Research School Network: Where did it all go wrong? Head of Bradford Research School, Mark Miller, considers why initiatives fail in schools

This is the way initiatives in school end
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot (paraphrased)

Schools are never short of new initiatives, but we are all aware of how many of these new initiatives don’t last the test of time. While we may not lose sleep over some poorly thought out approaches, there are certainly some effective ideas that never take hold, or quietly fade away. When this happens, it can be useful to ask some questions.

Were the active ingredients clearly specified and communicated?

In the EEF’s ​‘A School’s Guide to Implementation’, they emphasise the importance of ​‘active ingredients’, the set of well-specified features that are crucial to the fidelity of an intervention:

If the active ingredients are not understood they are not clearly defined. If not clearly defined, they are not communicated. If not communicated, they are not implemented. Before we know it, everyone has their own understanding and the intervention isn’t delivered as intended. Before you know it, they are swiftly dropped for the next fad. In addition, without the knowledge that any active ingredients were adhered to, then we can’t confidently say that something didn’t work, just that it was poorly implemented.

A contemporary example of something which may fail because of this misunderstanding of the active ingredients is the Knowledge Organiser. A fantastic exploration of the implementation of this particular tool is Alex Quigley’s blog: Is it Time to KO the Knowledge Organiser? He outlines some of the problems and highlights elaboration as an important strategy for their effectiveness. If leaders are going to bring in something like a knowledge organiser strategy, they need to ask what it is that is essential to the success of the strategy. This must be clearly defined and adhered to with fidelity.

We have some thoughts on that in our series of blogs:

• Knowledge Organisers: Setting out a Definition
• Knowledge Organisers: Facilitating Retrieval
• Knowledge Organisers: Facilitating Elaboration
• Knowledge Organisers: Organising the Organiser

Was it the initiative, or the school culture?

Some schools can have a kind of initiative buckaroo, where new initiative is piled on new initiative. And if so many things are happening at once, then it is highly likely that nothing will take hold. There is also a danger that initiative fatigue sinks in. Eyes are rolled and expectations are low. Sometimes the success of your initiative depends on doing fewer things.

There are questions in the guidance report which are a good way of framing whether your school culture is an effective place for good implementation:

• Do we implement changes across the school in a structured and staged manner?
• Is adequate time and care taken when preparing for implementation?
• Are there opportunities to make fewer, but more strategic, implementation decisions and pursue these with greater effort?
• Are there less effective practices that can be stopped to free up time and resources?
• Does our school have a climate that is conducive to good implementation?
• Does the school leadership team create a clear vision and understanding of expectations when changing practices across the school?
• Do staff feel empowered to step forward and take on implementation responsibilities?
• How do day-to-day practices affect the motivation and readiness of staff to change?

Bradford Research School sits within Dixons Academies Trust, and we have started to codify our culture in a series of videos here. It’s not the only model, but healthy school culture is a prerequisite for effective implementation.

What changed?

Whether by design or otherwise, things change massively from the outset of any new approach. Things can change by design. For example, you may choose to scale something up and it is less effective. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps the intervention relied on the expertise of those who first delivered it or conceived it. In bringing in more people, it can be difficult to ensure that everyone has the same understanding and approach. It can be harder to ensure fidelity the more people are involved with a project. This can be avoided by treating scaling up as a new process rather than part of the same one.

Or things mutate. Brown and Campione (1996) used the term ​‘lethal mutation’ to describe the problem where teachers do not understand the underlying principles but instead focus on the surface features, thus the intervention begins to mutate. This can be avoided by specifying and adhering to the active ingredients.

Sometimes the school changes. Personnel changes, so the advocates of an initiative and those who were at the initial training go. Clarity is lost. Or, as Alex Quigley puts it:

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Brown, A. L., & Campione, J. C. (1996). Psychological theory and the design of innovative learning environments: On procedures, principles, and systems. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Innovations in learning: New environments for education (pp. 289 – 325). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.