School improvement is often presented as a process: introduce a strategy, communicate clearly, implement consistently and success will follow.
But in practice, change rarely unfolds in a straight line. It moves through people, and people experience it very differently. The longer I spend working with leadership teams, the clearer it becomes that one of the most common mistakes is treating staff as a single group.
Because the reality is that in every school you will find different kinds of people, and understanding these differences is often the key to whether an initiative spreads or stalls.
Different staff react differently to change
For school leaders introducing change, colleagues can be categorised into different groups.
1. The first group is familiar: the supporters.
The supporters trust leadership, engage early and help to create initial momentum. They are essential, but they rarely sustain change on their own.
2. Then there are the fence-sitters.
Often underestimated, the fence-sitters are watching carefully. They are not resistant, but they are not yet convinced.
This is the group that determines scale. If they move, change spreads. If they hesitate, it stalls.
3. The third group are the constructive critics.
The constructive critics challenge assumptions, but in ways that improve the work. They are not against new ideas or processes, but consider unintended consequences (often based on past experience). They are not barriers to change. They are safeguards against poorly designed change.
4. The fourth group are the resisters.
The resisters often see a new way of working or initiative as threatening to the status quo. “I don’t have time for this” or “This won’t work in my subject” are often heard.
Their response is often emotional. It is easy to dismiss them but they need to be brought along on the journey. You cannot simply push them into it (if you do, the initiative will be seriously undermined). Instead listen to them and support them to help build momentum.
5. And then there is a sub-group, often split between these groups: the friends.
If you have grown within your school from teacher to leader, you will have friendships. And leadership changes them. A delayed reply. A decision that does not go in someone’s favour. A conversation that becomes more formal than it once was. These moments are small, but they accumulate.
Sometimes those closest to you find the shift hardest, and, over time, many leaders come to a difficult realisation: leadership, in part, requires professional distance.
This is not about becoming distant. It is about recognising that relationships now carry different weight, and that matters, because relationships shape trust, and trust shapes whether people engage with change.
Overall, leaders must recognise that if they try to treat everyone the same, they will often lose the group that matters the most. But if you recognise each group and move them along together, then real change is possible.
Building a shared understanding
How, though, can you tell which group everyone sits in? Some staff will be vocal, and it will be easy to place them. Others may be more taciturn. However, one of the most effective ways we have found to surface these differences is through a simple exercise.
We ask colleagues to complete a set of unfinished sentences such as the following:
- When I leave this organisation, I want people to remember me as someone who…
- I want my school to become a place where…
- The school I would choose for my children should be…
- My organisation stands out because…
- For me to feel proud of my organisation, it needs to…
- If I had more resources, I would…
- In five years, this school will be…
Individually, these questions seem straightforward, but collectively they reveal something deeper.
When responses are gathered, ideally anonymously, and brought together into a single document, patterns begin to emerge. Alignment where you expected difference. Difference where you assumed alignment.
With these insights, though, you can create the conditions for meaningful dialogue. They allow teams to recognise diverse perspectives, identify alignment and misalignment, and build a shared understanding of purpose.
And, ultimately, it helps to answer a question that sits beneath all school improvement work: why do we work here? Because without a shared answer to that question, even the best-designed strategies struggle to take root.
A different way of leading change
School improvement is not just about introducing new ideas. It is about understanding how those ideas are received, interpreted and acted upon by different people. Some will move quickly, some will question, some will wait and some will feel the shift more personally than we expected
The role of leadership is not to eliminate these differences. It is to work with them, because change does not succeed when everyone moves at the same time.
It succeeds when enough people move, for the right reasons, in a way that others trust and are willing to follow.
Ildar Iliazov is head of projects, IT and marketing for Light Group of Schools in Kenya. He was previously a school principal for a school in the group in Mombasa
