Across Europe and internationally, education systems are under sustained pressure to demonstrate improvement in student outcomes, equity, and future-oriented competencies, while simultaneously responding to policy agendas shaped by OECD frameworks, international comparisons (e.g. PISA), and national accountability regimes. Despite this, school reform continues to be characterised by initiative overload, policy churn, and short-lived interventions, producing what has been described as “projectitis” (Adelman & Taylor, 2007) rather than durable systemic change.

Whole-school change (WSC) is frequently proposed in European and international policy discourse as a solution to this fragmentation. Yet, as Thomson (2010) argues, it remains a concept “used in various ways, by different people, for diverse purposes, and [with] distinct appearances and effects in schools and school systems” (p. 11). Empirical research across multiple national contexts suggests that many reforms fail to embed because they are treated as programmes to be implemented rather than as organisational transformations to be lived (Hargreaves, 2008; OECD, 2015; Roffey, 2016).

This paper contributes to European debates on sustainable school reform by examining whole-school change as a systemic, meaning-making process within a secondary school in the UK implementing the Thinking Schools (TS) framework. While TS is now used in multiple countries, it is not studied here to determine its effectiveness, but to provide the context as a locally enacted reform ecology operating under pressures familiar across European systems: accountability, curriculum constraint, staff workload, and performativity.

The study investigates how whole-school change can be conceptualised through the perceived experiences of both Staff and Student Drive Teams tasked with change, addressing three operational questions:

(1) how participants perceive whole school change itself; (2) how they experience their role within the change process; and (3) how they perceive the facilitators and challenges shaping their work.

The theoretical framework integrates systems theory, organisational learning, and autopoietic theory. Following Thomson (2010), schools are conceptualised through the metaphors of ecological systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and learning organisations (Senge, 1990), both of which are widely influential in European school improvement discourse. These are extended through Wheatley’s (1999) autopoietic interpretation of organisations as self-producing meaning systems (Luhmann, 2012; Maturana & Varela, 1980). Within this frame, reform is not implemented but perturbs the system, triggering internal processes of reinterpretation and reorganisation, aligned with Argyris and Schön’s (1978) concept of double-loop learning.

Based on the findings, the paper argues that whole-school change is best understood not as an ‘add-on’, but as ongoing systemic change and a multiple-loop, multi-layered learning process supported by risk-taking, reflection, teams interrelations, non-negotiable whole school change, common values and language, and continuous learning, developed into a ‘petal’ model that merits further attention with direct implications for European debates on school improvement, professional learning, and democratic participation in education.

This study adopts a qualitative, exploratory longitudinal case study design to investigate how whole-school change is experienced and conceptualised by members of Staff and Student Drive Teams within a Thinking School context. A case study approach is particularly suited to this research as it enables the in-depth exploration of complex, contextually embedded and evolving processes of change within a real-life organisational setting. The research is situated within a constructivist paradigm, informed by ontological relativism and epistemological interpretivism. From this perspective, reality is understood as multiple and socially constructed, and knowledge is generated through participants’ interpretations and meaning making. This philosophical positioning aligns closely with the study’s focus on lived experience, perception and sense-making in relation to whole-school change. The case is a co-educational selective secondary school engaged in whole-school change through the Thinking Schools framework. Particular attention is given to the contributions of the Staff Drive Team and the Student Drive Team, who are formally tasked with leading and sustaining the change process. The longitudinal and exploratory nature of the design enables the study to capture not only participants’ experiences at a single moment in time, but also how understandings, practices and relationships evolve across the change journey. A multi-method qualitative data generation strategy was employed to support depth, triangulation and analytic richness. Data sources included two non-participant observations of both Drive Team activity, four focus groups conducted at different stages of the process, 16 semi-structured interviews with members of both teams, and documentary material (school development plans, Drive Team agendas and Thinking School accreditation reports). Data analysis proceeded in two complementary strands. Semi-structured interview data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), allowing for a detailed examination of participants’ lived experiences, identity positions and meaning-making processes. The remaining data sources were analysed using qualitative content analysis to identify patterns, themes and systemic relationships across practices, structures and discourses. These analytical approaches were integrated within an interpretive framework informed by systems theory, systems thinking and ecological models of development with autopoietic connotations. Research quality was addressed through strategies appropriate to qualitative case study research, including data triangulation, iterative and reflexive analysis, transparency of analytic procedures, and attention to researcher positionality. Ethical considerations included informed consent, confidentiality, and careful management of relational and professional boundaries within the research context.

This study set out to explore how whole-school change can be conceptualised through the perceived experiences of Staff and Student Drive Teams within a Thinking School context. The findings demonstrate that whole-school change is not experienced as a linear process of implementation, but as a systemic continuous multiple loop and multi-layered learning process through ongoing renewal. Across all three research questions, change emerged as a multi-layered phenomenon operating simultaneously at individual, team and whole school levels. Participants did not describe change as something that is “done to” the school, but as something that is continuously co-constructed through shared language, collective reflection, relational trust and distributed agency. Resistance was not positioned as obstacle to be eliminated, but as productive element within the school’s learning ecology. The role of both Staff and Student Drive Teams proved central to this process: their work extended beyond coordination and implementation. The inclusion of students as legitimate participants in leadership and strategic dialogue represents a significant reconfiguration of agency within the organisation and aligns strongly with European agendas around participation, democratic schooling and student voice. The proposed ‘petal’ model conceptualises whole-school change as a recursive, interdependent system of learning processes, held together by shared values, coherent language and aligned structures. Each “petal” represents a dynamic domain of activity, none of which operates in isolation. Conceptually, this study argues that sustainable school improvement is best understood as collective organisational learning rather than technical reform. For European school improvement research, this implies a shift towards ecological, participatory and systems-oriented models of change that recognise both staff and students as co-authors of educational transformation.

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