School improvement conversations tend to focus on what is visible: leadership frameworks, policies and accountability systems.
But the longer I spend leading international schools, the clearer it becomes that stability is rarely built through structure alone. It is built through relationships and, more specifically, through how well we notice those who sit at the edges of them.
In our work on social capital, we discovered something uncomfortable: the greatest risk to school stability is rarely found among high performers or strong teams. It is found among those who are least connected. And most of the time, we don’t see them.
The risk of disconnection
Schools are good at celebrating excellence. We notice innovative departments, strong classroom practice and confident teachers.
But when we began mapping professional relationships, a different picture emerged. Some staff were highly connected: central to conversations, collaboration and decision-making. Others were not.
These were not underperforming teachers. In many cases, they were quietly competent, committed and professional, but they were isolated.
And isolation is rarely about personality. It often comes from:
- Timetable design
- Small departments
- Being new to international education
- Being at an early-career stage
- Workload patterns that limit interaction
- Long-serving staff with limited opportunities to share expertise
This mirrors the insight behind survivorship bias: if you only study what is visible and successful, you miss what is quietly at risk. In schools, disconnection is that hidden risk.
Integrating the isolated
When we deliberately integrated isolated colleagues through mentoring, cross-department planning and committee structures, we saw measurable changes: faster professional confidence, richer collaboration and stronger retention.
In one case, a new teacher working largely alone described planning every lesson from scratch which took a lot of effort. Once paired with a colleague for joint planning, though, both workload and confidence shifted within weeks.
In another case, we noticed that a teacher in a small subject area rarely appeared in wider curriculum conversations. Their subject was successful, but they were professionally disconnected from the wider school. By inviting them into an interdisciplinary planning group, they became a useful bridge between departments, and their own sense of professional belonging increased.
Importantly, this wasn’t about “fixing†individuals. It was about strengthening the system.
This reflects a wider pattern: schools improve when professional relationships improve. The difference is where we choose to look: not at the strongest connections, but at the weakest ones.
And once you begin to notice those weaker connections, another pattern starts to emerge. Not just about who is connected, but about how people experience their work within those connections.
Because isolation links to another area impacting school stability: professional effort.
Unequal levels of effort
Performance theorist Thomas F Gilbert proposed a simple but powerful idea: Professionalism = Results ÷ Effort
In schools, this plays out clearly. Early-career teachers often expend enormous effort for similar outcomes, while experienced teachers rely on internalised routines that reduce cognitive load.
This is also why workload conversations often miss the point. The issue is not just how much teachers do, but how much effort their work requires.
Early-career teachers, without strong connections, carry the full weight of planning, behaviour management and decision-making alone. Long-serving teachers, meanwhile, see the inverse.
Yet experienced long-serving staff can face a different form of isolation if their expertise becomes embedded within their own practice and there are few opportunities to share or exchange that knowledge.
For us, this meant creating more structured opportunities for experienced colleagues to share what they know.
They were invited to lead short practice-sharing sessions, contribute to curriculum review or join cross-department planning groups, where their knowledge could influence wider school practice.
It also gave experienced staff a renewed sense of contribution. They were not being asked simply to change what they had built over many years; they were being asked to help others understand and benefit from it.
Bringing it together
These ideas of isolation and effort point towards a different understanding of leadership.
Leadership is not primarily about managing individuals. It is about shaping the ecosystem in which professionals operate.
A stable school is not one with perfect structures. It is one where:
- Isolated staff are intentionally connected
- Professional effort is respected and distributed
- Collaboration is embedded into daily practice
- Trust is strong enough to sustain learning beyond formal systems
In our work redesigning performance reviews to recognise teamwork, the shift was simple but powerful: value the relationships that make improvement possible, not just the outcomes that result from them.
If we want schools that are not just improving but enduring, we need to stop asking, “Who are our strongest teachers?†and start asking, “Who is working alone?†because that is where school stability is either quietly built or quietly lost.
Ildar Iliazov is head of projects, IT and marketing for Light Group of Schools in Kenya. He was previously the principal of a school in the group in Mombasa
To get essential briefings from ÌÇÐÄVlog magazine delivered directly to your inbox, sign up to our newsletters. And stay up to date with the latest education news via the ÌÇÐÄVlog magazine mobile app - available on and on
