Establishing a new school, a new department or new pedagogical approach can be an exciting challenge. At the start of each new build process the excitement is infectious. Freed from inherited routines, these schools begin with bold aspirations, innovative learning environments, and a determination to create something different.
Yet, over time, I have also noticed a recurring pattern. Five or six years later, sometimes more, 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.
In this document I start by thinking about organisational atrophy. I begin by asking what the rise and fall of civilisations can teach us about educational transformation, drawing on historian Arthur Toynbee’s work on why some civilisations flourish while others stagnate or decline.
In part two I explore the leadership challenge in all of this – not simply starting something innovative, but about knowing how to lead differently as the organisation evolves without losing its capacity to experiment and learn.
I then propose that what we’re talking about here is pathways, not a progression, noting that innovations don’t necessarily fail. Sometimes they simply outlive the question they were designed to answer.
In part four I introduce the idea of trust as the missing ingredient here, describing trust as the renewable resource of a learning organisation.
And in part five I suggest that there needs to be more attention paid in this process to the stewardship of the vision, noting the difference between leadership as a question about capability (does this person have what it takes to keep the innovation alive?) and stewardship as a question about time (what happens when the person who has what it takes is no longer there?)
Taken together, these five parts make a single argument: that the loss of a school’s capacity to learn is not inevitable, nor is it a failure of any one leader or generation. It is a predictable pattern – one that can be understood, anticipated, and actively guarded against. My hope is that this document offers not a formula, but a set of lenses: ways of noticing, earlier than we usually do, when a school is drifting from the very things it set out to become – and what it might take to keep it capable of learning, long after the excitement of the opening day has faded.
Preview and download the paper below…
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