What Makes or Breaks Change in Schools

Lessons from Sport

If you love cricket and watch it like our family does, the result of England’s ‘Bazball’ approach can be instructive for school leaders: whilst the English cricket team had prepared how they wanted to play, they had not prepared for the conditions in Australia and the competition they’d face: they assumed that their success in another context was completely transferable and needed no adjustment. The Australians knew the conditions, prepared their own game, and prepared to meet the English team where they were.

The result: Australia won the Ashes series convincingly. The lesson: prepare, yes, but prepare appropriately.

In my three decades as an educator, I have watched, been part of, tried to implement, and bemoaned many a school initiative.

What I have learned is that ‘Be Prepared’ is an important mantra for leaders. Leaders will favour different approaches, but what is essential regardless of your style is to understand the big picture and have a clear strategy… and once that is clear – prepare, prepare, prepare.

The factor that makes or breaks school change?

Pre-work: the effort made before any new change effort begins.

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin

Successful change in schools starts long before the professional learning is rolled out, a new program is launched or a timetable is rewritten. “Pre-work” is one of the strongest predictors of whether change will be successful, sustained and make a difference… or quietly disappear.

So, what is effective prework?

How leaders read the context
Build readiness; and
Design the conditions for improvement

Research across education, business and organisational psychology is unequivocal: the conditions that precede a change initiative determine its trajectory more than any other element (Bryk et al., 2010; Fullan, 2002 & 2019; Kim & Mauborgne, 2015; Collins, 2001).

Why Pre-Work Matters

Decades of school-improvement research show that initiatives succeed not because of the intrinsic brilliance of a program (which is obviously important) but because of the conditions around it. A 20-year longitudinal study in Chicago schools (Bryk et.al. 2010) identified “five essentials” – the essential ingredients for successful change. They are:

Leadership
Professional capacity
Parent-community ties
A student-centred learning climate; and
Coherent instructional guidance

Schools strong on these essentials were up to ten times more likely to improve than those that were weak.

Implementation science echoes this: readiness (motivation, general capacity and innovation-specific capacity) predicts long-term success more than program design (Fixsen et al., 2024; Scaccia et al., 2015).

And we can take lessons from other contexts too. Some of the key ideas that shape my approach include:

Simon Sinek’s Start With Why (2011): highlights that effective change begins with clarity of purpose – leaders who articulate a compelling ‘Why’ create the trust necessary for people to follow them into ambiguity.
Jim Collins’ Good to Great (2001): emphasises that sustainable excellence comes from disciplined people, disciplined thinking, and disciplined action – especially the hard diagnostic work he calls “confronting the brutal facts”.
Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy: (2015): focuses on the importance of eliminating unnecessary work, reducing low-value practices, and creating value innovation. The importance of making space for strategic reinvention, not adding more to a saturated system – a mistake many, many schools make.

Now, schools aren’t businesses, and not every lesson from outside education can or should be imported directly. But in my experience, these approaches are instructive for us as educators.

Together these frameworks reinforce key pre-work imperatives:

Know your ‘Why’
Confront your current reality
Stop doing unproductive work
Cull to provide space to create
Align culture and strategy

For school leaders, this means that the most important work needs to happen before the change programs begin. The leadership team must:

Understand the school’s history and culture
Map what has already been tried, as well as people’s experience
Identify what is – and isn’t – currently working and why

Pre-work involves an honest self-assessment, ideally with staff input. Jim Collins encourages great leaders to confront the brutal truth:

“Every good-to-great company faced significant adversity along the way to greatness, of one sort or another. … In every case, the management team responded with a powerful psychological duality. On the one hand, they stoically accepted the brutal facts of reality. On the other hand, they maintained an unwavering faith in the endgame, and a commitment to prevail as a great company despite the brutal facts. We came to call this duality the Stockdale Paradox.”

This paradox emphasises the ability of great leaders to “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. To:

Maintain unwavering faith that you will succeed in the long run.
Stoically accept and address the harsh realities of your current situation without denial or false optimism.

Culture as a Lever, Not a Backdrop

Education research is clear: Professional Development that is active, structured, collaborative, and ongoing, produces the strongest gains (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017).

Change efforts succeed when they work through teacher professionalism, not around it. Hargreaves’ analysis shows that collaborative, inquiry-oriented professional cultures are better able to sustain deep change than those with cultures of privacy or contrived collegiality. So to maximise your chance of success:

Identify existing cultural assets

Teams that already collaborate deeply
Staff with informal influence
Spaces where teachers share practice without fear
Successful exemplars of instructional or wellbeing work

Identify and address cultural inhibitors

Low psychological safety
Cynicism from past reform failure
Faculty silos
Narratives of “we already tried that”
Shallow or performative collaboration or engagement

Blue Ocean Strategy provides a useful framework: To maximise the likelihood of successful change, leaders must create a value proposition for staff that makes engagement attractive, not obligatory. It can take time for some staff to engage with, too – so don’t lose heart if it’s not instant.

While the concept of a ‘value proposition’ might sound like it belongs to business marketing, and not schools, the key point is that making change something staff want to, rather than have to, engage with is vital.

This means designing change so that it builds professional capital including time allocated to collaboration, meaningful autonomy, and opportunities for teachers to lead inquiry, rather than just asking teachers to “do more”. Studies of effective professional learning emphasise that linking this to teachers’ needs, involving active learning and collaboration over time, correlates with stronger changes in classroom practice.

Common Pitfalls When Pre-Work is Weak

The literature on school change repeatedly flags similar failure modes:

Change by announcement: launching a new initiative via email or a single staff meeting, with little prior diagnosis or co-construction.
Program shopping: buying “off-the-shelf” solutions without examining fit with context, culture or capacity.
Overloading the system: layering successive initiatives without culling older ones, leading to superficial implementation and staff burnout.
Ignoring cultural undercurrents: treating resistance as individual negativity rather than a signal about unresolved history, workload, or trust.
Neglecting impact evaluation: moving onto the next change before understanding whether the last one worked and why.

Each of these pitfalls can be mitigated through robust pre-work: rigorous diagnosis, relational trust-building, honest readiness assessment, and deliberate de-implementation of lower-value work.

Putting It Into Action

Practical pre-work questions for leaders

You could use or adapt these prompts in leadership retreats, executive meetings or faculty planning days.

Context and history

What significant changes has this school experienced in the last 5–10 years (curriculum, leadership, assessment, wellbeing, structures)?
Which of those are now “part of how we do things around here”? Which quietly disappeared? Why?
How do staff and students talk about change? As an opportunity? A threat? A fad?

What works well here – and what does that tell us?

In which areas is student learning, engagement or wellbeing strongest?
What do those areas have in common in terms of leadership, collaboration, time, and expectations? (Remember Bryk’s essential supports and instructional leadership practices here.)
How can we protect and amplify those strengths as we introduce new work?

What doesn’t work well here – and how do we know?

Where are we seeing persistent gaps (by stage, subject, cohort, equity group)?
What patterns appear in our quantitative data (achievement, attendance, behaviour) and qualitative data (student voice, parent feedback, staff reflections)?
Which of these problems are genuinely new, and which are longstanding and structural?

Readiness and capacity

What would we need to stop doing to create time and energy for this change?
Which teams or individuals are best positioned to be early adopters or pilots, and why?
What specific knowledge, skills and tools will staff need – and how will we provide them?

There is more detail on some of these questions in the sections below.

Diagnosing Change-Readiness

Readiness ≠ enthusiasm.

Readiness is more than expressed- or real enthusiasm, it is the collective belief that change is needed, the shared commitment to act, and the capacity to do so. It’s often referred to as collective efficacy. Recent work on school readiness for change highlights three intersecting drivers (Scaccia et al., 2015):

Motivation to change

Is there a widely acknowledged problem (e.g., plateauing results, inequitable outcomes, student disengagement)?
Do different groups (teachers, leaders, support staff, students, parents) see the same problem?

General capacity

Time: Is there protected time for collaboration, learning and implementation?
Structures: Are there functioning teams or PLCs that can carry the work?
Culture: Are collaboration and inquiry normal, or are they experienced as compliance tasks?

Innovation-specific capacity

Do we have access to the knowledge and skills required for the specific change (e.g., explicit instruction, inquiry-based learning, restorative practices)?
Are there credible internal or external experts who can coach and model?
Is the necessary infrastructure in place (e.g., assessment systems, digital tools)?

Without this, even excellent strategies are doomed (Fixsen et al., 2024).

Doing an Initiative Inventory: Mapping What Has Been Done

Implementation research emphasises that change should supplement what already works, not displace valued practices that have been hard-won. A structured initiative inventory helps avoid both duplication and erosion of existing strengths. This combines Bryk’s focus on instructional coherence, Collins’ emphasis on disciplined analysis and Kim & Mauborgne’s “Eliminate–Reduce–Raise–Create” logic.

Insights from this inventory:

Conditions: ‘What works well’ tells you what conditions to replicate.
Barriers: ‘What doesn’t work’ tells you which barriers need addressing (time, skill, clarity, culture).
Values: ‘What is repeated across multiple initiatives’ tells you what staff value or fear.

This is how I do it, and something you can replicate:

Create a simple grid:

Column 1: Initiative or program and alignment with corresponding strategy elements
Column 2: Intended problem/goal and the ‘Why’
Column 3: Actual practices introduced (what people really did)
Column 4: Evidence of impact (student learning, engagement, wellbeing, equity)
Column 5: Perceived load/benefit for staff
Column 6: Status (embedded, partial, abandoned)

Use a variety of valid and reliable evidence:

Achievement data, progression measures, attendance and behaviour patterns
Student voice data and surveys
Classroom observations and work samples
Focus groups or interviews with staff and students

This connects directly to the framing questions I asked, above:

What have we tried?

The initiative inventory.

What works well here and what does that tell us?

Identify initiatives with evidence of positive impact and low or manageable load; infer the conditions that made them work (e.g., strong coaching, time allocated, leadership modelling).

What doesn’t work well here and what is the evidence of impact?

Identify initiatives with limited or no impact, or that created collateral damage (e.g., unsustainable workload, narrowed curriculum, worsening inequities).

What is repeated across multiple initiatives?

Identify the variety of staff responses to past initiatives. What do their responses tell you that they fear? What do their responses tell you they value? Are there gaps that are unknown? What are the commonalities?

Bryk’s “essential supports” provide a useful lens: initiatives that worked in successful schools tended to strengthen at least one support (e.g., professional capacity through high-quality PD; coherent instructional guidance through shared assessment practices).

The Pre-Work Checklist

Before you launch your next major change, ask:

Have we made the problem visible and shared?

Staff, students and parents can articulate the case for change in their own words.

Do we understand our history of change here?

We know what has been tried, what is embedded, where there is residual fatigue or pride.

Have we mapped what works well and why?

The change builds on existing strengths and does not inadvertently dismantle effective practices.

Have we honestly assessed readiness?

We have a realistic view of motivation, general capacity and innovation-specific capacity, and a plan to address gaps.

Is the professional culture ready to carry this work?

There are real structures for collaboration, inquiry and feedback, not just rhetoric.

Have we decided what to stop or simplify?

We have deliberately reduced competing demands to create space for deep implementation.

If the answer to several of these is “not yet”, the most valuable strategic move is to invest longer in pre-work, not to push harder on implementation.

Where you are on your journey matters…

How does this differ if you’re new in a role, or have been there a while? Read on…

If you’re new to a role

Entering a school as a new leader in any role is a unique opportunity to read the system without legacy bias. Research on successful principal transitions shows that highly effective leaders begin with listening, sense-making and cultural diagnosis (Day & Leithwood, 2007). That research is about principals, but the principles (pun intended) apply at any level.

Effective leaders do not rush to restructure or rebrand, instead, they begin with learning the story of the school or department and building relational trust. They deliberately assess the unique drivers within the context, gathering information firsthand, second-hand and anonymously to garner a holistic view.

As a new leader, your pre-work includes:

A ‘listening tour’ with clear intent

Sinek’s ‘Why’ and Hargreaves’ ‘emotional geographies’ are great guides to understand environments and the ‘Why’ of organisations. So use:

Structured one-on-one and small-group conversations with staff, students, and parents.
Anonymous views to unlock the views of people who can be silent, but deadly to your strategy.
Focus questions mentioned earlier, such as:
- “What are we proud of here?”
- “What changes in the last five years have worked well? What made them work?”
- “What hasn’t worked, and what did it feel like?”

Hargreaves’ work on the “emotional geographies” of teaching reminds us that teachers’ responses to change are shaped by their histories of trust, respect and previous reforms. Listening carefully to these emotional narratives is part of your evidence base. These narratives are what drive behaviour (Schein, 2010).

History of reform

Take history lessons. We study history to understand the present and influence the future.

Map major initiatives over the last 5–10 years: curriculum projects, assessment changes, wellbeing frameworks, pedagogical pushes.
Note what was sustained, what faded, and where there is residual cynicism or pride.
This helps avoid “initiative fatigue” and acknowledges the effort already invested, which can often be harnessed to kick-start new/improved programs

This mirrors Jim Collins’ practice of “getting the truth on the table” and facing the brutal facts.

Cultural reconnaissance

Remember the phrase: “Culture before structure”. Drawing on Schein’s organisational culture theory, leadership scholars note that the cultural assumptions in a school (about students, learning, work, and each other) amplify or undermine change.

New leaders must decode the hidden assumptions:

How is success defined?
Who holds informal influence?
What is “safe” to talk about here?

Without this, you treat symptoms rather than causes, so:

Observe formal structures (committees, teams) and informal ones (who people go to for advice, who shapes the staffroom narrative).
Identify “cultural carriers” – individuals whose behaviour signals what really counts: relationships, results, tradition, innovation, etc.
Find trustworthy people with deep institutional knowledge and ask open questions.

Baseline trust and psychological safety

Effective change requires people to take risks and admit uncertainty. Studies of learning organisations in education highlight that leaders who create conditions for open discussion of problems and less-successful practices see stronger professional learning cultures. In short: organisations that value vulnerability and truth are more likely to have success.

Look for evidence: Do staff willingly share failures in faculty meetings? Is dissent expressed openly or in corridors? How is dissent communicated?
Your early behaviour – how you respond to bad news, pushback or mistakes – builds or erodes the trust needed for later change.

Being new is a great gift for change. You have been chosen for this role and have a clean slate here, so you have the opportunity to make big inroads with the right preparation. While it is hard to be patient (perhaps I am just projecting!), your patience will pay dividends. That doesn’t mean that you won’t make mistakes along the way, but being new is an incredible opportunity; use it wisely.

If you’ve been here for a while?

Long-serving leaders have advantages: deep contextual knowledge and established relationships. But they also carry the legacy of previous decisions. The pre-work is therefore more about ‘re-contracting’ than discovery. This requires a different type of courage and vulnerability to that of new leaders. Ensconced leaders have a record and need to manage this as they move forward.

Interrogate your own reform history

List major changes you have led or endorsed. For each, ask:

What problem was it meant to solve?
What has changed in practice and in student outcomes?
Who benefitted? Who was burdened?
What did not change?
What were the unintended outcomes (positive or negative)?

Fullan’s work emphasises that change-leaders must be willing to examine their own “theories of action” in the light of real impact, not good intentions. Collins’ “Stockdale Paradox” lays the groundwork for effective mid-term change.

Surface unspoken narratives

When you have been in a school for some time, staff assume they already know you and “what you want” and shape their responses to new initiatives accordingly. Hargreaves describes how veteran staff cultures can become conservative, resigned or gun-shy if prior reforms felt imposed or short-lived.

Hargreaves also asserts that cultures develop “emotional memory” of past change, influencing future uptake. Additionally, your position can make you seem ‘unapproachable’ to some staff and creates an immediate power imbalance, so you will need to unpick the facades. To do this effectively you should:

Use anonymous surveys or external facilitators to gather more candid perspectives on “how change happens here”.
Pay particular attention to:
- Mid-career teachers, who are often gatekeepers of professional culture.
- Powerbrokers, wanting to manage initiatives to embellish a CV or build their own power base.
- Those who are silent: What aren’t they saying?

Signal how and why this change will be different.

Explicitly acknowledge past missteps or initiatives that created overload or failed to produce the intended outcomes.
Explain what you have learned as a leader and how it will shape this next phase (e.g., “We will run fewer initiatives, for longer, and evaluate them more rigorously”, “We will give more time for the program or change to settle and show impact”, “We will use more appropriate measures of success”).

This kind of vulnerable, reflective leadership is associated with stronger trust and greater willingness to engage in new improvement cycles.

So, if you have made a few mistakes that’s okay – we all have. It’s how you own them and move on from here that matters. Learn from the mistakes and embrace these learnings in the next phase.

Preparing for your context is essential for success

Preparation is vital. Preparing for your context is essential to success. Even the most amazing idea fails without preparation and can fail because of over-enthusiastic zeal.

Leading school change is difficult, but even more difficult if the correct groundwork has not been laid. Before planting a new idea, we make sure that it has the best chance to succeed. A good gardener does not just plant a seed – a green thumb takes the time to understand the climate, tests the soil, and prepares the ground. In short, they give the plant the best start possible, and the best chance to flourish.

Pre-work usually isn’t glamorous or exciting. But without it, even your best endeavours might be in vain. Just remember the 5 Ps: “Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance” – James Baker.