Research School Network: Engage and unite: moving beyond buy-in With the launch of the EEF School’s Guide to Implementation, Phil Stock considers how to involve staff in school decision-making

‘People, ultimately, value what they feel part of’

The above line from the new EEF’s A School’s Guide to Implementation expresses what I think is the fundamental difference between this report and the previous one, and it encapsulates what for me is the most important aspect of understanding effective school improvement: people.

While the previous implementation guidance recognised the importance of the school leadership environment and the climate for change within it, this latest report goes even further in stressing the social dimension to implementation and therefore improvement.

In this post I want to unpick the social process of school improvement in a bit more detail. I’d like to suggest that what the new guidance report offers most is a much more nuanced understanding of what it means to involve staff in school decision-making – one that moves beyond more simplistic notions of gaining ​‘buy-in’.

What’s changed

Before looking at what it might mean to involve people more in the implementation process, it is worth outlining the main changes to the latest report and how the new guidance is organised.

The six previous recommendations have now become three:

1. Adopt the behaviours that drive effective implementation
2. Attend to the contextual factors that influence implementation
3. Use a structured, but flexible, implementation process.

The familiar implementation cycle of explore, prepare, deliver and sustain (each previously represented by its own recommendation) now sits within one overarching recommendation: use a structured, but flexible, implementation process.

I think this rightly retains the importance of process in change, but sets it alongside the other elements of context and behaviour.

As the new guidance points out, these three elements ​‘work together’ but the ​‘behaviours and contextual factors underpin effective implementation.’

Context matters – but people matter more

While every school has its own contextual factors to attend to, and is at a different stage of its development, all schools can benefit from a collaborative approach to development, particularly in terms of sustaining long-term changes to culture or practice. It’s people (the teachers, the support staff and the pupils) that ultimately make the biggest difference.

If implementation is collaborative and social in nature ​‘driven by how people think, behave, and interact’, the challenge is then how to meaningfully engage staff in the implementation process.

But what does such collaboration actually look like? How do leaders practically and purposefully involve teaching and non-teaching staff in school development?

Some of the answers to these questions can be found in the guidance that supports the first recommendation around adopting the behaviours that drive effective implementation.

The recommendation is broken down into three core behaviours that leaders should consider when leading change:

Engage, unite and reflect

Engage, unite and reflect are familiar terms that might sound like they mean the same thing. In the context of effective implementation, however, they mean something very specific to the process of cultivating and maintaining the staff behaviours necessary to drive change.

I’d like to focus on the first of these behaviours, engage, as this seems to me to be most fundamental to the success of any implementation activity, as well as to the wider culture of collaboration and trust within a school.

The guidance around what it means to ​‘engage people’ draws attention to the ​‘ways in which people are involved’ and the ​‘quality of their interactions’. I think this distinction is helpful as it flags up the importance of a certain kind of engagement: one that is active, genuine and valued. This is not so much ​‘buying-in’ as ​‘being-in.’

I’ve always been bothered by the term ​‘buy-in’. It’s often bandied around by us leaders (including by me, I’m sure) and is usually intended to be seen as something positive and virtuous: that we, the leader, recognise that it would be much better for staff to agree and like our proposed changes.

The problem is that ​‘buy-in’ is not really collaborative – it simply involves ​‘buying-in’ to some kind of predetermined set of actions that someone else has taken, and that usually have an impact on everyone else. It’s consensual at best; underhanded at worst.

Engaging staff in implementation

Whilst considering ​‘buy-in’ is obviously better than not considering it, it would be better still to ​‘engage’ staff in implementation. The operative word used in the report is ​‘shape’. If staff genuinely feel like they have the ability to shape the school’s approach to its development, they will be much more likely to invest in ensuring and sustaining its success.

Vivian Robinson offers a helpful model that illustrates this point. She distinguishes between two different approaches to implementation – persuasive and dialogic. A persuasive approach involves the leader advancing her own agenda without engaging with the teachers’ values and beliefs. This is what I tend to associate with the ​‘buy-in’ mentality.

In contrast, an engaging approach takes into account teachers’ alternative theories of action and involves decisions being taken collaboratively.

It seems to me that actively involving staff in all aspects of the decision-making process so that they are helping to ​‘shape’’ its direction is much more likely to be impactful.

This is not just about improvement, but culture and climate too. A school that values its staff and involves them in its decision-making, is likely to get good results and be a great place to work.