Finding A Way Through The School Improvement Labyrinth
This introduction to the Knowledge Bank on School Improvement traces its development over decades of theories and models, outlines approaches that have been particularly influential, and provides insights into current thinking and practice. Throughout this overview of a somewhat labyrinthine journey what emerges is an emphasis on bottom-up approaches within the culture of the school. Ultimately, school improvement takes place on a teacher-by-teacher and classroom by-classroom basis, facilitated by effective leadership.
Perhaps the long and evolving account of the school improvement story is helpfully exemplified through the career and contribution of David Hargreaves. In the 1980s, as Chair of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Committee on the under-achievement of working-class students, he produced the report entitled Improving Secondary Schools (1984).[1] Then as Chief Inspector of ILEA he set about implementing the report in practice within London schools. Later, when ILEA was abolished, as Professor of Education at Cambridge University, Hargreaves worked with David Hopkins to pioneer the concept of School Development Planning as a key School improvement tool.[2]
Through the 1990s a number of people, such as Louise Stoll, were beginning to look at how the concepts of school effectiveness and school improvement might be linked in order to raise standards.[3] Thus, Hargreaves developed a new theory of school effectiveness and improvement based on “the master concepts of intellectual capital, social capital and leverage.” He applied this theory of the need to build upon capital and “know how” to three specific areas: school effectiveness and improvement in knowledge economies, citizenship education and teacher effectiveness.[4]
In the early 2000s Hargreaves joined Secretary of State David Blunkett’s Standards Taskforce and became Associate Director of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in 2002. This led to two important developments in the school improvement journey. The first was the work of Hargreaves and others on the concept of personalised learning as an important element in school improvement; development of this can be seen in the later Kunskapsskolan movement (see Professional Development Today 22.2).
The second major development was a seismic shift of focus to see school improvement as a collaborative endeavour between schools. During his time at the National College for School Leadership, Hargreaves heralded the need to move beyond the notion of an individual self-improving school to a bolder vision of how through collaborative partnerships between schools the whole system of schooling could be catalysed and become self-improving. He thus produced a series of think pieces which have become highly influential on subsequent school improvement policy and practice:
- Creating a Self-Improving School System (2010);
- Leading a Self-Improving School System (2011); and
- A Self-Improving School System: Towards Maturity (2012).[5]
There are other leading educationalists who have also help steer the course of this school improvement odyssey. Amongst these has been David Hopkins. As well as his collaboration with Hargreaves on the concept of School Development Planning which powerfully influenced Government policy in the 1990s, he also developed in the following years the Improving the Quality of Education for All initiative entitled School Improvement and Cultural Change, in which the five IQEA principles continue to resonate today.
In recent times Hopkins has proposed A Powerful Learning Framework as a means for driving school improvement. Here, instead of taking the traditional approach of improvement policies being forged outside the school and then rolled out and implemented, the framework “begins at the other end of the sequence, with student learning” and supports an “inside-out” way of working. (See separate knowledge bank on Hopkins’ work.[6])
This signalled a fundamental feature of effective school improvement widely emphasised by other leading educationalists – the importance of school improvement being grown and situated at school level rather than imposed from on high. Hopkins has built on this thinking in his latest initiative: Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement[7] which sets out an eight-step strategy:
- Clarify Moral Purpose
- Focus on Classroom Practice
- Decide on the Non-negotiables
- Articulate the Narrative
- Utilise Instructional Rounds & Theories of Action
- Embrace Peer Coaching and Triads
- Practice Instructional Leadership
- Exploit Networking
Within this context of bottom-up development driving school improvement has been the fundamental emphasis on the crucial role of teachers and their development. There is a powerful consensus that the quality of teaching has a direct impact on student learning. The New Zealand educationalist, John Hattie, found in his meta-analysis of over 800 research studies on how different teacher practices influence student learning, that “enhancing the quality of teaching practice will have the most immediate and sustained impact on student performance”.[8]
Another factor emerging from the current consensus about school improvement is the its collaborative dimension. This has become particularly prescient in an era of Multi-Academy Trusts and federated schools development. In research commissioned by the DfE on How do MATs and federations improve schools, Toby Greany[9] found that sustainable improvement at scale was linked to five strategic areas:
- Vision, values, strategy and culture;
- People, learning and capacity;
- Assessment, curriculum and pedagogy;
- Quality assurance and accountability and
- A suitable learning organisation.
These in turn were dependant on action related to five school improvement fundamentals:
- Establish sufficient capacity;
- Analysis of needs;
- Deploy and support leadership;
- Access effective practice and expertise and
- Monitor improvement outcomes.
The contribution of leadership, listed here, is also stressed in all current school improvement narratives. Many have followed in the train of the report of Chris Day and colleagues which concluded that school leadership has a clear and direct impact on student outcomes.[10]
Much of the understanding and messages that have been gleaned from these decades of work upon school improvement are brought together in the recent School Improvement Commission report, Improving Schools.[11] In the preface to the report Sir Tim Brighouse states:
If the teacher makes the weather, the school creates the climate. School improvement is how schools create an ever-better climate for the individual and groups of teachers to do their job in the most favourable circumstances.
As with other commentators over the years it highlights the limited value and effectiveness of top-down accountability measures in securing school improvement:
High stakes accountability is a powerful tool for driving compliance to minimum standards but a poor one for creating excellence within a system.
It decries that fact that schools often concentrate energies on being “Ofsted-ready” rather than teaching and learning. Instead, it says:
Headteachers need the confidence to reassert their role as leaders of learning, ensuring positive cultures exist within schools and, critically, have the courage of their conviction when confronted with pressures for quick wins or faced with shifting goalposts.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary society perpetuates the view that there is a great difference in performance between schools. In fact, much of the evidence is that despite the preoccupation with perceived differences between schools, far more significant is the variation of performance within a school. So, school improvement efforts are much better deployed within schools in through sustained, owned and rigorous approaches. This again is echoed in the Commission report:
Sustainable school improvement takes time, delivered more often through small incremental changes at the classroom level than through ‘big-ticket’ structural changes.
The report gives a comprehensive guide to how this might best be pursued under the sections:
- Ensuring teachers thrive;
- Empowering and developing leaders;
- Collaboration and collective responsibility;
- External support and
- Equity and excellence.
The following declaration that the report makes provides a helpful and powerful conclusion to all that has been learnt about what works in school improvement over the decades:
School improvement is not about a top-down, one-size-fits-all process. The commission believes that redefining school improvement away from short-term fixes and a search for magic bullets is important. We believe that a greater understanding of the research, combined with teachers’ professional knowledge of what works in their particular context, is critical to success.
Resources in this Knowledge Bank
This Knowledge Bank provides a range of resources from within the TeachingTimes archive and elsewhere to help you explore and navigate the School Improvement labyrinth. These include authoritative think pieces by the key policy makers mentioned above together with articles on crucial aspects of facilitating bottom-up school improvement process, such as the promoting of peer review. The Knowledge bank also contains HOW TO contributions which provide guidance to school practitioners and leaders on school improvement approaches and strategies.
The Knowledge Bank includes:
- Each of David Hargreaves’ think pieces on creating, leading and bringing towards maturity the self-improving school system.
- HOW TO … develop within a self-improving system by Graham Handscomb gives a short overview introduction to Hargreaves; self-improving school system.
- Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement by David Hopkins which provides a School Improvement pathway for both schools and Multi-Academy Trusts. Also the TeachingTimes archive contains a three-part article series by David Hopkins on his Professional Learning Framework approach to school improvement.
- Toby Greany’s Sustainable improvement in multi-school groups describes in detail the research project which sets out the strategies that MATs can use to bring about school improvement.
- HOW TO … bring about effective improvement by Graham Handscomb. This explores how to bring about personal and organisational change through the respective approaches of the school improvement and school effectiveness movements.
- School Improvement is Everybody’s Business by Judy Durrant, which sets out how to use research to extend professionalism, increase participation and enrich development.
- Similarly Achieving Evidenced Informed School Improvement by Chris Brown, provides a checklist for securing school improvement through research practice.
- Professional Development is School Improvement by Graham Handscomb explores how school improvement is built on professional development of teachers and leaders.
- The Impact of School Leadership on Pupil Outcomes by Chris Day and colleagues. This account of a major research initiative shows how headteachers and other school leaders help drive school improvement and the fundamental influence leadership has on pupil outcomes.
- HOW TO … perceive change leadership as a journey by Graham Handscomb explains how the improvement process is one undertaken over time and provides a range of practical strategies and professional development tasks. This contribution includes video links to Andy Hargreaves’ System Thinking and Principles of the Fourth Way.
- School Peer Review Beats High Stakes External Inspection by Graham Handscomb this blog argues how schools can take ownership and powerful control of the school improvement process through peer review.
Graham Handscomb. October 2023.
References and weblink resources
- Hargreaves, D.H. (1984) Improving Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee on the Curriculum and Organization of Secondary Schools. London, ILEA
- Hargreaves, D.H. and Hopkins, D. (1991) The Empowered School: The Management and Practice of Development Planning. London, Cassell.
- [Stoll, L (1992) Linking School Effectiveness and School Improvement in a Canadian School District. PhD Thesis. Institute of Education. University of London.
- Hargreaves, D.H. (2001) A Capital Theory of School Effectiveness and Improvement British Educational Research Journal Vol 28 No 4 2001
- Hargreaves, D.H. (2010) Creating a Self-Improving School System National College. creating-a-self-improving-school-system.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
- Handscomb, G. (2021) David Hopkins’ Approach to School Improvement and System Leadership. Teaching Times. David Hopkins’ Approach To School Improvement and System Leadership – TeachingTimes
- Hopkins, D. (2020) Unleashing Greatness – A Strategy for School Improvement. AEL 42 Issue 3 Lead Article; Unleashing Greatness.pdf (profdavidhopkins.com)
- Hattie, J. (2008) Visible Learning. Routledge.
- Greany, T. (2018) Sustainable improvement in multi-school groups Research report UCL Institute of Education/University of Nottingham. Department for Education.
- Day, C; Sammons, P; Hopkins, C; Harris, A; Leithwood K; Gu, Q; Brown, E.; Ahtaridou, E and Kington, A. (2009) The Impact of School Leadership on Pupil Outcomes Final Report. University of Nottingham; Institute of Education, University of London; and University of Toronto. DCSF.
- NAHT (2020) Improving Schools. A report for the School Improvement Commission. NAHT. NAHT Improving schools final.pdf
- Hargreaves, D.H. (2011) Leading a Self-Improving School System. National College. leading-a-self-improving-school-system.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
- Hargreaves, D.H.(2012) A Self-Improving School System: Towards Maturity. National College. a-self-improving-school-system-towards-maturity.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)