Why educational impact fades out

Making positive changes to yourself is hard but to try and do it at a school, college, or even across a group of schools locally, and sustain that change, is doubly difficult.

We know from lots of research evidence, and lived experience, that best laid plans can make a jump start in education, but they can be just as quickly fade out. This is perhaps just natural. People move on, priorities change, and habits shift. But facing this sobering reality - that are efforts to improve are highly likely to fade - can help prepare us to make change that is more likely to stick better and for longer.

There is ample research about the phenomenon of 'fade out', but it is still hard to predict (and therefore plan to address). The best evaluations of school improvement usually tell us what happened across a year or two years (which can feel like an age in 'education years'!), but spanning any longer is much harder to do. On average, according to the research on 'fade out', only around 46% of an intervention's initial impact survived the following year.

Does this feel familiar when thinking about the great new initiative that was launch last September? Or the reading intervention that made such a boost in year 7, but doesn't seem to have transformed the reading of those who made early gains?

Five reasons sustaining change is hard in education

It's worth exploring why some programmes and planned improvements fade out more than others. Here are five recurring reasons:

1. Policy churn and change. National and local priorities shift fast, often before a school-level initiative has had the time to properly embed.
2. Practitioner churn and the recruitment and retention crisis. Change is made by people. When the staff who championed and modelled an approach move on, the institutional memory and momentum often goes with them.
3. Variable training and tools to improve. Initial training is rarely matched by the sustained coaching, resourcing, and follow-up tools needed to keep an approach alive day to day.
4. The gap between programmes and classroom practice. There is a chronic disalignment between an intervention as designed and the everyday demands of a busy, time-poor classroom. What looks coherent in a programme or glossy video can quickly become diluted, or quietly dropped, amid the tricky reality of real lessons.
5. Human habits, bandwidth, and powerful trends. Attention and energy are finite. We can take on new teaching or school routines, but then go looking for the next novel solution - often before the old one has had a fair chance to take root. The academic year cycle seems to drive this reality, with new people initiating new changes each time.

Planning for fade-out, not against it

Sustaining change in a complex, time-poor system will never be easy, but there are practical steps that make fade-out less likely - or at least less damaging when it happens.

Useful strategies can include:

• Careful monitoring. Build in genuine checkpoints well beyond the first term of implementation, not just an initial launch evaluation. If you only ever measure year one, you will only ever know about year one. Tools are needed to monitor and this stuff takes time and planning too.
• Pre-mortem. Before you begin, imagine the initiative has failed in two years' time, then work backwards to identify why. Surfacing the likely causes of failure in advance is far easier than diagnosing them after the fact.
• Sustained communication. Treat communication as an ongoing campaign, not a launch event. The message needs repeating, refreshing, and modelling by leaders long after the training day launch has been forgotten.
• Clear implementation planning that anticipates fade-out from the outset. Build review points, repeat training, and succession planning into the plan itself, rather than treating them as an afterthought once momentum has already begun to slide.

There is no neat formula for stopping fade-out altogether. But assuming it will happen - and planning accordingly - is a far more realistic starting point than simply hoping it won't.

In the coming year, working with schools, colleges, trusts, and other organisations, I will be helping them to fend off fade-out. If you want to work with me, see my Contacts Page.

Related reading:

• I have written about the research on 'detecting voltage drops' that sees a struggle to scale up improvement - READ THE BLOG HERE.
• I drew on findings from this study on 'Predicting Persistence and Fadeout Across Multi-Site RCTs of an Early Childhood Mathematics Curriculum Intervention', in generating my ideas for this blog.