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There is something energising about the start of a new academic year. September offers schools an opportunity to reset, refocus and look ahead.

For leaders, this inevitably means revisiting priorities and considering what needs to improve over the year ahead, with new initiatives and action plans initiated.

Anyone who’s led an improvement plan will recognise the sense of satisfaction that can come with it. Staff training: delivered. Policy reviewed: completed. New programme introduced: done.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Improvement requires action. And actions are tangible. They can be allocated, given a deadline and, eventually, marked as complete.

What really matters, though, is impact - and that is a lot harder to measure.

Take professional development. If a school identifies adaptive teaching as a priority, leaders might commission training, provide resources and establish opportunities for staff to share practice. All are entirely reasonable actions, and all can be completed successfully. But none, by itself, demonstrates impact.

Measuring impact

The more important questions about impact come afterwards.

Has teachers’ practice changed? How consistently? Are teachers making better-informed adaptations in response to pupils’ needs? What difference are pupils experiencing and, particularly, what difference is being experienced by those pupils the improvement work was intended to benefit?

This distinction can be applied to almost any school priority.

Introducing a new attendance strategy doesn’t demonstrate that attendance has improved. Revising the curriculum doesn’t mean that pupils are learning more. Establishing a new approach to behaviour doesn’t necessarily mean that pupils experience greater consistency.

Actions create the conditions for improvement. They should not be confused with improvement itself.

Start with the difference you want to see

One way of addressing this is to think about the impact you want to see at the beginning of the improvement process.

Leaders should therefore ask not just “What are we going to do?” but “What do we expect to be different because we have done it?”

Take attendance: the intended impact might ultimately be an improvement in overall attendance and a reduction in persistent absence.

But leaders might also expect to see particular groups attending more regularly, families engaging differently with the school and identified barriers being addressed more quickly. Those expectations matter because they give leaders something against which to evaluate progress.

A useful sequence might therefore be: priority - root cause identification - action - expected impact - evidence - evaluation.

Crucially, the final stage should be capable of changing what happens next. If the expected impact is not emerging, the answer should not automatically be to continue the original actions with greater determination.

Sometimes the action needs to change. Sometimes we need to ask ourselves whether we identified the right root cause.

Don’t wait to analyse impact

This creates another challenge. Some of the outcomes schools seek take time to materialise. Leaders cannot introduce an improvement strategy in September and wait until the end of the academic year to decide whether it’s worked.

This is where identifying early indicators of impact becomes important. Imagine a school seeking to improve writing outcomes. End-of-year attainment might be an important measure of success, but leaders will need evidence much earlier.

They might expect to see increasing confidence in teachers’ subject knowledge, greater consistency in how writing is taught, improvements in the quality of pupils’ work and particular gaps beginning to narrow. These don’t replace the ultimate outcome. They help leaders determine whether they are on the right trajectory towards it.

It changes the conversation around improvement planning from “Have we completed the actions?” to “Are we seeing the changes we expected to see by this point?” That’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

Improvement plans should be flexible

It also brings us to another key point: a good plan should provide direction without preventing leaders from responding to what they learn.

If evidence shows an approach is having less impact than expected, adapting the plan isn’t evidence of weak implementation. It may demonstrate precisely the opposite: leaders are evaluating impact and responding intelligently.

Equally, an action marked as complete should not necessarily disappear from view. Completion may simply mark the point at which evaluation becomes most important. The training has happened. What changed? The intervention has been introduced. Who’s benefiting? The new approach has been implemented. Is it consistent?

These aren’t questions designed to create additional workload. Used well, they should help leaders concentrate attention on what matters and stop doing things that are generating activity without sufficient benefit.

A different question for September

As schools enter a new academic year, there will inevitably be new challenges alongside familiar ones. Leaders will make difficult decisions about where to focus limited time, energy and resources, and improvement plans will play an important role in providing clarity and direction.

The argument is not that we need fewer actions simply for the sake of having shorter plans, nor that every action must immediately produce a measurable outcome. Rather, it’s about maintaining a disciplined connection between what we do and why we are doing it.

So, as leaders review their priorities this September, perhaps every significant action on an improvement plan should be accompanied by two questions: what do we expect to be different because of this - and how will we know?

Professor Michael Green is head of quality improvement planning at Buckinghamshire New University. He is on X at @Michael_S_Green

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