There’s a passage in PiXL’s Serious About Subtraction Leadership Thinking Guide that tends to hit harder in leadership teams than its writers probably expected:
“Sometimes, we are addicted to adding things to our list, our plans and our approach. Of course, adding things can be a very good thing, it is how we can improve and how we can change things. Doing more can really help but sometimes it can disguise the real problem and sometimes, it can even get in the way of our leadership and our effectiveness.”
Most heads, if asked privately, would recognise some version of this in their own school. The harder question is what to do about it, particularly at this point in the year, when leadership teams are starting to look at next year’s improvement plan and the natural pressure is to make it bigger rather than tighter. The behaviour intervention from October. The literacy strand that began in January after the data analysis came in. The wellbeing piece that launched alongside the staff survey. The data review cycle that runs every six weeks because it always has. The new attendance protocol that came in after Easter. Each was introduced for a good reason and survived the review that followed. Each is still officially live.
The pressure most leadership teams feel at this point is to add more on top of all this: a better MIS system, a new marking policy, another attendance initiative, training on Adaptive teaching, an oracy audit. The other available response, the one that tends to take more time and produce fewer visible deliverables, is subtraction
Why subtraction takes longer to do well
There are practical reasons subtraction is harder than addition. Adding produces something visible. It comes with a meeting, a launch event, a slide in a strategy document, a line in the autumn newsletter to parents. Subtraction has none of those affordances. There is no launch event for stopping a thing.
It’s also harder because the work coming off the plan was usually introduced by someone still on the team, championed in a previous SLT meeting, defended in a Trust review. Letting it go can feel internally like a quiet admission that the original decision was wrong, which it usually wasn’t. Most things on a plan worked when they were introduced; the honest question is whether they’re still doing the work they were brought in to do.
Most leadership teams underestimate the cost of never asking that question. Schools that only ever add eventually run out of operational room. Staff who came up through the adding years often keep pace, because the layers went on one at a time. New colleagues joining a school whose plan has been accreting for a decade frequently can’t see where to stand. Over time, the harder cost shows up as a loss of clarity. When every initiative is still officially live, the leadership team loses the ability to point at the small number of things that genuinely matter most this year.
What subtraction actually requires
Subtraction, properly done, is leadership work rather than housekeeping. Tidying the school improvement plan is the version anyone with a highlighter can do in an afternoon. The version that matters asks, honestly, which of the things we still do are genuinely moving us towards the outcomes we care about, and which are still here because the conversation about stopping never happened.
Done well, the work needs a few things:
The first is rigour about the criteria, made explicit rather than left to whoever happens to hold the most influence on the day. What earns its place against the outcomes we want for the children and young people in our schools, and what doesn’t.
The second is care for the people involved. Some of what comes off the plan will be attached to colleagues who introduced it, defended it, or built their professional identity around it. Subtraction done carelessly creates damage that takes years to repair, and the work deserves to be done with that in mind.
The third is the willingness to actually have the conversation in the room. Subtraction in theory is easy. In practice it means saying out loud what has been quietly understood for a while: that the literacy strand isn’t working in its current form, that the data review cycle is producing reports nobody acts on, that the line management structure introduced two years ago is creating more friction than clarity. The leaders who do this well tend not to outsource the conversation to a consultant or a survey.
Questions worth taking into the summer term
A handful of questions that tend to surface the most useful subtraction conversations in leadership teams:
What did we add this year that hasn’t done what we hoped it would, and what are we waiting for before we say so?
Which things on our plan are still there because they work, and which are there because they are what we did last year?
If a new colleague joined our leadership team tomorrow, which parts of the plan would we explain apologetically?
What would our most experienced staff say is getting in the way of their best work this term?
If we removed one thing from the plan before September, what would it be, and who needs to be in the room when we decide?
The questions are designed to make a leadership team look honestly at what its plan has become, including the parts that have become difficult to defend.
Precision over volume
The wider framing here connects to the theme of this year’s PiXL June Conference: precision leadership, which the conference materials describe as not doing more, but doing the right things with greater clarity and intent.
Subtraction is one of the most practical forms that idea takes between now and September. Are you brave enough to stop the high-effort, low-impact initiatives and go into next year with a slightly shorter plan, held with more conviction? Schools that do tend to make more genuine progress than those carrying everything forward by default.
