There is a comforting promise woven into almost every new leadership framework. If we follow the steps faithfully enough, implement with sufficient precision and remain true to the model, improvement will surely follow.
It is an attractive proposition, and perhaps never more so than now. School leaders are expected to navigate extraordinary complexity while projecting confidence, clarity and certainty.
They lead through financial constraint, workforce instability, shifting policy landscapes and increasingly diverse pupil needs, all under the constant gaze of accountability.
The rise of the framework
It is hardly surprising that frameworks have become so popular. They offer the reassurance that, amidst the uncertainty, there is at least a map.
Of course, over the past decade, education has become remarkably adept at producing them. There are frameworks for implementation, instructional coaching, curriculum design, behaviour, attendance, professional development, leadership, wellbeing and almost every other aspect of school life.
Many are excellent. They distil decades of research into accessible principles and provide a shared language that has undoubtedly improved professional conversations.
The problem is not that frameworks exist.
It is that we have begun to confuse them with leadership itself.
Plotting your own course
Leadership has never been about faithfully following someone else’s map. It has always been about deciding how that map should be interpreted when the terrain beneath your feet looks nothing like the one printed on the page.
That distinction for us is key. It’s what led us to put together our book on leadership, Clearing the Path for School Leadership: A Journey of Head, Heart, and Hands.
One of the unintended consequences of the evidence-informed movement has been the quiet assumption that enough evidence can remove uncertainty from leadership.
We talk about implementation with increasing sophistication. We discuss fidelity, active ingredients and implementation drivers. We search for the approach with the strongest evidence base, believing that if we can simply implement it well enough, the desired outcomes will inevitably follow.
Yet schools stubbornly refuse to behave like laboratory conditions.
Back in the real world
A behaviour policy that transforms one school can generate resistance in another. A coaching programme that flourishes under one leadership team quietly disappears under the next. Curriculum models celebrated in one context fail to gain traction elsewhere.
The evidence has not suddenly become wrong. Rather, it has encountered the awkward reality that schools are not collections of interventions. They are communities.
Margaret Wheatley argued that organisations resemble living systems far more than machines. Schools remind us of this every day. They evolve. They adapt. They surprise us.
Their cultures are shaped not only by structures and systems but by histories, relationships, memories and identities accumulated over years. Every member of staff carries previous experiences into every conversation. Every pupil arrives with a unique story. Every community interprets change through its own lens.
It is precisely because schools are living systems that leadership resists simplification. This is why frameworks can illuminate possibilities, but they cannot make judgements on our behalf.
This is where we sometimes worry that our language around fidelity has become unhelpful.
Originally, fidelity simply meant protecting the core elements of an evidence-informed approach so that it retained its integrity. That is sensible. There is little value in claiming to implement instructional coaching while quietly abandoning the very features that make coaching effective.
Increasingly, however, fidelity appears to have acquired a moral dimension. Leaders speak as though adapting an approach is evidence of weakness rather than expertise. The conversation shifts from asking “What does this school need?” to “Are we implementing this correctly?”
Those are not the same question.
Expertise and flexibility
Professional judgement has always involved adaptation. Indeed, adaptation is one of the defining features of expertise. An experienced teacher does not deliver every lesson identically simply because consistency matters. Just as an experienced surgeon does not perform every operation exactly the same way – because every patient is different.
Expertise lies not in rigid replication but in knowing which principles remain constant and which require adjustment. Why should educational leadership be any different?
Ronald Heifetz distinguished between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems can usually be solved by applying existing expertise. Adaptive challenges require people to rethink assumptions, interpret uncertainty and exercise judgement because the solution is not immediately obvious. Most of what occupies school leaders falls firmly into the second category.
Culture cannot be implemented.
Trust cannot be mandated.
Professional relationships cannot be reduced to checklists.
Judgement calls
No framework can tell you exactly how to rebuild confidence after a difficult Ofsted inspection, support a grieving member of staff, or respond to community tensions. These moments demand something far richer than procedural compliance.
They require leaders who can read situations carefully, weigh competing values and make thoughtful decisions despite incomplete information. In other words, they require judgement.
Perhaps this is why the best leaders rarely talk about frameworks during the moments that matter most.
They listen before they decide. They notice what others overlook. They ask difficult questions rather than reaching immediately for familiar solutions. They understand that evidence is something to think with, not something that thinks for them.
Viviane Robinson has argued that effective leadership depends upon integrating research evidence with deep contextual knowledge and relational expertise. Gert Biesta makes a similar point from a different perspective, reminding us that education is inherently a moral practice.
Evidence can help us understand what is likely to happen under certain conditions. It cannot tell us what is worth pursuing or whose interests should take precedence when values collide.
Those decisions remain profoundly human. Which is precisely why they remain leadership decisions.
The invisible effects of framework focus
We sometimes wonder whether our enthusiasm for frameworks has had another, less visible consequence. We may inadvertently be deskilling the very leaders we hope to develop.
If every challenge is accompanied by a toolkit…
If every decision is reduced to a sequence of implementation steps…
If every leadership conversation becomes an exercise in demonstrating fidelity…
...then where exactly do leaders learn to think?
Knowledge undoubtedly matters. Research matters. Implementation matters. But professional expertise has never simply been the accumulation of knowledge. It is the capacity to exercise wise judgement when knowledge alone proves insufficient.
Pattern recognition
Gary Klein’s work with firefighters, military commanders and emergency physicians also demonstrated that experts rarely make decisions by mentally working through checklists. Instead, they recognise patterns, interpret subtle cues and adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. Their expertise lies not in following rules but in knowing when the rules no longer quite fit the situation before them.
We believe educational leadership deserves to be understood in much the same way.
Let us be clear. None of this is an argument against frameworks. Quite the opposite.
The best frameworks sharpen our thinking, expose our assumptions and prevent us from overlooking important evidence. They provide valuable maps, particularly for leaders early in their careers. They create shared language and coherence across organisations.
But maps have always had limits.
A map cannot tell you what the weather feels like. It cannot warn you that the bridge ahead has washed away overnight or that the path has been altered since it was last surveyed. At some point every traveller must lift their eyes from the page and attend to the landscape itself.
Leadership is no different.
Perhaps we have spent too long searching for the perfect playbook when what we really need are leaders capable of thoughtful interpretation. Leaders who know when to hold firm and when to adapt. Leaders who can distinguish between principles that should remain constant and practices that must inevitably evolve. Leaders who understand that fidelity to purpose is often far more important than fidelity to process.
Because schools are not algorithms waiting to be optimised. They are communities of people trying to do meaningful work together. No framework, however elegant, can ever remove the responsibility, or the privilege, of deciding what wisdom demands next.
Dr Haili Hughes is an international expert in teacher mentoring, instructional coaching, professional development at scale, and teacher retention. She is Associate Professor and Associate Dean at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Professor of Teacher Mentoring and Coaching at Academica UoAS in Amsterdam.
Michael is headteacher of Longdendale High School, a principal examiner and author.
Clearing the Path for School Leadership: A Journey of Head, Heart, and Hand, by Michael Chiles and Haili Hughes is available for pre-order now.
