Education Endowment Foundation:Putting Evidence to Work – A School’s Guide to Implementation

Treat implementation as a process, not an event; plan and execute it in stages.

Allow enough time for effective implementation, particularly in the preparation stage; prioritise appropriately.

Create a leadership environment and school climate that is conducive to good implementation.

• Set the stage for implementation through school policies, routines, and practices.
• Identify and cultivate leaders of implementation throughout the school.
• Build leadership capacity through implementation teams.

Define the problem you want to solve and identify appropriate programmes or practices to implement.

• Identify a tight area for improvement using a robust diagnostic process.
• Make evidence-informed decisions on what to implement.
• Examine the fit and feasibility of possible interventions to the school context.
• Make an adoption decision.

Create a clear implementation plan, judge the readiness of the school to deliver that plan, then prepare staff and resources.

Develop a clear, logical, and well-specified implementation plan:

1. Specify the active ingredients of the intervention clearly: know where to be ​‘tight’ and where to be ​‘loose’.
2. Develop a targeted, yet multi-stranded, package of implementation strategies.
3. Define clear implementation outcomes and monitor them using robust and pragmatic measures.

Thoroughly assess the degree to which the school is ready to implement the innovation.

Once ready to implement an intervention, practically prepare for its use:

1. Create a shared understanding of the implementation process and provide appropriate support and incentives.
2. Introduce new skills, knowledge, and strategies with explicit up-front training.
3. Prepare the implementation infrastructure.

Support staff, monitor progress, solve problems, and adapt strategies as the approach is used for the first time.

• Adopt a flexible and motivating leadership approach during the initial attempts at implementation.
• Reinforce initial training with follow-on coaching within the school.
• Use highly skilled coaches.
• Complement expert coaching and mentoring with structured peer-to-peer collaboration.
• Use implementation data to actively tailor and improve the approach.
• Make thoughtful adaptations only when the active ingredients are securely understood and implemented.

Plan for sustaining and scaling an intervention from the outset and continually acknowledge and nurture its use.

• Plan for sustaining and scaling an innovation from the outset.
• Treat scale-up as a new implementation process.
• Ensure the implementation data remains fit for purpose.
• Continually acknowledge, support, and reward good implementation practices.