Research School Network: Developing a school wide approach to Implementation Jeremy Baker discusses how they have built a collective understanding of implementation amongst the school leaders in his Trust.

Developing a school-wide approach to Implementation

The EEF published ​‘Putting Evidence to Work – A School’s Guide to Implementation’ has become the glue that holds school improvement projects together. There are great ideas everywhere but the Implementation Guidance report teaches us to stop, think, think again and then think again some more before even contemplating putting something into action in your school.

For me, working in a south Birmingham comprehensive school, the Guidance Report has been at the very heart of our school’s improvement journey. Central to this has been developing capacity amongst school leaders to understand the key evaluative concepts of fidelity, acceptability, reach and feasibility. It is through combining our use of evidence with these concepts that we are able to prioritise effectively and work out what is needed to improve our schools.

How have we built a collective understanding of implementation amongst our school leaders?

In the midst of the pandemic in May 2021, we made a decision to run a year long CPD programme for the school’s SLT on the subject of Implementation. This meant taking five one-hour sessions from our traditional weekly meeting slot and planning a training schedule built around the Guidance Report. The aims of the programme were clear:

To explore and understand the implementation process
Develop an understanding of fidelity, reach, acceptability and feasibility
To become a more efficient team

Using key video footage from Jonathan Sharples, we began our journey towards understanding how implementation thinking would make our School Improvement Plan a much clearer and more effective document. The five sessions (figure 1 below) did not just examine the report but looked outside of it to seek challenge also. In the second session, we explored the role of domain specific knowledge in school leadership and how important it is in ensuring good decisions are made. This knowledge allows us ensure we don’t overload plans with abstract buzzwords, instead thinking carefully about how our changes will be understood and acted upon (fidelity) by colleagues.

The course was very successful and through the second half of the course we began to bring middle leaders into the conversation too by ensuring they understand how to evaluate their faculty improvement targets using fidelity, reach, acceptability and feasibility. The success of the course has led to it being taken now to a group of 12 secondary schools in Birmingham working together to improve the educational outcomes for SEND students. We await the outcome of this work but a focus on implementation will lead to improved decision making across the family of schools.

Jez Baker is Associate Vice Principal at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School in Birmingham.

Here is the link to the Implementation Guidance Report- https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/implementation