Educational leaders must recognise the importance of seemingly “low level and administrative” elements of management that are actually crucial to driving school improvements, according to Professor Rob Coe.

Speaking at the World Education Summit on Monday, Professor Coe, director of research and development at Evidence Based Education and a senior associate at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), said leadership is often seen as being “inspirational and transformational and [about] vision”.

This means the idea of “management” is relegated to being seen as “an administrative thing that is necessary but not very glamorous”.

However, drawing on insights from four leadership reports from Evidence Based Education published last year, he said this is “wrong and actually [management] is really really important”, claiming that this has been shown by numerous research studies drawn from numerous sectors.

“There’s a lot of good evidence about the importance of management in the success of organisations… they apply to schools, but they would apply if you’re running a small business or a factory or a hospital,” Professor Coe said.

He told Tes that the main research papers he was citing included Does management matter in schools?, The World Management Survey and The New Empirical Economics of Management.

School leadership: 4 fundamentals for success

From these papers, four key areas emerge that, if handled correctly, can ensure that teachers and other staff are in the optimum professional environment to achieve success and improvements.

According to Professor Coe, this starts with ensuring that leaders “create good working relationships between colleagues” and then, secondly, making sure that there is a “process of improvement” embedded in the school.

“So however good we are, we can be better…we believe we can be better, and ‘I’m personally accountable for how well I do’. ‘I’m willing to innovate to get better’…all organisations have to do this to drive improvement.”

The third component he outlined was the importance of delivery - so understanding what decisions need to be made and prioritising them so schools achieve their defined goals.

“Part of delivery is about removing the barriers that make things harder, addressing problems and implementing new things [and] making sure that they do get put in place faithfully, authentically, sustainably,” said Professor Coe.

The final area of focus is staffing: ensuring that you have the “best people, the best qualified, the best, most able people in all the roles” - not just in teaching roles but all roles in school.

He said this also included taking action to refocus staff if it was clear that their skill set would be better suited elsewhere.

“There is lots of interesting research about how, with no change in the who’s in the building, just by allocating people to their strengths, we can create improvements in output - that’s in schools as much as in other organisations.”

Underlining the importance of all this for teacher development, Professor Coe cited a report by professors John Papay and Matthew Kraft that says teachers’ impact on pupils’ learning dramatically improved in settings with positive professional environments, based on the above four concepts, compared with those that did not have this.

Don’t try to do too much at once

Building on this, Professor Coe said that if leaders set about applying these fundamentals to their setting, it was also important not to rush to try and fix everything at once but to focus instead on just one or two issues at a time.

“If you’re in a business-as-usual, steady state, where things are under contro,l I think a mistake people often make is to try and do too many things - so do less than you think,” he said.

“Identify something you think is constraining learning…that’s actually preventing students from learning as much as they could, and then a lever which means you can do something about it.”

He said that, based on his experience and wider EEF knowledge, the most common issues that needed fixing were behaviour, removing barriers to effective work for teachers and then creating a professional development culture that truly drives improvement.

However, he acknowledged that if you are in a “firefighting” situation in your school then simply fixing one or two things at a time is not an option

“Obviously, if it’s a crisis and everything’s going wrong, if you’re firefighting, every fire has to be put out - you can’t just say I’m only going to do one because the others will grow.”

Professor Rob Coe was speaking at the World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event. To find out more and access the rest of the week’s sessions, click here

Dan Worth is senior editor at Tes