: Guidance Report. London: Education Endowment Foundation, p1–16.
[7] Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-professionalqualifications-frameworks-from-september-2021.
Thank you for sharing these impactful points. I fully agree that those implementing initiatives often focus too heavily on communicating the plan, while neglecting to secure the emotional buy-in that's required to lead a community through change.