UK expert shares practical strategies for school improvement

Professor Hopkins has a long history supporting school improvement, including as Chief Adviser to several secretaries of state on school standards in the UK, and has published 3 books on school improvement.

His keynote address at Research Conference 2025 will explore contemporary debates over school improvement and explain the Unleashing Greatness strategy, which focuses on the ‘instructional core’ as the key means of enabling holistic growth for all students.

In a pre-conference interview with Teacher magazine, Professor Hopkins said Unleashing Greatness was a ‘bottom-up’ strategy that provided schools with a road map to move from average levels of student performance towards outstanding performance.

‘Typically, we're used to (in Australia and in England and many other countries) very top-down strategies; governments or administrators or boards, you know, impose policies upon schools,’ Professor Hopkins said.

‘And the evidence is that that will sort of raise standards up a little bit, but if you really want to get to the highest levels of performance, you have to ‘unleash greatness’ – you have to sort of make schools more free.’

Professor Hopkins told Teacher the 3 take aways from his Research Conference 2025 keynote would be the importance of:

• having an unrelenting focus on the ‘instructional core’
• creating conditions where teachers could support each other collaboratively
• talking about the journey of school improvement.

Much of Professor Hopkins’ Teacher interview focuses on the ‘instructional leadership’ step within the Unleashing Greatness strategy. He describes instructional leadership as using 4 key behaviours: setting direction; managing teaching and learning; developing people and developing the organisation.

Professor Hopkins explained that, while the school principal’s leadership in setting direction and providing the infrastructure for professional development was important, creating a collaborative culture focused on the school’s moral purpose was fundamental.

‘Obviously, the principal, the head, the head teacher has an enormous influence, but it's really about how they distribute leadership throughout the school … and how you can create in the school a culture that prizes intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation,’ Professor Hopkins said.

Research Conference 2025, on the theme ‘Transforming learning systems: Enabling holistic growth for all students’, takes place in Melbourne on 6 and 7 February. Early bird registrations are available until 31 October 2024.