Sustaining school improvement initiatives: advice from educational leaders

ABSTRACT

There are reports about school improvement initiatives that have been successfully implemented and evaluated within relatively brief time scales. However, many initiatives do not survive over longer terms. Our purpose in this study was to identify successful strategies for achieving long-term school improvement. We interviewed 12 leaders at four educational sites. We adopted complex adaptive systems perspectives to analyse the interview transcripts, provide rich descriptions of contexts, illustrate examples of practices, and synthesise participants’ accounts to highlight key areas for attention and action. Participants described purposeful programme selection with clear goals, strategic staff leadership and continuous professional education, accountable professional networks, data sharing and feedback, time and resource management, distributed multilevel leadership, and a supportive school culture. We recommend adopting a complex adaptive systems perspective to communicate and facilitate processes of change, including planning, enacting, and evaluating school improvement as a continuous long-term process rather than as an end product of any singular initiative.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable school improvement
• distributed leadership
• culture change
• complex adaptive systems
• continuous evaluation

Introduction

Schools foster students’ academic, social, and emotional growth in keeping with ever-changing societal needs. To achieve this broad mandate, schools engage with improvement initiatives such as wellbeing programmes (Humphrey et al., 2010), anti-bullying programmes (Skrzypiec & Slee, 2017), literacy development programmes (Townsend & Bayetto, 2021), teacher professional education programmes (Desimone et al., 2002; Garet et al., 2001), health and lifestyle improvement initiatives (Bartelink et al., 2018; Jones & Verity, 2022), and so on. However, despite substantial investments of time, staff enthusiasm, and economic resources, many school improvement initiatives fail to sustain beyond initial implementation phases (Fullan, 2005; Trombly, 2014). The loss of expected gains, invested resources, and stakeholder commitment due to poor sustainability of initiatives has been a continuous concern of researchers ranging from Goodman and colleagues’ (Goodman et al., 1993; Goodman & Steckler, 1989) investigations about programme institutionalisation to contemporary research highlighting that similar problems continue to exist. For example, a systematic review by Asada et al. (2023) of the sustainability of nutrition and physical activity interventions in early childcare settings identified that only 28% of implementation designs used a theory or model to guide evaluation, whilst only 24% considered factors related to sustainable implementation.

The state Department for Education (2022) advises that school improvement is about improving educational outcomes for every student. In this article, we adopt a broad view that conceptualises school improvement as planning, implementing, monitoring, and adapting proven effective initiatives that better address the intellectual, physical, social, and emotional needs of students, staff, and associated education stakeholders. As Hargreaves and Fink (2006) pointed out, leading and sustaining change in schools is extraordinarily difficult, with marginal effects observed in various settings (Chambers et al., 2013; Hargreaves & Fink, 2003, 2004; Preiser et al., 2014; Trombly, 2014). Indeed, Fullan (1992) observed that school improvement initiatives fail more often than they succeed. Examples include the fading presence of arguably well-designed initiatives such as the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme in the United Kingdom (Humphrey et al., 2010; Wigelsworth et al., 2012, 2013) and KidsMatter in Australia (Askell-Williams et al., 2013). Unfortunately, a typical approach to education programme evaluation is to collect data about relatively short-term student outcomes that have occurred in response to relatively short-term programmes (Cooper et al., 2015). Follow-up assessments of system changes, when initial funding and impetus have dissipated, are rarely conducted with school staff “to evaluate the maintenance of improved teaching quality or sustained use of evidence-based curriculum components after the intervention trial” (Bierman et al., 2013, p. 1194; Shelton et al., 2018). For example, Newmann et al. (2001) noted with concern that many schools seemed to be engaged in a large and fragmented circuit of activities that lacked coherence. Newmann et al. used hierarchical linear modelling to identify a negative association between poor instructional programme coherence and lower student achievement. One view of instructional programme coherence is of coherence between initiatives. A complementary view is that programme coherence also has a time dimension. Lack of instructional programme coherence over time is a sustainability problem. Improvement initiatives need to survive in order to yield their desired results because time-limited improvements lead to time-limited results (Cooper et al., 2015; Fixsen et al., 2005).

Defining sustainability of school improvement initiatives

Sustainability of school improvement initiatives can be understood as the continuation of an intervention, practices, or a programme after the initial implementation phase or funding has ended (Lennox et al., 2018; Wiltsey Stirman et al., 2012). “Sustainability means holding the gains and evolving as required – definitely not going back” (Maher et al., 2010, p. 6). Fullan (2005) defined sustainability as “the capacity of a system to engage in the complexities of continuous improvement” (p. ix). For instance, the introduction of a new improvement initiative into a school may lead to various changes in the school system, such as policy change, change in teaching practices, changes in the physical and social environments of the school, re-direction of resources, employment of fresh staff, and formation of community groups. Changes will continue to occur as the school system organises and re-organises in response to feedback until the school is able to continue with its day-to-day operations that have adapted to the change initiative. Improvement initiatives might fail to sustain in schools due to the inability of designers and implementers to adapt to emerging and continuous change in schools.

Features of sustainable implementation of initiatives

Literature reviews, frameworks, factors, and checklists for supporting sustained implementation have been developed by previous authors, including early work by Goodman et al. (1993) that focused upon the concept of institutionalising educational change, Mancini and Marek’s (2004) work in community-based interventions, investigation of behaviour support interventions by McIntosh et al. (2011), research in public health settings by Schell et al. (2013), Hitt and Tucker’s (2016) review of influences on student achievement, and a review of sustainability in health care practices by Lennox et al. (2018).

It is worth noting an overlap between school improvement and health settings with respect to achieving sustainable initiatives. For example, Maher et al. (2010) produced a model and guide for sustainable implementation in the United Kingdom National Health Service. The model included the three core components of process, staff, and organisation, with each component further delineated into subcomponents requiring attention. An example from the United States is provided by the Program Sustainability Assessment Tool proposed by the Centre for Public Health Systems Science (Luke et al., 2014; Schell et al., 2013), which directs attention to four components applicable to community-based interventions, namely, understand, assess, review, and plan. We have found little evidence of broad dissemination of practitioners’ use of such guides, although they might be in use but not reported beyond local contexts.

Recently, Koh and Askell-Williams (2021) canvassed the education and health sciences literature using search terms such as sustain, maintain, and long-term success. Over 130 papers were screened, from which 100 components of sustainable implementation were identified. The authors noted that, although a wide selection of components was identified in their scoping review, individually, none of the reviewed articles contained a broad spectrum of components. In tandem with the literature screening, Askell-Williams and Koh (2020) conducted 70 interviews with staff working in education settings. From these two data sources, the authors undertook thematic coding, qualitative data reduction (Miles & Huberman, 1994), and principal components analysis to create a framework of themes and components associated with sustainable implementation in educational settings. The framework, displayed in Table 1, contains six frequently cited and conceptually salient systemic themes, namely, organisational culture, personal dispositions, implementation processes, organisational capacity, data collection, and change orientation. Column 2 in Table 1 shows how the six themes are expanded into components, while Column 3 illustrates practical exemplars of each component. The underpinning tenet of Askell-Williams and Koh’s framework is that change occurs in complex adaptive systems, specifically taking advice from Rutter et al. (2017) that, instead of just focusing on end-stage outcomes, it is necessary to identify if and how an initiative reshapes all facets of a system in favourable ways. Fundamentally, if a system does not change to enable the client’s or student’s need to be satisfied, the initiative has not been successfully sustained.

Table 1. Exemplars of components of sustainability.

Theme	Components	Exemplar participant statements
Organisational culture	Site improvement	It (wellbeing) ties in with our culture and legacy
Personal dispositions	Agency	I did a session connecting this with TfEL (Teaching for Effective Learning) strategies to encourage teachers to frame their thinking around positive education
	Resilience	You are doing a million things and you think “Do I have to do that again?!”
Implementation processes	Programme selection	The “why” first of all, to be able to talk about the “why” and have enough evidence
	Planning	The earlier you embed it into the strategic plan, the better
	Leading	Leadership supports us
	Commitment	We’ve got vision, commitment, and passion
	Involvement	The on-going problem is teachers’ involvement, the “buy-in” – some never will, and others will do anything anytime
	Teams	They need to work as part of a group where they can get together and plan activities together
Organisational capacity	External connections	So, we align ourselves with organisations that we trust and believe in
	Capabilities	Emma (principal) hired us for our expertise and doesn’t micromanage us
	Funding	We are being clever with our money
	Staffing	They have chosen certain people with certain attitudes to learning, a certain expectation of education, a certain involvement in their own professional world
	Time	Can deliver lots of curriculum content in a small amount of time by weaving it all together
Data collection	Implementation data	The parents came up to me and told me what their kids had done and what they brought home
	Outcomes data	Then get continual feedback, keep nurturing it
Change orientation	Adaptability	Being open to adaptability is the key
	Processes	One of the first jobs was to write a school environmental management plan, and part of the process was to connect everything we do into the school curriculum
	Relationships	I can always come back to them, and I knew I had their support
	Site renewal	You see schools that got re-invented at the whole-school level

A complex adaptive systems perspective

However, a persistent problem of poor sustainability of school reform initiatives suggests that literature reviews, frameworks, and checklists such as those discussed above fail to be operationalised at scale in schools and health care settings. For example, Alazmi and Alazmi’s (2023) review of current literature indicates a continuing gap between researchers and policymakers, which, in turn, translates into limited reforms by practitioners. Reasons for this impasse include policymakers’ and practitioners’ lack of knowledge about contemporary research, which may be exacerbated by lack of access to such research along with unfamiliarity with the language used in research papers. In addition, practitioners might consider research topics to be irrelevant to their real-world practices. One approach to addressing these failures is to focus more strongly on reporting the language, perspectives, and experiences of practitioners. A second approach is to bring to the forefront of research design, data collection, and analyses information about the complex adaptive systemic nature of the research settings.

Schools are complex adaptive systems comprised of networked human relationships that are interconnected in non-linear ways (Mason, 2008; McQuillan, 2008). In a complex school system, agents (e.g., students, teachers, parents, volunteers) continually co-learn and self-organise to provide feedback to each other (Fidan & Balci, 2017). Processes of individual and organisational learning lead to emergent changes that drive sustainable improvements (Hubers, 2020). In this sense, emergent means iterative refinement of new knowledge and adaptations of skills and practices that replace a school’s previous patterns of behaviour, which, in turn, lead to a new initiative persisting in a school. The greater the rate of feedback that loops through a school system, the greater the adaptability of a school system to respond to change (Trombly, 2014).

When a new programme or innovation is introduced to a school, dynamic interactions between staff shape emergent behaviours that lead to system stress, which, in turn, triggers change (Hawe et al., 2009; McQuillan, 2008; Rosas, 2017). Furthermore, as a school system evolves in response to a change agenda, the initial purpose and form of an initiative may not be relevant 2, 5, or 10 years later in the same school. Schools improve by engaging collectively in the continuous acquisition and application of new knowledge and skills (Laferrière et al., 2012; Rosas, 2017). Sustaining improvement initiatives in schools is therefore a developmental process whereby schools and programmes need to adapt flexibly to the changing needs of school communities.

School improvement initiatives may fail to sustain because they are implemented on schools, instead of with schools (Daly-Smith et al., 2020). For example, some programmes emphasise programme fidelity, such as teachers’ close adherence to prescribed pedagogical approaches and curriculum content. Strict adherence to implementation manuals might erroneously expect teachers to be compliant implementers of predetermined curricula despite their professional knowledge about the particular social, emotional, and learning needs of their students (Bierman et al., 2013). Typically, a programme fidelity approach takes a one-size-fits-all perspective; namely, that what worked in one school should also work in another (e.g., see evaluations of the SEAL programme, Humphrey et al., 2010; Wigelsworth et al., 2012, 2013). A one-size-fits-all perspective is at odds with best practice in education that calls for adaptive student-centred individualised curricula (Wang & Lindvall, 1984). As Trombly (2014) argued, school improvement is not well served by staff, students, and stakeholder compliance. Rather, dynamic and emergent change emanates from staff exercising their commitment and expertise.

Schools are part of larger systems such as the state’s education system (Keshavarz et al., 2010). Sustainable school improvement cannot occur in isolation from micro and macro school systems (McQuillan, 2008; Preiser et al., 2014). Sustainability is influenced by programmes and by settings, including historical events, political climates, governance mandates, assessment mandates, resource limitations, and community expectations (Schell et al., 2013). Hargreaves and Goodson (2006) documented external influences of economic and demographic shifts that produce forces of change (waves of reform, changing student demographics, teacher generations, leadership succession, and school interrelations). A clear example of external systemic influences on school improvement is provided by Ngendahayo’s (2014) discussion of barriers to education reform in Rwanda, such as competing visions about the purposes of assessment (such as favouring summative assessment of learning over formative assessment for learning), very large class sizes leading to limited individualisation of the curriculum, and impoverished student prior learning (e.g., students from socially and academically deprived households).

Leading sustainable school improvement

School leaders drive change (Bennett et al., 2007; Fullan, 2006; Gaikhorst et al., 2017; Grootenboer et al., 2019; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Harris et al., 2019; Hitt & Tucker, 2016; Schneider & Somers, 2006; Stoll & Kools, 2017). They influence school directions, allocate resources, and model staff interaction and implementation behaviours. These actions influence not only short-term implementation goals but also the long-term sustainability of school improvement initiatives.

Hitt and Tucker’s (2016) systematic literature review highlighted the central position of school leaders as agents of school effectiveness. Significantly, school leadership is not located only in people with formal positions of authority. Harris (2008) described leadership as “the co-production of knowledge, rather than leadership as a role, position or a set of competences” (p. 31), where leadership is distributed and “assumes a set of direction-setting and influence practices” (Leithwood et al., 2007, p. 38). In other words, leadership is an emergent product of conjoint agency when a group or a network of people interact formally and informally to solve sets of problems due to change, perturbations, or the introduction of a new event (e.g., new initiative, change in policy, budget cuts, bullying in school).

Rationale for the study

The present article is a microlevel qualitative companion to the abovementioned macrolevel literature review and quantitative study by Askell-Williams and Koh (Askell-Williams & Koh, 2020; Koh & Askell-Williams, 2021). Here we present more detail about the data gained from a selection (due to space limitations) of interviews with practising educational leaders, with a view to more fully illustrating the components of the authors’ 2020 framework with examples of contextual backgrounds, curriculum initiatives, and practitioners’ advice.

We proceed from four premises flowing from the above introduction, as follows:

• Sustainability of school improvement initiatives is an ongoing and widespread problem. Initiatives that are introduced without long-term adaptive systemic change lead to wasted human and economic resources, staff change fatigue, and stagnant organisations.

• The nature of schools as complex adaptive systems is often overlooked in implementation designs and processes, arguably due to short-term funding and evaluation cycles, lack of appreciation about the need to plan and implement processes to support sustainability, and/or lack of knowledge about how to plan and implement processes to support sustainability.

• Successful school improvement requires distributed leadership that is centred on co-learning.

• Previous frameworks for sustainable implementation show limited evidence of translation from research to practice, suggesting that more attention needs to be given to practitioners’ perspectives, language, and contexts.

We propose that practitioners’ accounts of planning and processes that have supported sustained school improvement initiatives can build a bridge between researchers’ and practitioners’ knowledge. Accordingly, in the study reported in this article we adopted a complex adaptive systems perspective to analyse and synthesise a diverse sample of educational leaders’ experiences and advice about factors that have enabled the sustainability of improvement initiatives in their own organisations. Achieving sustainability of new initiatives is an important but understudied problem in the fields of knowledge translation and science-to-population impact (e.g., see Spoth et al., 2013).

Method

Overview

Using a set of three focus questions as a guide, Askell-Williams and Koh (2020) audio recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded, using NVivo (Version 12; QSR International, 2018), 70 interviews with educational leaders and practitioners in Australia. We revisited the transcripts of the 70 interviews and identified 12 transcripts from educational leaders at four sites for the additional analyses reported in this article. The 12 transcripts contained extensive narratives that indicated that the participants were good social informants (Payne & Payne, 2004) for our research study. Three sites are schools, whilst the fourth site provides educational services and resources to schools.

Ethics

Ethics approvals for the interviews were granted by the lead University’s Social and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee (Project Number 6928), the state Department for Education (Project Number CS/15/00003-1.28), and site principals/directors.

Recruitment procedures

This section summarises the methods used in the original 2020 study by Askell-Williams and Koh. Convenience and snowball sampling methods were used to contact, via email, school principals to determine their willingness to be involved in the study. Site leaders who agreed for their organisation to participate in the study were asked to nominate staff who were formally and informally involved in a school improvement initiative. Nominees were contacted by email with information about the study and a request for an interview. Nominees who responded to the email request were contacted to arrange an interview at their school during regular school hours. Prior to each interview, participants provided verbal and written consent to participate in interviews and for the resulting de-identified interview transcripts to contribute data to the production of scholarly articles.

Research sites were de-identified. Interviewees were given pseudonyms at the point of data collection so that there was no connection between the interviewee’s identity and their interview transcript.

Participant characteristics

The interview transcripts from four male and eight female participants were selected for the present study. Their roles varied from formally elected leadership positions (e.g., school principal, programme director) to parents and teachers with informal leadership roles who engaged in day-to-day teaching and implementation of the initiatives. Table 2 summarises the characteristics of participants, sites, and school improvement initiatives in this study. It can be seen from Table 2 that we accessed leaders at various levels of school systems with the intention of accessing diverse perspectives in line with our view that leadership can occur at all levels of an organisation.

Table 2. Characteristics and descriptions of participants, sites, and initiatives in this study.

Site	Site description	Initiative type	Interviewee ^a	Gender	Role
A	The primary school campus of a private (fee-paying) boys-only Catholic school	Environmental Management	Mary	Female	Director of teaching and learning
			Caleb	Male	Maintenance manager
			Sue	Female	Sustainability officer
B	The education team from a national organisation consisting of a mix of state and regional government, community, and non-governmental agencies whose priorities are in natural resource management	Education for [environmental] Sustainability (EfS)	Alex	Male	Education manager
			Ben	Male	Regional coordinator
			Deb	Female	Acting education coordinator, registered teacher
C	A public (state-funded) co-educational secondary school at a coastal suburb consisting mostly of least disadvantaged communities	Positive Education	Kate	Female	School principal
			Liz	Female	School deputy principal
			Amy	Female	Programme committee lead, teacher
D	A private (fee-paying) girls-only non-denominational Christian school for early learning to secondary schooling that also provides boarding options for girls living away from home	Fostering Students’ Wellbeing	Pam	Female	Leader of wellbeing
			Walter	Male	Curriculum coordinator
			Emma	Female	School principal

^a Names are pseudonyms.

Data collection

Participants were invited to identify, from their own perspectives, their own school improvement initiatives that were achieving desired results and that had been sustained over time. No attempt was made to direct interviewees towards the researchers’ concepts of success or sustainability. Interviews were conducted by two trained research officers. The interviews were based on the following three focus questions:

(1)	What, in your opinion, were and are the factors that enable the initiative at your school to be sustained?
(2)	What were the main challenges for continuing the initiative?
(3)	What advice would you give to other schools about how to go about sustaining new initiatives?

The focus questions were used as conversation starters and to guide the interview process. Interviewees could take any direction the focus questions generated. On average, each interview lasted 1 hr.

Coding framework

Audio recordings of the interviews were uploaded to NVivo (Version 12) and transcribed. Opinions, learning experiences, and strategies for maintaining improvement initiatives in schools were deductively and inductively coded using Askell-Williams and Koh’s (2020) framework (see Table 1). Inductive coding responded to additional concepts raised by participants that were not captured by the initial coding framework.

Results

In this section, we describe each site context and present illustrative examples of practices taken from the interviews with participants. Narrative quotes from the participants are presented in their edited form to exclude grammatical errors, pauses, false starts, and sounds.

The four research sites

Site A

Site A is a primary school campus of a private (fee-paying) boys-only Catholic school with 350 enrolled students and 38 staff members. Site A was established in the 1950s with a commitment to Christian education. Site A has a strong community focus, which is included in its mission statement. For the purposes of our study, the school principal nominated the school’s successfully implemented and sustained environmental awareness and management programme. The impetus for the environmental initiative came from the teachers’ and parents’ desire for the boys to eat healthy food. It started as a school garden project and expanded to include kitchen (cooking), waste management, and wetland programmes. These programmes are incorporated into the school’s strategic plan, culture, curriculum, teaching practices, and physical environment. Interviewees expressed a strong moral, social, and ethical rationale for their environmental awareness and management programme: “It’s not just about the school, because it’s actually making our boys responsible citizens for the future; that they are going to make good decisions” (Mary, Director of Teaching and Learning).

A call for expressions of interest in the programme led to one parent to advocate for a vegetable garden. One of the earliest actions taken by the school leaders was to form a garden committee:

I think one of the really important things we did was to start that garden committee. Meeting every month, that was really great! So, I never felt alone out in the garden. I can always come back to them and I knew I got their support. It’s very important to have a core group of people to drive it so that it’s not just one person. (Sue, Sustainability Officer)

Following the establishment of the vegetable garden, Sue and a Year 3 teacher went to professional education sessions about the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden project (https://www.kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/) that led to the Year 3 teacher starting a kitchen programme in the school. Professional education was offered to teachers, parents, and school staff. Following the positive progress with the kitchen and garden projects, another teacher proposed the need for a wetlands project. With the help and involvement of the community and students, that teacher designed, built, and implemented the wetlands programme, which is maintained and managed by a school wetlands committee and student group. By the 4th year, the original vegetable garden project had expanded into wetland, environmental, and waste management programmes. These programmes are maintained through the support, training, and collaboration with external agencies such as the local council, Obesity Prevention and Lifestyle programme (SA Health, 2022), Keep South Australia Beautiful (http://www.kesab.asn.au), and Natural Resources Management (2018). In the first few years, the sustainability programme was coordinated by a parent volunteer. However, by the 5th year, a paid Sustainability Officer was appointed to the school staff.

Although described as a “steep learning curve” by Mary, the school was able to continuously secure funding for their programmes. Mary and Sue learned how to write formal proposals and submitted proposals to potential funding bodies. At the time of the interview, the school had successfully won funding from all their external collaborators. Securing grant funding was cited as a challenge because it was a time-consuming effort that required the resilience of school leaders who juggled multiple responsibilities. However, Mary, who was the key person involved in preparing the grant submissions, was able to overcome this challenge because she was not working in isolation: She had the support of people in the school who shared the same vision and values:

That’s one of the hurdles, when people tell you it’s in the bag but it’s not in the bag. You are doing a million things and you think “Do I have to do that again?!” Those are the biggest hurdles. But we’ve got enough people that when you do feel flat, and you see someone else coming in and excited – we look after each other. I think that’s what makes us sustainable. We’ve got vision, commitment, and passion. They are the three big things. We are all on the same wavelength. (Mary, Director of Teaching and Learning)

Grant monies were not the only sources of funding for the school. The school is quite self-reliant when it comes to securing funding for the continuation of the initiatives:

Money is actually a benefit, not a challenge, because it forces you to not rely on others. The fund raising and garden stalls have been amazing. And with time, we started selling the products that the boys were cooking . … Most of that money has gone back into running the programme and we had money from that to put towards charity as well. (Sue, Sustainability Officer)

The school’s ability to adapt and to continuously make refinements based on learning experiences and feedback were also mentioned as factors for its successes:

I am very open with what I’m trying to achieve. If I am struggling with any project, for example, nude food, I put it out to the parents “How can we assist you to make it easier?” So, we did that. I set up displays and they gave me feedback and what they need to make it easier for them. (Sue, Sustainability Officer)

Integration of the initiatives into every part of the school system was emphasised, with particular attention to how the initiatives should be viewed as improvements and not add-ons to the work teachers are already doing:

Actually, there’s so much out there that they don’t need to re-invent the wheel, and it’s not an added extra. People can get bogged down with ticking off the curriculum that they could not see that getting the boys out there and being involved in the activities can tick off so many parts of the curriculum. You don’t need to do an assignment or a test to do that. (Mary, Director of Teaching and Learning)

The school leaders also worked at disseminating their environmental programme to associated schools, although new difficulties emerged. The associated senior school is a larger school. It was described by Caleb, the maintenance manager, as being “less of a community” because senior-school teachers follow set curricula resulting in a more time-constrained system. There was also a view that some senior-school teachers viewed activities such the environmental awareness and management programme as not being part of subject-teachers’ roles. To address this problem, the leaders in the primary school organised campus tours and offered educational sessions to staff from the senior campus. Some of these efforts have paid off:

The push just to get them to recycle their cans met with quite a bit of opposition, but they went on and it’s done. And now the kids there recycle around 90% of their cans and drink bottles. We are working on cardboard recycling bin over there as well. (Caleb, Maintenance Manager)

Overall, the interviewees in Site A attributed the successes of their environment initiative to supportive leadership, planning, and community commitment and involvement. As expressed by Mary, the school does not want to “sit in a little bubble” but instead aims to be part of the larger community. This perspective sits well with the school’s mission statement and foundation, which are based on a tradition of human and Christian education of young people. When reflecting on the sustained changes in the school, the interviewees described a culture that welcomes change, continuous learning, and innovation.

Site B

Site B is an education team from a national organisation that was formed from a mix of state and regional governments, community members, and non-governmental bodies. The main portfolio of this organisation is environmental management. Site B uses the Education for Sustainability (EfS) approach to work in schools to educate staff and students about environmental sustainability. EfS is a systems thinking approach that encourages participation, collaboration, partnership, and co-creation of emergent practices in a bid to change practice architectures (i.e., preconditions) that are detrimental to environmental sustainability (Kemmis & Mutton, 2012). The team in Site B is responsible for the promotion, recruitment, engagement, and support of schools that are interested to start or expand an environmentally associated initiative. Schools contact the education team at Site B to discuss their needs or problems they encounter. Site B then assigns an education officer to the school. The education officer’s job is to facilitate discussions, provide support, and link schools to appropriate organisations or communities that can help to build each school’s capacity to sustain their environmental initiatives.

All the leaders interviewed at Site B attributed their environmental curriculum successes to their “systems” approach. Unlike many externally delivered programmes that offer a set of activities for schools to complete, the team at Site B facilitates opportunities for schools to form relationships with people and agencies that can build each school’s capacity for success. The leaders in Site B believe that programme sustainability means working to their own redundancy. Furthermore, sustainability is not about maintaining any particular initiative, but continuing and expanding the value and vision of the overall programme:

Programmes can’t last forever, so what does sustainability mean in the long term? … it’s all about those values and principles being embedded and lasting. Even though programmes may look a little bit different … they are all contributing to that value or vision which is sustained. The aim is to make ourselves redundant; that we don’t need to be there, and schools would do this anyway. (Alex, Education Manager)

To achieve such self-redundancy, the team emphasised that the impetus for change needs to come from the schools themselves. Schools approach Site B for assorted reasons, from wanting to start a new project to just keeping them as a contact for resources. To begin, the education officer investigates the school’s needs, history, values, communities, infrastructures, and resources. Through informal conversations and formal meetings, the education officer’s main job is to gauge the school’s capacity for change and to suggest ways or alternatives that can help the school build their capacity to achieve what they want to achieve. The team in Site B sees themselves as a bridge between schools and the reservoir of knowledge, experiences, and networks that Site B staff can offer. The aim is to build networks and connections to a mass of people with diverse experiences that can better sustain programmes in schools:

So often you see a frog pond where one teacher is passionate about, got a grant, and built it, and they [the teacher] left, and the frog pond is in disrepair. Vegetable gardens are also like that – got abandoned and it’s a waste of money. I see it like an ecosystem. When you get a grant or fund and then you connect it into the business, schools, or pre-schools, if a couple of those threads are broken, you still get all those other connections to help maintain it, to hold it in there. That’s where our work is – to create those multiple connections so that the value for that work is maintained. That’s the argument we use for schools: “If you are going to do all this effort, why not get multiple benefits out of it rather than just a single benefit which then if that person leaves, you don’t have any benefit at all”. (Ben, Regional Coordinator)

Site B staff encouraged schools to look at their existing resources and to creatively use those resources to achieve a “quick win” that addressed the needs of most stakeholders. This “quick win” approach enabled the Site B team to find their “entrance” into schools. Next, the team would work to evolve and expand the original project into something more substantial through the empowerment of school agents:

There’s no point if one or two teachers want to do a frog pond and the [broader school] community cares about waste – they don’t care about the frog pond, they want to see waste cycling and waste management happening … . I would say, “Go for a quick win [waste management] and then you can steer them to the direction you want [the frog pond]”. (Deb, Education Coordinator and Teacher)

The Site B team spends considerable effort to link what they do with each school’s curriculum. Linking is important as it creates value for the schools and ensures that what they are doing is not seen as an extra task for schools to take on. Importantly, the team developed close working relationships with the state Department for Education, Catholic Education, and the Association of Independent Schools. Education officers also meet with teachers to learn how to link new initiatives with the curriculum and to share those learning experiences with their colleagues:

I had a meeting with two teachers at the start of this year to understand how they plan their curriculum for the year, and I took that back to the [Site B] team. So, when we have conversations with teachers about “You can include this into the curriculum here”, we actually understand a bit more about the process they might go through or how they plan or what things they are considering when they are running a lesson. (Deb, Education Coordinator and Teacher)

The team sees ongoing education as an essential ingredient for engaging agents in schools. Instead of providing one-off education sessions in schools, which are perceived as having little to no impact, the team offers longer term education (over school terms and years) to include hands-on workshops, practical resources, and follow-up contact to bridge the gap between awareness and practical commitment. The team reported instances where the outcomes of workshops were not merely the knowledge gained but the formation of community action groups:

We are running a 7-week course. It’s for people who want to go further with EfS. What we’ve found at the end of the course is people are wanting to come out and continue. So, they form a group and continue to work together. I think, “That’s emergent! Self-organising groups!” This is really exciting! That’s a great outcome that we didn’t expect from running training courses. (Alex, Education Manager)

Data collection and keeping records of what worked and did not work was consistently mentioned as important. The team regularly shared information amongst themselves and reflected on latest information and experiences. A co-learning process is important for the flexibility and adaptability of the team so they can continue to work in context with schools, thus mirroring the flexibility and adaptability required in school systems:

It’s in our working attitude that we are learning with schools. If you go in with that humility, that sort of sensitivity that you are not the expert and you’ve got experience with lots of sites that can be useful for schools, but we don’t know what is going to happen with this interaction and we are going to learn through that; I think that has helped with our sustainability. Because we are so responsive, we are not stuck in our ways of doing things. We keep shifting and feeling what’s the context, and how best we can deliver in the current situation. (Ben, Regional Coordinator)

The team developed tools to help schools plan and evaluate their progress. The tools themselves are not rigid. Schools have adapted them according to their situations and needs:

Part of the reason why we have the school environmental plan is to capture what’s been done because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time and you can see that this occurred, was supported, was important. (Alex, Education Manager)

One of the issues the team faced was the problem with staffing. The team consisted of 12 to 14 staff working in a mix of full-time and part-time capacities, but they were expected to deliver support to over 1,000 schools and pre-schools. To address limited staffing, the team decided to prioritise their efforts on schools that were aiming for whole-school cultural change. Schools who, during discussions with staff at Site B, indicate that they are aiming for broad culture change are seen by the team at Site B as capable of achieving long-term reform and are therefore more cost-effective, as opposed to schools who are only after short-term or immediate benefits:

If we work across the 1,200 schools and pre-schools, we can get little wins, but when you see schools that got re-invented at the whole-school level, they become like factories for pumping out kids who have the knowledge, skills, and values to live sustainably, and they also bring families into that conversation. They become very powerful entities and they are helping us to achieve our vision of having more people living in harmony with the natural world. We have a school where it’s deeply embedded in their system, now with little help from us, they are able to bring through cohorts of kids and families year after year. To me, that warrants that investment. So, if we spread ourselves too thinly and didn’t put much effort into those schools that are ready for that big shift and did lots of little bitty things instead, we’ll have less success in that cultural change space and we’ll have less of those institutions set up to create those changes in knowledge, skills, and values. (Ben, Regional Coordinator)

The team also faced challenges with attracting leadership support in schools. Two main strategies were suggested by Site B’s leaders as ways to address this problem. First, the team shared stories of successes with school leaders so that the school leaders can relate to the value of the work that was done in schools that were successful:

They [principals] are like gatekeepers of their very busy staff. If they see this as an add-on, they will be less likely to go with it but if they see it as a spark that can get kids learning and make jobs easier for teachers that can deliver lots of curriculum content in a small amount of time by weaving it all together, they are more likely to support. (Ben, Regional Coordinator)

Second, the team supported students to be agents of change. This is seen as a particularly useful strategy when leaders and parents are resistant to change:

Kids are really pushy. They can get in where staff can’t. Having a student working group or a student action group and them coming up with “What would you like to see happen in the school?”, and “What would make you more engaged with the school?” Them coming up with the ideas while we offer the youth mentoring. We can explain the process to them and then get them through the process of “How do I get leadership on board” and “How do I get funding for this”. That’s a big learning outcome for them, and when parents and school leaders see them working through these big adult processes, these school systematic processes, they give the students real credit. (Deb, Education Coordinator and Teacher)

Funding was also mentioned as a challenge, but the team’s attitude towards attracting funding was positive. Having survived for 10 years despite changes in the organisation’s structure and funding priorities, Site B is familiar with adapting to change. At the time of the interview, the leaders were seeking new sources of funding. When asked what they would do if the funding for the team ends, Alex responded:

There are threats to programmes, even long-lasting ones that are doing some of the best work in the state, we’re still subject to funding. In my mind, if that came to be, we would throw the last 3 to 4 months of our time into building a time capsule – putting in everything we’ve learned and all of our resources so that it’s not a learning again thing down the track; so, it’ll be recognised as a programme that could be picked up again. (Alex, Education Manager)

Site C

Site C is a publicly funded co-educational secondary school with over 1,600 enrolled students and 120 teaching staff. It was established in the 1950s and is located at a coastal suburb consisting mostly of least disadvantaged communities.¹ Site C’s vision is to equip young people for a bright future with a focus on developing positive individual characteristics and global citizenship. The leaders and teaching staff in the school had noticed a significant increase in “B grades” (with a concomitant decline in “A” grades), which prompted the leadership team to seek solutions:

We had a big spike in the B grades. That meant they kept getting Bs, no pressure to improve from parents. There’s the element of coasting – life’s good, don’t put yourself under pressure. When there’s pressure, anxiety levels go up, and lots of students end up needing support. (Kate, School Principal)

After discussions with colleagues and listening to success stories with positive education from other schools, the leadership team decided to implement a positive education initiative to their school. Positive education promotes explicit instruction about strategies to achieve happiness (Seligman, 2019). Associated with government initiatives to invite Professor Martin Seligman as a Thinker in Residence, positive education has gained a following in a number of Australian schools that have an interest in delivering curricula that promote student wellbeing (e.g., Positive Education Schools Association, https://www.pesa.edu.au/). To begin to develop Site C’s capacity to engage with a positive education approach, two school leaders and one teacher searched literature, spoke to colleagues, and attended a full-day professional development session at another school that had been engaging with positive education for a number of years. Subsequently, a positive education approach was formalised through inclusion in the school’s site-improvement plan,² with a particular focus on working with students to develop a growth mindset (Yeager et al., 2019).

Initially, however, the positive education initiative got off to a slow start through lack of clear direction and actions. After about 1 year, the leadership team re-convened and brainstormed ways to better incorporate positive education in the school system. The deputy principal, Liz, proposed a site-improvement model that incorporated three school priority areas. Three teams were formed to lead the three priorities, namely, interdisciplinary learning, digital innovation, and positive education. The school improvement model was endorsed by the leadership team and communicated to school staff through weekly professional learning communities sessions.

The leadership team was cognisant of the challenges they were facing and understood that embedding positive education in the school would require continuous and persistent effort over an extended period, leading to significant culture change in the school:

Positive education is in the improvement plan but [in the first couple of years] hadn’t made the translation into being a living thing that is in the school … . We understood that it’s a 5-year cultural shift. What is essential is that you have to keep telling the story, you can’t take your foot off the accelerator. (Kate, School Principal)

One of the biggest challenges the leadership team faced was to engage the teaching staff to be actively involved in the positive education initiative. Staff had diverse levels of motivation and multiple competing interests. Moreover, although attendance at weekly staff professional learning communities sessions was mandatory, attendance for the positive education team meetings was voluntary. As a result, only teachers who were enthusiastic about positive education were initially involved in the initiative:

The on-going problem is teachers’ involvement, the “buy-in” – some never will, and others will do anything, anytime. People face initiative fatigue – it’s another idea or another conference. We want to move on [with the programme], but we don’t want to overwhelm people with a million ideas at once. (Liz, Deputy Principal)

To encourage staff to participate in the initiative, the leaders included the staff in their decision-making processes:

Now the leaders are aware that staff need to see documentation to see how all [strategies taken to implement the initiative] are connected. To her credit, Kate has run google doc all year to let people speak, and I do think they [the leaders] have taken on board a lot of what people said. (Amy, Teacher and member of Positive Education team)

The positive education team recognised the importance of engaging all staff in the initiative. Hence, professional education for existing staff and induction for fresh staff were named as important strategies. Responsibilities concerning the initiative were included in the written job and person specifications when employing new teaching staff. The school follows a Teacher Learning Communities model (Australian Government Department of Education, 2021), which enables the incorporation of professional education into the weekly professional learning community sessions. One strategy used by Amy was to facilitate professional education sessions with staff focusing on how to translate positive education into classroom teaching:

What teachers want is – how will this look in my classroom, how will it help the learners in my space, how do I make it happen? So, I did a session connecting this with TfEL [Teaching for Effective Learning] strategies to encourage teachers to frame their thinking around positive education as being something they already do in many ways, and how they can reframe it. The responses that I got from connecting positive education to TfEL were positive. (Amy, Teacher and member of Positive Education team)

Although the initiative was initiated by the leadership team, the leaders were aware that the drive to embed the initiative should not be top down, including how the professional education sessions are conducted:

Everyone wants to be in control of their own bus, but if it’s top down, that will meet with resistance. Put the challenge out there, provide structures to explore, then it empowers. This is really important. (Amy, Teacher and member of Positive Education team)

Including positive education into the school’s school improvement model was also seen as an important strategy to progress student leadership and student voice in the school. One of the biggest issues the school had faced in previous years was a lack of student representation and leadership: “We looked at what is student leadership for 2018 because, clearly, the old idea of a student leadership or representative didn’t get traction with the kids” (Kate, School Principal).

Kate linked the lack of students taking up leadership roles to students’ poor resilience. Resilience is defined by the American Psychological Association (2022) as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands” (p. 1).

To address student resilience, a new model for student leadership was proposed and approved by the school’s leadership team. The model has a five-step continuum where students are encouraged to participate according to their abilities and motivations. A student may start with irregular participation, but, through a series of steps, can slowly build towards full motivation and participation, and ultimately take active leadership roles. This model was seen by the leadership team as complementing a growth mindset within the positive education initiative. As a result, a team of 50 student leaders were elected which consisted of prefects, house captains, music captains, sports captains, and international captains. The student leaders met with the school’s leadership team three times per term, during which leadership education and workshops were provided for the students. The school’s leaders were pragmatic that support would need to be given to the students at the initial stages of the programme’s development as they worked towards achieving full student leadership:

They [the students] can’t be expected to come in at top level of the leadership continuum without having learnt that you can take little bits of it, and get success, and that breeds more success. So, we [the leaders] need to work with them long enough so they can see what success looks like. We need to work behind them and put scaffolds in, because at this stage they need a lot of help to be independent. (Kate, School Principal)

When asked about advice for schools that are starting a new initiative, the school’s leaders highlighted the need for a strong rationale for initiative selection, clear strategic planning, data collection, engaging all stakeholders, culture change, and good leadership. Partnering with external agencies was also mentioned as a potential future step for sustaining the initiative in the school:

The first step is always awareness. Then, you need culture change. There have definitely been shifts in culture in the school. Compared to 6 years ago, it’s a different feel. We have different teachers, new teaching spaces with opportunities and willingness to grow. Lots more celebration and recognition when something good has happened. Databases are now growing. A more targeted, whole-school development. I would like to see more connection to external agencies and more around why this is important. I would like to see someone in leadership where this is their thing – not fragmented with other roles. (Amy, Teacher and member of Positive Education team)

Site D

Site D is a private (fee-paying) girls-only non-denominational Christian school with over 800 enrolled students. Established in the 1800s, Site D provides education from early learning to secondary schooling, offers on-campus boarding, and has a strong track record for academic excellence. Site D aims to enable girls to be the best they can be and focuses on developing relationships, responsible citizenship, and lifelong learning in its students. The leaders at Site D described their school as a values-based school with one of its founding values being kindness. The early founders of this school introduced the culture of requiring the girls to be mindful and grateful. Therefore, wellbeing, defined as “a sustainable state of positive mood and attitude, resilience, and satisfaction with self, relationships and experiences at school” (Australian Catholic University & Erebus International, 2008, p. 5) is embedded in the school’s daily business. This includes curriculum planning, policies, language, literature, structure, environment, and employee selection. Wellbeing forms the core of the school’s identity. Hence, having a strong culture that emphasises girls’ wellbeing was cited as a main reason Site D was able to successfully embed an updated wellbeing programme into the school system.

Participants at Site D proposed many reasons for the importance to the school of having an embedded and dedicated wellbeing programme. These included the worrying trend of mental health issues in young people, the changing nature of the job market, changes in family structures, uncertainties of personal and world circumstances, growth of social media, and the myriad of challenges young people will face post-school. Implementing a wellbeing programme in the school was not seen by the school and its community as an add-on, but a natural progression and evolution of the work that was already being done in the school:

Schools need to continue to grow. It’s about continual improvement. It’s about evolution and it’s about being responsive to the current context and cohort of young people we serve. I think if it’s another movement, then it’s redundant. Having wellbeing in our school is not in response to a deficit model. Schools have always cared about kids. Programmes have been called different things but now we have more information and new set of tools we can bring to the table. (Emma, School Principal)

Nevertheless, teachers in the school faced a challenge to embed wellbeing into their classrooms due to competing priorities and scheduling of extracurricular activities that reduced the time that teachers could spend with students to foster their wellbeing. Recognising these time-limiting issues, the school appointed a Leader of Wellbeing with the specific purpose of revising the school’s wellbeing framework and addressing gaps where wellbeing could be better embedded. This position sits within the senior leadership team and reports directly to the principal and school board. Pam, the appointed Leader of Wellbeing, viewed the seniority of her position as important because it gave her the authority to propose systemic improvements to school leaders and staff. In turn, school leaders viewed Pam’s employment as a significant commitment by the school towards the wellbeing initiative. However, the principal cautioned against making assumptions of success merely from Pam’s employment:

I’m sceptical when people say if a school has a director of wellbeing, it’s going to work. The reason why Pam can have some effect in what she does is because she’s part of the leadership team which she works with closely and collaboratively, and that her vision of the programme is embedded within the overall vision of the school. She’s part of that collective and she works within and through others in the school. That’s why it works. Yes, having a director of wellbeing means we invested money in it [wellbeing programme], that we value it, but the success of it will be bound to how well she’s [Pam] able to work with the collective. (Emma, School Principal)

Working with the collective (school community) was heavily emphasised by all three leaders interviewed in Site D. This emphasis was achieved through five main strategies. First, there was clear communication of vision and intent from the leaders to staff at all levels. The mission of the school was not merely written on paper: It was actioned in the school’s daily activities such as assemblies, meetings, presentations, staff inductions, and classroom teaching.

Second, staff were given adequate time and opportunities for professional education. New staff were given induction that introduced wellbeing as being part of the main pillars of the school’s learning agenda and paired with a buddy who helped their familiarisation with the school’s culture:

You can’t make staff buy in on something that they don’t believe in. So, you’ve got to pick the right package, inform the staff, and they need professional development to get them to a point where they own it. The minute you do that, it becomes self-perpetuating. When staff move out, and new staff move in, they [new staff] are indoctrinated at the beginning of the year and you give them a buddy that teaches them the school way. (Walter, Curriculum Coordinator)

Third, in addition to formal and informal professional education for existing staff, unfamiliar staff were employed in a way that sought a good fit with the school’s culture. These complementary strategies worked towards ensuring that staff at dissimilar stages of their careers and involvement with the school would agree with the school’s values and visions, as well as possessing shared personal and professional characteristics to work towards the same goals:

Whenever you employ a staff member, you better get a fit. If you talk to all of us, we sound similar and it’s not by accident. They have chosen certain people with a certain attitude to learning, a certain expectation of education, a certain involvement in their own professional world – so it is not by accident. (Walter, Curriculum Coordinator)

Staff were also employed for what they could offer to advance the school’s vision. For example, Pam was employed for her experience and expertise not only as a teacher but also as a qualified psychologist. Having access to expert advice and skills was seen by the leaders as important for the continual improvement of the school.

Fourth, leaders engaged with staff who were potential champions for driving change. For example, Pam had an idea about including daily one-to-one student–teacher wellbeing conversations. She spoke to the teaching staff about her idea and engaged seven teachers who were interested to pilot the idea with their students. These teachers were termed by Pam as “influential teachers” because they were able to influence, through examples and attitudes, their colleagues. The seven teachers piloted the new strategy while Pam collected and shared feedback from the teachers and their students. The idea gained traction, and eventually more teachers adopted wellbeing conversations. By the 3rd year, the middle and senior schools practised the “wellbeing conversation” strategy.

Fifth, leaders were able to engage their staff to work collectively because they modelled desired behaviours themselves, in how they supported their staff and in how they monitored and measured staff’s progress with the initiative:

I attend faculty meetings every term. I get to go into small groups with teachers. It’s a huge commitment but I made that commitment because it’s a way for them to know that I value it [collective work]. You have to show that you value it, and that you care. (Emma, School Principal)

Data were collected and exchanged in the school. Staff were expected to have transparent accountability for their roles in the programme. Leaders followed up activities to ensure that progress was constantly monitored. Feedback and latest information were shared via a centralised communication portal. Leaders and staff said that they reflected on the reasons for what they were doing and how their practice aligned with the school’s vision. Planning was strategic, explicit, and intentional, as evidenced by everything the school did – from curriculum to partnerships with external agencies:

The other thing that I think we do really well is who we connect with. We are a school; we can’t be doing research all the time. So, we align ourselves with organisations that we trust and believe in. We are very intentional about the partnerships that we select and who we work with. We are very clear about the next 2 years, and we track it. We talk about our journey. It’s about always unpacking “why” – why we are doing what we are doing. (Emma, School Principal)

Adaptations to programmes driven by evidence from the literature and their own school’s data were reviewed, recorded, and communicated to all staff at all levels. Being adaptable to change was cited as an important characteristic of the staff and the school system to sustain the initiative in the school:

I’ve got 5-year-olds in my school. Can you tell me what they are going to look like in Year 10? What are they going to be doing? If we are not adaptable, then we are redundant, we are irrelevant. It’s the same with wellbeing. We think we know – the research at the moment is saying this is what we should do for young people to “flourish”, but we will continue to be informed because the environment will be different [in the future] – there will be something new that comes along and they [the students] will develop and learn differently. (Emma, School Principal)

The biggest challenge the staff faced when implementing the programme was the lack of time due to multiple competing interests and priorities. To address time and workload management, staff formed small groups to share the workload. They were also allocated time by the leadership team to work in their small groups as part of their professional education activity:

You can’t leave a staff member who has a full teaching load, a family, and everything else in life to invent things to do every day. They need to work as part of a group where they can get together and plan activities together, therefore forming professional learning communities … . By doing it together, it’s not a personal burden because they don’t have to do all that work on their own or in their own time. (Walter, Curriculum Coordinator)

Finally, when reflecting on the work they had done, both Pam and Walter acknowledged that the wellbeing programme would not have been successful if not for the staunch support and drive from Emma, the school principal:

Leadership supports us. Emma [principal] hired us for our expertise and doesn’t micromanage us. We are enabled as professionals to do what we do really well. For example, Emma will give me a day for writing. Not many employers would do that. (Pam, Leader of Wellbeing)

Synthesising the interview data

To this point in this article, we have provided context-rich descriptions from staff of four sites, each at different phases of sustained improvements in their schools. For our second phase of data interrogation, we adopted Askell-Williams and Koh’s (2020) framework to identify recurring themes in participants’ interviews (using NVivo transcription, and deductive and inductive coding capabilities). Column 3 in Table 1 contains exemplar statements from our participants that expand and illustrate each of the six themes and 20 components of the framework, showing that all components in the framework were salient across participants’ interview transcripts.

Next, we organised participants’ accounts into key emergent practices that were favoured in each site. Table 3 shows that there are recurring practices across sites; for example, working in teams and sharing responsibility, continuous professional education, development of professional learning communities, being adaptable and flexible, having a culture that welcomes change, and data collection/feedback. Participants also spoke about specific strategies that their own site did very well. These included garnering collective community action in Site A, starting with a systems perspective and shared responsibility in Site B, professional education and adaptability in Site C, and a strong focus on building a school culture in Site D.

Table 3. Site-specific strategies and their key emergent products.

Site	Strategies	Emergent products
A	Collective community action Working in teams Professional education Engaging externals Sourcing for independent sources of funding Engaging teachers and volunteers with specific expertise and backgrounds Collecting and recording data Engaging in reflective dialogue Integrating initiative into curriculum and school culture	Distributed leadership Culture change Programme-specific committees Student voice and leadership Collaboration and partnership with the wider community Professional learning communities Context-specific integrated curricula Staff and community empowerment Renewal of the student buddy system Portable gardens, cooking programme (e.g., making and selling own sauce) Environmental and waste management
B	Building relationships Resource development and sharing Utilising staff expertise Professional education Developing negotiation skills Prioritising and addressing needs Integrating initiative into the curriculum and school culture Collecting and recording data Promoting ideas to leaders Engaging students to advocate for improvement Engaging in reflective dialogue	Distributed leadership Culture change Needs-specific resources Measurement tools Professional learning communities Student voice and leadership Revised protocol for prioritising staff and resource investment Collaboration and partnership with schools, government and non-governmental bodies, and other programmes Environmental sustainability
C	Working in teams Professional education Collecting and recording data Engaging staff and students Re-distribution of staff workload Including initiative-specific criteria into job specifications Allocating time for meetings and training	Distributed leadership Culture change Programme committee Professional learning communities School improvement model New leadership structure Growth mindset poster Student voice and leadership New resources for training (e.g., how to include positive education into classroom teaching) New model for student leadership
D	Intentional selection of initiative, partnerships, and staff Utilising staff expertise Professional education Employment of staff into initiative-specific positions Engaging teachers Working in teams Sharing of information Time allocated for meetings and training Piloting new ideas Engaging in reflective dialogue Engaging expert help Collecting and recording data	Distributed leadership Culture change Daily teacher–student wellbeing conversations Professional learning communities Revised wellbeing framework Context-specific integrated curricula

Discussion

It is evident from our interview data that participants believed that certain conditions need to be present for improvement initiatives to sustain in schools. All four sites demonstrated some of the components in the sustainable implementation framework (see Table 1). However, there were varying degrees of emphases and diverse strategies attached to different components, depending on local context and the stage of implementation of each initiative at each site. For example, having implemented initiatives for 4 and 10 years, respectively, Sites A and B are examples where an initiative had become permanent parts of the sites’ cultures, including structures, communications, and daily routines. Participants from Sites A and B had observed significant cultural changes and provided instances where innovation and creative problem solving demonstrated their abilities to adapt to change while implementing new initiatives. Forming collaborative partnerships and working in groups to ensure continual succession of leadership of the selected initiatives were strongly emphasised in Sites A and B.

On the other hand, Sites C and D were at their 2nd and 3rd year of implementation, respectively, at the time of the interviews. Participants placed more emphasis on initiative selection, with both sites collecting data and evidence to justify reasons for selecting the initiatives, building new frameworks, and learning how best to implement the initiatives to meet their sites’ needs. The importance of engaging staff to be involved in the initiatives, having sufficient staff with suitable professional education to implement the initiatives, and problems with time management were mentioned. Staff in Sites C and D were learning to re-organise their school systems to develop favourable attitudes and structures for the initiatives to sustain.

Our synthesis of data from four diverse sites enabled a broad view, from which seven components of the processes of sustainable change emerged. In the next section, these seven components are highlighted and linked to extant literature.

Component 1: a clear sense of purpose

Sustaining school improvement initiatives relies on acting with clear purpose at multiple levels (Fullan, 2006). Acting purposefully requires creating a strong imperative for the adoption of an initiative, explicitly motivating and supporting staff and other stakeholders towards that mission, selecting superior quality and well-targeted professional education, and planning for staff succession. These goals can be achieved through the selection of the most appropriate initiatives to shape the current school conditions, and through the development of collective ownership (Marishane, 2016). The leaders in our study were cognisant of the reasons underlying their goals and were constantly reflecting upon and evaluating their decisions. In other words, they were self-regulating (Zimmerman, 2000) and committed to an ongoing process of problem solving and solution generating (Fullan, 2006).

Participants also spoke of a shared moral purpose, which finds similarity with Kerr’s (1981) early philosophical analysis about dimensions of good quality teaching, and recent analyses of principals’ leadership by Townsend and Bayetto (2021). In contrast, regular changes in purpose and direction lead to incoherence both between programmes, and, over time, leading to loss of staff expertise, efficacy, and motivation to try something new (Newmann et al., 2001).

Component 2: strategic staff leadership and management

Stoll and Kools (2017), in their review of articles about sustainable school improvement, argued that “modelling and growing learning leadership” (p. 11) is one of seven action-oriented dimensions associated with sustainable school improvement and actions against their purpose. Modelling and fostering leadership strategies were demonstrated by the leaders in our study, who showed in-depth knowledge of their staff members’ experiences, capabilities, attitudes, motivations, expectations, and engagement. Participants’ accounts of their schools’ practices reinforce the overlap between the actions of leaders, such as described by Hitt and Tucker (2016) and Hargreaves and colleagues (Hargreaves & Fink, 2003, 2004; Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006), and sustainable reform as described by Lennox et al. (2018).

One recurring example is provided at Sites A, B, and D, where leaders spoke of how the recruitment of staff and volunteers was targeted towards each school’s mission. Concurrently, existing staff and volunteers were given opportunities for initiative-related professional education and allocated time to develop their skills and understanding. Achieving a balance between targeted staff recruitment and professional education for existing staff is related to the stage of implementation (early, middle, late) of an initiative, as well as to systemic issues of staff attrition and recruitment. Changing staff profiles in schools means that the work of engaging old and new staff’s motivation, commitment, and professional knowledge about a school’s mission is a constant and multiperson, multilevel endeavour (Fullan, 2006). For capacity building to lead to school improvement, it must be on a broad scale that includes everyone in the school, with constant iterations over time (Marishane, 2016; Newmann et al., 2001).

Component 3: developing interactive and accountable professional networks

Interactive and accountable networks require leaders and staff who clearly communicate the school’s vision, foster collaborations and shared decision making, encourage the development of staff and student leadership groups, and promote co-learning and co-production of knowledge. Leaders in our study engaged in reflective dialogue with their staff through their commitment and involvement in learning communities. Diverse groups of people (e.g., teachers, parents, volunteers, programme designers, experts, management staff, students) with specific skills were engaged in conversations about school improvement and were given opportunities to be part of programme committees or advisory boards. Frequency of meetings differed between sites, but our participant leaders made efforts to ensure that groups and teams met frequently enough to ensure that support was given, and feedback was exchanged in a timely manner. This broad-spectrum involvement goes beyond the careful preparation of a successor for the principal or senior leaders in the school. It involves making use of formal and informal leaders who will continue the work on school improvement even in the absence of the school principal or senior leaders (Cook, 2014). Professional learning communities were mentioned by leaders in all sites in our study as vehicles for nurturing collective learning. Professional learning communities can be the building blocks of school culture and have been influential in the development of teacher collaborations and interactions in school improvement (Bowe & Gore, 2017; Lee & Louis, 2019; Vangrieken et al., 2017).

Therefore, sustaining school improvement initiatives requires school communities to work collaboratively with collegiality, trust, shared responsibility, and shared purpose. The sites investigated in our study did not achieve all these goals at all phases of implementation. However, the importance of network building and formation of partnerships were frequently mentioned and recognised. Social networks with combinations of strong ties, frequent interaction, and high expertise enable teachers to adapt to new conditions (Coburn et al., 2012).

Component 4: sharing information

As introduced in the Rationale for the study section of this paper, one intention of our study was to elicit practical advice about sustaining effective initiatives, with the underlying assumption that ineffective and/or negatively effective initiatives should not be continued. This assumption suggests that schools need mechanisms for differentiating between effective and ineffective initiatives. The conceptual framework (Table 1) underpinning this study includes processes of data collection, feedback, and adaptation, which are essential not only for sustainability but also for ascertaining whether initiatives are achieving desired outcomes and therefore are worthy of being sustained. These information-sharing processes featured in participants’ accounts of their practices.

Schools that continually improve share information. The rate of information flow, the richness of connectivity, and diversity of school agents all contribute towards a robust and sustainable school system (De Nobile, 2018b; Mason, 2008). Feedback loops arising from agentic interactions create the momentum needed for school systems to be adaptable and to self-organise. Therefore, at the sites we studied, data collection, documentation, and dissemination were critical strategies whereby rounds of feedback-adaptation-feedback informed practice. As reasoned by our interviewees, measuring, recording, and communicating the processes and outcomes of improvement efforts are necessary to ensure reproducibility of parts that work, adaptation or cessation of parts that do not work, and making efficient use of time and school resources. Feedback loops can be positive, leading to continuation, or negative, leading to adaptation or discontinuation (Murphy et al., 2021).

Component 5: time and resource management

Leaders must understand and respect staff time and resources. Consistently, leaders in our study stressed that improvement initiatives should not be viewed as an add-on to the work teachers are doing (Humphrey et al., 2010). Staff members must be given the opportunity to understand how the initiatives can enhance their teaching through systematic and systemic improvements (Shucksmith et al., 2005) rather than creating busy work for both teachers and students. This is further highlighted in De Nobile’s (2018a, 2018b) research about middle leadership, whereby middle leaders were unable to fulfil their supportive roles in school improvement initiatives due to a struggle with balancing between leading and teaching. Leaders in our study discussed strategies for achieving programme integration and coherence (Newmann et al., 2001), such as providing opportunities for professional education, renewing the curriculum to accommodate and enhance new initiatives, and realistically allocating time and staffing to achieve the goals of their initiatives.

Component 6: distributed leadership

The importance of distributed leadership is highlighted by a consensus in the literature that middle leaders play an important role in supporting school improvement initiatives (Bennett et al., 2007; Grootenboer et al., 2019; Gurr, 2019, 2023). Change should come from all directions and at all levels of the schools’ system for an initiative to sustain in schools (Trombly, 2014). The initiator(s) and original driver(s) of an initiative may come from the grassroots/bottom up (e.g., parents, teachers, students), top down (e.g., directives from the Education Department, principal, school board), or lateral (e.g., interventions from the Health Department, collaboration with universities, funding from a partner business or organisation). But for an initiative to sustain, leadership should be distributed to include multiple school agents (Keshavarz et al., 2010). This is important, because distributed leadership will give the school system the mass, such as staff and broader community stakeholders who possess knowledge about the initiative (Mason, 2008), and the necessary replicated parts, such as planning and curriculum documents (Rickles et al., 2007), to sustain the initiative in the school system when other changes occur. Distributed leadership can prevent loss of system capabilities by adapting when parts of the system change, such as government policies, staff illness/turnover, school governance, and the transition of cohorts of students with diverse needs through the year levels.

The leaders in Sites C and D, who were initiators of their initiatives, worked to engage other school agents with the initiative. In reverse, the parents, teachers, students, and volunteers in Sites A and B indicated that they would struggle to sustain their initiatives if they did not receive externally visible support and personal help from their site leaders, and involvement from external organisations. Moreover, implementation studies are showing that a lone, overworked champion cannot ensure the continuation of school improvement efforts (Lee & Louis, 2019). Schools are constantly faced with perturbations such as staff turnover and resource limitations. Under such circumstances, it is highly unlikely that improvement initiatives will survive the absence of “sole champions”. Therefore, leaders work towards their own redundancy by developing a network of agents to sustain initiatives in their absence. The ability to survive the removal of parts is a characteristic of a complex adaptive system (Rickles et al., 2007).

All sites in our study showed evidence of distributed leadership. However, the extent of distributed leadership varied. In Sites C and D, which were at earlier phases of implementation, the drive for change came more strongly from senior leadership as indicated by higher levels of involvement from the senior leadership team. In Sites A and B, which were at later phases of implementation, senior leaders’ day-to-day involvement appeared less, because the responsibility and workload for the initiatives had become distributed between various agents in the school systems. Distributed leadership entails the use of governance structures and organisational processes that empower staff and students, encourage participation in decision making, and promote shared accountability for student learning (Hallinger & Heck, 2010). Developing capacity and helping others to reach their full potential is the crux of both effective school leadership and sustainable practice (Cook, 2014; Hitt & Tucker, 2016).

Component 7: school culture: an emergent product of systemic relationships

Distributed leadership exists in a reciprocal relationship with school culture and therefore is highly contextualised (Hallinger & Heck, 2010). In the words of Hargreaves and Fink (2003), “School leadership is a system, a culture. Schools are places in which principals, teachers, students, and parents should all lead” (p. 698). Distributed leadership and school culture are emergent products from adaptive systemic relationships. Participants in our study frequently referred to their own distinct school culture.

School culture has been identified as a key explanatory variable for positive and negative teaching and learning outcomes (Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006; Harris, 2006; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991). There are variable conceptualisations in the literature of what constitutes a positive school culture, but a recent secondary analysis of data by Lee and Louis (2019) of data obtained from principals and teachers in 182 US schools concluded that academic press, student support, trust and respect, low negativity, and active professional learning communities (e.g., collective learning, shared responsibility, reflective dialogue) contributed to the concept of positive school culture. The leaders in our study reported that culture building required them to be explicit about learning expectations, make resources and education available for staff and students, demonstrate respect for the work and skills of their staff and colleagues, trust the ability of their staff to deliver what was promised, form healthy working relationships in the school that are mutually supportive, and show their involvement in professional learning communities. It is noticeable that strategies such as communication, relationships, and professional learning communities underpin the seven components that emerged from participants’ interviews.

Limitations of this study

This article examines conditions for sustainability from the perspectives of a range of educational leaders. The information gathered forms snapshots from participants’ retrospective recollections of what was done to sustain improvement initiatives in their schools. Our study could be extended by seeking the perspectives of school improvement initiatives from other school staff, students, and parents. It could also be augmented with independent on-location observation of school improvement initiatives. This study could also be supplemented if participants were to be interviewed again at different time intervals to capture changes that may occur at various stages of implementation.

Data collected during this study are limited to the questions asked during the interviews, which were focused on describing experiences and factors for sustaining initiatives in schools from the perspectives of educational leaders. Information about methodologies (e.g., how the sites collected data, when or how often data were collected) and tools used (e.g., student survey, staff interview, questionnaire) was sometimes proffered, but was not specifically targeted by our interview questions (which focused on sustainability). Therefore, this study could be extended by examining methodologies and tools various sites use to support implementation and sustainability of initiatives in schools.

The voluntary nature of participation in our study may have led to selection bias. However, a study of this nature would not seek to involve participants who were not free volunteers. Therefore, the findings of this study can provide a lens through which to consider other contexts but should not be overgeneralised.

Conclusion

This article presents a microlevel, contextual analysis of conditions for sustainable implementation of school improvement initiatives. We have showcased different strategies and described how similar strategies were used at four sites. We have presented diverse educational leaders’ accounts of how they engaged with critical tipping points in their school systems, such as engaging students and staff to work in teams/groups; participating in professional education; collecting, recording, and disseminating data; and developing collaborative relationships. These activities led to the formation of emergent products such as distributed leadership; culture change; professional learning communities; student voice; and context-specific plans, protocols, and curricula that were critical to the long-term successes of the initiatives at their sites. Our synthesis of interviews from a variety of practitioners and sites contributes authentic examples and information about how frameworks of themes and components, such as presented by Askell-Williams and Koh (2020), could be operationalised at design, implementation, and evaluation phases of school improvement initiatives by various levels of leaders, and in different contexts. Notably, when comparing the components in Tables 1 and 3, no individual participant or site generated information about all, or even most, of the components in the framework developed by Askell-Williams and Koh. Rather, participants at each site focused upon relatively few components of sustainable implementation. This indicates the utility of making a more comprehensive operational framework available to educators at planning, implementation, and evaluation stages to provide information and strategies for sustained implementation of school improvement initiatives.

The study reported in this article is an important contribution to the literature as there are few published practice-based studies that examine successful sustainability of improvement initiatives in schools through the voices of educational leaders and the conceptual lens of complex adaptive systems.

Acknowledgements

We thank all the participants who willingly gave their time and perspectives to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research and ethics conditions of anonymity and data privacy, data are not available to researchers not named in the original ethics application.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project under Grant Number DP170100237.

Notes on contributors

Gloria A. Koh

Gloria A. Koh, PhD, M(Nutr Diet), BSc(Hons), is a research officer in the School of Education, Psychology and Social Work at Flinders University. She is a qualified dietician with over 10 years’ experience teaching community nutrition and supervising community and public health intervention projects. Her research interests include early childhood health and obesity interventions, sustainability of health interventions, and health education targeting families, schools, and disadvantaged communities.

Helen Askell-Williams

Helen Askell-Williams, PhD, GradDipAppPsych, BEd (SpecEd) (Hons), BA (Psychology & Sociology), AMusA, holds Academic Status (retired) as Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology and Educational Practice in the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work at Flinders University. Her research interests include motivation, cognition, and metacognition during learning. She also undertakes research into mental health promotion in educational settings. Helen currently leads an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant project investigating the problem of the long-term sustainability of effective educational initiatives once start-up enthusiasm and funding run out.

Shyam Barr

Shyam Barr, PhD, MEd(Cognitive Psychology & Educational Practice), MEd(Leadership, Policy and Change), BSc(Psychology)/BEd (Secondary Education), is an Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. His research considers educational leaders and teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices related to self-regulated learning, and how innovative models of professional education can bring about sustained improvements in schools. Prior to his work as a researcher, Shyam has held different consultancy, leadership, and classroom teaching positions in local and international schools for over 12 years. Building on this experience, he now works in close partnerships with schools to enhance sustained implementation of evidence-based initiatives for high-quality teaching and learning.

Notes

1 The Index of Educational Disadvantage is a socioeconomic index used by the Department for Education and Child Development (2012) to allocate resources to schools to address educational disadvantage related to socioeconomic status. The most disadvantaged schools have an index of 1, the least disadvantaged have an index of 7. The Index is calculated using measures of Parental economic resources, Parental education and occupation, Aboriginality, and Student mobility.

2 Each state school principal, in collaboration with staff, is required to develop and implement a Site Improvement Plan that aligns with the Department for Education Strategic Plan (2022) and includes planned actions based on recommendations from external review processes. This includes planning; implementing evidence-based intervention strategies addressing identified targets, outcomes, and learning needs that are designed to maximise learner outcomes and achievement; and data provision.