The 7 inconvenient truths of school improvement planning

Call it what you will, the time to think about the school improvement plan has come around again, because God forbid we should be happy with what we have. 😉

Fitter, healthier, more productive…

I don’t need to put it on my calendar; I just wait for the blogs to start appearing. And there have been some good ones this year, like this one, and this. If you want insight and practical advice, start with these.

I am going to weigh in with a few inconvenient truths, the biggest of which is that you won’t ever write a plan you are really happy with. In fact, this truth is so important that it should go first…

1. You won’t ever write a plan you are really happy with

The thing is that changing anything about a school is a messy business. Good luck writing it down. The very act of documenting your thoughts and articulating your ambitions somehow renders them anodyne.

Has anyone this side of the invention of Ofsted been brave enough to refuse to write one of these things? If only we could find enough schools obstinate enough to resist, we could have a great randomised control trial. The EEF could spend a million pounds finding another thing that makes no discernible difference (more on that later).

What if we wrote something else, like a pledge, a story, or a history told from the vantage point of our future selves? What if our articulated thoughts were imbued with emotion rather than scripted in technocratic business-speak? We sacrifice the art of rhetoric when we set out our cold plans – fully costed, SMART, absolutely bloody rational.

Okay! I’ll write a plan. But just accept that it won’t be perfect.

2. It isn’t all about improving

Not everything needs to improve all of the time. If we are too busy improving things, we’ll forget to cherish what we have. And the inconvenient truth is that we can only work at improving a fraction of the things we’d really like to improve at a time.

There are also things in schools which require tremendous effort which won’t end up improving as a result. Sometimes we’re running to stand still, or even to fall behind. For example, in the face of rapidly declining applicants for vacancies, we can aim to ‘improve’ our recruitment processes, but if we are lucky we’ll only just find people to do the jobs that need doing. And they might not be as good as the ones we used to find.

Most change is adaptation, particularly when the environment is unstable. Adaptation involves changing something, maintaining something, removing something and pulling something else back up. If you can leverage some improvement amongst all of that then bonus points.

3. Multiple things lead to multiple things

Back to the EEF… there is a reason that so few trials generate statistically significant effects and that reason is that very few things on their own will have a reliable and discernible impact in schools. It takes a combination of factors to achieve a noticeable difference.

So, school improvement doesn’t have levers which, when pulled, cause something obvious to happen.

If your school improvement plan is full of levers, each with SMART targets and discrete success criteria, it is a nonsense. I have no problem with trying to be explicit about what should be better as a result of your efforts to make things better, but drawing lines between an intervention and its outcome is a fool’s errand in all but a few instances (like a targeted phonics programme). Look ahead five years and say what should have improved, then tell a story about how you are going to get there. People like stories better than instruction manuals anyway.

4. Most plans don’t have a credible theory of change behind them

Scrutinise most school improvement plans and you will find them full of ‘good ideas’ with no credible theory for how they will achieve the change required. State your assumptions! If your plan won’t stand up to the scrutiny of 100 cynical members of staff then go back to the drawing board.

5. All school improvement involves changing human behaviour

Who should change? Exactly what do you want them to do differently? How will this be achieved?

The inconvenient truth is that it is much harder to change how people behave than we would like to admit. If we insist upon writing an improvement plan, perhaps start by articulating precisely how people must adapt their daily actions if the plan is to succeed. Then provide a compelling reason for why they should do so. And what support they will get. And when they get to practice and refine these new behaviours.

A further truth is that the ones who need to change most are those writing the plan.

6. The plan devalues as soon as it is driven off the forecourt

Plans have a short shelf-life because things rarely go to plan. If we adopt the Adam Ant mindset – ‘plan and deliver’ – then we should expect to fail.

This is annoying for those who craft monolithic improvement plans. Use a sketchpad, not a hammer and chisel.

7. You won’t find the secret to school improvement in a blog

I lied earlier. This is the biggest of the inconvenient truths, but you wouldn’t have read this far if I’d put it up front.

We can be inspired, informed, challenged, enraged or depressed by a blog post (I hope I have achieved one of these), but we have to find our own way of writing the imperfect document that is the school improvement plan. It is imperfect because our schools are imperfect. It is imperfect because we are. Now get on with it!