The Rumble Strips of School Improvement

Simon Breakspear
25 August 2026

I’ve been deep in the final edits of my new book, Lean Monitoring, these past few weeks, and one idea keeps following me out of the manuscript and into my conversations with school leaders. It’s about bad news, and why we should want it much earlier than we usually get it.

The Idea: A rumble strip is a gift.

30-Second Version

The outcome data on your improvement work arrives many months, sometimes years, after the work itself. The early signals show up much sooner. In school improvement, these are called lead indicators, and the type I’m particularly interested in is what I call the rumble strip: an early warning that things are drifting off track – confusion, patchy uptake, quiet deprioritisation. Sometimes they’re spoken out loud; often they’re subtle, visible only when you go and discover what’s happening on the ground.

Surfaced early, and met with curiosity, a rumble strip is a gift. It gives you the information you need to course correct and steer towards the impact you’re after.

The Full Read

Anyone who’s done a long highway drive knows the moment. A long straight, late afternoon, attention shifting to the podcast or playlist, and the car eases towards the edge of the lane. Then the road answers: the low vibration of a rumble strip up through the steering wheel. The warning reaches you before the danger does. You course correct back into the centre of the lane and carry on towards your destination.

Improvement work sends the same kind of signal, if you know what to listen for: teachers unclear about what they’re actually meant to do, uptake that’s patchy across the team, an approach being diluted in a way that removes the active ingredients, a slow return to default practices.

Sometimes these warnings are loud and clear. People will tell us directly: “I’m confused.” “I haven’t got around to it yet.” “I’m not sure why we’re being asked to do this.” At other times the signal is far subtler. People agree with us. They say, “It’s going pretty well, thanks.” But when we look at the programs, the approach isn’t built in. When we visit classrooms, the target practices aren’t yet part of instructional habits. When we check the online platform, nobody has logged in for weeks. This is why we go and seek evidence of what’s really happening. We want to know what people are really thinking, what they’re really doing, and how it’s really going. And we want to know early enough to learn and adjust, increasing the likelihood of achieving the impact we’re after. I call these the rumble strips of any improvement journey.

I remember learning this from Michael Fullan, who once said to me, “Being ‘right’ at the end is better than being ‘right’ at the beginning.” Seeking out rumble strips and steering by what they tell us is at the core of how effective leadership teams adjust along their implementation journeys. On the road, we hear the judder, correct and carry on with the journey. In our improvement work, we get curious, we learn, we course correct, and hopefully make even better progress towards what we’re trying to achieve for our learners.

Small step →Name one rumble strip for an improvement priority you’re leading right now.

If it’s already making a noise, get curious: ask what’s driving that pattern of behaviour and what it’s telling you about the effectiveness of your implementation strategies.