Imagine a primary school that, on the face of it, seems to have improved its reading test scores, and this is something that you want to do at your own school,” says Becky Allen, co-founder and chief analyst at Teacher Tapp.
Perhaps, Allen suggests, speaking today at the World Education Summit, you might decide to contact that school to find out the secrets of their success.
“The headteacher [at the school] agrees that reading is vastly better taught now than before,” she explains. “They tell you this is thanks to the implementation of the Lightbulb reading programme and suggest that you can purchase it, too.”
More teaching and learning:
The question is, will purchasing that scheme actually have the desired results? Will simply copying what this school has done be enough to improve reading at your own school?
That is far from certain, Allen says, because lifting an example of good practice wholesale from one school to another - for example, by purchasing the same reading programme - will only be successful as long as several conditions are met.
The first condition is that reading at the first school really has gotten better, “rather than the school having just improved their test scores, test-score preparation or their intake demographic,” says Allen.
Secondly, she continues, the implementation of the reading programme in question must truly have been the key mechanism by which the school improved its reading instruction.
“Remember, school leaders inevitably try to develop quite neat narratives as to the causes of their success,” Allen points out.
Thirdly, you will need to make sure that the difficulties with reading at your school line up with the difficulties at the school you are copying if the programme is to fix the problems in the same way it did for them.
And finally, Allen explains, you must be able to purchase and implement the programme in the same exact manner that the other school did.
“If any of these individual conditions are violated,” she continues, “this mechanism of copying that is so successfully applied in other industries will tend to fail in [education]”.
Unfortunately, it is incredibly difficult for schools to ensure that they meet all of the conditions Allen has listed, because of the sheer complexity of the school environment and the nature of learning.
“It’s no wonder that many times we see strategies that are brought into a school by leaders who’ve seen them work elsewhere, and find that they fail to have the same effect,” she explains.
While copying examples of good practice might seem intuitive as an approach to school improvement, it often does not work in reality, then. But if schools can’t just copy the best practice of others in the sector, where should leaders look for guidance?
Best practice: Where should leaders turn?
Of course, they can turn to research evidence, drawing on resources such as the Education Endowment Foundation’s teaching and learning toolkit. However, Allen suggests, this is also not straightforward.
“Researchers like me, we try to draw the maps of what works. But unfortunately, the maps we’ve drawn so far are incomplete. They’re lacking in detail, and they’re downright incorrect in places,” she says.
In education, she continues, the map is “inadequate” because, in many areas - such as lesson planning, marking and curriculum design - the evidence base is “weak”, and it is therefore impossible to develop a reliable “blueprint” for what best practice should look like.
Where, then, does this leave school leaders?
Much of it comes down to their own professional judgement, says Allen. They must be willing to embrace the complexity of learning environments while trading in “uncertainties and best bets about how to lead a school and promote good practice”.
As for what that might look like, Allen says that there are two sides to it.
“First, [leaders] need to open their eyes to diversity, ambiguity and complexity. They need to take a sophisticated view of what needs to happen in their schools,” she says. “And secondly, they need to simplify their external message to staff about how you will lead them through change.
“This is how we countenance complexity but offer a compelling narrative about the future: we develop a complex internal understanding of the challenges we face, and we provide a straightforward story of how we will go about improving things together.”
Admittedly, doing this is not easy. But in the absence of a simple blueprint for school improvement, embracing the complexity is perhaps the only way forward.
“Schooling is complex,” Allen concludes. “Why pretend otherwise?”
