: Understanding contextual factors – empowering people as agents of change Enabling sustainable change in schools: three areas leaders can focus on when managing people.
—
Blog
Understanding contextual factors – empowering people as agents of change
Enabling sustainable change in schools: three areas leaders can focus on when managing people.
Share on:
by Cornwall Research School
on the
Luca Owenbridge
Deputy Director of Cornwall Research School
Luca Owenbridge is History and Maths teacher based in Penzance, Cornwall. He came to teaching after working as a Policy Analyst for the Department for Education in London. Click here to read more.
School leaders know that their people are their greatest assets. Finding, retaining, and empowering the right people in the right places is hugely important. Unsurprisingly, this is borne out by the literature on what makes for successful change in schools.
In the context of a well-documented recruitment and retention crisis this becomes an even greater challenge for leaders. Many of the factors affecting retention are outside the control of school leaders. However, perhaps by ensuring an organisation’s people are empowered and enabled effectively, leaders can do something to address this in their own settings.
Mounts Bay Academy
The Teaching and Learning advisory board at Mounts Bay Academy is meeting to discuss implementing an Instructional Coaching model for professional development.
Present are senior leaders, research school members, lead practitioners and classroom teachers. Each member brings a unique contribution to the debate. Senior leaders set out strategic direction and the aims of the shift, whilst research colleagues ground and challenge proposals with evidence. Teaching staff bring a classroom centred perspective which highlights the potential barriers to change on the ground, particularly around ensuring sufficient time is given to implementation and that all staff are clear on the rationale and timeline of the changes.
This distribution of leadership and agency helps foster engagement and a sense of unity. It helps access a range of perspectives and builds the resilience of the implementation process by ensuring a spread of staff are involved and invested.
The Evidence
The first EEF guidance report on implementing change in schools focussed on the understanding of implementation as a process. This process helps schools to do implementation.
Their recent update and new EEF Implementation guidance report moves towards an understanding of how to do implementation well. Recommendation two of the guidance report encourages schools to “attend to the contextual factors that influence implementation”. The behaviours that drive implementation are influenced by what is being implemented, the existing systems and structures, and whether there are people in place who can enable change.
The EEF suggest three areas leaders can focus on when managing their people to enable sustainable change.
Distribution
It is important to ensure there are a range of people who can lead and support change. This should include senior leaders as well as wider implementation teams, early adopters, support staff and student representatives. This distribution of leadership has the advantage of sharing the burden, bringing in new perspectives and expertise and increasing resilience as implementation becomes less reliant on specific individuals.
Knowledge, skills, and expertise
We should ensure that anyone tasked with promoting or managing the implementation process has the necessary knowledge and expertise. This might include scoping a staff member’s existing knowledge, delivering professional development, facilitating skills shares and providing sufficient time for relevant parties to develop their expertise.
Empowered with Agency
Once we have distributed leadership, ensured expertise and facilitated development, leaders must empower their agents of change. This is distribution in action.
Leaders should ask - are people genuinely empowered to exercise professional judgement, lead others, and have a voice, whilst feeling united in a strategic direction?
This is hard. It requires leaders to have a clear sense of individual remits and where people can exercise agency and choice and were there are non-negotiables. It requires leaders to have a strong sense of what is being implemented and where they ‘need to be tight and where they can be loose’.
The people involved in any implementation process are integral contextual factors. If we can build a diverse team for implementation, distribute genuine leadership to them, whilst maintaining a strong strategic direction and empowering them as agents of change there is more hope for sustained and positive change.
