The case for doing nothing for one full term

One of the hardest pieces of consulting advice to give to a school leadership team is also one of the most useful. It is some version of: don't change anything new this term. Stabilise what you started last term. Wait.

The advice is hard to give because it sounds like a lack of value. The team has spent money on the consultant. They expect a roadmap, a plan, a list of new initiatives. The team has also, often, been hired into the school under the implicit promise that they will be making changes. Doing nothing feels like falling short of that promise.

It rarely is. The cost of constant change in a school is large, slow-moving, and hard to see. Every initiative comes with a tax on the staff who absorb it. The tax is usually paid in goodwill, and goodwill is the resource that allows future initiatives to land.

There is a pattern I see at schools where staff goodwill has been overdrawn. The leadership team announces a new initiative. The staff nod politely. The initiative goes in the same drawer where the previous three are still gathering dust. By the end of the year, nothing has actually changed in classrooms or workflows, despite half a dozen leadership-level launches.

This pattern is not a failure of the staff. It is a failure of pacing. Each individual initiative was probably reasonable. The combined load, term-on-term, exceeded the rate at which the school could absorb them.

What "doing nothing for one term" actually looks like in practice is rarely literal nothing. It looks like finishing the things that were started in the previous two terms. Closing out the implementation that was 80% done. Writing the handover documentation for the workflow that was changed in week three of last term. Sitting with the assistant principal who has been carrying the change unilaterally and asking them what is and isn't working. Updating the policy that was written quickly and never returned to.

The work is real. The work is not new. The work is the unglamorous middle of any change cycle, and it is also the work that is most often skipped in favour of the next initiative.

Schools that get this right tend to operate on an 18-month rolling cadence rather than a term-by-term one. They start things knowing they will not be done for at least a year. They protect implementation time as fiercely as they protect launch time. And they are willing, occasionally, to publicly say, "this term we are not starting anything new. This term we are finishing what we started."

I have never met a leadership team that regretted that decision. I have met a lot of teams that wished, in retrospect, they had made it earlier.