Best Practice

Implementation in schools: Step three is deliver

School improvement Senior leadership Whole-school issues
Implementation is a core part of school improvement. In this series, Robbie Burns considers a four-step model of implementation as proposed in the book Making Room for Impact. This time he considers step three – delivering your well-designed implementation initiatives
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

Implementing initiatives in school: A Headteacher Update Series

 

This five-part series has been inspired by the recent book entitled Making Room for Impact: A de-implementation guide for educators from Professor John Hattie, Dr Arran Hamilton, and Professor Dylan Wiliam (Hamilton et al, 2024).

So far, we have explored why before any initiative is implemented in a school, the de-implementation of other programmes must be considered. We then considered the book’s proposed 4D implementation model: Discover, Decide, De-implement, Re-Decide (I have tweaked the language to make these four steps Discover, Design, Deliver, Double back).

In parts 2 and 3 or this series we focused on Discover and Design. In this fourth part, I will consider “Delivery” – how to deliver the initiative, ensuring that there is deep impact on the area of the school you are looking to improve.

Taking this step for granted, assuming it will just happen, would be a mistake, as there are key elements to consider. Here, we will take a closer look at approaches to delivery, barriers to implementation, and how to collect data from monitoring and evaluation. Let’s look at each in turn.

 

Approaches to delivery: Rigid, fluid and iterative

To bring the project plan and program logic model (see article 3) that you have developed into reality, you need to consider the overall approach you will take to your deliver. In essence, this is how you will carry out your plan as a team.

Pre-empting this saves confusion later on in the thick of the work you are doing among team members, ensuring that the execution lands on the impact you are hoping for. There are three broad options to consider.

Rigid: A rigid approach is one that tightly follows the design work and, regardless of feedback, will stick to the agreed planning. This approach is often seen in lines of work such as construction, where stopping or redoing the laying of bricks or other infrastructure is very difficult. The way that projects within construction are able to stick to this approach is by doing many, many tests and studies beforehand to explore all the possible ways that the plan may not work to ensure that when the design is eventually agreed, it is tightly followed right to the end. Within education, this sort of approach is less common, but there are times when it may be needed. For example, fire evacuation, health and safety, risk assessments, safeguarding, and healthcare planning are all very important parts of school life that need to be adhered to exactly as stated. Other examples could be the delivery of summative assessments across the school: all teachers need to administer them the same way in order for the data to be valid.

Fluid: At the other end of the spectrum is what is known as a fluid delivery approach. By testing informally and using your intuition and instinct as a leader, you then decide what is next in the project plan. It might be that this is done with your leadership teams and decisions are made quickly about the next steps. Although this may work at classroom level when exploring a range of strategies, this is rarely successful at team, whole-school or trust level because aligning basic norms between classrooms is a critical part of whole-school success (McCrea, 2024; Rose, 2021).

Iterative: Neither rigid nor fluid but builds in key moments to ensure that quality data can be analysed accurately so that good decisions can be made for the progress of the project. In an iterative approach, after you have identified your educational challenge, you then explore options for the design of the initiative that fits with your local context. You are careful to develop your project plans and logic models. But the critical difference is that it assumes nothing as certain and strategically builds in stopping points where evaluative work can be undertaken. By doing this, it enables the team to regroup, review the data that is emerging and consider the next steps. This may mean the plan continues as prescribed; it may also mean that a change in direction, a slowing down, or a speeding up is needed in order to see the project through.

Aligning your approach to delivery is important because it enables the leap from agreement of the design to the way it will be enacted to be made with clarity and purpose among team members. It also means that when you are having discussions with your team, you are aligned on what is expected.

 

Planning tools

In the previous article – design – I discussed the need for development planning to include timescales allotted into what I called “sprints”. I also discussed the need to develop a logic model that outlines the framework for all of the work that is being undertaken.

Other ways you can support your team with planning are Gantt Charts and Kanban Boards to track the progress being made. There are a whole variety of templates for these to be found by searching online.

The important principle to note is that they should support you and your teams to get work done and enable you to keep track of what is going on in the project. With this in mind, it is key that you choose and agree to use whichever tool you choose collaboratively to make sure the work gets done to achieve greater impact removing the educational challenge you have identified.

There are two words of caution about selecting the tools you will use. First, whatever initiative is being developed and whatever way you want to develop your templates, it is critical that leaders at all levels consider carefully the design of their work and clear systems for monitoring and evaluating at key moments in the process are used with fidelity.

In this sense, this is an aspect of your implementation approach which ought to be rigid: the last thing you want is five different spreadsheets and 10 different to-do lists gathering the same information.

Second, there is always a danger that we choose interesting or innovative tools that actually make processes more complicated. Keeping things simple and clear at all levels enables you to hold leaders to account and support everyone to keep the main thing the main thing.

 

Barriers to implementation

Even though the right planning and the right tools can be selected, there are almost always barriers to implementation. The value of creative approaches and even the power of evidence is often insufficient in removing the barriers to implementation that arise (Nordgren & Schonthal, 2021). Let’s consider a few.

 

Physical barriers

Not every new project needs to consider the physical barriers of the way a school has been designed, but many do. When developing new systems for interventions, reading groupings, deployment of teaching assistants and timetabling, the physical make-up of a school environment matters. Within early years, the space is particularly important, and can be the difference between students engaging in meaningful independent play or not. When considering approaches to behaviour or even health and safety, the physical space can be the difference between children getting hurt or being able to play freely. With all this in mind, as part of the design and logic model, physical space needs to be considered carefully to ensure that it is not a barrier.

A practical way to do this is to visualise with your team the changes to the space and the way that students and teachers will move around and interact. This should reveal ways that the plan can be further refined.

 

Organisational and interpersonal barriers

Schools often operate in either a trust or local authority system. Understandably, there are often a wide variety of priorities and needs across the groups of schools and this will set the agenda for each individual school within it as resources are allocated and budgets are designed. Within schools, there are often whole-school priorities that are important, but may not be specific to a team or phase. Furthermore, there may be priorities for individual teachers that are not significant for others. This can create a variety of barriers to implementation that are complex but not impossible to overcome.

Given the complexity of each layer of the system, it will be impossible to lead an implementation process without some people feeling as though the programme is not relevant to them. However, what needs to be remembered is that the students are the ones who need to benefit most from the changes you are making.

Therefore, as a leader, you need to support everyone involved in the project to rally around the need to improve whatever aspect of practice, sharing your rationale clearly on what needs to be improved, so that the education challenge can be overcome.

Whatever challenges may arise later, the buy-in built by having them involved in deciding and designing the development process ensures that everyone feels involved in the change.

This can be done in a range of ways, and it does not mean that you need to agree with everyone’s opinions – simply asking and involving staff in the initial phases of development can often be enough.

 

Cultural and parental barriers

Parents are an important part of the school community, and often gaining buy-in to the school improvement project from them can be a key indicator of success in the future. For example, if you are changing your approach to teaching reading, helping parents understand the changes, the approaches you are taking, and how they can support at home can build strong foundations for students. This can be done very simply by producing good quality explainer videos, running parent workshops, sharing information in newsletters, and teachers generally being willing to pick up the phone and give parents a call about how their child is getting on. You may even consult with them on some of the book choices, reading challenges and strategies the school could use to support reading at home. There is also scope for schools to make sure that parents are fully aware and informed of what learning is going on in classrooms through curriculum summaries, communications through specific portals, and parent evenings.

 

Leadership and management barriers

Consider the false dichotomy between leadership and management. Originally stated in a famous article by Zaleznik (1992), the standard wisdom is that leaders are those who are visionary, doing the right thing, while managers are responsible for making things happen, and doing things right.

There are deep issues with this in general, but more specifically when we consider implementation. Within the busy life of a school, leaders must carefully curate their time, support people, nurture students, and partner with parents. But an often overlooked element to our work is the need to also be excellent managers of projects and development planning. Implementation is difficult and complicated work, requiring deep focus. There is a suite of management skills that are implicit to the process described in all of these articles that school leaders need to possess: establishing priorities, monitoring and evaluating, communicating clearly and consistently, and high-levels of organisation. In sum, leaders need to also be excellent managers when it comes to implementation: having a strong vision is not enough (see Hamilton et al, 2022; Hamilton et al, 2024).

 

Collecting monitoring and evaluation data

As part of the delivery planning, there should be moments throughout the implementation journey where data is collected. Some may claim this is not important and evaluating a programme as it is being developed is the enemy of progress and will slow things down unnecessarily.

However, this sets up false opposition between the two ideas: to implement well, quality data must be collected from a range of sources on how things are going within the initiative being developed. This quality data should inform the iterative delivery approach that has been outlined above, making sure that maximum impact from the project is being gained and there is full buy-in from your staff team, students, and parents at every step of the way.

Another reason for ensuring that evaluation and monitoring is built into the work of implementation is the need to overcome the “sunk cost fallacy” (Kahneman, 2013). Well-documented as a cognitive bias, this occurs during implementation when those involved in a project continue to invest resources and money and time into programmes even though the results are not showing positive returns. For example, a leader may think: “I’ve already put several thousand pounds into this reading programme, we can’t pull out of it now.”

The way to avoid this is ensuring that there is quality evaluation and monitoring at key points throughout the development plan. Therefore, as we will see in my next article, built into the delivery stage of the implementation work you are doing, you must gather data, monitor and evaluate. This keeps you as a leader close to the ground of the project, able to react and be proactive to any issues that may be occurring, possibly even changing course, or stopping completely if things are not working.

 

Final thoughts

This article has looked at approaches to delivery, some of the barriers to implementation, and why it is so important to collect, monitor and evaluate the data throughout the plan.

In my next and final article, we will look at this topic in more detail, unpicking key ways evaluation can be done well and considering a few practical tools.

 

Further information & resources

Related articles

Implementation in schools: Step two is design

Implementing initiatives in school: Step one is discover

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