In many schools:

  • Workload is high: Teacher Tapp surveys find only a third of teachers are happy with the hours they’re working. Most teachers (80%) say they work more than 40 hours a week. The most common reason (given by 86% of teachers working more than 40 hours a week) is that this is necessary to get their job done.
  • Retention is low: job adverts in secondary schools are up. More teachers say they plan to leave. Leaders are struggling to find qualified and effective teachers (more here).
  • Time is short: teachers often say they’d like to make improvements – but they’re too busy planning and marking and filling in workload audits and answering emails from parent governors about why Jemima isn’t on the netball team.

We struggle to keep afloat, struggle to keep teachers, struggle to get better. Something has to give. But what? The obvious solution: do less stuff – cut workload, boost wellbeing, make time to improve. But what can we cut? Will parents object? Will Ofsted approve? What if we cut the thing that’s making a huge difference to students? What is to be done?

Step forward Arran Hamilton, Dylan Wiliam and John Hattie, with a novel and much-needed book, Making Room for Impact.  An implementation guide helps us put new things into practice. This book is a de-implementation guide: it helps us take things out of practice. Among innumerable books exhorting us to do more – retrieval practice, restorative justice, responsive teaching – finally, there’s a book that tells us how to do less.

The authors don’t tell us what to stop doing (although they suggest ideas). They tell us how to stop doing things. How do we choose a focus? How do we identify possible consequences? How do we get change started? How do we evaluate the results? Everything conspires against de-implementation: teacher habits, parental expectations, Ofsted criteria, exam pressures. Hamilton et al. give us a process to address or preempt each barrier and overcome this conspiracy. Let’s look at the overall process (which the authors organise into nine Ps), through the story of Miguel.

So how can we stop doing things?

Miguel is an associate assistant head. He’s responsible for wellbeing and teacher professional development. In exchange, he gets no additional pay and one extra free period a fortnight, during which he invariably ends up covering Year 9.  He’s grown increasingly concerned about two things.  First, professional development is additive: he keeps asking teachers to do new things – he never asks them to do less. He’s not an animal: when staff say they’re stretched, Miguel listens and suggests things they can cut. But he knows staff struggle: they feel unconfident, reluctant and guilty to do less. Second, staff seem overwhelmed by workload – and teacher retention is falling.

Discover

Miguel raises his concerns at a leadership team meeting.  This sparks heated debate about how reasonable staff beliefs are, but he gains agreement to form a small team to investigate and propose changes (P1 Permit).  Half a dozen staff volunteer to participate. Miguel gives each staff member a role, and is careful to note what is and isn’t in scope: there’s value in looking at planning, marking, teaching and parent communication – no one can face relitigating last year’s debate on designated spaces in the car park.

The team begins collecting information about what can be changed (P2 Prospect).  They survey staff to better understand how they’re using time – and compare what staff say they’re doing with what the school and the inspectorate actually require. They whittle down possible areas of focus to three priorities: marking, lesson planning, and revision support.  All three take up substantial staff time and are amenable to school-led change.

The team now begin considering what could change be changed within each focus area. They use interviews and discussion with staff to (P3) Postulate why they do what they do.  For example, they ask how long staff spend marking, what kind of comments they make, how they follow up – and why: do staff believe it has an impact? Believe it sends a message? Believe it’s expected?

Decide

Revision support seems the most promising area to change, so they now (P4) Propose changes and identify likely consequences. They could:

  • Remove it entirely
  • Reduce it: for example, mandate a maximum of four after-school hours’ revision support per subject per year
  • Re-engineer it: for example, have a handful of departmental sessions, or focus on reusable online materials
  • Replace it: for example, with teaching activities designed to reduce the need for revision

Each approach has pros and cons. The team don’t feel able to remove revision support entirely. They do believe, however, that the current approach – class teachers lead multiple sessions – could be replaced by a handful of department sessions. They can supplement this with commercial revision guides and whole-school assemblies on effective revision. Miguel also looks at what will undermine change and plans antidotes. For example, staff may be tempted to offer additional support anyway: the team plan to offer reminders of the plan, and its rationale, at key points of the year.

Next, Miguel and the team plan exactly who is going to do what and when (P5 Prepare). How will they launch this with staff? How will they communicate key messages to parents and pupils? How does teaching need to change, if teachers are offering less revision support? Miguel leads multiple meetings listening to heads of department and classroom teachers about their concerns. He briefs the governors, and drafts a letter to parents.

Before change begins, the team need to (P6) Picture success. They sit and imagine a glorious future in which evenings, weekends and the Easter holidays are theirs again. Then they specify exactly how they’re going to achieve this, and agree simple and proportionate indicators that things are heading in the right direction: no revision sessions running, clear guidance to students, greater student effort, and so on. Miguel doesn’t want to enforce a plan which isn’t working, so the team also agree triggers for abandoning it, based on teacher concerns and mock exam results.

De-implement

It’s finally time to (P7) Proceed. Miguel times things carefully, introducing the plan just as this year’s exams are ending. Many teachers are exhausted by the additional revision support they’ve offered. They welcome an alternative. They use gained time in the summer to dream of a better life, and to review existing revision materials, assess and purchase commercial revision guides, and plan changes to teaching which should lessen their reliance on revision support. At the start of the next year, students are briefed on what they can expect, and what it requires of them, and parents receive letters echoing these messages.

Re-decide

Throughout, Miguel and the team collect data on what’s happening – and meet regularly to (P8) aPpraise the results. They track whether the planned teaching changes are being made, ask heads of department to report on students’ revision activity, and keep an eye out after school for staff who can’t resist continuing to lead revision sessions.

Within a few months, most of the team are convinced it has worked. Miguel can see that assistant headship in his grasp however, and insists they keep monitoring. As exams draw nearer, anxiety increases among students and parents. A few complaints trickle in, and teachers worry that students aren’t doing enough revision. But at the end of the year, most staff agree they’ve saved time, and want to continue with the plan. When exam results finally arrive, they have even improved slightly – enough to convince Miguel that the plan worked.

Finally, Miguel looks to next year (P9 Propel). Change seems established, but Miguel knows that new staff and heads of department are likely to challenge it. But the team’s main effort shifts to a new issue: reducing the time staff spend marking.

Makes sense – how’s the book?

Picture Making Room for Impact as a diligent guide, leading you, step-by-step, through de-implementation.  He ensures you’re never at a loss as to what to do next. So for each step, he offers substeps, for each substep he offers a mnemonic or a structure or a tool.  He organises the nine Ps into four Ds, and make frequent reference to the four Rs. So, for example, within D1 (Discover), Step P2 (Prospect), Key Action 2, Part A is Agree on your amenable focus areas [for change], for which he suggests the acronym HEAT: look for changes which won’t do Harm, which are Easy and Acceptable, and which save Time.  As you can perhaps imagine, such diligence is a little exhausting – but invaluable whenever you’re unsure of your next step.

To ditch the metaphor, it’s not always a smooth read. But it is an invaluable guide book: almost anyone could pick it up and plan their next step with ease. For example, we all know that staff end up doing things which no one has ever mandated – as the Ofsted inspection myths document illustrates. The book offers a systematic way to identify these gaps, and challenge the additional workload which has accreted around what is required. And it can be used – as the examples illustrate – at any scale: by a teacher, head of department, headteacher, or trust leader.

Conclusion

Once upon a time, I taught myself to manage my workload better. I prioritised more, and did less. I’d realised that the work we could do is infinite, and since our capacity is finite, we must prioritise, and stick to our prioritisation, if we are to survive and thrive. I still worked hard, but I worried less, worked more efficiently, and taught more effectively. Replacing written marking with dot marking, for example, saved a huge amount of time and allowed me to track and respond to students’ needs far better.

I always struggled, however, to help colleagues do less. I offered suggestions, encouragement and support. But I didn’t know how to get them from feeling their workload was unmanageable to sustaining changes to it. I couldn’t help them overcome the compulsion to keep going – through habit, pressure, or the guilty belief that students would suffer if they stopped. If you’ve ever felt like that, or seen your colleagues feel like that, this book is for you.

Indeed, while the guidance on how to change is invaluable, the most powerful thing about the book is the underlying message. It offers teachers, schools and leaders licence: you can and should do less, and be more critical about what you do. As the authors say:

Everyone needs to know that it’s OK to (collectively) do less to achieve more. It might even be perfectly OK to do less to achieve the same.”

If we want teaching to be a sustainable profession, we must take this to heart. This book is an invaluable first step to better looking after ourselves and our colleagues, and focusing our actions around impact, not just doing more. It should be on every leader’s bookshelf. Better still, their desk.

The nine Ps model in summary

  • P1 – Permit: Give/get permission to experiment
  • P2 – Prospect: Identify areas you could change
  • P3 – Postulate: Find out what teachers are doing and why
  • P4 – Propose: Identify possible changes and likely pitfalls
  • P5 – Prepare: Plan the change
  • P6 – Picture: Identify what you’re looking for when change happens
  • P7 – Proceed: Make the change
  • P8 – aPpraise: Evaluate your impact
  • P9 – Propel: Decide where further effort is best placed

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The book: Making Room for Impact: A De-implementation guide for educators

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