Why do schools lose their capacity to learn? pt.2

This is the second in a four-part series exploring why schools lose their capacity to learn. In the first post, I explored a pattern I’ve watched play out again and again over the two decades I’ve spent working alongside schools built to do things differently. However genuinely innovative their founding vision, so many gradually lose the capacity to keep learning, and drift back toward the very institutional patterns they set out to replace. It’s not a failure of nerve, and it’s rarely a failure of the original idea. Something else is going on. In this post, I want to look closely at one part of that story – the critical role leadership plays, both in getting these schools off the ground, and in determining whether they ever find a way of scaling and sustaining the innovation they began with.

The importance of leadership

So why do organisations that were created to challenge established ways of thinking so often find themselves becoming established institutions themselves? It’s a question that’s followed me through every school I’ve helped establish over the years, and while I don’t think there’s a single answer, I’ve come to believe leadership sits close to the heart of it.

The leadership challenge isn’t simply starting something innovative; it’s knowing how to lead differently as the organisation evolves without losing its capacity to experiment and learn.

I’ve started to think about the schools I’ve helped establish in terms of phases – not as a rigid model, but as a rough map of the terrain I’ve watched schools travel through. Reflecting on this (and using the inspiration from Toynbee’s work as introduced in my previous post) I’ve created an image to try and illustrate shown below. In this diagram the phases are named across the top of each section and the associated leadership style at the bottom.

The more I’ve reflected on this, the more I’ve come to understand that the issue isn’t simply whether a leader is “innovative”. Different phases of a school’s development call for different leadership dispositions. In the illustration above I’ve identified six different approaches to leadership that are matched to the six phases of the development life-cycle.

It takes a visionary leader to get things started – to keep an eye on the big picture and bring others on board with that vision, but as the work of establishing the school begins, the leadership style must shift more to an entrepreneurial one as the focus must move to the execution of the vision that has been created.

I’d note here that these aren’t necessarily roles occupied by different people – or by the principal alone. Consider, for example, where do you see visionary leadership among your teachers? Who are the entrepreneurs in your staff?

As the school continues to grow and the underpinning processes and supports have been successfully put in place, the challenge becomes how to respond to the pressures of roll growth and new staff – so the leadership needs to be more adaptive as some of the things put in place to work with the original (often small) group of students, staff and community need to be expanded and to accommodate needs that may not have been previously considered.

This transition can be difficult for some, and may explain why, in so many cases, the establishment principals of many of these new schools move on after 5-6 years in the role. It isn’t because they are poor leaders – it’s simply that their core strengths as visionaries and/or entrepreneurs, while valuable in the start-up phase, will no longer serve them well as the organisation grows and matures.

Once things have settled into what may be considered as ‘normal’ for the new organisation, the leadership must become focused on scaling and sustaining the innovation that was started, and ensuring the school operates effectively as a learning organisation. The key to this is a collaborative leadership style, that recognises the strengths of the team and power of networks to help shape practice. Any form of ‘hero’ or ‘iconic’ leadership at this stage will result in the leader becoming overwhelmed and burned out, and members of the organisation feeling disempowered and lacking opportunity to contribute or participate in the changes taking place.

For me, this is the critical phase of leadership. Collaborative leaders are able to manage their role effectively by the agency they provide their staff, with various forms of distributed leadership evident in the way things operate. Collaborative leaders also recognise the importance of networks. They are active in professional learning groups and encourage staff to do the same – whether in person or virtual. They (and their teams) are constantly scanning the environment, subscribing to various forums and newsletters to remain informed about where innovation is occurring in the sector.

Consider where this happens in your context, for example. Who notices that something isn’t working and experiments with another approach? Who connects the school to ideas and practice beyond its walls?

Crucially, this doesn’t mean the visionary and entrepreneurial impulses get retired once collaborative leadership takes hold. The best collaborative leaders I’ve observed make a point of keeping those impulses alive somewhere in the organisation – sometimes in themselves, more often by deliberately creating space for others to hold them. It’s less a changing of the guard than a redistribution.

What happens when leaders & teachers become the custodians of “the way we do things here”?

At this point things can change markedly. If an organisation can maintain people within it who are the visionaries, entrepreneurs, adaptors and collaborators, it is more likely to succeed as a learning organisation and successfully navigate the complexities of change that will inevitably be encountered.

Sadly, this is also where I’ve seen some schools default to what I’ve labelled a managerial mindset. At this point I need to emphasise that I’m not suggesting we don’t need good managers. Good management is essential to embedding and sustaining innovation. The problem isn’t management; it’s when management becomes the dominant leadership response to a changing environment. Where this is the case maintaining established systems and structures dominates any open-ness to change.

This is what I referred to as the ‘decision point’ in the illustration in my previous post. This is the point at which a school can either continue to treat itself as a learning organisation, or begin to protect what it has established.

What becomes important for some at this point is the preservation of what has been put in place. The idea of establishing and maintaining ‘traditions’ can appeal as a way of building loyalty and a sense of belonging (which, one could argue, has its place) – but often these traditions can also act as a hinderance or roadblock to change that may be important to pursue. (Consider here the challenges face by some single sex schools when the idea of becoming co-ed is introduced, or when a suggestion is made to abolish long-established ‘departments’, for example, in favour of some other staffing structure that is better suited to the needs of the students and/or curriculum).

The longer the manager-leadership style continues, the more likely then that we see the emergence of the defensive leader – whose priority is to defend the status quo, and to actively resist change. In fact, change is often used as the reason to excuse poor performance. Often, a defensive leader will feel they are ‘trapped’ with few options as the relentlessness of change cascades upon them, and they lack the network of support and understanding that the collaborative leader encourages for example.

This has particularly important implications at a time where we see a plethora of leadership development programmes emerging – the question I’d be asking is “Are we preparing leaders to lead schools at different stages of development – or simply preparing people to occupy leadership positions?”

To summarise how these approaches differ I’ve created the table below:

The six leadership dispositions across the life of a school

Disposition	Core Focus	Risk Profile	Relationship to Change	Working Style
The Visionary	Imagining big, new concepts and long-term changes	Intellectual risk: Risks being misunderstood	Future-focused: Driven by what could be	Big-picture thinker: Ignores small details for the ultimate goal
The Entrepreneur	Turning ideas into real, working businesses	Risk-taker: Puts personal time and money on the line	Problem-solver: Adapts fast when things go wrong	Action-driven: Focuses entirely on tangible execution
The Adaptive	Continuous improvement and fluid execution	Calculated risk: Experiments with new workflows	Highly responsive: Constantly reacts to internal/external shifts	Flexible: Refuses to get locked into a set way of working
The Collaborative	Collective intelligence and horizontal networks	Shared risk: Relies on group buy-in	Network-driven: Uses shared learning to navigate transitions	Involving: Scans external practice and involves others to learn
The Manager	Rules, plans, and steady daily work	Risk-averse: Works to keep things safe and avoid losses	Stability-focused: Preserves current functional systems	Organiser: Directs people and tasks to make systems run well
The Defensive	Status quo preservation and personal comfort	Risk-phobic: Minimises personal exposure	Resistant: Looks for ways to avoid or stop change happening	Obstructive: Uses top-down, imposed change as an excuse

In my representation of the phases I see the first four phases of development and leadership as being a ‘healthy’ development and one we should be intentionally seeking to encourage and nurture through the leadership programmes available in our sector. Sadly, I don’t see this being the case – there’s too much simply left to chance at a system level and many school leaders (i.e. principals already in the role and senior leaders who may be aspiring to those roles) left to navigate their own way through this maze of decision making etc.

The fortunate ones may have been mentored by effective leaders in the past and experienced the sorts of collaborative and responsive approaches that are necessary. But there are those who have missed this experience and suddenly find themselves in a position of leadership without the broad range of knowledge and skills required to make them effective in any of the first four approaches outlined above – and in worst case scenario, start their role by adopting a managerial approach.

The education half-life of schools

The tragedy, as I see it, is that so many schools get stuck in that fifth phase – managing and protecting what was built rather than continuing to build. Every educational innovation, I’ve come to believe, has a half-life. Not because the original idea was wrong, but because the problem it was designed to solve doesn’t stay still. Schools don’t become less innovative because their founding vision was flawed. They become less innovative when a vision that once answered a real question keeps being applied to questions it was never designed for. That is, new questions – not the original question.

As I worked to develop this table it occurred to me that what I’ve seen happening in these new schools as they grow and respond to change is that one of two things occurs. Either the original visionary or entrepreneurial leader moves on to another ‘startup’ challenge, handing the reins to another leader chosen because of their ability to advance things to the next level of organisational maturity. Or, the original leader continues in the role but is able to change the way in which they lead. These leaders are the ones that succeed in scaling and sustaining the innovative practices that were there in the beginning, but are agile in their approach to establishing the organisational systems and processes to avoid them becoming locked into something that can’t be changed.

Before I am accused of making too broad a generalisation here I need to acknowledge that there are schools I’m aware of that haven’t followed this pattern. In these schools I’ve observed the principal and senior leadership demonstrate the ability to shift their leadership focus and approach to successfully navigate the next phase of the school’s development. It’s this recurring pattern that intrigues me most: leading a well-established school is a genuinely different challenge to leading a new one. One isn’t better than the other – they simply require different strengths.

The Real Challenge Isn’t Innovation

Innovations don’t necessarily fail. Sometimes they simply outlive the question they were designed to answer.

The challenge then isn’t building an innovative school. I’ve shown, throughout this piece, that a visionary and an entrepreneur can do that. Give a group of committed educators a clear philosophy, a blank site, and a bit of room to move, and something genuinely new will emerge. That part is the easy part.

The harder challenge – the one that actually determines whether any of it lasts – is leadership that keeps learning long after the founding vision has been realised. Innovation isn’t a destination a leader arrives at and then occupies. Transformation isn’t a programme a leader runs once and rolls out. Both are better understood as an ongoing leadership discipline –  keeping the organisation’s capacity to learn alive, deliberately, over time.

Pathways, not a sequence

At this point it’s worth returning to the table from earlier, because I think it points somewhere different when you read it a second time – not as a sequence of phases a leader passes through and leaves behind, but as two modes of leadership a mature leader learns to hold at once. I’ve attempted to illustrate this below:

And here’s the point I think matters most – this isn’t a sequence. It’s not that a leader runs the left-hand column for a few years and then graduates to the right, retiring the visionary and the entrepreneur along the way. It’s a constant weave, and what distinguishes the leaders who sustain it is that they’ve learned to hold both columns at once – they don’t stop experimenting once they start embedding and scaling, they get better at experimenting, precisely because they’ve learned how to learn from what they try.

That’s really what a culture of experimentation means, in practice. It’s an ongoing willingness to take risks, to treat failure as information rather than embarrassment, and to keep asking “what if” even once the systems and processes that made the school work are firmly in place. The danger isn’t that a school stops innovating on some identifiable date. It’s quieter than that – it’s that the systems built to embed and scale the early innovations gradually harden into the very things that make asking “what if” feel risky, or irrelevant, or someone else’s job.

There’s a really important distinction to be made here between embedding innovation (i.e. making successful practice easier, more sustainable and less dependent on individuals), and institutionalising innovation (i.e.turning something that once solved a problem into a fixed way of doing things.)

A school that’s stopped experimenting rarely notices the moment it happened. It just notices, years later, that no one’s asking the question anymore. Which is, in the end, a leadership choice as much as a cultural one – and perhaps the clearest marker of the leaders who make the whole arc, from dreaming through to a mature, sustaining organisation, actually work.

A final thought

Having presented my thoughts based on the observations I’ve made over the past couple of decades, I want to suggest a revision to the original illustration of the six phases I introduced earlier.

The six phases remain useful for describing the different leadership dispositions I’ve observed, but presented as a sequence they can imply an inevitability to the journey – that schools move from vision and innovation towards management and, ultimately, defending the status quo. But that needn’t be the case.

As I’ve argued in the previous section, effective leadership must hold the tension between the dispositions that are important in the early stages of a school’s development and those that become increasingly important as the organisation matures. The challenge is not to move from one set of dispositions to another, but to find ways of keeping them alive and in productive tension.

Again I argue that the key lies in creating a culture of experimentation – one where established practices are continually examined rather than simply protected; where reflection leads to adjustment; and where there is an ongoing willingness to try, learn and adopt new approaches when circumstances demand it. In other words, the goal is not simply to sustain the organisation we have built, but to sustain the school’s capacity to learn.

The illustration below is therefore not intended to replace the six phases, but to offer another way of seeing them. I’ve condensed the six into three overarching themes: the start-up phase (starting something); the growth phase (growing something); and the sustaining phase (keeping something alive). Each brings together two of the leadership dispositions identified in the earlier illustration.

Importantly, I don’t see these as three steps that a school simply moves through. Rather, they represent three ongoing leadership challenges that need to be held together if a school is to remain capable of learning, adapting and renewing itself.

Seen this way, the sustaining phase takes on a rather different meaning. It is not the point at which innovation gives way to management, and ultimately to defending the status quo. It is the point at which the real leadership challenge begins: how do we sustain what we have built while continuing to question whether it is still what our learners and our community need?

This requires holding a productive tension between two impulses. One is the need to manage well – to establish systems, embed effective practice, provide consistency and ensure that the organisation functions effectively. The other is the need to keep experimenting – to remain curious, to notice when something is no longer working as well as it once did, and to be willing to try something different.

The danger comes when the first impulse overwhelms the second. What was established to support innovation can gradually become something that is protected from challenge. Practices that were once experimental become “the way we do things here”; systems designed to make things work become reasons for not changing them; and the organisation’s capacity to learn begins to diminish.

The alternative is not perpetual change for its own sake. It is a culture in which embedding and experimenting coexist – where we are prepared to hold on to what works while remaining willing to ask whether it could work better, or whether changing circumstances call for something different.

That, for me, is the real meaning of sustaining. We aren’t simply sustaining the school we have built. We are sustaining its capacity to learn, adapt and renew itself.

Perhaps this is what distinguishes schools that remain learning organisations from those that become institutionalised. The former don’t abandon stability, systems or established practice. They simply refuse to let those things become the end of the story.

The question for leadership is therefore not, “How do we stop things changing?” or even, “How do we keep innovating?” It is: “How do we create the conditions in which a school can be both well established and continually learning?”

Reflect

If there’s one thing this piece has tried to argue, it’s that leadership itself needs to keep learning. That the skills which get a school off the ground aren’t the ones that sustain it, and that the leaders who last are the ones who never quite retire the visionary and the entrepreneur, even as they grow into something more collaborative.

So before moving to the next part of this series – where I want to look at what schools themselves can do to guard against decline – it’s worth pausing on your own leadership, wherever you sit in an organisation. Use the following questions as a starting point:

• What are we protecting that was originally created to help us learn?”
• What are we doing today because it still serves our learners – and what are we doing simply because it has become the way we do things?
• Is there a “what if” question your school has quietly stopped asking? Who would need to ask it again?
• What needs to change so that we hold ‘both columns at once’ in the leadership in our school?

None of these have comfortable answers. But that discomfort is probably the point – it’s the same “keeping learning” this whole piece has been arguing for, just aimed inward instead of at the organisation.

[Confession time: the illustrations in this post were created with the help of AI after experimenting with several prompts and further work in CANVA]