Why Do Schools Lose Their Capacity to Learn?

This is the first of a four-part series exploring why a number of the innovative schools I’ve worked alongside or observed over the past two decades gradually drift back toward the very institutional patterns they set out to replace. Over the coming weeks I’ll unpack more of the patterns I’ve observed, why this happens, what leadership looks like when it’s resisted, and what might be done differently. This post lays the groundwork: what I’ve observed, and the historical lens that helped me finally make sense of it.

Introduction

During the past twenty years I have had the privilege of working alongside a number of communities establishing new schools across Aotearoa New Zealand. The excitement among these early innovators is infectious. Freed from inherited routines, these schools begin with bold aspirations, innovative learning environments, and a determination to create something different.

Yet I have also noticed a recurring pattern. Five or six years later, many of those same schools begin to look remarkably like the schools they were designed to replace. The language of innovation remains, but the habits become increasingly familiar. It isn’t because the leaders lacked courage or the ideas lacked merit. Something deeper is happening.

I need to emphasise, not every school follows this trajectory. I’ve worked with some schools that have managed to keep returning to each new challenge with the same experimental mindset that drove their founding – refreshing rather than settling. What distinguishes them isn’t luck, or the calibre of their original idea. It’s something about how they’ve chosen to keep responding, year after year, as the challenges facing them changed. That difference is worth naming now, because it’s the thread I’ll be pulling on through the rest of this series.

What the rise and fall of civilisations can teach us about educational transformation

Let me begin with sharing what prompted me to start thinking about this. A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast when the host mentioned the historian Arnold Toynbee. I’d heard the name before but knew very little about his work, so, as often happens, I disappeared down one of those wonderful rabbit holes of curiosity.

Toynbee’s monumental A Study of History (1934–1961) explores why some civilisations flourish while others stagnate or decline. At the heart of his thinking is a deceptively simple idea: societies grow by responding creatively to the challenges they face. When they stop responding creatively, decline begins.

It seems a very timely idea given the state of political upheaval we’re experiencing here in NZ and around the world at the moment, but the more I read, I became distracted from thinking about civilisations and instead thinking about my experiences with these new schools I had experience with. As I reflected on those experiences, I realised that Toynbee’s ideas offered a helpful lens for understanding the pattern I’d been noticing for years, but had never quite been able to explain.

What I’ve observed and learned

My experience in working alongside communities establishing new schools in Aotearoa began initially in regions where new schools were being planned and built in response to population growth, green-fields building in the true sense of the word. Then came the re-build of many schools following the earthquakes in Christchurch, including the green-field building of schools in areas of the city where new suburbs were being developed.

The process with new school builds follows a familiar path. Once the demographic need for a new school is justified and a site is identified and purchased by the Ministry of Education, an establishment board is created to work on behalf of the community to develop a shared set of beliefs that will guide the vision, mission and values for this new school. These things are described in a project brief, and are intended to provide the foundation for a school culture and ways of working that reflect the needs and aspirations of the community.

The process to this point can be straight forward enough when working with the community of an existing school that is undergoing a re-build, or groups looking to establish a new charter school for example. In these cases there is an existing community to work with and consult.  But it can be problematic for a green-fields school where there is no established community as the housing developments surrounding the school site are yet to be completed. Identifying whose feedback should inform the strategic vision for the school can be problematic, with the final decisions left to just a small group of people appointed to the establishment board.

Once the project brief has been written, the next phase in a green-fields build is to engage architects who will use information about the physical site, the vision for the educational approach that has been developed and the guidelines supplied by the Ministry of Education to first come up with a master plan for what might be developed, and then, through a period of consultation on this, formulate a final plan that can be used to go to tender to find a building company to complete the work.

While the building programme is underway, the establishment board engage in the process of recruiting an establishment principal. This is a part of the process that seems a little ‘out of synch’ for me – the employing of the principal after all of the visioning work has been done. Generally the requirements for the role include previous experience in leading a school (either as principal or deputy principal) and a personal philosophy and vision for education that aligns with what the establishment board have developed.

Being a part of this process has been one of the most rewarding opportunities of my career. It’s the dream of someone who has devoted much of his career to asking questions about the purpose of education and what will serve us best into the future. Most schools inherit their culture. These schools had the opportunity to create one.

As I’ve been reflecting on these experiences and looking back over more than two decades of this work, I see some really exciting things that have been achieved. But I have also observed that despite being given such an innovative start, many of these new schools have gradually begun to look remarkably like the schools they were designed to be different from. Not failures. Not poor schools. Simply… familiar.

The Pattern I’ve Come to Recognise

Over time I’ve noticed a pattern emerging. It wasn’t confined to one school or one community. Nor was it the result of poor leadership or a lack of commitment. If anything, many of these schools were led by some of the most capable and visionary educators I’ve worked alongside.

The pattern seemed to emerge almost regardless. I’ve tried to capture it in the diagram here which is described in more detail below:

The development of a new school generally begins with a challenge. A new community. A blank piece of land. An opportunity to think differently about what schooling  could become. That challenge releases enormous creative energy.

Next comes the design phase resulting in a creative response. The founding members question long-held assumptions. They visit innovative schools. They debate the purpose of education. They imagine new ways of organising learning, designing spaces, building relationships with whānau, and supporting learner agency. The conversations are exciting because almost nothing was taken for granted.

Those innovative ideas are then put into practice. The early years or these schools were characterised by experimentation. Staff worked collaboratively, adapting as they learned. New routines emerged. Fresh approaches were tested and refined. There was a strong sense that everyone was building something together. Through this phase most of these schools experienced early success and flourished.

But as enrolments grew a different set of challenges emerged. As the roll grew so did the number of new staff being employed. Systems needed to be documented. Expectations become clearer. Successful practices are embedded so that new staff can learn them quickly. Consistency and coherence become increasingly important. And so the focus gradually shifted from creating something new to making sure what had been created could be sustained – the focus shifts to building the institution.

None of this was wrong. In fact, much of it was necessary. Growing organisations need reliable systems. Families value predictability. Teachers need clarity. Students benefit from stability. Yet alongside these strengths, something else often began to happen.

Over time the questions became fewer. Experimentation became less common. Practices that had once been innovative slowly became “the way we do things here,” and it became expected that these ways of working would suffice as new challenges were experienced. The energy that had driven invention was increasingly directed towards protecting what had already been built.

This is the point where school leaders and their communities reach a decision point – to focus on the project of sustaining the school as an institution – or to embark on a process of refresh, to keep things responsive to the new challenges they are presented with. These challenges might be new knowledge about learning, different student needs, developments in technology (AI), changing community priorities etc. All of these things require a school to be ‘responsive‘ not merely sustaining.

The refresh route repeats the cycle, returning to the identification of new creative responses to the challenges experienced through innovative approaches marked by the preparedness to experiment, permission to take risks, persevere with promising results, and to learn from failure. These lead to new forms of success which, in turn are adopted into the way the school is organised and operates. And so that cycle continues.

The institutionalisation route occurs when the school remains focused on sustaining what has been established, and over time, the school begins operating very much like the ones the original visionaries of the school were trying to ‘break free’ from.

Why this matters

None of this is academic. Every establishment board that opens a new school is, in effect, making a bet – that this time, the bold aspirations in the founding documents will hold. Toynbee’s insight is that civilisations don’t usually fall because they run out of ideas. They fall because the people responsible for responding creatively stop doing so, often without noticing, and the old patterns quietly reassert themselves under new language.

The same appears to be true of schools. So as you read this, it’s worth pausing on a few questions about your own context:

• Where in your school’s story would you place yourselves right now – still in the “creative response” phase, or drifting toward institutionalised habit?
• What language has stayed the same in your school even as the practice behind it has quietly changed?
• Who, in your setting, is currently playing the role Toynbee would call the “creative minority” – and are they still being backed, or increasingly worn down?

I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about the slide from innovative to institutional. But avoiding it seems to depend heavily on the people carrying it – which is where I’ll turn next. In the second post in this series, I’ll look more closely at the particular qualities of leadership I’ve seen distinguish the schools that hold their edge from those that don’t.