It is often difficult to judge whether something is genuinely causing learning, because much of what we see in classrooms is performance rather than thinking. Engagement, completion, or even correct answers can give the illusion of learning without necessarily indicating that knowledge is being retained or understood. As a result, school leaders must look beyond surface-level indicators, drawing on evidence over time - such as students’ ability to recall (“you have to know something in order to retrieve it” Didau, 2026), apply, and connect ideas - and considering whether teaching is leading to lasting change in knowledge and thinking. Perhaps there is an argument for suggesting it is easier to identify when learning design and classroom tasks do not cause learning. Regardless, in making decisions, leaders should continually return to a key question: will this cause learning? This disciplined focus helps ensure that improvements are rooted not in what is visible, but in what truly matters.
Why leaders need a single organising question
An organising question is a simple, guiding question that helps focus thinking, decision-making and action. It acts as a filter - something leaders return to repeatedly to test whether what they are doing is purposeful and, in this case, causing learning. Without an organising question, leadership decisions can become fragmented - driven by habit, or compliance rather than impact. An organising question keeps attention on what matters most and provides coherence across improvement efforts.
Leithwood’s (2016) ‘Seven Strong Claims’ suggests that “leadership is second only to classroom teaching in its impact on pupil learning”. This places a clear responsibility on leaders to design routines and structures that cut through the noise and complexity of school life. In a landscape shaped by competing initiatives, emerging trends, and external pressures, effective leadership depends on maintaining disciplined focus - bypassing distraction and resisting the pull of the latest idea. Instead, leaders must create clarity through consistent organising principles that ensure the core purpose remains central: keeping the main thing the main thing - improving learning.
Defining “Will this cause learning?”
Addressing this question depends on leaders holding a sophisticated and shared understanding of how learning happens – and the question forces leaders to distinguish between activity or engagement and learning. Framing leadership through the organising question will this cause learning? fundamentally reshapes conversations about time, workload, and priorities. In terms of time, it provides a powerful filter: time becomes aligned - not with coverage or compliance, but with what most directly supports learning. In relation to workload, the question acts as a discipline. It challenges well-intentioned but low-impact demands, helping leaders to strip away unnecessary complexity. It encourages leaders to consider de-implementation – to stop doing what isn’t reliably causing learning. When it comes to priorities, it creates coherence - moving the organisation away from chasing novelty and initiatives.
The power of the question depends on a clear, shared definition of learning. Without this, Will this cause learning? risks becoming superficial or open to interpretation. Leaders must therefore develop shared understanding - drawing on cognitive science - so that learning is understood not as performance in the moment, but as something durable, retrievable, and transferable. Only then can the question meaningfully guide decisions and shape practice.
Evidence informed decision making
There is a risk in schools that decision-making becomes reactive rather than evidence-informed. As Scutt (2021) highlights, “the level of research-engagement varies substantially across the system, both between and within schools,” suggesting that engagement with evidence is not yet routine. Evidence suggests that decision-making is often shaped by more informal and less reliable factors. Pegram et al. (2024) note that “decisions are influenced by personal experience, the experiences of colleagues and staff in other schools, and by non-research-based professional development,” highlighting the powerful role of habit and social influence in leadership decisions and action. This makes the organising question Will this cause learning? particularly important: it provides a disciplined counterbalance to intuition (which isn’t always unhelpful!) and imitation. By insisting that decisions are grounded in what is known about learning - rather than what feels familiar or popular - leaders can move towards meaningful evidence-informed practice.
Implementation: good ideas don’t cause learning unless they’re implemented well
As the EEF (2019) makes clear, “it’s not just what you implement but how you do it too,” and “it does not matter how great an educational idea or intervention is in principle; what really matters is how it manifests itself in the day-to-day work of people in schools.” This highlights the persistent gap between knowing and doing: awareness of evidence alone is insufficient. Fixsen and Blasé (2005) reinforce this point, arguing that “knowing what to do is insufficient”. For leaders, this demands a shift in focus - from selecting the ‘right’ approach to asking a more disciplined question: Do we have the conditions for this to work? In this way, leadership is not solely about choosing evidence-based strategies, but about building the conditions in which they can be implemented well enough to cause learning.
Feedback loops: checking whether the decision did cause learning
When visiting lessons, leaders need to be both curious and discerning, approaching classrooms with a sensitivity to context rather than a narrow focus on performance. The purpose is not to judge, but to understand: what is causing learning here? The organising question Will this cause learning? helps leaders look beyond surface compliance - busy students, neat books, or rehearsed routines - and instead consider whether task design and pedagogical choices are genuinely shaping students’ thinking.
This requires attention to whether teachers are making purposeful decisions in the moment, selecting approaches that fit the content, the learners, and the goals of the lesson. As Sarah Cottinghat (2022) reminds us, effective teaching is rooted in deliberate choice, with research acting “not as a prescription but as a compass”. In this sense, lesson visits become an exercise in disciplined professional curiosity: are teachers choosing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason - and is it leading to learning?
School leaders frequently operate at a distance from the lived consequences of their decisions, creating a risk in which decisions that appear coherent at system level can distort - or even inhibit what happens in the classroom. As Kirby (2026) observes, “decisions are easy to make from a distance. Consequences are not,” and in large organisations “the gap between those who decide and those who live with the result” can weaken decision-making if left unchecked. This distance matters because it obscures the central organising principle: is this causing learning? Without deliberate mechanisms to interrogate impact, leaders are prone to evaluating decisions through proxies - compliance, activity, their own preferences, or perception - rather than genuine changes in learning.
Well-designed feedback loops address this problem by acting as critical mechanisms for continuous improvement, ensuring that the effects of decisions are systematically gathered, analysed and fed back into future action. As Heath (2024) argues, organisations must “get better, faster feedback to guide [their] work,” highlighting that the quality of leadership depends on how quickly and accurately it can learn from its own decisions. In schools, strong feedback loops enable leaders to close the gap between decision and consequence, continually testing whether their leadership actions are actually causing learning, rather than merely appearing to do so.
References:
Cottinghat, S. (2022) ‘Sarah Cottingham – Tips for Teachers’, Tips for Teachers Podcast. Available at: https://tipsforteachers.co.uk/sarah-cottingham/ (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
Didau, D. (2026) Five principles for effective retrieval practice. Substack. Available at: https://open.substack.com/pub/daviddidau/p/five-principles-for-effective-retrieval?r=4es0hr (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
Education Endowment Foundation (2019) Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation. London: Education Endowment Foundation.
Fixsen, D.L., Naoom, S.F., Blase, K.A., Friedman, R.M. and Wallace, F. (2005) Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida.
Heath, D. (2024) Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. London: Bantam Press.
Kirby, J. (2026) ‘Why serious leadership reduces the distance between decision and consequence’, LinkedIn, 23 May. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-serious-leadership-reduces-distance-between-decision-john-kirby-cvdee (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
Leithwood, K., Day, C., Sammons, P., Harris, A. and Hopkins, D. (2006) Seven strong claims about successful school leadership. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership.
Pegram, J., Hughes, C., Hoerger, M. and Watkins, R.C. (2024) ‘The factors that inform school leaders’ decisions when adopting programmes to use in schools’, Wales Journal of Education, 26(1). Available at: https://journal.uwp.co.uk/wje/article/id/526/ (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
Scutt, C. (2021) ‘Evidence-informed teaching and teacher professional status’. Teaching Times, 17 May. Available at: https://www.teachingtimes.com/evidence-informed-teaching-and-teacher-professional-status-2/ (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
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