: What are the ingredients needed to bring about effective, sustainable change in school? Claire Savory, CEO of a multi-academy Trust of 11 primary schools, shares her guidance on effective change management.

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What are the ingredients needed to bring about effective, sustainable change in school?

Claire Savory, CEO of a multi-academy Trust of 11 primary schools, shares her guidance on effective change management.

by Gloucestershire Research School at the Gloucestershire Learning Alliance
on the

Claire Savory

Claire Savory

Claire is the CEO at The GLA Trust, a multi-academy Trust of 11 primary schools. Prior to this role she was the Director of Academies leading on School Improvement and new Free School Projects. Claire has been an Executive Head teacher across 3 primary schools and was the Head teacher at one the GLA’s founding schools. Under Claire’s leadership, the school achieved an outstanding’ OFSTED judgement in 3 consecutive inspections. She has also been National Leader of Education for 12 years providing system leadership in failing schools.

Read more aboutClaire Savory

Easy! Just have a great idea that will make a big difference for children (hopefully) and get all the staff to buy in to this because you are a credible school leader and people ultimately want to be led. Oh, and if they struggle to do this, it’s probably because the culture is wrong,’ said Claire Savory, the new-to-role, naïve, optimistic leader….

Change initiatives: here to stay?


Referenced by Forbes, 70% of change initiatives in business fail. I have often wondered whether this figure might be better or worse in schools. In doing so, I have reflected on initiatives that I have seen come and go: Accelerated Learning, VARK learning styles, Brain Gym, the literacy hour, Shanghai maths methodology, and even wearing slippers as an initiative to improve behaviour (disclaimer – I did not advocate this one!).

My journey through a changing landscape


My leadership journey began when the local authority deployed me, along with two other successful headteachers, to turn around an inadequate school. This innovative approach mirrored the principles of a strong MAT and was an early example of alternative leadership models for change. We encountered butterflies on walls, inspired by the London Challenge initiative, symbolising how small acts can catalyse large-scale change. While well-intentioned, these symbols felt disconnected from the practical realities of school improvement.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

Attributed to Peter Drucker

I learnt very quickly that whilst culture absolutely does eat strategy for breakfast, we also need a suite of clear policies, systems and practices to keep everyone safe and to enable effective accountability. Without doing so, implementing change and transformational school improvement can be a messy business!

More recently, I came across a book, unleashed’ written by Frei and Morriss (2020) – not the memoirs of Boris Johnson! I enjoyed their take on culture eating strategy for breakfast’. My reflection being that the debated competition of culture vs. strategy’ is not a fair fight because in practice, strategy is rarely communicated well enough to influence employees.

Whether we like it or not, culture gets to flamboyantly declare its intentions with a constant flow of informal signals and behavioural cues, Meanwhile, strategy often gets stuck inside the minds of a few top lieutenants or buried inside a strategic plan that gets revisited once a year.

Frei and Morriss, 2020

This extract prompting me recall the number of SDPs and action plans I have created in the last 30 years and how much impact these really had in terms of improving outcomes for children: a 30% success rate? 20%? A number difficult to provide when considering longevity as a determiner of success, but nevertheless an interesting reflection.

Cue to the EEF release: A School’s Guide to Implementation’

Implementation
Sharples, Eaton, Boughelaf, J. 2024

The latest iteration is our very best bet as leaders to implement sustainable change. This new guidance report secures the important relational, cultural stuff’, and is underpinned by a systematic approach to implementation.

The process is designed to support you to do implementation, while the behaviours and contextual factors help you to do it well

EEF, 2024

I once streamlined our school improvement plan to focus solely on writing, increasing opportunities and making it central to lessons, with extensive CPD. It was safe to say that I felt pretty chuffed that we had stripped back our many priorities. Despite our efforts, writing outcomes didn’t improve because we skipped the crucial explore’ phase. Once we did that, we identified the real issue: teachers lacked confidence and clarity on effective strategies to teach spelling, which did not feature on the action plan! Lesson learned!

For me, adopting explore’ as a critical phase in our school improvement processes has been a game-changer. It creates opportunities for engagement activities to unpick the problem; use research; trial proposed changes; and build capacity to support implementation. Most importantly, it builds trust. Trust in leaders that changes – and subsequent demands on time – have been well considered (unlike my improving writing action plan!)


Top tips

  • Explore well – it builds culture and your team to support implementation.
  • In doing implementation well, we should all think about doing less – a lot less! – and doing it really well. Resist the urge to load up your improvement plans with multiple competing priorities.
  • Pace yourself! Exploration takes time, but it is time really well spent that saves on time later on

Finally, remember implementation is fundamentally a collaborative and social process driven by how people think, behave and interact.


References


Education Endowment Foundation (2024). A School’s Guide to Implementation. [online] EEF. Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/implementation.

Frei, F. and Morriss, A. (2020). Unleashed: the unapologetic leader’s guide to empowering everyone around you. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press.

Sharples, J., Eaton, J., Boughelaf, J. (2024) A Schools Guide to Implementation. Education Endowment Foundation: London

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