Six Levels of School Improvement: Why Genuine Excellence Requires a Whole-School Lens

What are the six levels of school improvement? 

School improvement research consistently shows that lasting, measurable change in a school's quality cannot be engineered by addressing any single dimension of institutional life in isolation. The six levels of school improvement are the school level, the leadership level, the curriculum level, the teaching and learning level, the student level, and the support level. Each level is interdependent with the others, meaning that progress made at one level is constrained or amplified by the conditions at every other level. Schools that improve in ways that last do so because they address these six levels as a coherent, connected body of work rather than a rotating series of isolated initiatives.

School Excellence

This is not a conceptual framework invented in a workshop. It reflects what decades of school improvement research, from Fullan and Hargreaves's foundational work on sustainable educational change to more recent evidence on instructional leadership and student agency, has consistently demonstrated: that schools are complex, adaptive systems where governance, leadership, curriculum, teaching practice, student ownership, and pastoral structures interact with each other continuously. Reform that targets only one of these levels, however well-designed and well-resourced that reform is, tends not to hold.

For school leaders and school groups navigating India's current moment in education, understanding this framework has particular urgency. The National Curriculum Framework 2023 has set a clear institutional direction: moving decisively from rote learning and content coverage toward competency-based education, interdisciplinary learning, and the kind of genuine student agency that prepares young people for a world their teachers could not have fully anticipated. This shift, from rote memorisation to a skill-based, practical approach, aims to enhance problem-solving abilities, alongside a focus on cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development rather than just academics. The direction is right. But policy compliance is the occasion, not the destination. The schools that will build durable, genuine excellence from this moment are the ones treating these reforms not as a checklist to meet but as an invitation to rebuild how their institution actually works, across all six levels.

Can a school improve by focusing on one or two areas at a time?

Research suggests that focused, single-area reforms rarely produce lasting improvement precisely because the six levels of a school's functioning are interdependent. A school that improves its curriculum design without building the instructional capacity of its teachers to deliver it will see the curriculum change remain on paper. A school that invests in teacher development without giving teachers structured collaborative planning time will see individual classrooms improve while whole-school coherence remains elusive. Sustained improvement requires attending to all six levels, not sequentially but simultaneously, even if the intensity of work at each level varies by stage.

Level 1: The School Level - Governance, Vision, and Structural Alignment

The first level of improvement is the most foundational and the most frequently underestimated. Before any curriculum, teaching, or student-focused initiative can take hold durably, the institutional structure that surrounds and enables teaching must be coherent. This means governance clarity: school boards and trusts that understand the difference between strategic oversight and operational interference, and that hold leadership accountable for outcomes without substituting their own judgment for that of experienced educators. It means an institutional vision that is specific enough to guide real decisions, not a values statement that could apply to any school in the country. And it means structural alignment, the organizational architecture of timetables, resource allocation, professional development time, and inter-departmental communication that either supports or undermines every other level of improvement.

This is often the level where the gap between aspiration and reality is widest among India's school groups. A school group can have a compelling vision for twenty-first-century learning articulated beautifully in its prospectus and simultaneously have a governance structure that makes any meaningful change at the campus level nearly impossible: financial decisions made without pedagogical input, academic leadership roles that carry responsibility without corresponding authority, and improvement initiatives that begin and end with a single senior leader rather than being built into the institution's operating fabric.

Research on sustained school improvement identifies purposeful programme selection with clear goals, strategic staff leadership and continuous professional education, data sharing and feedback, distributed multilevel leadership, and a supportive school culture as the conditions that allow improvement to take hold over time. All of these are, at their root, structural conditions. They require the school level to be functioning well before any of the other five levels can move.

Level 2: The Leadership Level - Instructional and Strategic Capacity

What is the difference between school management and school leadership?

School management maintains the systems that already exist. School leadership builds the capacity of an institution to improve them. The distinction matters because India's schools have, historically, produced a significant number of capable administrators and a smaller number of genuine instructional leaders, and the gap between those two things is a significant driver of the variation in educational quality between schools with broadly similar resources and contexts.

Research by Fullan and Sergiovanni established that while the quality of teaching is influential in student achievement and motivation, the quality of leadership determines teachers' motivation and quality of teaching in the classroom. This means that investment in leadership development is not a parallel track to investment in teaching quality. It is a precondition for it. A principal who can give confident feedback on a teacher's questioning technique, who can structure professional development around actual classroom evidence rather than generic training topics, and who can create the psychological safety teachers need to try new approaches and reflect honestly on what did not work is a different kind of leader from one who manages rosters, handles parent complaints efficiently, and ensures compliance with board requirements. Both sets of skills matter. The first set is the one that drives improvement.

The expectation that teachers can learn the mastery of instruction and delivery in a one-day workshop represents a fundamentally flawed approach; a more effective model builds leadership capacity at the departmental level over sustained time. This insight applies with equal force to school leadership development itself. Principals and academic heads become genuinely stronger instructional leaders through sustained engagement with real evidence of learning in their own schools, not through attendance at conferences or completion of standalone training programmes.

Level 3: The Curriculum Level - From Content Coverage to Genuine Competency

What does competency-based curriculum delivery actually mean in a CBSE or ICSE school?

Competency-based delivery is not the same as completing the syllabus. It is the difference between a student who can recall the water cycle and a student who can apply the logic of systems interdependence to a new environmental question they have never encountered before. A student who can recite the causes of the Mughal Empire's decline has content knowledge. A student who can analyze primary source evidence, weigh competing historical interpretations, and construct a reasoned argument has developed a competency that will serve them in a law career, a research role, or a business context decades from now.

The NCF 2023 frames this shift explicitly: competency-based learning moves away from rote memorisation toward a skill-based, practical approach designed to enhance problem-solving, with flexibility in learning paths providing students with interdisciplinary studies and experiential learning opportunities. The framework has set the direction. The harder question, and the one that a school's curriculum leadership must answer in practice, is how to deliver the existing board syllabus while simultaneously building the skills the NCF envisions. The answer, as international school systems have demonstrated over decades, is not to replace content but to teach it differently: through genuine inquiry, through problems that require synthesis across subjects, through assessment tasks that demand application rather than recall. For grades 6-8, the NCF 2023 itself combines subjects like history, geography, political science, and economics into thematic learning, recognising that interdisciplinary approaches connect ideas across subjects and make learning relevant and comprehensive.

A school that has strong curriculum leadership at this level is one where teachers understand not just what they are teaching but why, in terms of the skills and competencies their subject is best positioned to build, and how their unit connects horizontally with what a student is experiencing in a parallel subject this term and vertically with what they will encounter in the grade above.

Level 4: The Teaching and Learning Level - What Students Actually Experience Daily

This is the level that matters most to students, and the one where the distance between a school's stated philosophy and its actual practice is most visible. A school can have a beautiful vision document, an experienced leadership team, and a thoughtfully designed curriculum framework, and still have classrooms where the predominant experience is a teacher talking at students from the front of the room, where questions are asked only to confirm content recall, and where assessment means a test at the end of a term.

Research on teacher professional capital establishes that ongoing professional learning, including keeping up-to-date with new teaching ideas, is widely considered both a natural component of teachers' professional activities and a key component in improving instruction and cooperation among staff members. This framing matters because it positions teacher development as a continuous professional commitment rather than a remedial intervention for underperforming staff, and schools that internalize this distinction create very different professional cultures from those that do not.

The specific practices that distinguish strong teaching from adequate teaching are well-documented and broadly consistent across research traditions: effective questioning that deepens rather than checks understanding; formative assessment used in real time to adjust instruction rather than only to grade; structured opportunities for students to talk about their thinking with peers; explicit teaching of metacognitive strategies alongside subject content; and the use of genuine student evidence, not test scores but actual student work and teacher observation, to inform planning decisions. None of these practices are new. All of them require sustained practice, structured feedback, and a school culture that treats professional improvement as a shared institutional commitment rather than an individual teacher's personal project.

Hargreaves and Fullan argue that a more collaborative and collegial profession improves student learning and achievement, and research evidence shows that student achievement can be positively influenced when effective collaborative structures for teachers to problem-solve and learn together are utilized. The corollary is also true: schools where teachers work in isolation, where classroom practice is rarely observed or discussed, and where professional learning is episodic rather than embedded will find that teaching quality across the institution varies enormously from room to room, driven primarily by individual teachers' prior training and personal inclinations rather than by any coherent institutional practice.

How does teacher collaboration affect student outcomes?

The evidence base here is substantial and consistent. Analysis of PISA data across multiple countries demonstrates that teacher collaboration, particularly in the areas of instructional strategies and curriculum, instructional approaches to groups, and approaches to assessment, produces measurable improvements in student achievement. The critical caveat, which the same research identifies, is that collaboration needs to be structured, goal-directed, and supported by both time and leadership commitment to produce these effects. Informal collegial relationships, while valuable for school culture, do not by themselves drive the kind of evidence-based improvement that structured professional learning communities do.

Level 5: The Student Level - Building Genuine Agency

What is student agency, and why does it matter more than academic performance alone?

Student agency refers to the capacity to set goals, make choices, take responsibility, and influence learning environments to achieve meaningful outcomes, and studies consistently link strong agency to improved academic performance, social-emotional well-being, and lifelong learning dispositions. It is worth being precise about what this means in practice, because "student agency" has become a phrase that many schools use in their marketing without substantively changing what happens in their classrooms.

Genuine student agency is not the same as giving students choices from a pre-determined menu. It is the development of a student's real capacity to identify what they want to understand, to take initiative in pursuing that understanding, and to evaluate and adjust their own learning process over time. The skills and behaviors associated with student agency are positively related to college and career outcomes because students are able to direct their own learning and transfer the knowledge they learned in the classroom to new settings. This is a fundamentally different outcome from high examination scores, and a school committed to building it needs different classroom practices, different assessment approaches, and a different relationship between teachers and students from those that content-focused instruction produces.

Research drawing on Self-Determination Theory demonstrates that learner agency, which extends far beyond offering students simple choices, involves fostering a sense of ownership and competence, cultivating intrinsic motivation and self-initiation, and equipping learners to actively shape their educational process rather than passively selecting from pre-determined menus. For Indian schools navigating the NCF 2023's emphasis on student-centred learning, this distinction is the difference between compliance with a policy direction and genuine transformation of learning culture. Dwight Seoul

Level 6: The Support Level - Ensuring No Child Is Left to Struggle Unseen

The sixth level is the most frequently under-resourced and the most consequential for the students whose needs are greatest. Support structures encompass everything that surrounds a student beyond the academic curriculum: learning support for students whose developmental profiles do not fit a standard instructional pace; counseling and wellbeing systems that respond to emotional and social challenges before they reach crisis; attentiveness to each child's sense of belonging in the school community; and the pastoral intelligence to identify a student who is struggling invisibly, not failing assessments, perhaps even performing adequately, but not genuinely thriving.

India's national curriculum schools have historically concentrated their improvement energy at the curriculum and teaching levels, which is understandable given the board examination pressures that structure institutional accountability. The consequence is that support systems are often the last to be developed, under-staffed relative to the genuine range of student need, and disconnected from the academic leadership structures that drive teaching and learning decisions. A student who is anxious, unseen, or working without any understanding of their own learning differences will not benefit fully from even the most expertly designed curriculum and the most skilled teaching. The sixth level is not a supplement to the other five. It is the foundation on which a student's ability to benefit from all the other levels rests.

Fidelity First, Then Excellence

A question that school leaders frequently raise when confronted with a six-level framework is sequencing: where does a school start, and in what order do the levels need to be addressed? The honest answer from research and from direct experience is that the levels are not a sequence. They are a system. But there is a useful distinction to be drawn between fidelity and excellence as organizing principles for the work.

Fidelity is the floor: delivering the curriculum a school already follows with real depth and consistency, meeting its own stated standards in practice rather than on paper. A school that is not yet delivering its existing programme with genuine fidelity, where curriculum planning is inconsistent across sections, where teaching quality varies enormously by individual, where assessment is neither criterion-referenced nor used formatively, should address those gaps before layering additional innovation on top of them. Excellence is what a school builds once that floor is secure: the international best practice in instructional design, inquiry-based pedagogy, formative and criterion-based assessment, and collaborative teacher professional learning that the strongest school systems have built into their architecture over decades.

The core argument behind both NEP 2020 and NCF 2023 is that Indian school education has, for decades, over-rewarded memorisation and under-invested in reasoning, creativity, and real-world skill-building, and the new curriculum represents the most concrete institutional attempt to fix that through structural redesign rather than minor tweaks. That structural ambition is right. But structure alone does not produce change. A school group that responds to NCF 2023 by updating its prospectus language and attending a CBSE training day has met the administrative minimum. A school group that uses this moment to genuinely diagnose where each of its six levels currently stands and to build a coherent, sustained improvement plan across all of them is doing something that will produce real, lasting results for the students in its classrooms.

Where to Begin

The most productive starting point is honest, evidence-based diagnosis: a structured audit of where a school currently stands across each of the six levels, conducted with the kind of rigor that produces actionable findings rather than a validation exercise. This means looking at actual classroom practice, not just teacher self-reports. It means examining governance structures and leadership decision-making processes, not just job descriptions. It means talking to students about what they experience daily, not just reviewing performance data. And it means assessing support structures against the actual range of need in a school's student population, not against a notional standard of what a good school should offer.

That audit is where Ameyaa's work with national curriculum schools begins: not with a set of predetermined solutions but with the institutional honesty to identify what a school actually needs at each level and the experience to know what genuine improvement at each level looks like from the inside of a school that has built it.

Ameyaa works with CBSE, ICSE, and state board schools across India to build genuine excellence across all six levels of school improvement. If your school or school group is ready for an honest assessment of where you currently stand and what a coherent improvement journey could look like, we welcome the conversation.

References

Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. Jossey-Bass.

Fullan, M., & Hargreaves, A. (2015). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. Teachers College Press.

Hargreaves, A., & Fink, D. (2006). Sustainable leadership. Jossey-Bass.

Hargreaves, A., & Goodson, I. (2006). Educational change over time? The sustainability and nonsustainability of three decades of secondary school change and continuity. Educational Administration Quarterly, 42(1), 3–41.

Harris, A., & Lambert, L. (2003). Building leadership capacity for school improvement. Open University Press.

Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2023). National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023. NCERT.

OECD. (2019). OECD learning compass 2030: A series of concept notes. OECD Publishing.

Reeve, J., & Cheon, S. H. (2023). Autonomy-supportive teaching: A meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research (cited in Structural Learning, 2024).

Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Self-efficacy: An essential motive to learn. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 82–91.