Perspectives

Why Improvement Fragments On Its Way Through a School

By Nik Bishop · Synnovate

An initiative is agreed. It's clear in the room where it's agreed, and the people in that room could all describe it the same way afterwards.

Six weeks later it's running in four departments, and it's running slightly differently in each.

Nobody has ignored it. Nobody has misunderstood it, exactly. What's happened is that four groups of professionals each took a reasonable decision about what it meant in their context, and those decisions were not the same decision.

Every layer translates, and translation is the job

An initiative described at whole-school level cannot be applied without interpretation. It arrives as a principle, and a principle has to be converted into something a Tuesday can hold: a change to a routine, a different way of running an existing meeting, a new expectation about what gets recorded.

That conversion is skilled work, and the people doing it are the right people to do it. A head of department who applied a whole-school principle without adapting it to their subject would be doing the job badly.

So the fragmentation isn't a failure of the layers. It's the predictable result of asking each layer to do exactly what it should be doing, without giving any of them a way to see what the others decided.

What accumulates is coherence, locally

This is the part that makes it hard to correct. Each version is internally coherent. Ask any department to explain what they're doing and why, and the answer will be sensible and connected to the original intention.

There's no obviously wrong version to point at. There's just no single version, and no vantage point from which anyone can see that.

Leadership usually discovers it late, and usually by accident: two people describe the same initiative in a corridor and notice they're describing different things. By then all four versions have been running long enough to have their own history and their own defenders.

Documents don't hold it. Routines do.

The instinct at this point is to write something clearer. A more precise policy, a better one-page summary, a diagram.

It rarely works, because the fragmentation didn't come from ambiguity in the document. It came from the absence of any occasion on which the versions met. A clearer document still gets interpreted four times, in four rooms, without those interpretations ever being compared.

What holds an initiative together is a routine that repeatedly brings the versions into contact. That can be small. A standing item where two departments describe how they're actually running it. A record of what was adapted and why, kept somewhere the next person will find it. The point isn't the format. It's that comparison happens on purpose rather than by accident in a corridor.

Schools rarely lose an improvement initiative. They produce several of it, each defensible, and then discover much later that the thing they've been reporting on wasn't one thing.

The version that survives is the one that got practised, not the one that got circulated.