Every school has a school improvement plan. It is usually written in the summer, presented to staff in August, referenced at key meetings throughout the year, and updated the following summer. In most schools, it is a careful, well-intentioned document that articulates the school's priorities, identifies actions, assigns responsibilities, and specifies success criteria. And in a surprising number of schools, it bears only a loose relationship to what happens.
This is not because school leaders are cynical or careless. It is because the improvement plan, as a genre, has a structural problem: it describes intentions rather than processes. It tells you what a school plans to do. It does not, in itself, create the mechanisms through which those plans translate into changes in classroom practice, and it provides no built-in system for knowing whether those changes have occurred.
The gap between the plan and the classroom
The EEF's Putting Evidence to Work: A School's Guide to Implementation (2019) identifies a finding that should give every school leader pause: the impact of any educational change depends less on the quality of the intervention itself and more on the quality of its implementation. A well-chosen strategy, poorly implemented, produces no measurable effect. This matters for school improvement planning because the plan is, by definition, about the strategy — about what to do. Implementation — how to do it, at what pace, with what support, with what feedback loops — is where improvement plans succeed or fail, and it is the dimension that most plans give the least attention to.
Consider a common improvement priority: raising attainment in literacy across the BGE. The improvement plan might specify that all departments will adopt a consistent approach to teaching reading in their subject areas, that professional learning will be provided, and that the impact will be measured by improvement in ACEL data at P7 and S3. These are reasonable components. But between the plan and the outcome lie a series of questions that the plan itself cannot answer. Did the professional learning change what teachers actually do? Do teachers understand the literacy strategies well enough to apply them in their own subject contexts? Are they applying them consistently, or does the approach vary from classroom to classroom? How would you know?
The answer, in most schools, is that you wouldn't — at least not systematically. The plan specifies the input (professional learning) and the outcome measure (ACEL data). But the space between input and outcome — the daily reality of classrooms where the strategy is either being enacted or not — is often invisible to the improvement process. Viviane Robinson's meta-analysis of school leadership effects (2011) describes this as the gap between 'policy as written' and 'policy as practised', and her finding that the most effective leadership practice is 'promoting and participating in teacher learning and development' implies that leaders who close this gap — who stay connected to what is happening in classrooms rather than assuming that the plan is being followed — produce better outcomes.
Self-evaluation that evaluates
Scotland's quality improvement framework, How Good Is Our School? 4 (HGIOS4), provides a sophisticated structure for school self-evaluation. English schools work within a parallel structure — the Ofsted quality of education judgement, supported by the school's own self-evaluation, serves the same function. The framework names differ; the gap between what the plan says and what classrooms show is identical. Its quality indicators — particularly QI 1.1 (Self-evaluation for self-improvement), QI 1.3 (Leadership of change), and QI 2.3 (Learning, teaching and assessment) — describe a model in which self-evaluation is not a periodic exercise conducted for inspection purposes but an ongoing process through which schools understand and improve their own practice.
The framework is right about the destination. The difficulty is that it describes what good self-evaluation looks like without fully addressing how schools develop the capacity to do it. QI 1.1 asks whether staff at all levels engage in self-evaluation. QI 2.3 asks whether there is a culture of observation and professional dialogue. QI 1.3 asks whether leaders develop a shared vision and manage change effectively. Each of these indicators describes a condition that is necessary for genuine improvement. But the indicators are evaluative rather than procedural — they tell you what to look for, not how to build it.
The schools I have seen that do this well tend to share several characteristics. Their improvement plans are shorter and more focused than average — typically two or three priorities rather than six or seven, because they have learned that implementation capacity is finite and that trying to improve everything simultaneously means improving nothing effectively. Their priorities are connected to evidence rather than assumption — they have looked at their data, their observation evidence, and their stakeholder feedback, and they have identified the specific areas where improvement will make the greatest difference to pupils. And their plans include not just what will be done but how they will know it is working — not at the end of the year when it is too late to adjust, but at regular intervals throughout the year when the information can still inform action.
The improvement plan should be built from evidence — and most schools already have more evidence than they realise.
The monitoring problem
This is where most improvement planning falls short. The plan specifies actions and success criteria. What it rarely specifies is how the school will monitor whether the actions are being implemented as intended, whether they are producing the expected intermediate effects, and whether adjustment is needed. The result is a common pattern: a priority is identified in August, actions are taken in September and October, and the next substantive engagement with the priority happens in February or March when someone realises they need to prepare a progress report. By that point, half the year has passed, and the question of whether the strategy is working has been replaced by the question of what can be said about it.
The EEF's implementation guidance describes a four-phase process: explore, prepare, deliver, sustain. Most improvement plans are strong on the first two phases and weak on the second two. Delivery without monitoring is hope rather than strategy. And sustainability — the embedding of new practices so that they persist beyond the initial implementation period — is almost entirely absent from most improvement plans, which tend to assume that a priority, once addressed, can be replaced the following year by a new one. The result is a school that cycles through priorities annually without ever embedding anything deeply enough for it to become part of the school's settled practice.
Kim Schildkamp's research on data use in schools (2019) offers a framework for thinking about what monitoring should look like. Schildkamp describes an iterative process: set a goal, collect data relevant to that goal, make sense of the data, take action, and evaluate whether the action achieved the goal. The process is cyclical rather than linear, and it operates on a timescale of weeks and months rather than years. Applied to school improvement planning, this would mean that a school pursuing a literacy-across-the-BGE priority would not wait until the next round of ACEL data to assess progress. It would be collecting classroom-level evidence — through observation, through formative assessment data, through professional dialogue with teachers — on a rolling basis, and using that evidence to determine whether the strategy is being implemented, whether it is producing the expected effects, and whether it needs to be adjusted.
Observation as the improvement mechanism
The connection between classroom observation and school improvement is, in principle, well understood. HGIOS4 locates observation within the self-evaluation framework. The GTCS Professional Standards frame it as a component of professional learning. Every school improvement plan includes teaching and learning among its priorities, implicitly or explicitly.
If observation is designed to capture evidence rather than compliance, it becomes the primary input to improvement planning.
But in practice, observation and improvement planning are often disconnected activities. The observation programme runs on one timetable, generating individual feedback for individual teachers. The improvement plan runs on another timetable, generating priorities and actions at the whole-school level. The evidence from observation rarely feeds systematically into the improvement plan, and the improvement plan rarely shapes the focus of observation. The result is that the school has two parallel processes — observation and improvement — that ought to be integrated but are, in most cases, operating independently.
What integration looks like is relatively straightforward. If literacy across the BGE is the school's improvement priority, then a proportion of classroom observations that year should focus on how teachers are teaching reading in their subjects. The observation evidence — aggregated, anonymised, analysed for patterns — becomes the school's primary source of information about whether the strategy is being implemented. If the evidence shows that the strategies are being used consistently, the school knows it is on track. If it shows variation — some departments have adopted the approach, others have not — the school knows where to direct further support. If it shows that the strategies are being used but without the expected effect on pupil engagement, the school knows the strategy needs adjustment.
This is not a radical proposal. It is a description of what the most effective schools already do. But it requires a level of intentionality and infrastructure that most school improvement plans do not currently support. The plan needs to specify not only what the school will observe but how the observation evidence will be collected, analysed, and used. And the school needs systems that make this practical — that allow observation evidence to be recorded, aggregated, and connected to other evidence about teaching and learning without requiring heroic manual effort.
From document to process
The argument here is not against school improvement plans. It is against the assumption that writing a plan is the same as implementing one. The plan is the starting point, not the mechanism. The mechanism is the ongoing process of monitoring, evidence-gathering, professional dialogue, and adjustment that connects the plan's intentions to the classroom's reality. Without that mechanism, the plan remains what it too often is: a well-written document that describes a school's aspirations without determining whether they are realised.
An improvement plan without a professional learning strategy is a plan without a mechanism.
Schools that treat improvement planning as a process rather than a product tend to produce better outcomes — not because they choose better priorities, but because they close the gap between what they intend and what they do. Closing that gap requires evidence. And the most direct source of evidence a school has about its own practice is what it sees when it looks carefully at its classrooms.
Learning Lens exists to make that evidence cumulative rather than anecdotal. Book a conversation if you want to explore it with your team.
References
Education Endowment Foundation (2019). Putting Evidence to Work: A School's Guide to Implementation. London: EEF.
Education Scotland (2015). How Good Is Our School? (4th edition). Livingston: Education Scotland.
Robinson, V.M.J. (2011). Student-Centered Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Schildkamp, K. (2019). 'Data-based Decision-making for School Improvement: Research Insights and Gaps.' Educational Research, 61(3), 257–273.
Jamie Scobie writes from extensive experience in Scottish secondary education, including pastoral care, data for improvement, and school self-evaluation. This blog is an independent publication: he writes in a personal capacity as the creator of Learning Lens, writing about classroom observation, teaching evidence, and education policy. He speaks here only for himself and for Learning Lens, not for any employer or other organisation. He holds an MSt from Cambridge (Distinction) and a Masters from Stirling.