Our interest is in exploring how and why changes, innovation or ‘reforms’ are adopted in secondary schools. We think the conventional models of adoption of large scale reform may be inadequate and look to the area of information technology for ideas and concepts to guide a case study of significant educational development in Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, a group of schools of innovation. We adopt Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle’ (2013) model, which describes the rise, fall and recovery of the market for e-business solutions, as a framework for guiding our case study both in the formulation of interview questions and the analysis of documents, transcripts and observations. The questions we seek to address are: 1) What insights can be gained into the take-up and persistence rates of individuals or particular groups with access to new ways of teaching or leading learning? 2) What do key policy actors describe as the influencing factors in adopting certain reforms and not others? We examine these through the analysis of documents and plans for reforms produced by Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools in the last three years as well as a series of interviews with key policy actors and teachers.