Research School Network: The Trouble with Giant Ants: Scaling up Implementation Why scaling up an approach brings unexpected challenges
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The Trouble with Giant Ants: Scaling up Implementation
Why scaling up an approach brings unexpected challenges
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by Bradford Research School
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In the 1954 film ‘Them’, the world is plagued by giant irradiated ants.
In case you were worried that this could ever happen, fear not. An ant that reached this size could not survive for very long. Scaled up spiracles would not have enough surface area to take in enough oxygen. And at a much larger scale, the weight on an ant’s legs would increase beyond its ability to bear the burden too. We hope that’s reassuring.
When scaling up approaches in schools, we can also face challenges that did not become apparent at the smaller scale. So what should we bear in mind when scaling up an approach?
People
At scale, we cannot rely only on the expertise of those who first delivered it or conceived it. Engaging more people does bring benefits, such as additional expertise and knowledge, but we have to work harder at uniting them around implementation.
An interesting example of this is the IPEELL strategy. An efficacy trial in 2013/14 showed a huge improvement in writing scores. In November 2018, a scaled up version of the project showed some promise, but it was not seen to be as effective. In the scaling up there was a need to train more people to deliver, so a ‘train the trainer’ model was adopted, a change from the original efficacy trial. The evaluation states:
"...we recommend that having an experienced trainer who has seen the intervention be delivered and can share practical examples with the teachers from experience would be beneficial in the future roll-out of the cascading training model. It would also be useful for the trainers to watch an experienced trainer train the teachers first.”
What changes, what stays the same
A well-designed approach will set out the core components. These are the essential principles and practices that underpin the approach and are needed to make it work. When scaling up, we need to ensure these are just as clearly defined as at the start, but we need to acknowledge that the context for implementation has changed. The EEF recommend:
Reassessing pupil needs and the suitability of the approach
Reassessing implementation readiness
Reviewing implementation plans
Ideally, these steps are taken before we make a decision to scale-up. We might also decide to sustain or de-implement an approach as a result of these reflections.
The characteristics of a specific intervention
The ‘what’ really matters. A good summary of this comes from the Review of Evidence on Implementation in Education (Moore et al, 2024) that accompanies the EEF’s Implementation guidance report:
However, our analysis of the evidence suggests that the intervention itself shapes scale-up in several influential ways (Moore et al., 2021). The type of intervention and its specific objectives and characteristics all play a role in the forms of scale-up that are appropriate and feasible (Bogiatzis-Gibbons et al., 2021). For example, a whole-school intervention to improve behaviour for learning is likely to warrant a larger more comprehensive and holistic scale-up than an intervention for Key Stage 1 children with a specific learning need which impacts their learning of phonics. Therefore, reflecting on the characteristics of the intervention enables appropriate and feasible scale-up to be planned and implemented.
Like the giant ants, some approaches become incredibly difficult to scale up. That isn’t always a reason not to do it, but it may affect timelines and implementation activities.
If we consider what sustaining an intervention looks like from the start, then we can also design the original approach with this in mind.
