Improving a school isn’t easy. Sustainable improvement requires at least three things…
Clarity – we have to correctly identify what to focus on.
Time – school improvement doesn’t happen overnight, it happens over time. And
Perseverance – we have to be prepared to stick at it; there are no quick-fix silver bullets.
School improvement doesn’t work when…
1. When we try to do too much at once. In my experience, this is the main reason why school improvement activity fails or has only a small effect. There may well be a hundred good things that we could do, but doing them all just doesn’t work. I ran a bath the other day while I was shaving, and only noticed after about 5 minutes that it wasn’t filling up – I’d forgotten to put the plug in. Some improvement plans are like that; there’s plenty of stuff going on, but most of it is leaking down the plug-hole.
2. When it’s complicated: Priority 3.1.2, subsection 24. Few people understand things that are complicated, so there’s no buy-in. In schools where only the Head and a few senior staff and governors know the Plan, there is no chance of a general sense of ownership of it – it takes a whole staff to make a good school, and to improve a school. And setting aside the point about ownership, complicated plans are very hard to sustain.
3. When it’s not essential to what matters. What really improves a school? The three things that matter most in any school are 1) What the students are taught: the curriculum 2) How they are taught by all of the teachers, and how they learn, and 3) How well the students behave. To improve a school, we need to focus on these three things, be clear about exactly what will help to improve them, and persevere. Many school improvement plans are full of nice-to-do but not very important things that eat up staff time with only a very small, if any, positive impact on the school.
4. When it’s based on the new shiny thing that comes along – often, in my experience, a thing that someone has posted on Twitter. It’s not that Twitter is bad, or that trying new things is bad; it’s that I think there’s currently a culture of the shiny new thing, that’s really not helpful: I pluck an apple from a tree, and I’m looking at it and thinking about eating it, but then I notice another apple and I pluck that one because it looks a bit shinier. And I take a bite, but wait, there’s another one over there that looks even better! I’ll try that one instead…
School improvement works when
- It emphasises a small number of very important things. We keep it brief.
- It’s simple: concise, short plans set out in simple language on a few pages, that are clear to everyone, with time spent getting people’s buy-in.
- It is focused on the right things: the curriculum, how well students behave, how they learn and how they are taught – the knitting.
- It is sustained: we cannot be changing our minds every second day about our key priorities. We decide what we are doing – carefully – and then we hammer away at those things, and we persevere. Yes, we tweak the plan if we need to as we go but by and large we stick to it.
School improvement is a crucial activity; a school that is improving is getter better at improving the life chances of young people. And our young people is what it’s all about.
