Growing Pains: The Hidden Cost of School Improvement

A concept many of us will remember from childhood is growing pains. The term is commonly used to describe aches experienced by children, particularly during periods when they are active and developing. They are generally harmless and temporary, but the phrase itself has also become a useful metaphor: growth can be positive while still being uncomfortable.

Perhaps we should think about school improvement in much the same way. We understandably associate improvement with positive outcomes: better teaching, stronger behaviour, improved results, new facilities, increasing pupil numbers or an expanded curriculum. Yet we can sometimes overlook what happens during that improvement.

Schools rarely grow without experiencing some discomfort along the way. As a school develops, it asks its organisation—and the people within it—to do things differently. New systems have to be learned. Existing routines have to change. Roles evolve. Staff acquire new responsibilities. Leaders spend increasing amounts of time planning things that did not previously exist.

The destination may be better. But the journey can still hurt.

Growth creates pressure

Consider a school opening a Sixth Form. From the outside, this might appear to be a relatively straightforward expansion: recruit some students, introduce some courses and open the doors.

In reality, the organisational implications are enormous. The school may require new facilities, additional staffing, different safeguarding arrangements, new policies and procedures, curriculum planning, timetabling, careers provision, admissions processes, marketing, student recruitment, UCAS systems, pastoral structures, enrichment opportunities and relationships with universities and employers.

None of these things simply appear. They require people to create them. And importantly, much of this work must happen before the Sixth Form even exists.

Staff therefore find themselves simultaneously operating the school that exists today while designing the school that will exist tomorrow.

That creates additional workload, decision-making and cognitive demand. People are pushed beyond familiar routines and asked to solve problems they may never previously have encountered.

The result can be organisational fatigue. These are the school's growing pains.

The faster you grow, the more it can hurt

The analogy becomes particularly useful when considering the pace of school improvement. If growth creates pressure, then logically, rapid growth has the potential to create considerably more pressure.

Imagine a school simultaneously introducing a new behaviour system, changing its curriculum, increasing pupil numbers, restructuring leadership, opening new facilities, recruiting significant numbers of staff and preparing to open a Sixth Form.

Each initiative might be entirely sensible. Each might ultimately improve the school. But collectively? The organisation may simply struggle to absorb them.

This is an important distinction because leaders can sometimes evaluate change initiative by initiative. "Is this a good idea?"

Perhaps the more important question is: "Does our organisation currently have the capacity to absorb this idea?"

Ten good ideas implemented simultaneously can produce a worse outcome than three implemented exceptionally well.

School improvement therefore cannot simply be about identifying what needs to change. Leaders must also consider how much change their organisation can successfully carry at any one time.

Growing pains should be anticipated, not discovered

Perhaps the biggest advantage of recognising growing pains is that they should rarely come as a surprise. If leaders know that a period of significant development is approaching, they can identify where the pressure is likely to emerge before it arrives.

Returning to the Sixth Form example, if the intention is to open in twelve months, appointing a Head of Sixth Form only when students arrive would clearly be too late.

Marketing may need to begin a year in advance. Courses need designing. Applications need managing. Students need interviewing. Staffing decisions need making. Partnerships need developing.

Appointing the person responsible significantly earlier may appear expensive because the school is funding a role before the provision generates income. But this may miss the point. Sometimes capacity has to arrive before growth, not because of it. The same principle applies elsewhere:

• If pupil numbers are increasing significantly, does administration capacity need to increase first?
• If a new behaviour system is being introduced, do pastoral teams require additional training and preparation beforehand?
• If assessment is changing, has sufficient time been allocated for teachers to understand and practise the new approach?
• If a member of staff is carrying a disproportionate amount of the development work, what can temporarily be removed from their workload?
• If additional resources will be required six months from now, have they already been built into financial planning?

Good leadership does not wait for growing pains and then attempt to treat them. It anticipates where they will occur.

Not every pain is a growing pain

There is, however, an important danger within this analogy. Leaders should be cautious about dismissing every difficulty associated with change as simply a "growing pain". Some discomfort is an inevitable consequence of improvement. Some is the consequence of poor planning. There is a significant difference.

If staff are temporarily stretched because they are learning a carefully planned new system, that may be a reasonable growing pain. If staff are exhausted because five major initiatives have been launched simultaneously without adequate resources, that is not a growing pain. It is an implementation problem.

Similarly, if responsibilities temporarily increase during a transition, some additional pressure may be unavoidable. But if roles remain permanently overloaded because staffing has not kept pace with organisational growth, the problem is no longer temporary discomfort.

Growth should not become an excuse for dysfunction.

This means leaders need to diagnose the pain rather than simply accept it:

• Is this temporary?
• Is it necessary?
• Is it proportionate?
• Could we have anticipated it?
• Could we reduce it without compromising the improvement?
• And perhaps most importantly: Is the organisation genuinely growing—or are people simply hurting?

Growth can stretch culture too

Growing pains are not limited to workload. Growth can place significant pressure on school culture.

A small school may have relied heavily on informal communication. Everyone knows everyone. Leaders are highly visible. New staff quickly absorb expectations from colleagues. As the organisation grows, these informal cultural mechanisms become less reliable.

A school of 300 pupils cannot necessarily operate culturally in the same way as a school of 900. The behaviours and expectations that were once transmitted naturally may now need to become explicit. Communication may need greater structure. Leadership may need to become more distributed. Induction becomes increasingly important. Systems that once existed in people's heads need to be documented.

In other words, growth can expose the parts of a culture that were never actually embedded—they were simply dependent on the organisation being small.

This can be particularly significant when a school recruits large numbers of new staff. Culture is diluted unless it is deliberately transmitted. The school is not simply adding people to its existing culture. Every new member of staff potentially changes that culture.

Growth therefore requires leaders to think not only about operational capacity, but cultural capacity.

Sometimes you need to slow down to grow faster

There is an understandable urgency around school improvement. When outcomes are not good enough, leaders quite rightly want them to improve quickly. But urgency can create its own danger. It can encourage schools to confuse speed of implementation with speed of improvement. They are not the same thing.

Introducing more changes, more quickly, does not necessarily accelerate improvement. In fact, if the organisation becomes overwhelmed, implementation quality falls and improvement may actually slow down.

Sometimes the quickest route to sustainable improvement involves deliberately slowing the pace. Sequence the changes. Build the infrastructure. Create capacity. Train people. Embed one thing before introducing another. Then move again.

The objective is not to remove every growing pain. That is probably impossible. The objective is to make sure the organisation can carry the weight of its own ambition.

What are your school's growing pains?

Perhaps this gives school leaders a useful question when considering improvement. Not simply: "Where do we want our school to go?" but: "What will our organisation experience while getting there?" Such as:

• Where will workload increase?
• Which roles will become stretched?
• What new expertise will we require?
• Which existing systems will no longer be sufficient?
• What resources need to arrive before the growth does?
• How might our culture change as the organisation becomes larger?
• And what can we stop doing to create the capacity for something new?

Growth is positive. Improvement is necessary. Ambition should be encouraged. But none of them are frictionless.

The strongest school improvement plans therefore don't just describe the destination. They anticipate the discomfort of the journey and put structures in place to manage it.

Because perhaps the question leaders should ask before embarking on the next phase of improvement isn't simply:

"How quickly can we grow?" It is: "How do we make sure our school is strong enough to grow without breaking?"

 

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Muscle Memory: The Invisible Ingredient of Schools

One of the most overlooked influences on school culture may be something we normally associate with sport rather than education: muscle memory.

Think about riding a bike, playing a musical instrument or even scrolling through your phone. When we first learn these activities, they require conscious thought. We concentrate on every movement and regularly make mistakes. But through repetition and practice, the actions become increasingly automatic. Eventually, we perform them with remarkably little conscious effort.

Scientists generally describe this as procedural memory: our ability to learn and retain skills and processes through repeated practice. But what if schools have a form of muscle memory too?

Of course, an organisation does not literally have muscles. However, the concept provides a useful metaphor for understanding school culture. Over time, schools develop an organisational muscle memory.

Processes that initially require explanation, modelling and conscious effort gradually become automatic. Staff know what happens. Students know what happens. Leaders know what happens. Eventually, nobody needs to ask. It is simply "how we do things here."

And that phrase should sound familiar, because it is also one of the simplest definitions of organisational culture.

New schools don't have muscle memory

This becomes particularly interesting when considering new or rapidly growing schools. An established school may possess years, or even decades, of organisational memory that is easily taken for granted. A new school does not have this luxury.

Consider something as apparently straightforward as staff duties. In an established school, staff may instinctively know where duty points are, when they need to arrive and which areas require particular attention. They know where sightlines are restricted, where students are most likely to congregate and what to do if a colleague is absent.

They may also understand the less tangible aspects of performing the duty effectively: wearing a high-visibility jacket, positioning themselves rather than standing passively, actively scanning the environment, interacting positively with students, challenging inappropriate behaviour and not becoming distracted by their phone. Very little of this may appear in the duty rota. It doesn't need to. The organisation has developed muscle memory.

Now imagine the same duty system being introduced into a new school with a large number of new staff. The spreadsheet might be identical. The outcome probably won't be.

Without organisational muscle memory, leaders may need to spend significant time and resources explicitly teaching, modelling, rehearsing and revisiting behaviours that an established school simply assumes people understand.

This has significant implications for leadership. Sometimes what looks like a failure of commitment is actually a failure of practice. We assume people know how to do something because we have told them what to do. But knowing and doing are very different things.

It can also explain why initiatives that are taken for granted in established schools can be that much harder to implement and embed in new schools.

Culture needs rehearsal

This is where the metaphor becomes particularly useful. Nobody would expect somebody to become an accomplished pianist because they had been shown a PowerPoint explaining where the keys were.

Yet schools can sometimes introduce important cultural changes in almost exactly this way. A new behaviour system is presented during INSET. A new routine appears in the staff handbook. Expectations are emailed to staff. And then we expect fluency.
If we want cultural behaviours to become automatic, they need something closer to deliberate practice. Explain it. Model it. Practise it. Correct it. Repeat it. Then repeat it again.

This applies equally to students. Walking calmly between lessons, entering classrooms, responding to instructions, using equipment, attending assemblies or leaving the building at the end of the day are all behaviours that can become part of the school's organisational muscle memory.

When they are sufficiently embedded, they require less conscious thought. Culture begins to feel effortless. Of course, it isn't effortless at all. It only looks effortless because somebody put considerable effort into establishing it.

But muscle memory can also be wrong

There is, however, another side to this. Muscle memory does not distinguish between good and bad technique. Practise something incorrectly often enough and the incorrect technique can become automatic.

The same is true of schools. Poorly organised meetings can become normal. Weak duty practice can become normal. Starting lessons five minutes late can become normal. Ignoring minor disruption can become normal. Leaders failing to follow through on decisions can become normal. "That's just how we do it here."

Suddenly, organisational muscle memory stops supporting culture and starts protecting dysfunction. This creates a particular challenge for established schools.
New schools may struggle because they lack muscle memory. Established schools may struggle because they have too much of the wrong muscle memory.

Changing an embedded practice can therefore be considerably harder than creating one from scratch. Leaders are not simply introducing a new behaviour; they are asking people to consciously override something that has become automatic.

Consider learning to ride a bike incorrectly. If poor technique has been practised thousands of times, simply explaining the correct technique may not be enough. The old behaviour must first be recognised, interrupted and then replaced through repeated practice. School culture can work in much the same way.

This means that when leaders encounter resistance to change, the explanation is not necessarily that staff oppose the destination. Sometimes the organisation is simply attempting to overcome years of established muscle memory.

The advantage of being new

This also presents new schools with an enormous opportunity. They may lack organisational memory, but they also have fewer deeply embedded habits to unlearn.
The first assembly matters. The first parents' evening matters. The first examination series matters. The first transition day matters. The first staff meeting matters.
Not because any of these need to be perfect, but because every repetition begins teaching the organisation what "normal" looks like.

The challenge for leaders of new schools is therefore not simply to establish systems. It is to deliberately practise the culture they eventually want to become automatic.
Because today's consciously rehearsed behaviour can become tomorrow's organisational instinct.

Muscle memory doesn't disappear overnight

There is another interesting feature of muscle memory. Once a skill has been learned thoroughly, returning to it after a period away is often easier than learning it for the first time.

Someone who has not ridden a bicycle for ten years can often climb back on and rediscover the skill surprisingly quickly. Similarly, previous physical training can make returning to exercise easier than beginning from scratch. Organisations can experience something similar.

An established school may stop running an activity for several years—perhaps mock interviews following examinations, a particular transition event or an annual community project. When it is reintroduced, there may still be staff knowledge, documents, stories and expectations that allow the school to recreate it relatively quickly. The organisation remembers.

This may help explain why established schools can sometimes absorb change or reintroduce systems more easily than newer organisations. They possess a reservoir of experience that is largely invisible until it is needed. But again, the same principle applies negatively. Old habits can return too.

This is why leaders should be interested not only in what their school currently does, but in what their organisation has learned to do automatically.

What is your school's muscle memory?

Perhaps this gives leaders a different way of thinking about culture. Walk around your school and look for the things people do without being told:

•   What happens when the bell rings?

•   What happens when a student drops litter?

•   What happens when a colleague needs help?

•   What happens when behaviour deteriorates?

•   What happens when somebody makes a mistake?

•   What happens when a leader says they will do something?

Those automatic responses may tell you more about your culture than any values statement ever could.

Because culture is not only what an organisation believes. It is what an organisation has practised so many times that it no longer has to think about it.

The challenge for school leaders is therefore deceptively simple: What behaviours are we practising today that we want our school to perform automatically tomorrow?

 

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