Best Practice

Implementing initiatives in school: Why we must begin with de-implementation

School improvement Senior leadership Middle leadership Education research
The implementation of initiatives and new approaches is core to school improvement. In this five-part series, Robbie Burns considers a four-step model of implementation as proposed in the book Making Room for Impact. In part one, he considers why we must begin with ‘de-implementation’
Four Ds: Drawing upon a large body of evidence, Professor John Hattie and his colleagues have developed a four-step model for thinking both about de-implementation of existing initiatives and how we implement new, more impactful ones (see Hamilton et al, 2024) - Adobe Stock

“The era of evidence collection on education is (largely) over,” so write the influential authors of the recent book Building to Impact (Hamilton et al, 2022). “The era of systematic implementation of the existing evidence,” we are urged, must begin.

The authors, who include Professor John Hattie, go on with a rallying cry to trusts and schools to develop, improve and understand the complexity of implementation processes and procedures and put them to effective use in all of their programmes of school improvement.

In essence, what they state is that there really is no further need to grow the knowledge-base for effective education: if we wanted to consume all of the available evidence, we would need to work through 68 books and journal articles per-day in order to do it in a single lifetime.

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