Let me dispense with the suspense from the outset: a ten-year plan for education is not only necessary, it’s absolutely do-able. The problem for frustrated professional organisations and ambitious policymakers alike is that being ‘vision-led’ won’t deliver it.
It’s easy to convince ourselves we have the answer; if only others shared our vision, we could revolutionise young people’s lives! That kind of thinking makes it easy to dismiss failure as someone else’s fault, but it misses the important and unavoidable fact that practical solutions rarely work first time ‘in the wild’.
In my experience, it takes years to get a new solution ready for prime-time. We can do a pilot; get an efficacy study. Phew, job done, right? Well, no. The solution still needs to be refined in a range of contexts that differ from the pilot. There may be supportive leadership at the pilot site, but the solution also needs to work where leadership is focused on other things. We must build new processes so the solution can be rolled out at a reasonable cost. And build a team. All in all, a successful pilot only gets you about a quarter of the journey to your destination.
