I’m trying to figure something out: why is it that, in some contexts, school improvement is really simple and in others it’s really bloody hard!

For the past 15 years I have been in the privileged position of working alongside school leaders to try and improve outcomes, both within my own schools, within the Leaf Trust, and more widely as a mentor for school leaders locally and nationally.

I spend a great deal of time trying to work out why some schools seem to pile school improvement successes one upon the other, whilst others seem beset by false starts and disappointment. I have experienced both as a headteacher (the disappointments, as well as the successes, I write about at length in the book).

There are times – especially in very familiar and stable contexts – when school improvement feels really easy.

In these situations I am surrounded by people who seem to quite like me – and certainly trust me – earned over years of consistent leadership behaviours (and very occasional – but swift – apologies for lapses in this). Over time, these teams have come to a shared understanding as to what we believe about educating young children, based on deeply held shared values. We know our mission and are all pushing for the same shared vision. We have systems in place to plan and execute our goals and everyone knows the part which they have to play in this shared endeavour.

There are times – especially in very new or unstable contexts – when school improvement feels really bloody hard!

In these situations I am surrounded by people who don’t know me, and therefore have no reason to trust me. There aren’t the systems, disciplines or structures in place to drive the school improvement machine. People are working just as hard (sometimes harder). They care just as much. But their endeavours often amount to little in the way of improvement as valuable school improvement power leaks out of a holed ship.

I often work with these who are keen to make improvements to teaching and learning and who feel the pressure to do so quickly. I rarely come across anything other than dedicated leaders and teams who desperately want to improve their schools. Schools are extremely complex institutions where there is a subtle interplay between strategy, leadership, context and culture. Boiling school improvement down to a neat model belies the complex social organism which is a school. And yet, there is a body of academic work which points to ‘best bets’ when instituting school improvement.

Indeed, it’s not like there’s any shortage of advice on how to do school improvement (or leadership in general). Anyone who has done their NPQH will have been exposed to a dozen models which can be applied to this. But with a few leadership miles on the clock, I have been reflecting on these models and how they are applied in real school improvement (not the theory of the NPQH classroom).

For this blog, I’m focusing on McKinsey’s ‘7S’s’ model, as a lens through which to explore why some school improvement efforts appear to yield better results than others. Because the more I think about this issue the more convinced I am that the key to this conundrum lies in the interplay between organisational systems and structures, the strategy itself, and how this is understood and enacted by the people in the school.

Hard vs Soft elements

McKinsey divides their 7S’s into both hard and soft elements.

Hard elements describe visible formal structures which are easy to identify and develop as physical aspects of school improvement: Strategy, Structure & Systems.

Soft elements describe the attitudes, culture and behaviours of the team: Style, Staff, Skills & Shared Values. These involve people. And people are the hardest part of any school improvement riddle. Yet one could argue that it is these areas which will either propel a strategy to success or doom it to failure.

1. Style matters first (soft) – even before values…

I have reorganised the order of prioritisation in this blog several times.

Initially ‘staff’ came first, then ‘values’. But before these comes you as a leader. This is because, how you show up to school improvement will determine everything else.

The leaders’ style is everything.

We will have studied the six types of leadership in our NPQH and will no doubt have a self-leadership-image which sees us drift effortlessly between coach, affiliative/ democratic guru and, occasionally a pace-setting visionary.

But it is more important to consider what leader we become when under pressure. Are we still the zen-like democrat, leading the team hand-in-hand, or do we swing round to grumpy autocrat burning through goodwill via diktat; or do we hide in our office, an impotent democrat governed by mob rule?

These questions matter. If you blunder in and demonstrate a leadership style which is at odds to the needs of the organisation, then it will be hard to recover as, in the eyes of the team, your authentic self has already been revealed.

How you show up as leader will be context specific. Sometimes, a pace-setting autocrat is needed to get a school out of a hole quickly. Sometimes, where all else is stable, a democratic coaching style will unlock the creativity and effort of the team. And whilst you will need to switch between all of these styles (sometimes several times in a single day), think carefully how you show up (especially when under pressure).

2. Shared values build trust, safety and a common moral purpose

Before you can improve a school, you must make sure people feel safe – which comes before they trust you. This is why ‘shared values’ is at the centre of McKinsey’s model. Before any leader can have any hope of driving forward their school improvement agenda, they must first align the values of the team around a shared moral purpose. They must start to build trust by showing the team that every decision, especially the hard ones, are visibly led by these agreed values.

If you’re lucky then you will be driving school improvement in a setting which is already ‘organisationally and culturally healthy’. By this I mean that you have a stable staff and outcomes, and systems which allow you to move school improvement forward at a easy pace, with the team all pulling in the same direction. More importantly, you will already have aligning values.

However, often more rapid and radical school improvement is brought on by a crisis: usually poor outcomes or critical judgements by external bodies such as OFSTED. Again, if the organisation is already culturally healthy then teams can use existing systems and strong team values to drive any school improvement actions. Yet, more commonly, crisis-led school improvement is usually accompanied by a period of cultural instability where the team is not on the same page and a bunker mentality sets in where different factions may persue different agendas. In these schools the team may not have identified shared values – or, more commonly – will say the right thing in public, but behave in a way which tramples on the agreed values in private.

So, job number 1 of any new leader trying to drive a school improvement agenda is to make sure the team agrees which values will be adopted, shared and, most importantly, defended.

3. People (staff) next (soft).

Within The Leaf Trust our CEO, Ross Newman, has created our ‘school improvement flywheel’ (inspired by the work of Jim Collins) as a method of articulating a sequence of school improvement. Here, getting the right people in the right roles comes first.

It is fair to say that, initially at least, a new school leader will have to work with the staff which they have. As such, it is not possible to wait for the optimal staffing structure before embarking on significant school improvement changes.

However, it is possible to look at how staff responsibilities are organised and deployed. This needs to be done with some care (nothing will piss of a leader’s new team more quickly than having their roles messed about with without their input or agreement). But, if the leader works with the staff team, addressing their views and fears – and considering their need to feel safe – it is possible to optimise the team by setting the right people to the right work.

The core of this element also relates to staff behaviours and attitudes.

We are all prone to unconscious bias.

We are all prone to what Lencioni refers to as the 4 dysfunctions of a team: lack of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, lack of accountability and inattention to results.

In short, we essentially behave in a way which largely matches those in the tribe.

When a school’s culture is healthy, this makes this element easy. The team’s attitudes and behaviours are largely self-supporting (as discussed above). However, the ‘one bad apple’ trope is true. A single rogue staff member can sap morale and damage the team in ways which are disproportionate to their place in the team. Often, this will be the result of the staff member having been squeezed into the wrong chair on the bus (as Jim Collins puts it). Shifting their responsibilities or tweaking their role can often resolve this issue. However, sometimes staff may be on the wrong bus. And difficult as this is, difficult conversations must be had to ascertain whether this can be resolved through a new seat… or resolved through them getting off the bus.

If the shared values have been established, these act as norm references for the team, and are a powerful tool for both recognising positive team behaviours and calling out those which conflict with those which the values define.

4. Form a strategy – a clear plan (hard).

Most schools find writing a school improvment plan quite straightforward.

However, writing a clear plan is a lot harder. Whilst most leaders can accurately articulate the problem, all too often the temptation is then to grab at a solution which ‘sounds like’ it will solve the problem. Sometimes a leader will get lucky and will grab at the right solution through dumb luck – and will be hailed a visionary. Sometimes they will have very accute perception of the problem (or experience of similar problems in their previous roles) and will grasp at a solution with the confidence this experience. But most of the time (especiallty for particularly thorny problems) the strategy which will provide a solution will not immediately present itself.

And in this moment, uncomfortable as it is, the leader must sit with that uncertainty whilst possible solutions are explored.

Only once the problem is understood (or, more realistically, as understood as it can be in the given moment having considered known evidence and options) can action be planned for. I won’t go into all the detail of makes an effective school improvement plan (it’s in the book ;), but it should clearly define the problem, articulate what success looks like (again, as clearly as possible so that progress towards the goal can be measured), and then show how the active ingredients of the change will be enacted over time. This is a blog all of its own (or the chapter of my book…) but unless this is done with precision and situational knowledge then any improvement actions are likely to fail.

5. Create effective Systems (hard)

A beautifully written school development plan is doomed to failure if there aren’t sufficient school improvement systems to operationalise its elements and embed them across the school.

Again, this is where schools often fall short. They have thought deeply about the ‘what’ but not at all about the ‘how’. In the worst cases, training is confined to a glitzy INSET and maybe the odd staff meeting. Likewise, as written about in my last blog, sometimes schools simply run out of energy when the challenges and niggles (hallmarks of any improvement activity) begin to erode morale.

It is here, like in so many other areas of successful schools, that effective school improvement systems come into their own. These are not the same as operational systems (although there may be some overlap). Operational systems make sure that the school runs smoothly. They are concerned primarily with logistics, routines and scheduling. Important as these systems are, sometimes schools don’t put the same level of thinking into their school improvement systems as they do their operational systems.

For improvement plans to work, clear delivery systems need to be put in place which ensure that the new approaches are successfully embedded. The EEF and many other writers have outlined how to develop these implementation systems so I won’t detail these here. However, those in charge of school improvement need to ask themselves whether clear systems are in place to ensure that new initiatives are effectively elected, tested and implemented.

6. Leadership structures help (or hinder) school improvement

If the ‘strategy’ (plan) is the ‘what’, and the ‘systems’ are the ‘how’, then the ‘structures’ are the ‘who’.

In smaller schools, especially smaller primary schools, there are often not a lot of senior or middle leaders available to do the school improvement work which, whilst creating some time and resource pressures, can support school improvement activity being adopted quite quickly as there are fewer moving parts to the organisation and therefore each team members’ reach is greater.

Conversely, in larger schools (primary or secondary) there maybe many leaders available to lead school improvement activities. This can add valuable capacity and specialist knowledge which may be lacking in smaller institutions. However, the larger the organisation, the less individual reach each leader will potentially have, and the more scope there is for mutation and misunderstanding.

Whatever the size of the school, leaders need to view leadership and team structures as central to school improvement. Effective structures will allow leaders to implement priorities by drawing on the combined expertise of the team. Clear responsibilities will ensure that there is no duplication, competition or confusion between teams and staff members. Effective structures are also nimble and fluid with responsibilities and lines of report changing according to the school improvement priorities, which may challenge the traditional single subject leader structure which is common in many primary schools.

The most effective structure will depend heavily on the context of the school itself, so one size doesn’t fit all. However, leaders need to consider the design of their leadership and team structures alongside the other aspects of school improvement already outlined above.

7. Skills last?

It seems odd to put developing the team’s skill (whether that be in teaching or leading) last, and, to be honest, none of the above is done without elements of the other 6 S’s.

However, unless you have secured the above (in the first instance at least) then it is unlikely that you’ll be able to have a sustained impact on the skills of the team.

For this you need a leader who knows how to motivate a team around common values and a shared vision. A leader who then defends these values in a way that shapes the teams’ behaviours. A leader who can put the right people in the right roles and free the latent potential within them. A leadership team who can develop a clear strategy and decant this into an actionable plan. A leadership team who spends as much time on developing school improvement systems as they do operational ones. Leaders (and governors) who shape the leadership structure around school improvement and not convenience.

Then, and only then, will the path to improving the skills of the team become clear and will become effective.

And that’s when school improvement will feel easy.