: Strategic Implementation A multi-faceted vehicle for driving leadership impact – Part 1 Strategic Implementation A multi-faceted vehicle for driving leadership impact – Part 1
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Strategic Implementation A multi-faceted vehicle for driving leadership impact – Part 1
Strategic Implementation A multi-faceted vehicle for driving leadership impact – Part 1
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by Essex Research School
on the
Nicola Spearman
ELE, Deputy Headteacher at the King John School and Staff and Leadership Development
Over the last five years, as a school we have been on an ambitious and rapid improvement journey. Moving a very large, comprehensive, secondary school from the unenviable position of an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating with below average achievement, to one with six ‘strong’ grades has been no easy feat. It took blood, sweat, and tears but most significantly, it took strategy.
Strategy is an overused, buzzword in education, often featuring arbitrarily on school development plans without appreciation for its role in delivering real, sustainable impact. The EEF’s Putting Evidence to work: A Schools Guide to Implementation (edition 2,December 2019) transformed our thinking to implementation being a process, not an event. Later, edition 3 (April 2024) confirmed our understanding of the role of people throughout the process to foster buy-in, promote collaboration, and sustain positive improvement.
EEF Effective Implementation: adopt the behaviours that drive effective implementation
Throughout a series of 3 blogs, I intend to share our learning, process, and the impact of using A School’s Guide to Implementation on changing leadership culture and capacity across our organisation, to the benefit of our students.
Blog 1 – Phase 1 – Senior Leaders exploration of strategic implementation and preparing for effective change management
Blog 2 – Phase 2 – Delivery of strategic implementation through Increasing Middle Leader capacity and competence for driving sustainable change
Blog 3 – Phase 3 – Sustaining high-impact implementation through effective collaboration (alongside EEF A School’s Guide to Implementation edition 3, April 2024).
Reflection 1: Implementation is a process, not an event
EEF’S Putting Evidence First: A School’s Guide to Implementation (December 2019)
EEF’s A School’s Guide to Implementation (April 2024)
All editions of the guidance report identify 4 key phases for implementing sustainable change: Explore, Prepare, Deliver, and Sustain. We, like many schools, were initiative rich, with well-intended leaders seeking to solve ‘problems’. However, often these competing initiatives would turn out to be short-term sticking plasters that lacked impact soon to be replaced by, yet another initiative. The guidance emphasises the importance of evidence-informed, priority-driven exploration and preparation ahead of any implementation; something we had not done well.
As a leadership team we reflected on previous low-impact initiatives against the implementation process and recognised that to shift the organisation to a culture of strategic implementation, as leaders we first needed to:
• Develop our leadership pedagogy and practice to improve our strategic competence; • Create a clear approach and model for implementation, promoting a shared language; • Facilitate strategic planning by protecting time and removing operational noise.
Reflection 2: Developing Leadership expertise is a priority
To successfully realise the priorities outlined in the School Development Plan (SDP) we first had to prioritise increasing the capacity of leaders to think and plan strategically. As a fairly new senior leadership team we recognised that committing to our professional development (PD) would build our expertise as individuals, improve our capacity as a team, and motivate us to drive improvement across the school (links to the 3 recommendations of the Guide to Effective Professional Development (2021) (Effective professional development – Summary poster | Education Endowment Foundation).
To ensure we were evidence-informed from the start, we worked with EEF experts who helped us to engage with the EEF guidance. This enabled us to consider the recommendations and challenge our thinking around the evidence we use to inform planning – real evidence, not anecdotes. From this we developed a shared understanding of what strategic planning for implementation was, and how we each could begin to apply it to our area(s) of responsibility.
Complemented by wider leadership reading we used a variety of PD modalities to develop our thinking, gather meaningful evidence, and shape our longer-term strategy. We recognised that this first exploration phase was part of a much larger implementation cycle that had to be right if we were to bring the middle leadership team with us. In my second blog, I will outline how the PD of Middle Leaders was a key part of cascading leadership competence throughout the school.
Reflection 3 – Clarity of approach promotes effective delivery
One significant development central to our prepare phase was the creation of an Implementation Plan (IP) document. Adapting the EEF’s Implementation Template provided gave us a structured model for strategic thinking for implementation. Through a step-by-step approach it encourages evidence-informed consideration of the current issue or concern that is requiring change, followed by what the intended, measurable outcome would be of positive change. Once clarity of the issue and outcome is achieved, actions can then be identified with careful consideration of their evidenced impact and appropriateness for the school’s context. Assessing the school’s readiness to implement change is important at this point and may inform further actions in your plan to become ready. Finally, identifying the individuals and teams you need to develop and deploy to deliver the actions is crucial to facilitating effective implementation. The third edition of the Implementation guidance report emphasises the importance of people and behaviours which when aligned with school processes is an important area of reflection that I will revisit in the next blog.
Reflection 4 – Strategic thinking requires ‘guilt-free’ time
It can be difficult to escape the day-to-day operational noise of a school, especially as a leader. In the beginning it felt uncomfortable to sit and think about how we were going to strategically implement strategic implementation across the school. However, we recognised that for us to successfully drive our desired improvement and shift the school’s culture we needed regular protected time for individual focus and team collaboration. This was our priority, and we stuck to it. We committed to using existing meetings to build, challenge, and refine our overall strategy and latterly our individual IPs, always returning to the evidence. This helped us maintain focus, promoted accountability and ensured a collective brain across the organisation. The ability to prioritise fewer things and do them well facilitated long-term positive change (Prioritise fewer things and do them well to make long-term,… | EEF) and an area that continues to prompt further reflection is how this approach cascaded through the leadership structure, which I’ll explore in more detail in my next blog.
Perhaps the most significant impact has not been a particular strategy or activity, but a shift in the way we think and work. Through engaging with evidence, reflection and collaborative enquiry, we have strengthened leadership decision-making and developed habits that are becoming increasingly embedded in our practice. These changes have begun to shape not only individual approaches, but also the culture of our organisation, supporting more intentional decision-making, stronger collaboration and, ultimately, better outcomes for the young people we serve.
