Each September seems to bring some new vocabulary or other that inserts itself into Inset days, staffrooms and performance management meetings almost overnight. This year, that word is “fidelity” - a slightly less clumsy formulation of “faithfulness”.

Suddenly, a word that was mostly reserved for marriage gossip or geeking about stereo systems is now earnestly deployed to evaluate the implementation of phonics programmes and, increasingly, pretty much everything else that goes on in schools. Following the curriculum plan, the pedagogical script, the questioning approach, the behaviour policy - fidelity to all these and more is increasingly seen as the ethical approach to teaching if we are to ensure that every child can thrive, no matter their background.

Not everyone is happy about it. And it is worth looking at why. Because while we may think fidelity is the post-pandemic fix that education needs, we need to be more rigorous in asking, at what cost?

It started with phonics

The rise of “fidelity” followed two influential publications in the summer of 2023.

First, it appeared as a primary aim in the Department for Education’s reading framework guidance and then, shortly after, as a key principle in a blog written by Ofsted’s national director of education, which was also focused on early reading.

The purported issue was quite specific, relating to phonics schemes and how teachers were deviating from the programmes.

Since the grapheme-phoneme correspondences within these government-validated schemes are carefully sequenced, it was argued that messing with them would undermine their integrity. This, in turn, would almost certainly lead to gaps in pupil knowledge and inconsistency in pupil attainment.

The introduction of the phonics screening check seemed to lend support to the case for fidelity to the phonics scheme. More and more schools - many serving disadvantaged communities - were managing to get in excess of 90 per cent of kids hitting the “pass” mark, and one of the things these schools had in common was their strict adherence to their chosen scheme, sometimes implemented with scripts and rehearsal.

I’ve visited many of these schools, and it’s often possible to listen to a teacher begin a sentence with one phonics group and then hear that sentence being finished by a teacher with a group next door.

Quickly, maverick teaching of phonics became seen as the death sentence for reading.

But some battled on off-script regardless. A charitable interpretation would be that those teachers know their children best and are simply responding to their specific contexts. The scheme might say that the kids should be ready to move on to the next digraph on Wednesday, but only the teacher in the classroom can really make that judgement. Context is king and education is much too messy to be outsourced to a pre-formulated recipe.

However, some have suggested that it isn’t so much to do with the children, it’s more about teachers just getting a bit, well, bored. Many teachers got into the profession because it allowed for spontaneity, creativity and variation. So these teachers rolled their eyes at demands for “fidelity” and started to mix things up, keeping the job stimulating for the adults at the expense of the predictable, systematic approach that maximised success for children.

This could have remained a relatively contained debate within phonics teaching. But it didn’t.

The moment of recognition

The battle lines of key stage one soon became the battle lines of the entire profession, as the drive for fidelity with early reading schemes coincided with a bigger phenomenon: many schools, especially those within multi-academy trusts (MATs), began to take a clearer position on what they considered to be effective teaching and curricula.

During the early stages of academisation, most MATs gave a cast-iron guarantee to schools joining the family: you’ll retain full autonomy of teaching and learning, and keep your unique identity as a school.

However, this position has become less tenable for trust leaders, who can often see large variations in performance across their schools. If a particular approach to behaviour management, or geography at KS3, say, is resulting in massive success, why wouldn’t you roll it out more widely?

Put yourself in a trust leader’s position. How is it fair that the students in one of your schools receive a rich, detailed and carefully constructed curriculum, while students in another school in your trust are hampered by materials that you know are much weaker in quality?

Sets of principles, sometimes referred to as playbooks, started to be published. Curriculum booklets and lesson PowerPoints were created for each unit and key stage. In some cases, these were simply “off the shelf” resources, such as posters of Rosenshine’s principles of instruction. But they were increasingly being drawn up by central teams, as MATs made the decision to appoint dedicated trust leaders to spend time producing these materials.

Freed from the whirlwind of classroom teaching, these leaders were able to consult the evidence base on effective teaching and curriculum design, learn from what other high-performing schools were doing, and use their professional experience to draw up blueprints that covered everything from behaviour management strategies to questioning techniques.

These materials became not only the vehicle for student improvement but also part of the very brand, the identity of the trust. They marked out to the community and to prospective staff that clarity and excellence live here.

Of course, just writing this down, from a trust’s perspective, isn’t enough. If you want outcomes to improve, you need to make sure that teachers are acting in line with those principles, enacting the curriculum or the behaviour management strategies as intended. You need to ensure that there is fidelity to the approach.

On the face of it, this scaling up of fidelity seems to have been effective. Schools that were judged to be chaotic and low-performing were rapidly turned around, and new schools achieved remarkable results in areas where they had historically languished in the league tables. Ofsted reports have begun praising consistent behavioural approaches, where every teacher adheres strictly to specific routines, using identical phrasing in classrooms.

This set the scene for things to become even more granular.

Once you have had some success with fidelity, you begin to look for marginal gains. You may have dictated the use of retrieval practice, but should you not also break it down into a step-by-step process, with the number, type and even content of questions pre-determined? Expecting, or even allowing, teachers to make their own call on such matters may lead to misinterpretation, and will almost certainly result in inconsistency.

And so, fidelity is increasingly being prescribed as the antidote to the dreaded lethal mutations. Proponents invoke other high-prestige professions, such as airline pilots or surgeons, and note how they follow carefully predetermined procedures. Commercial pilots don’t get to do barrel rolls, they say, even if flying in a straight line is becoming a bit tedious for them. So why should teachers?

The fightback

This is where we find ourselves now. In many trusts, and in many schools, little of what a teacher does is free from some form of prescription. And that is where it gets knotty.

Increasingly, there’s a pushback against fidelity from across the ideological spectrum. It’s not only those teachers fighting for more progressive approaches - many of those who are staunch advocates of cognitive science-led pedagogy and Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction are beginning to shout the loudest about the folly of attempting to guarantee fidelity to these ideals.

For example, in a recent episode of the They Behave For Me podcast, a teacher wrote in to share that they had been told they must use branded template slides during lessons, which mandate a lesson’s structure.

The hosts, Adam Boxer and Amy Forrester, both confessed stalwarts of the cognitive science movement, gave unequivocal advice: “If your school, or MAT, is forcing you to use particular slides, whatever their layout: leave.”

It seems that, for many teachers, this is a level of prescription too far, even if they broadly agree with the ideas that underpin them.

Stepping over this line, which is in different places for different teachers, is interpreted as sending a loud but hidden message: you aren’t trusted here, you don’t know what you are doing.

It is easy to see why fidelity rankles.

Teaching is an intellectual vocation, and so the removal of the ability to exercise this aspect undermines, for many, not only a core aspect of the job but an important part of a teacher’s identity. Taking a head of department role has historically been pitched as an opportunity to craft your vision of your subject in action, not to monitor the implementation of an approach developed by someone who may never even have set foot in your school.

And if you look at subject curricula, too, it’s easy to see why problems emerge. In order to operationalise a particular practice, it’s first necessary to deconstruct and generalise it so that it can be enacted in any phase, subject or context.

However, often it is the substance and discipline that gets lost in such an approach. The use of narrative may be a legitimate, even preferable, practice in history, for example, but trying to force it on maths teachers entirely misunderstands how knowledge in each subject is communicated and constructed.

Then there is the issue that, in some cases, the prescription may be wrong. Have senior leaders fully understood the nuances of the practice to which they are demanding fidelity? It’s not at all uncommon to hear the original academic or educationalist complain that they “didn’t really mean that” when seeing their ideas in practice.

So we’ve found ourselves in a bind: where is the sweet spot between fidelity that drives more positive outcomes and the detrimental effects that it can breed?

The sweet spot

Of course, teachers can never agree about anything, and it’s pretty normal in many professions to hear complaints about management overreaching. The sweet spot may be different for every individual.

However, we can strive for more consensus.

Autonomy may well be a necessary component of motivation, but few would argue for total freedom in all aspects of the job. And yet, if teachers are positioned as effective only as delivery units for centrally agreed materials and using centrally sanctioned strategies, we’re clearly in a world of trouble.

The sociologist George Ritzer coined the term “the McDonaldisation” of education and, just as with the fast-food chain of that name, perhaps the problem isn’t that the approach doesn’t work, it’s that it does. You never get a bad burger from McDonald’s, but nor are you ever surprised or wowed by something a bit different. Demanding fidelity to the menu and recipe raises the floor standards but simultaneously lowers the ceiling. The same may well be true for teaching.

The consequence of this may not be open rebellion, but instead a kind of apathy, as teachers give up trying to innovate in the classroom. There is a certain irony to this, given that so many of the programmes and approaches to which fidelity is now demanded themselves began as renegade innovations.

A real risk is that, without these, we could see the teacher retention crisis exacerbate. Currently, it’s mostly been driven by behaviour and workload, two issues that are more likely to affect less experienced teachers. But we could also see more experienced and skilled teachers fall out of love with a job they have less and less control over.

So what’s the answer?

We need to look at implementation by category: which aspects of teaching require strong fidelity, which are those in which some flexibility would be preferable, and when can complete freedom can be granted.

And that cannot be rigid. We need leaders to be able to - and be empowered to - make better decisions about fidelity. We need teachers to recognise that decision-making process. We need everyone to better understand the trade-offs in the decisions we make about fidelity.

We are not, by and large, good at being honest about trade-offs in education. And there are always trade-offs.

Strict fidelity to a scheme could see a boost in pupil outcomes but also increase staff turnover, which could both fracture a school community and lead to attainment issues down the road.

So which is the biggest concern to leaders at a particular moment?

The antidote to the war of fidelity is to be wary of blind fidelity to fidelity.

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