Research School Network: Why it’s important to engage people in planning How the ​‘engage’ concept from the implementation guidance might inform your approach to planning

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Why it’s important to engage people in planning

How the ​‘engage’ concept from the implementation guidance might inform your approach to planning

by Devon Research School
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Jon Eaton

Director of Kingsbridge Research School

Based at Education South West, Jon works with schools and other improvement partners across Devon to provide guidance, training and support in using evidence-informed practices. Jon has worked particularly around metacognition, literacy and implementation and is a co-author of the EEF’s A School’s guide to Implementation.

Read more aboutJon Eaton

Any good planning document – a school improvement plan, an implementation plan, a Pupil Premium strategy – represents the outcome of often hours of thought, exploration and deliberation. To an outside observer, however, the final document might give the impression that we’ve leapt a tall building in a single bound. We haven’t. We’ve investigated the evidence, made false starts, mined our expertise, probed faulty assumptions. The plan is the culmination of an intensive learning process.

The problem is, if the resulting plan drops fully formed on the plates of teachers, we’ve missed a golden opportunity to engage them in that learning. They won’t share our insights or understand the evidence we’ve drawn on. Worse, they may not even share our values about why this matters in the first place. It couldn’t, for example, be more important to engage people in the way we plan and enact our Pupil Premium strategies.

What do we mean by engage’?

Engage means actively involving people in implementation and focusing on the quality of their interactions. As Mark Miller, Director of Bradford Research School, put it in this blog:

Sometimes we focus on​‘buy-in’, and the idea that we need to persuade people to implement a practice. Or we might engage in a faux​‘consultation process’, where the outcome is predetermined. While consultation and buy-in are not necessarily bad things, they can often be tokenistic. For effective implementation we need to see the value in engaging those at the heart of the implementation process.”

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Why engaging matters


It develops receptivity to a strategy - The opportunity to have a voice in planning – whether that’s contributing an idea, making key decisions or just offering feedback – helps people feel invested in the strategy. As the guidance report states, People, ultimately, value what they feel part of.”

It builds the capacity to deliver the strategy
– By engaging a diverse range of people, for example, teachers, TAs, families and pupils, we avoid blind spots in our thinking and expand the pool of perspectives and ideas we can draw on. In doing so, we distribute knowledge and help build the capacity to support the changes.

It develops clarity
– While we want to include a range of voices in our strategy, it isn’t about group-think. Implementation still needs actively guiding and steering to ensure it remains evidence-informed and focused on pupil needs. Clarity is also developed by engaging people in collaborative processes (e.g. planning, professional development, taking part in implementation teams), which helps people understand how their individual roles contribute to the collective endeavour.

Engaging is the doorway to uniting and reflecting
- It’s hard to see how, or even why, people would unite around a strategy that’s made no attempt to engage them in the first place. Likewise, if people feel their perspectives aren’t heard or valued, they are less likely to share reflections that could drive considerable improvement.

Practical ways to engage people…


  • Find opportunities to engage staff in decision-making e.g. can they help suggest what the evidence might mean in practice? Can they help anticipate potential barriers and enablers to change?
  • Involve people in identifying pupil needs, for example, by forming an implementation team to review data 
  • Involve staff in talking about the evidence so they can see how particular strategies are intended to address needs
  • Arrange social supports so that teachers can discuss problems, share insights, and provide peer support and assistance
  • Communicate how your strategy aligns with and supports existing organisational goals – the more directive’ aspect of engage which helps to keep implementation on track
  • Help people see how their individual roles contribute to enacting the plan

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