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?"