Whenever a colleague announces they are leaving, there is a flurry of well-wishes, a card, perhaps a carefully chosen leaving gift, and hopefully a fun leaving do.

But somewhere between their final goodbye and the first week of the new term, you realise how much institutional knowledge has quietly walked out with them.

This is common in all schools, although in international schools, where staff turnover can run at 14 to 17 per cent, that knowledge walks out of the door with alarming frequency.

Keeping hold of knowledge when staff leave

This matters a lot in terms of how organisations function. Research in 2020, titled Institutional Memory as Storytelling, argued that organisations remember not primarily through files and procedures but through the informal narratives circulating among staff.

This situation is something I faced this year after one of my colleagues, Sheriza, accepted a new post. I was genuinely delighted for her but I was also well aware of how much institutional knowledge was about to leave the school.

Of course, we will organise a handover between her and her replacement, but a single meeting is never quite enough. Notes get lost, details blur and the new arrival may not yet know which questions to ask.

So we have tried to be more strategic about how Sheriza’s time with us is used before she leaves, creating a series of video tutorials as a library that her successor can return to repeatedly when they start the new role.

These videos cover:

• The full Extended Project Qualification process, which Sheriza leads as head of the qualification: not just the teaching but the logistical architecture, managing logbooks, monitoring student progress, coordinating with supervisors, moderating work and navigating the upload and submission process.
• Her specialist knowledge of A-level Russian history, particularly its most demanding section, which asks students to critique historians’ arguments rather than simply making their own: a skill that has to be taught in a very specific way and one she has become very adept at. She has also developed a thematic model for the GCSE Middle East module that the department has come to rely on heavily. These videos mean that expertise stays with us.
• Walkthroughs on data tracking and OneNote that will serve the entire department. Sheriza is comfortably the strongest member of the team in both areas.
• Sheriza will also record a final “freestyle” video covering everything she wished she had known before she started - the kind of wisdom no induction day ever quite covers. It will be deliberately informal and loosely structured; the goal is simply to shake as much out of her as possible before she goes.

We make no grand claims for these video tutorials. They cannot replicate the back-and-forth of a good conversation or the judgement that comes with experience, and we know the new staff member will, in time, build up their own way of working.

But knowledge that is captured imperfectly is infinitely more useful than knowledge that is never captured at all.

Guides for new starters

Doing this has also prompted wider questions about what the rest of the department would leave behind if they moved to a new role.

In response, we have begun creating other videos from staff members with key institutional knowledge to ensure that we have it banked for future reference. The videos currently in production include:

• Introductory recordings on A-level politics papers 1 and 2 that future colleagues can work through before they start teaching.
• Focused videos from a leader with good experience on IGCSE source work, for a new colleague who has not taught IGCSE before. This can then be reused for any new teachers in the future, too.

The goal is not to replace collegial relationships but to use technology to build a foundation before those conversations begin, creating a permanent, sharable archive of departmental expertise that new colleagues can access before they even arrive.

This can help us to ensure that even if an experienced colleague moves on, the huge depth of knowledge they have built up does not leave with them, too.

David Tuck is head of history and politics at Harrow International School Hong Kong