The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) provides comprehensive guidance on how schools can effectively implement new approaches or interventions to improve teaching and learning. The core message is that implementation matters and should be treated as a structured, collaborative, and social process.
The EEF guidance is designed primarily for school leaders and staff responsible for managing change, such as heads of departments and implementation teams. It is based on an extensive review of evidence in education and outlines three key elements that work together to enable effective implementation:
1. Adopt the behaviours that drive effective implementation: This involves fostering three core behaviours:
- Engage: Involving people—including staff, students, and parents—in decisions that affect them, providing opportunities for discussion, and ensuring clear communication and active guidance.
- Unite: Aligning people around shared values, knowledge, understanding, and practices regarding what is being implemented and why it matters. This helps ensure clarity on expectations and a shared approach to new practices.
- Reflect: Regularly assessing pupil needs, considering the fit and feasibility of the intervention, monitoring implementation progress, and identifying barriers and enablers to inform ongoing improvement.
2. Attend to the contextual factors that influence implementation: These factors include:
- What is being implemented: Ensuring the approach is evidence-informed, right for the specific school setting, and feasible to implement.
- Systems and structures: Developing and repurposing infrastructure that supports implementation, such as timetables, data monitoring systems, resources (funding, equipment), allocated time, policies, and defined roles.
- People who enable change: Identifying and empowering individuals (e.g., senior leaders, implementation teams, early adopters) who have the knowledge, skills, and agency to lead and support the changes.
3. Use a structured but flexible implementation process: The EEF recommends a four-phase process for enacting implementation, emphasizing that it is an ongoing learning process rather than a single event:
- Explore: Systematically identifying pupil needs and their root causes, understanding current practices, assessing how well an evidence-informed approach fits the setting, and considering its feasibility and potential barriers/enablers to implementation.
- Prepare: Building clarity and coherence by collaboratively planning the implementation. This includes defining the problem, specifying the intervention’s core components, selecting tailored implementation strategies, designing monitoring systems, and specifying final outcomes. It also involves practical preparations like providing leadership direction, adapting the approach where appropriate, delivering high-quality professional development, and ensuring necessary systems and structures are in place.
- Deliver: Enabling ongoing improvement by supporting staff, providing timely prompts, reinforcing professional development, monitoring implementation progress and fidelity, and gathering feedback from pupils and parents. It also involves tailoring implementation in response to emerging barriers and enablers.
- Sustain: Maintaining the implementation effort over time to embed effective practices. This involves continued leadership support, building sustainability through ongoing strategies, and regularly reviewing and acting on the outcomes to decide whether to sustain, scale, or de-implement the approach
