S1 E9 - The Real Cost of Creating Our Own Programs

In this episode, Jocelyn unpacks a question school leaders increasingly face: should we build our own curriculum program instead of buying one? 

Using the distinction between price and cost, Jocelyn shows how "free" homegrown programs often carry hidden costs: lost coaching time, leader burnout, and knowledge that vanishes when the person who built it leaves.

Drawing on a real coaching example, Jocelyn argues that no program, bought or built, replaces the core work of growing teachers' skill in reading the room and responding to students. The episode closes with a practical framework - tweak, rewrite, or replace - for deciding when an existing program truly needs to change. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to the Leading Learning Podcast, I'm Jocelyn Seamer. A little while ago, I was on a coaching call with a school we've been working with. We were talking through next steps in school improvement, and the conversation arrived at a question that comes up more and more often. Should we build our own program for this area rather than using something that already exists? And I want to say at the outset that schools are under real pressure here. They're being told more and more that they have to have a specific scope and sequence for every single thing in their school, subject by subject, term by term. And this can lead us to feel as if we should be producing everything. I'm raising this today because I think that a clear look at this through the lens of cost versus price might take some of that pressure off.

Speaker 0:57

Now I understand the pull of the question of should we be building our own programs? And I'll come back to why a little bit later. But I want to ask a question in this episode that your leadership team might not have considered. What does building our own programs actually cost us? And is that cost the one we think we're paying?

Speaker 1:23

This work can take a few different shapes. Sometimes it's a leader starting from a blank page and writing the whole thing. Sometimes it's cobbling together bits and pieces gathered from all over the place, a slide from here, a sequence from there. And sometimes it's trying to bolt an old program onto a new one, which tends to leave us with an instructional mess that's harder to teach from than either program was on its own. So the version of make our own might change, but the cost question that sits underneath it is the same.

Speaker 1:58

Let's unpack a bit about the difference between price and cost, because the two can get muddled. Price is the dollar figure we pay for something. Cost is different. Cost means what are we saying no to because we've said yes to this? Because that's the reality for everybody. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to another. The price of building our own program can look very low. If the expertise is already in the room, if the coach or the leader knows the area well, then on paper it costs next to nothing. There's no product to buy, no invoice, no license. The price of building our own program can look very low. If the expertise is already in the room, if the coach or the leader knows the area well, then on paper it costs next to nothing to make your own. There's no product to buy and no invoice. And that's exactly why it can feel like the thrifty, responsible choice, particularly when budgets feel tight.

Speaker 3:05

But what about the cost? And let me put some numbers on it because I think the numbers might be sobering. So say an instructional leader spends 10 hours a week building a new program at a rough rate of $60 an hour. That's $600 of school's money that has been spent in a single week. Over a term, you're looking at $6,000 worth of leader time. Over a year, it's something like $24,000 of our most valuable leadership time being spent on a curriculum creation project. And that's probably conservative because a body of work like this almost always takes far longer than anyone expects it will when they start.

Speaker 3:51

Now, the part that matters here is what those hours would otherwise have been spent doing. Every one of them is an hour that leader is not coaching, not modelling in a classroom, not team teaching, not planning the next round of professional learning, or sitting alongside a teacher who's struggling and helping them to get better. The hours have to come from somewhere. And if they're done during the school day, then they come straight out of the work that grows the team. And when they can't come from the school day, they come out of the leader's own personal time instead. So that's evenings, weekends, and holidays. And a leadership team that's stretched that thin can't be at its best during the school day and teachers feel it. So when the support that teachers need isn't there, we see this turn up as teacher turnover, absences, and eventually in students' results that sit lower than they should. That curriculum build that looked free turns out to have a very large bill attached.

Speaker 5:02

And there's one more cost that I want to identify. And this one probably won't show up for a while. When a program is written by one person in a school, whether that's maths or phonics or reading comprehension or science, all of the knowledge of how that program actually works tends to live inside that one person's head. They know why it's built the way it is and what to do when something's not working. And the day they leave or they move into a different role, that knowledge walks out the door with them. And the leadership team is left holding a program that nobody quite knows how to run or repair.

Speaker 5:44

With a well-chosen external program, we should be able to lean on the provider for training and support that carries on regardless of who has come and gone. That can be the difference between a program that survives a staffing change and one that comes unstuck the moment that key person moves on.

Speaker 6:04

So why do we do it anyway, even when this makes sense? And I want to be fair because leaders who reach for this solution are not making a foolish choice. For a start, the work is interesting. Give a leader who loves curriculum and instruction the chance to build a program, and it can be for them the most satisfying thing that they do. And I'm putting my own hand up here because instructional design is my happy place, so I get it. There's also the belief that we're saving money, and that's a really understandable thing when budgets are increasingly tight. Finally, there's a wish to just own something ourselves, to have a program that's truly ours and fits our school exactly. And that's really understandable too. But there's a catch. Building our own program does not remove the hard part of the work, it just can't, because no program, whether we build it or buy it, answers the two critical questions that actually lead to making learning stick. Every teacher, every day, is making two big decisions. The first question they're answering in these decisions is: Am I optimising the intrinsic load of the task for the children in front of me? And the second one is, have the students had enough practice and the right kind of practice for us to build on this or move on? Now, no program can do that thinking for us. That is the role of the teacher in the space. The best program in the world is a starting point that a skilled teacher then responds from. It can't read the Year 2 data, it can't see that six children in the Year 5 spelling lesson haven't secured something and really this needs a little bit more time before we move ahead. That work, being able to read the room and respond to it, is the actual job, it's what comes about when we build our skills as teachers to mastery. And the need for this exists no matter whose program is being used.

Speaker 8:21

So when a leader pulls all their energy into building, the risk is that we're putting our best effort into the one thing that was never going to do the hard work for us, which is helping teachers grow in their capability to be able to optimise instruction for the students in front of them.

Speaker 8:42

In an earlier episode, I talked about how to avoid bright and shiny things. Now, new programs, particularly ones we build ourselves, can be their own version of bright and shiny. It's just that we made the bright and shiny, we didn't buy it in. There are times when, with the best of intentions, a school will change up a program. They change the instructional routine, they change the scope and sequence, they change the way that things are done. The danger is, and we see this with our work, is that the changes that are made undermine student outcomes because they've been made without really understanding why things were structured the way they were in the first place. The other side of this coin is that sometimes a program really does need stripping back or it needs changing in some way. If a program tells teachers to push every child through foundational skill development at the same pace, regardless of where they are up to, or they're moving everyone through a sequence so fast that we can see students being lost along the way, then changes absolutely should be made. Reading that and acting on it is good leadership, that's not interference. The tricky bit about all of this is that there's no one size fits all rule. And if you're feeling a little bit lost, I would suggest that you are not alone, it can be hard to get this right. When we do reach the point of deciding that what we have in front of us isn't fit for purpose, then I think it helps to know that there are three options available.

Speaker 10:21

The first is to keep using the program, but make tweaks and adjustments. Now that can be a real option if what's needed truly is only tweaks and adjustments. If you have to do more than that, well, then we're not able to keep using the program that is there.

Speaker 10:40

The second option is to rewrite that program to make it fit for purpose. And we need to go into this with our eyes open, it's the point of this particular podcast episode, because the costs of that can be unexpected but very real.

Speaker 10:57

The third option is to find something else. And if that's the road we take, the thing that I'd ask is that we understand deeply what good instruction looks like when it reflects the research, both on how we learn, as in the science of learning, if you want to call it that, or about cognition, and the curriculum area itself. Don't take marketing material at face value. The glossy brochure and the research-aligned reality are not always the same thing, and telling them apart needs a body of knowledge all by itself.

Speaker 11:32

So, what does it look like when we get this right? Let's talk through a real live example. I was coaching a leadership team who had noticed in their data that some early years students had weaker recognition of graphemes than their peers. Now they didn't hit this speed hump and decide to rewrite the program or write their own. They'd started with something carefully written and they responded to what the data was telling them. They tweaked. They adjusted their daily review to build in more chances for students to recognise the graphemes. They put in a short check-in every Monday before any review or instruction to see what had and hadn't stuck from the week before. They then examined their data to determine whether the tweaks and adjustments they had made got the students where they needed to be. And the answer was yes, it was working. What that gave them was a very clear sense of the problem in front of them, and they were able to use their data to evaluate impact.

Speaker 12:38

And I think that's the strategy that we want for every school. Start with something really sound, but you have to know why it's sound, don't just take people's word for it. We then analyse data, work out where the gaps are, and make a plan for how to close them, with the goal that the only acceptable outcome is that every student in our care is learning at an optimum rate. Growing a team who can do that well, cycle after cycle, is pretty much a full-time job on its own, which is part of the point. It's why we have to say no to things that are not going to get us to that goal, even when it's tempting to do fun stuff.

Speaker 13:25

So let's zoom out for a moment, because this podcast episode really isn't about programs. It's a question about where a leader's time and attention go and about what we believe actually drives improvement in a school. If we believe that improvement comes from having a perfect set of materials, then that's the goal we're going to work towards, where focus goes, energy flows. But I don't think that's where school improvement comes from. I think it comes from having a team of teachers who understand how learning works, who get better year after year at responding to the students in front of them. Now materials matter, of course they do, and a carefully built program matters a great deal and can make everything easier. But the program? The program should get you to the minimum viable system. It's not the ceiling of what can be achieved. The upper reaches of ambition for our students will be delivered on when we have teachers who have the capability to meet the students at their point of need.

Speaker 14:40

So every hour we can protect for coaching, for modelling, for sitting beside a teacher and helping them plan is an hour invested in the thing that actually moves the needle on student outcomes. When we spend those hours building material instead, we are spending our real improvement budget, the one that matters the most, on the thing that isn't going to get us where we want to go on its own. And I want to finish where I started with price and cost. In schools, we're not really in the habit of thinking about our team's time in dollar figures. And it can feel a little bit uncomfortable, feel a bit corporate. But I wonder if we did start thinking that way, if we said, how many hours of a teacher's time are being spent on that, and we actually put a dollar figure on that, I wonder how many things that we would decide we can let go, how many tasks we could look at honestly and admit that we just weren't getting a return on investment that made the spend worth it. That's a judgement only you can make. And what I'd ask is that you make it with the real cost in mind, not just the price. That's all from me for this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast. I hope to see you next time. Bye.