Keep going: routes to sustainable improvement and finding your why

Key takeaways

• Be adaptable: there’s no one-size fits all approach to school improvement. Consider what’s needed for your context. 
• Be consistent: consistency in schools is about a shared understanding and approach, rather than making everything identical. Consistency creates valuable continuity for students while allowing staff to express their unique styles. 
• Be people-centred: evaluate with honesty, plan with empathy, execute with confidence and review with humility. Emotional intelligence is key in driving change.
• Be a coach: your most important role is helping others improve, whether it's headteachers, senior leaders, or teachers. Coaching and CPD are vital in building strong, effective teams.
• Think marginal gains, not silver bullets: there are no quick fixes. Focus on small, incremental improvements to create lasting, sustainable change. 

Listen to the recording (33 minutes) or read an edited version below. 

Paul K Ainsworth is Education Director at Infinity Academies Trust.

A school improvement journey

My approach to school improvement has changed over time. If I go back to early on in my career, I went into a secondary school as Head of Maths, to a department which was one of the least performing areas of the school. I’d look at the English exam results, and they were 20% higher than the maths! So – what do I need to do here? How do I improve this department? 

Ok, I need to try and create a way of working that means everybody knows what they’re doing. Get some really consistent schemes of work. Make sure the school behaviour policy is used really clearly. All things that are now very commonplace, in terms of having those really clear medium term plans. 

At that time I was quite prescriptive – let’s get the mechanisms of the way that we work in place, and teachers will teach. But then I became a headteacher of a secondary school, working with a much bigger group of colleagues, and gained an understanding that people in the maths department will do something different from the science department, who will do something different from the PE department. 

I then moved into an executive role with a large multi-academy trust. It was working with a high proportion of sponsored schools. These were schools that often were in areas of high economic deprivation and had been struggling for a long time. Change was needed very quickly – maybe they had two inadequate judgments already, and you're under pressure to improve things. That required a different approach. 

I’m at a point now where I’m clearer on the way that I believe we improve schools best, and I can hone how I do things. Though it's a polarising topic. Not everybody believes in doing things in the same way. There are different viewpoints out there!

Being consistent

At the moment, I work with 13 primary schools. They’re looking for me to be consistent in the way I behave. Everyone knows how hard it is when the leader walks in, and you just don't know how they're going to be that day. I think that’s the first element of consistency: how we manage our emotions, how we manage our challenges, how we manage our praise. 

I think consistency is different from standardisation. In terms of school improvement, I think consistency is a group of people reaching a collective agreement on what they're trying to achieve. Consistency isn’t being identical, it’s that golden thread that runs throughout, so that you know you're in the same school. 

I've visited schools in the past, and I've walked from classroom to classroom, and each one could have been a completely different school. Equally, I've been in schools where every classroom looks absolutely identical, like it's just come out of a factory, and I feel a little bit uncomfortable in that environment as well. 

To me, consistency is agreeing the way you want to do things, and seeing that relationship as you walk around from classroom to classroom, department to department or phase to phase. It allows people to show their passions and enthusiasm, their personality. 

I think it's really tough for children if they go from one classroom to the next in a secondary school, and it's completely different. They don't know where to look in the classroom for support. They don't know how exercise books are set up. They don't know how the lesson is structured, and the behaviour systems might be different. That's incredibly hard for children.

Equally in a primary school, when children spend that whole year with one teacher, and then they move to a different classroom, you don't want that to feel like they're changing schools. 

You want them to build on what you've done before, and that's where I think that consistency is so important in enabling children to perform and achieve, and even more so for those children that find learning difficult. Consistency helps them feel secure in what’s happening. 

I’ve written two books recently: No Silver Bullets, day in day out school improvement, and No Silver Bullets 2.0, the heart and soul of school improvement. I wrote them the wrong way round! Number 2 is the one that you should read first; that’s where I explain how I feel about school improvement, and work through that process of what school improvement looks like.

Start with the why

I think of school improvement in three buckets, based on Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. You start with the why. 

Why are you trying to do what you do? What is it that gets you up in the morning? What is it that drives you? 

It could be that you went to a school that wasn't great, and you're desperate that other children don't have that experience. It could be that you've been a teacher in a really tough school, and you want teachers to have a better experience than you. It might be that you had a difficult leader in the past, and you don't want colleagues to go through that experience.

Then, what’s the why of the organisation? What's the mission statement? What's the vision? What are the values? And that needs to be the start of the school improvement process. 

If your personal why doesn’t match with the organisation’s why, you're just going to be fighting against each other. So, being really clear on that, is the start of the school improvement journey, and sharing that with staff as well. Why are we doing what we’re doing? 

For me, it’s about wanting children in my area – where education performance is not really high – to not be disadvantaged against children nationally. That means we have to raise attainment, because it isn't high enough at the moment. 

Also, I work in a part of the country where there's never going to be lots of teachers. We have to develop the teachers we've got, work with them and keep them. That means that maybe I do school improvement differently to how some other colleagues will. 

A people-centred ‘how’

The next bucket or step is – how are you going to do it? Maybe it's because I come from a mathematics background, but I believe in structures and processes. I want something that's really clear, so colleagues know how the school improvement cycle works.

In the past, the school improvement cycle was typically an annual thing. You'd write a School Development Plan at the start of the year. That would be cascaded down to subject leaders who would write their department development plan or in a primary school, their phase development plan, and you'd work through that. Then you'd wait for your external results, find how you’ve done, and start the process again in September. 

I think you’ve got to chunk that down. How about termly achievements? Or break it up into data cycles? In a secondary school, for example, you might base it around your Year 11 and Year 10 mock examinations, and then your final exams in the summer. 

I believe that school improvement is a really emotional thing. I work on a four-part plan whenever I’m doing school improvement. My non-emotional words are:

• Evaluate
• Plan
• Execute
• Review

But I put people-centred words alongside that:

• We evaluate with honesty
• We plan with empathy
• We execute with confidence
• We review with humility

So at the start of the process, we’re really truthful to ourselves and colleagues about how we're performing. 

Next we plan with empathy. Sometimes people will take a plan from one school and just put it into the next school. But then you haven’t got the empathetic view of where the school is, where the children and staff are at, where the community is. That helps you gauge the pace of improvement better. 

Then, execute with confidence. A really important part of our leadership is giving our leaders and teachers the confidence to deliver, because otherwise they're constantly second guessing. Am I doing it well? Is it any good? 

Sir Alex Ferguson, when he was manager of Manchester United, used to say to the team: ‘Go out and enjoy yourself’. And I think that’s important. Go to your classroom and enjoy what you're doing. Enjoy working with those children. Listen to those funny comments, have those smiles. Do the job well, do it confidently, and everyone will gain out of that.

Lastly, review with humility. We're not always as humble as we should be, and I think humility is a superpower. Take the honest view. I didn't get it right, what can I do next time? Rather than: I didn’t get it right, is it someone else’s fault? 

That’s my ‘how’ of school improvement, which I talk about in my second book. I think if we get those things right, we really have a school that is a self-improving school, a sustainably improving school, rather than the bang and bust that we sometimes see.

Doing the ‘what’ with marginal gains

So the third step is the ‘what’. What do you do? What’s your approach? 

So many people are looking for the silver bullets. What's the magic thing that I can implement in my school that's going to transform things? 

But there aren’t any silver bullets. They do not exist. 

There are great curriculum tools which, with good CPD, can have amazing results. But actually, one curriculum tool is probably no more effective than another. I work in primary at the moment, and the debate over which is the best phonics scheme will go on forever and a day. And there isn't a best phonics scheme. It's about how you use it. 

What I do believe in, is the aggregation of marginal gains. Find little things, and keep making them a little bit better. What's the one thing that I can do this week that's going to make a difference? 

Say for example, we're really working on behaviour at the moment. So as a senior leader, what's the little thing that I can do to make a difference? Ok, I know a certain year group is challenging at the moment, so I’m going to make sure that I'm around at change-over time, to just calm things down. It's a little action. It's not going to set the world on fire, but those little actions add up to make things happen.

One of the difficulties with the marginal gains approach is when people try to do too many at once. I’ve heard it memorably described as the spaghetti approach. I'm going to pick up a pan of spaghetti. I'm going to throw it on the wall. I'm going to see how many pieces stick.

Well, that's not sustainable in school improvement. So find the two or three tasks that you're going to work on as a school, this week. And then what's going to be the next? 

In my first book, I came up with 108 strategies that I'd seen used successfully in different schools. I'm not saying they are the magic answer. I'm saying, here's 108 things that people have used. Don't throw them against the wall like spaghetti, but try and pick out two or three of them, work on them, work on them with your colleagues, discuss them with your colleagues. Then, once you've done them, go on to some more. 

Alongside all of that, it's about helping colleagues get more effective, with coaching and CPD. 

There's a CEO that I know, and he says the most important thing he can do in his job is to help his executive leaders get better. So if we keep transforming that down, what's the most important thing a headteacher can do? Well, depending on the size of school, it’s to help their senior leaders get better, or help their teachers get better. 

And in my opinion, the best way of doing that is by coaching, along with good CPD. So people know, to use the phrase, ‘what a good one looks like’. And to me that's the most important part of CPD. What does good look like? Not what excellence looks like, or what one person can do one day in the whole year, but what does good look like? 

Then we can talk to people and use the aggregation of marginal gains of individual colleagues – those atomic habits that James Clear talks about in his book. 

Find your own way

For anyone setting out in a school leadership role, I would say – it's not easy. I think you have to find your own way. We all have our own style. 

In education we have a terrible habit of focusing on the things we're not good at, but instead, focus on the things that you are good at. If you're lucky enough to be part of a team, build a team whose strengths complement each other. Try and work with people with different views and diverse ways of thinking. 

Talk to people, go out and find out about different ways of doing things. Try things out. Look at how other people work, and see what little golden nuggets you can take from them, not to replicate or copy, but to add to your armoury and range of skills as a school improvement leader.

Lastly, find trusted people that you can talk to and reflect with, whether that’s people at home, friends, or fellow educators. People who can say, ‘you’re doing a good job, keep going’. Or maybe you need to stop, have a rethink. People who will give you honest opinions. Sometimes you have to change and look at doing things in a different way.

Recommended reads for school leaders

James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

Simon Sinek, Start With Why

Liz Wiseman, Multipliers

Paul says: ‘I read this in about 2009. It's not a very well known book. It's very simple to read. It's very American, but I still think it's the best education leadership book I've ever read, or even the best leadership book. I read it once, and then I started reading the book again. It is completely scribbled on!’

From Paul’s blog: 

• Be a multiplier
• Multipliers: Be a Challenger, a Debate Maker and an Investor

Paul’s books (he recommends reading 2.0 first!)

Paul K Ainsworth, No Silver Bullets, day in day out school improvement

Paul K Ainsworth, No Silver Bullets 2.0, the heart and soul of school improvement. 

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