Staff capacity is part of implementation

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s ‘Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much’ explores how having too little time or money can affect attention, decision-making and our ability to think beyond what feels most pressing. It has obvious relevance to poverty and financial pressure, but the idea of limited bandwidth is also useful when thinking about implementation in schools and colleges.

School staff do demanding work in environments that require sustained attention and frequent decision-making. They are expected to teach well, support behaviour, adapt for individual need, notice safeguarding concerns, communicate with families and colleagues, and remain regulated while responding to whatever happens around them. Planning, assessment, administration, meetings and professional development sit alongside that work.

They also have lives outside it. Financial pressure, parenting responsibilities, caring responsibilities, health, relationships and ordinary tiredness all affect the amount of capacity someone has available on any given day.

New practice adds another demand because it initially requires conscious effort. A member of staff can understand the evidence behind an approach, believe that it will help, and leave training intending to use it. In the classroom, they then have to retrieve that learning while simultaneously teaching, monitoring the room, managing time and responding to individual children. The old habit often requires less thought because it is already established.

Implementation can therefore look like a motivation problem when the greater barrier is capacity, fluency or habit.

Training alone rarely resolves that. Staff are more likely to use new practice consistently when expectations are clear, the number of changes is manageable, and there are opportunities to see, practise and refine what good looks like. Scripts, modelling, rehearsal and feedback reduce the amount of thinking required at the point of delivery. Over time, the new behaviour becomes easier to access.

The wider environment also affects whether that process succeeds. Schools often have several legitimate priorities running at once. Behaviour, curriculum, assessment, SEND, attendance and safeguarding developments may each require changes in practice, additional meetings, or new systems. The combined demand can become much greater than any single project appears to create.

When too many changes compete for the same attention, staff will prioritise. Usually they will deal first with the tasks carrying the greatest immediate consequence and return to familiar practice where there is little capacity left to think differently.

Leaders therefore need to consider the total demand created by improvement work rather than assessing each initiative separately. Sequencing change, reducing duplication and allowing enough time for practice to become embedded are all part of implementation.

There is also value in distinguishing between unwillingness and difficulty. Staff should be accountable for the quality of their practice, but challenge becomes more useful when we understand what is preventing somebody from meeting the expectation. Sometimes they need greater clarity or skill. Sometimes they need feedback. Sometimes the process itself is unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes too many things have been introduced at once.

Making aspirations accessible applies to adults as much as it does to learners. Strong implementation depends on people understanding what is expected, having the opportunity to learn how to do it and having enough capacity to use that learning consistently.

At Navigate, we spend a lot of time helping schools and colleges turn good intentions into everyday practice. That can mean simplifying expectations, supporting leaders to sequence change, developing staff skills or looking closely at where implementation is getting stuck. If that would be useful in your setting, there are free resources at letusnavigate.com, and our team is available if you want to talk through the work that you are trying to embed.