Quick links
Making Change Stick has received its first review! Check out this lovely write-up by the Canadian educator Paul Ketko.
I was recently interviewed on Teachers Talk Radio by Kathryn Taylor. It was a great conversation - Kathryn had really done her homework. You can catch up here - or search for TTR wherever you get your pods :)
You can get the first 3 chapters of Making Change Stick for free by visiting makingchangestick.co (just wait a few seconds for the pop-up). You can also access the first 5 chapters of the online Making Change Stick training suite for free at the site.
OK, let’s do this…
Implementation and Improvement Science: A New Synthesis
The jungle of jargon
The seed that led to the Making Change Stick programme was planted in 2014 when I attended a conference called ‘Implementing Implementation Science’. I was intrigued by the prospect of immersing myself in this ‘science of change’, and I started to read everything I could lay my hands on.
As I did so, it often felt as though I was hacking my way through a jungle of jargon. The literature on change management is riddled with the stuff. To begin with, there’s a surprising lack of agreement on what to even call the study of how to make good things happen. As we can see here, such things go by many names.
In short, with a handful of honourable exceptions, the change management literature can be a bit of a slog to wade through, and I often found myself with more questions than answers. But – as they used to say in California – ‘there’s gold in them thar hills.’ Every so often, I would find myself stunned by the elegance or explanatory power of an insight or strategy, and I would feel compelled to try it out in practice.
By 2018, after completing my PhD, I was working at UCL’s Centre for Educational Leadership, designing and facilitating professional development programmes. This allowed me to pilot an implementation science programme with schools. Initially, it was four half-day workshops focused on ten core ideas, but it has since expanded significantly. The programme draws from diverse fields, including education, healthcare, business, engineering, social psychology, and cognitive science.
Two fields have been particularly influential: implementation science and improvement science. While both have been widely applied in healthcare, they also offer valuable lessons for education. In this post, I’ll introduce these fields, their impact, and how Making Change Stick synthesises their insights alongside strategies from other disciplines.
Implementation science: What is it, and why should I care?
Implementation science is the study of methods and strategies that help translate research into everyday practice. One striking example comes from psychiatry, where a new approach to treating bipolar disorder—the collaborative care model (CCM)—was found to significantly improve patient outcomes at little to no extra cost. It was endorsed in clinical guidelines and published in top journals. Yet, within a year of the study ending, none of the sites had adopted it.
This issue is widespread. On average, it takes 17 years for a proven clinical innovation to achieve just 14% adoption across the healthcare system. This means that if you are hospitalised, you may receive suboptimal care despite better alternatives being known.
Implementation science addresses this problem by identifying and overcoming barriers to the uptake of effective practices. It focuses on making evidence-based interventions routine and sustainable, recognising that real-world change is complex, messy, and often disrupted by competing priorities, funding shifts, and staff turnover.
The importance of slice teams
One of the most effective ways to drive meaningful change is through a slice team—a cross-section of an organisation that includes stakeholders from different levels. In healthcare, rather than having senior clinicians and managers make all the decisions, a slice team might include junior doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients.
This approach has been shown to vastly accelerate change. While the standard approach to implementation leads to 14% adoption in 17 years, a well-run slice team can achieve 80% adoption within three years.
Case study: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
In an effort to reduce asthma-related hospital admissions, the hospital formed a slice team that included school nurses, pharmacists, and asthma patients alongside medical professionals. This team identified practical barriers—such as children lacking inhalers at both homes in shared custody arrangements or families struggling to access pharmacies. They responded by providing additional inhalers, home delivery of medication, and legal aid to help families address housing conditions that triggered asthma. Within six years:
Asthma-related hospital admissions fell by 50%.
School absences dropped by 24%.
Workplace absenteeism for parents fell by 30%.
The hospital saved millions in healthcare costs.
This case illustrates how implementation science can turn proven interventions into lasting, positive change.
Improvement science: What is it, and why should I care?
Where implementation science focuses on spreading existing best practices, improvement science is about developing, testing, and refining new approaches. It relies on rapid cycles of testing and adjustment, ensuring that interventions are continuously refined.
The six core principles of improvement science include:
Make the work problem-specific and user-centred – Understand the issue from the perspectives of those affected.
Focus on variation in performance – Instead of asking ‘What works?’, ask ‘What works for whom, when, and under what conditions?’
See the system that produces current outcomes – Map the processes and factors contributing to existing problems.
Measure to improve – Data is central to tracking and refining progress.
Use disciplined inquiry – Employ PDSA cycles (Plan, Do, Study, Act) to test and refine ideas.
Accelerate learning through networked communities – Form Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) to test ideas across multiple contexts.
Case study: Community College Pathways
In the US, many community college students fail to complete their mathematics courses, preventing them from earning degrees or transferring to university. The Carnegie Foundation formed an NIC to address this, bringing together faculty, administrators, and researchers. They developed new mathematics pathways (Statway and Quantway) and used PDSA cycles to refine the approach.
The results were remarkable:
Traditional pass rates for college-level maths: 15% in two years.
Statway pass rate: 54% in one year.
Quantway completion rate: 63% in one term.
Over six years, pass rates improved steadily, rising to 72% by 2017.
This demonstrates how improvement science enables rapid, scalable improvements in education.
Making change stick: A new synthesis
Both implementation and improvement science aim to improve outcomes, but they differ in focus:
Making Change Stick integrates both approaches, recognising that:
School improvement is a process that needs to be implemented.
Implementation is a process that requires continuous improvement.
It also incorporates insights from additional fields, including education, business and manufacturing, engineering, social psychology, sociology, cognitive science, political science and behavioural science. The goal is to provide educators with a practical, evidence-based framework for making sustainable, meaningful change in schools.
Conclusion
Despite billions being spent on research, much of what we know about effective practice fails to translate into real-world change. Implementation science tackles the ‘know–do’ gap by ensuring best practices become routine, while improvement science refines and develops new solutions through rapid iteration.
The Making Change Stick programme synthesises these approaches, combining them with strategies from diverse fields to provide a structured yet flexible process for school improvement. By using slice teams, PDSA cycles, and a focus on real-world barriers, the programme helps schools move beyond theory into action—ensuring that change not only happens but sticks.
So far, we’ve touched upon the importance of slice teams as a way to overcome the limitations of a top-down approach to change management. However, the Making Change Stick programme is not anti-leadership – far from it. In the next post, we’ll look at a number of important roles school leaders play in making change stick.
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