DID IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
Matthew Savage wonders whether impact assessments really reveal the full – or true – effect of the things we do in schools.
Certainty and its wobble
As an educator, consultant, and human being, I will name this plainly: I am interested in research. To deny that would be to deny the pursuit of knowledge itself – and what a barren and brittle landscape that would be. Likewise, I believe in the necessity of positive impact. Not simply its importance, but its ethical imperative. To be an educator is to seek to make a difference – and to make that difference without harm.
Even so, as I write these words, I notice the wobble beneath them – my own longing for certainty, for impact clear and knowable, for evidence I can present without doubt. I suspect I am not alone. We long for the kind of evidence that reassures us – of good done (or to be done), of difference made (or to be made).
The words themselves – impact, impactful – come readily, perhaps because they are borrowed from the cold metrics of industry and policy. I have used them, and will again, as, I am sure, will you, but I wonder if we should do so with caution, knowing their weight, and their limitations.
The will-o’-the-wisp of evidence
To be interested in research is not to demand research-based evidence for every pedagogical breath we take. If we want evidence, we can find evidence: correlation hides behind every data point if you are willing to squint hard enough. But causation? That is another thing entirely. It is the will-o’-the-wisp of our profession: glimpsed but rarely grasped.
Take, for instance, medication. I swallow, inject, apply – daily, hourly – dozens of substances designed to mitigate the symptoms of my own chronic, complex ill health and disability. And behind each capsule and each vial is an industry which purports to have evidenced its positive impact. A problem is spotted, a solution proposed, tested, trialled, peer-reviewed, approved, and prescribed. On paper, this is rigorous.
But even then – even with all the apparatus of evidence – we know that questions remain unanswered. Is the problem actually the problem, or is it a symptom of a deeper, entangled system? Whose bodies were part of the trials? Were they like mine? Were they like yours? Whose side-effects are considered acceptable collateral, and by whom? Positive impact for whom, and for how long? And at what cost?
If medicine, with all its controlled conditions, cannot promise certainty, how then can schools – alive with complexity and unpredictability?
The fog of impact
But the narrative of impact persists. We speak of it in staffrooms and strategy documents, in board meetings and bedtime worries. But I wonder whether “impact”, as we commonly invoke it, is more fog than fact.
Impact on whom? Each student is a singular ecology – a shifting, intersecting tangle of histories, identities, privileges, traumas, and possibilities. What nourishes one may starve another.
Impact on what? For every intended effect, there are unintended ripples. The strategies we celebrate may carry unseen footprints – what I have come to call the Wellbeing Footprint, the subtle tolls we impose without noticing. And who pays them?
Impact from where? As though the classroom were a vacuum, untouched by the ecologies beyond it. As though the child’s experience of home, community, marginalisation, and identity were mere background noise. The reality is deeper, more tangled, more alive.
Emergence and entanglement
Impact when? We are often complicit in the tyranny of the immediate – desperate for evidence this term, this year, this inspection cycle – like our politicians, obsessed with growth. But what if impact, like so many truths, reveals itself only later – in the quiet courage of a 40-year-old recalling a teacher’s kindness, or in the unconscious inheritance of a school culture long after its early architects have moved on?
Impact does not merely arrive late – students do not learn in straight lines. Some will seem to flourish overnight; others will spiral, pause, regress, and re-emerge, changed. Some move forward, then back, then sideways. Some take years before a seed germinates. Some bloom unexpectedly, some only partially, and some never fully in the ways we imagined – yet who is to say that blooming wasn’t occurring out of sight all along?
And here is where I struggle most: when we insist upon impact that is predictable, observable, and measurable, we risk robbing education of its greatest gift – emergence. We leave no room for the unplanned, the unexpected, the relational.
An invitation
What if we were to measure less and notice more? What if we allowed ourselves to become not gardeners tending rows of plants, but ecosystems ourselves – alive, entangled, unpredictable? In truth, we already are. Every educator, every student, every family member, every leader – we are garden and gardener both. We shape, and are shaped. We grow, and are grown.
And so perhaps the question is not, “How do we prove impact?”, but, “How do we till the soil?” – trusting that what may emerge – slowly, sporadically, surprisingly – might just be impactful, though not always in the ways we expected, measured, or planned.
Matthew is an international education consultant, and former international school principal, who works directly with school communities, helping them understand and enrich their soil. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Parents Alliance for Inclusion.
FEATURE IMAGE: by Wesley Tingey For Unsplash+
Support Images: by Drake Whitney on Unsplash, kris on Unsplash, Mo on Unsplash & Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
