Innovation, like creativity, is one of the current buzz words in education – by which I mean it is treated as a positive, even exciting, concept among teachers and has recently been taken up by education ministers and the DfES. Conventionally innovation has been defined as:

This immediately removes two popular misconceptions: that an innovation is simply a new idea, which is the first element in an innovation, but not the innovation itself; and secondly that an innovation must be a product or service, as is often so in industry, when innovation can just as readily be a process, and in particular the process of designing an organisation and its operation. The business guru Peter Drucker offered a definition of innovation as:

which would appeal to those who think of education as being largely concerned with the performance of teachers. I prefer, for application in education, innovation to be defined as:

which can mean a modest adjustment to what one has done hitherto or a much more dramatic change in that one does something new to replace previous practice. The emphasis on ‘better’ is important, for we cannot blindly assume that an innovation is inherently a good thing, an advance on what went before. An innovation is not necessarily more effective or efficient than current practice. An innovation can spread in educational circles because it is imposed on the profession or because it becomes the temporary fad or fashion. We ought to test whether or not an innovation really is an improvement, but the test is by no means always undertaken before an innovation is taken up. A corollary of this test is that because it is a real improvement it should displace some previous practice. Educational innovations should not be a net addition to what teachers do.