Agreement is not implementation
I can still remember the feeling of panic when the headteacher walked into my classroom. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I agreed with the initiative and thought it was a good idea. I fully intended to do it. In fact, I was trying very hard to impress the new headteacher.
Which made what happened next even more embarrassing.
I still remember this feeling from many years ago. I was a class teacher and we had a new headteacher. During a staff meeting she asked everyone to teach 15 minutes of handwriting after lunch each day.
I like to please, so the very next morning I printed the sheets and headed to the photocopier to prepare booklets for my class. The copier was busy so I decided to come back at lunchtime instead. However, at lunchtime, the usual realities of teaching had taken over: I had marking to do, behaviour issues to sort and was getting some thing out of the art cupboard. I set the copying going but never went back to collect the sheets.
At 1.03pm my class came in from lunch and were quietly reading while I was doing the register. Not doing handwriting when the headteacher walked in.
“Why are the children not doing their handwriting?” she asked.
Wanting desperately to make a good impression, I fumbled through an explanation about the photocopier.
She could have been angry but instead, she simply said: “OK, no worries.”
Later, people talked about how the headteacher had been coming around checking on us. But that wasn’t how I saw it.
As a budding leader myself, I admired what she had done. She had asked us all to do something that she believed would benefit children. Then she went to see whether it was actually happening.
Not to catch people out. To understand implementation.
The irony was that, as a subject leader myself, I’d recently introduced a new expectation myself. I’d told everyone about it in a staff meeting and explained why it mattered. Everyone seemed keen and said they’d do it. Job done. Or so I thought! But a few months and a change of leadership later, I hadn’t checked whether it was happening (it wasn’t).
That day taught me something that has stayed with me throughout my leadership career: Agreement is not implementation.
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is assuming that agreement in a staff meeting equals implementation in the classroom. It doesn’t.
Teachers can genuinely agree with an initiative, intend to do it well and still struggle to implement it consistently because school life gets in the way. Teachers rarely actively decide to ignore an instruction or purposefully forget to keep doing a routine.
My leadership style now is:
🗣️ Over communicate what we do to ensure we are sailing the ship in the same direction. My initiative isn’t going to work unless we’re all doing it properly.
🤲 High support, high challenge - which in this case means monitor if people are doing your initiative and give help if they’re not.
🗑️ Reduce the noise - keep focussed on what matters and do whatever it takes to reduce everything else (like queues for the photocopier!) Make it as easy as possible for people to do what they need to do.
💭 Assume the best. If people haven’t done what you’ve asked, be humble and wonder why without being angry first. Often there are things leaders could have done better to enable teachers to succeed.
I often find when I visit schools and ask a question about something on a learning walk such as checking for understanding or TAs actively supporting learning, leaders say, “they should be doing it, I did CPD on this”. They’ve done a staff meeting on a strategy or they’ve given out a new policy everyone should be doing. Even the best quality delivery and a really well written policy isn’t enough. More often than not, implementation has fallen down, and that can be disheartening for leaders who have a clear vision.
Breaking teacher habits is hard. Harder than most leaders expect.
The EEF implementation guidance has clear steps for success in the delivery and sustain phase:
Deliver
Start small where appropriate and refine before scaling up.
Model exactly what good practice looks like.
Use instructional coaching, rehearsal and deliberate practice rather than relying on one-off training.
Monitor implementation regularly through observations, coaching and conversations.
Give precise feedback to help staff improve one step at a time.
Adapt thoughtfully based on evidence without abandoning the core principles.
Sustain
Keep implementation visible through regular follow-up.
Celebrate small wins to maintain motivation.
Embed new practices into routines and systems so they become ‘how we do things here’.
Review impact on both implementation (Are staff doing it?) and outcomes (Is it improving learning?).
Refine rather than replace initiatives unless there is clear evidence they are ineffective.
Having been on both sides of poor and good implementation, that non handwriting lesson has stayed with me throughout my career. It’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in implementation, instructional coaching and professional development today. The challenge in schools is rarely deciding what needs to improve. The challenge is helping busy people turn good intentions into consistent practice.
Agreement in a staff meeting is not implementation.
The launch is not implementation.