Change Management in Education: Models, Benefits & Action Plans

Today’s schools face extraordinary pressure to adapt fast. From pandemic-era learning gaps to AI-fueled disruptions and rising stakeholder expectations, school leaders must drive change that’s not only effective but sustainable.

This guide offers a clear roadmap for change management in educational institutions. You’ll learn how to combine change management with leadership, apply proven frameworks such as ADKAR, Kotter, Lewin, and the McKinsey 7-S, and build a process that works in real classrooms.

Key takeaways

• Successful school change combines process discipline with human-centered leadership. Execution must align with staff readiness, not just timelines.
• Pilots only work when they’re followed by structured evaluation, using clear metrics and alignment checks (like the 7-S Framework) before scaling.
• Models like ADKAR and Kotter help identify where adoption breaks down and how to repair trust, desire, or clarity.
• Most resistance is circumstantial, not personal. Smooth change depends on aligning systems, addressing staff concerns, removing friction, and sustaining behavior over time.

What is change management in education?

Change management in schools refers to a structured discipline that helps individuals and systems smoothly adopt new curricula, technologies, and policies. In practice, the concept of change management in schools has two streams: execution and leadership.

The execution part of change management addresses the implementation. It’s planning, time management, tools, and a communications strategy. Change leadership, in turn, addresses human concerns. It communicates the purpose of change, leads by example, and inspires stakeholders.

Why managing change in schools is more critical than ever

The post-pandemic shift, rising use of AI, and budget constraints highlight the need for change in educational management:

• Learning gaps caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns deepened the digital divide in education and solidified many unproductive habits that reduced students’ readiness to learn, even after campuses reopened. This reflected in a significant drop in math and reading skills among students.
• Emergence of ChatGPT. AI fosters dependency and robs students of the mental work that builds skill. ChatGPT and other popular chatbots have been shown to impair working memory, learning capacity, and critical thinking.
• Budget constraints. Districts still can’t get the money. Billions in K–12 funds remain on hold at the Education Department. This makes many districts seek additional education technology funding solutions to maintain their tech stacks.

Taken together, these pressures leave schools with little margin for error. Change must be well-executed, sustainable, and long-lasting. That demands a structured approach with a clear plan, the right tools, and change leadership.

Additional reading: Explore how smart infrastructure and process alignment support cost-effective IT management in school districts.

Leading and managing change in schools: models and frameworks

You can apply several change management theories in education, including ADKAR, Kotter’s 8 Steps, and Lewin’s 3-Stage Model, which offer school leaders practical ways to lead change with structure and clarity.

ADKAR

The ADKAR model, developed by Prosci, is an outcome-oriented framework for managing the people’s side of change. It outlines five essential building blocks for individual change:

• Awareness of the need for change
• Desire to support it
• Knowledge of how to change
• Ability to implement new skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement to sustain the change over time

Kotter’s 8 steps

Kotter’s 8-Step Process is a leadership-focused change model, meaning it puts principals, teacher leaders, and change agents at the center of transformation. Rather than relying solely on policies or project plans, Kotter emphasizes that leaders should empower teams through these eight steps:

1. Create urgency
2. Build a guiding coalition
3. Form a clear vision
4. Enlist a volunteer army
5. Remove barriers
6. Celebrate short-term wins
7. Sustain momentum 
8. Anchor the change in culture

Credit: Kotter International

Lewin’s 3-Stage Model

Lewin’s 3-Stage Model is process-oriented rather than personality-driven. It focuses more on sequencing change in three stages that help in managing staff expectations and building routines that stick:

1. Unfreeze. This stage creates readiness, communicates the current discomfort, and signals that the current situation needs to change.
2. Change. Implements a new process, tool, or policy. This is the messy middle where staff are learning, experimenting, and adjusting. 
3. Refreeze. This stage locks in the new way. The goal is to make the change feel normal rather than temporary.

The McKinsey 7-S Framework

The McKinsey 7-S Framework is a diagnostic tool that highlights how an organization should carry out change as a system. McKinsey’s framework uses seven interconnected elements to identify misalignments in change implementation:

• Strategy (The change plan)
• Structure (How teams and responsibilities are organized)
• Systems (Daily tools, workflows, and processes)
• Skills (Staff competencies required to succeed in the new model)
• Staff (Headcount, roles, and capabilities)
• Style (Leadership tone and management approach)
• Shared values (What people believe “matters” at your school)

Credit: The Strategy Institute

Core change management principles in education

Different approaches to managing change in education share a set of core principles that guide successful implementation:

• Anchor the change in purpose and trust. Build credibility before making behavior shifts. People engage when they believe the change is necessary, relevant, and led by those they trust, not when it’s simply enforced. 
• Pace the rollout to match human readiness. Plan time decisions, training, and policy shifts based on your team’s actual readiness. Change fails when it outpaces people’s capacity to absorb it.
• Align the system to support the behavior. Check for misaligned incentives, conflicting tools, unclear policies, or overloaded staff and fix them before they derail momentum. Even motivated individuals will stall if the environment works against them. 
• Treat scaling as a decision, not a default. Start with a protected pilot, track what works, and only scale when there’s evidence that the change succeeds in real classrooms with real users. Don’t roll out to the whole school or district by inertia.

Developing a change management plan for schools

The mechanics of the change management process in education are the following:

1. State the problem and describe the solution.
2. Check individuals’ awareness and skills, verify available technology, and ensure enough professional development time for staff.
3. Pick 3–5 simple measures that prove the change is working. Record a baseline “now” and set targets for the end of a 6–8-week pilot. 
4. Define what policies, procedures, and technologies should be removed, rewritten, and realigned.
5. Appoint an executive sponsor and a pilot project lead, and 3–5 doers with authority to unblock issues.
6. Explain to the pilot group why it’s happening, what is changing, who is affected, when it takes effect, what to do now, and where to get help.
7. Deliver hands-on, job-specific training to your pilot group and use sandbox environments where users can practice tasks.
8. Collect feedback, share small wins, and adjust the process when needed.
9. Scale the process across the organization.
10. Hold regular check-ins and introduce light-touch adjustments.

Tackling common challenges of change in educational management

Managing change in educational organizations should be about the human experience. Securing buy-in from people is not that simple. In fact, as much as 70% of change initiatives fail, and management of change in education most commonly stumbles when:

• Staff don’t see the point of the change
• People revert to old habits after initial success
• Adoption stalls despite training
• Pilots succeed technically but fail culturally

There are many reasons for those issues; however, most of them stem from poor communication, burnout, and misunderstanding. Managing such resistance to change in education often begins with listening and identifying what staff members actually need.

Assessing readiness

Among change management strategies in education, the ADKAR model offers the most structured approach to assessing change readiness. You can survey or interview your pilot group and score each stage on a 1–5 scale.

Once scored, identify the first element rated 3 or below and address it. For example, if staff lack Desire, don’t jump to training (Ability) yet. Instead, improve communication around the purpose and personal relevance of the change. Only when each stage is rated high should you proceed to the next.

Stakeholder communication

A powerful way to structure stakeholder communication is by combining Lewin’s approach with Kotter’s and grounding your message in both education and communication.

#1: Unfreeze (Lewin) → Build urgency + alignment (Kotter Steps 1–3)

At this stage, your job is to break inertia and create space for change. Communicate the need for action through compelling data and human stories. Then form and introduce your guiding coalition, and share a clear, emotionally resonant vision that answers:

• Why are we changing now?
• What will happen if we don’t?
• What’s the future we’re aiming for?

#2: Change (Lewin) → Mobilize and remove friction (Kotter Steps 4–6)

Lewin’s change stage is the actual pilot. A good approach to handle communication during the pilot phase is to implement Kotter’s steps 4–6:

• Enlist a volunteer army (aka change champions). These are the most respected and motivated teachers, IT members, and administrators in the pilot group. They will amplify your message and motivate others to adopt the change.
• Remove barriers. Regularly check in with your pilot group to identify what’s slowing them down, whether it’s outdated policies, unclear workflows, missing tools, or time constraints. The goal is to maintain two-way communication so that stakeholders actually contribute to the process and feel valued as a result.
• Celebrate short wins. Use pilot results, including success metrics, quotes, and visuals, to share early success stories. Where possible, combine appreciation (recognition, public praise, peer validation) and practical incentives (stipends, release time, classroom resources) to reward participation and encourage broader adoption.

#3: Refreeze (Lewin) → Reinforce and embed (Kotter Steps 7–8)

Upon implementing change, the task is to solidify achievements:

• Sustain change. Continue to update stakeholders on the initiative and highlight the progress of late adopters. 
• Anchor the change in the culture. Phase out outdated practices in policies and strengthen new behaviors with support and meaningful incentives.

Setting metrics

Focus on practical, observable metrics that give early signals about whether the change is being adopted and used effectively:

• Active usage. The percentage of staff/students using the new process or tool.
• Feature adoption. Are users engaging with the full workflow, not just parts of it?
• Support volume. The number of help requests and the top three recurring issues.
• Training completion. The percentage of staff who have completed training. 
• User feedback. Quick pulse survey: What’s working? What’s confusing?

Training and professional development

Offer short, practical sessions or recorded walkthroughs that demonstrate key workflows. Provide sandbox access whenever possible, allowing users to test the process before going live. Support materials should be concise, such as quick-reference guides, checklists, or step-by-step sheets tailored to each role.

Protecting training time is equally important for effective change management in schools. Schedule it before the pilot launch and do it again around weeks two or three. Don’t expect meaningful adoption without space for learning, and ensure stakeholders have a way to ask for help.

Monitoring & adjusting

Besides the success of the pilot itself, the monitoring and adjusting process should reflect the strategic relevance of the pilot to the core principles in schools. The McKinsey 7-S Framework can help in achieving this if you evaluate the pilot from this angle:

Additional reading: Explore how various change frameworks apply to higher education change management.

The key benefits of change management in schools

The importance of change management in education lies in its ability to align people, processes, and culture around innovation. When done well, it delivers lasting benefits:

• Fits complex systems with deep-rooted traditions
• Overcomes resistance and operational friction
• Prepares communities to embrace innovation, such as physical automation in schools
• Fosters collaboration and continuous improvement

A practical example of managing change in education

A hypothetical “Westbridge High” school approached its learning management system (LMS) rollout with a structure in mind. Leaders began by sharing local data and real classroom stories to create urgency, then built early buy-in through listening sessions, informal demos (ADKAR), and a guiding coalition of respected staff (Kotter).

A McKinsey 7-S assessment revealed a key bottleneck: how to stage over 600 laptops without disrupting the learning process. As a Systems-level solution, the school introduced smart lockers to streamline device drop-off and pickup.

Implementation note on 7-S (Systems): Handle device staging/exchange at the Systems layer — the processes, tools, and workflows that enable the change. Train staff and students on the handoff flow and make regular check-ins.

Example school: St Andrews Christian College uses LocknCharge FUYL smart lockers with self-serve workflows, SSO, and remote unlock.

The rollout began with a one-grade pilot, supported by five success metrics, a seven-week decision gate, and weekly feedback loops. Role-specific training included a sandbox, quick guides, and smart locker workflows.

A good post-pilot ADKAR readiness score signaled a time for district-wide adoption. Behavioral nudges, such as champions, early wins, and just-in-time support, helped Westbridge High drive lasting change.

FAQ

Why do schools struggle with change?

Many initiatives fail due to a lack of buy-in, poor communication, or rushing ahead before people are ready. Structured planning without emotional alignment rarely works.

How do you know if a change has been successful?

Track early signals, such as adoption rate, and analyse stakeholder feedback. Success also means that the change is reflected in new routines, confident staff, and alignment with your school’s mission.

What role do parents play?

Parents influence how students respond to change and how the wider community perceives it. Engage them in the process through newsletters, parent portals, and updates.

What models work best for small schools vs. districts?

ADKAR, Kotter, Lewin, and McKinsey 7-S are equally important for smaller schools. The difference is that districts typically benefit more from clearly structured coalitions and carefully staged pilots. Smaller schools, however, may move faster with informal leadership.

Final thoughts: Leading the future of education

Effective school change management is an investment in leadership capacity and long-term student success.

The most innovative schools in the world approach change with intention, alignment, and empathy, building the resilience needed to navigate economic pressures and rapid technological shifts.

Choose to lead with purpose and discover how LocknCharge smart locker solutions can support school device management, so your team can focus on what matters most: learning.