Key takeaways:
Accountability is strongest when it creates professional dialogue, not just procedural proof.
Professional judgement is not a threat to accountability; it is one of the conditions that makes accountability meaningful.
Compliance can show that activity occurred, but it cannot determine whether the activity improved learning.
Stronger accountability conversations begin with outcomes, evidence, context, and the next responsible decision.
The Judgement–Compliance Gap becomes most visible when leaders remain accountable for outcomes while having less room to exercise the judgement those outcomes require.
Over the past few months I've noticed something interesting.
After conferences, workshops, and leadership sessions, I'll often find myself standing with a small group of principals continuing the conversation. We might have been talking about culture, wellbeing, change, or school improvement, but sooner or later someone says something remarkably similar.
"I don't mind being accountable."
Then there's usually a pause.
"I just want the opportunity to explain why we made the decisions we made."
I don't think that's a request for less accountability.
I think it's a request for a different kind of accountability.
The more I've reflected on those conversations, the more I've wondered whether we've quietly changed the meaning of accountability without really noticing we've done it.
Not the word.
The experience of it.
And that question has stayed with me for quite some time.
This week, I have been thinking about the relationship between accountability and professional judgement. More specifically, I have been thinking about a question that is often assumed rather than examined: what actually makes accountability possible?
That may sound like a strange question, because accountability is such a familiar word in education. It is one of those words we use as though everyone means the same thing by it. But the more I work with school leaders, the more I notice that accountability can describe very different experiences.
For some leaders, accountability means a thoughtful professional conversation about evidence, outcomes, and improvement. It means looking carefully at what is happening for learners, asking where progress is emerging, and deciding what needs to happen next. Those conversations can be challenging, but they often feel purposeful because they connect the work of leadership to the outcomes schools are trying to improve.
For other leaders, accountability feels more like procedural verification. The conversation is less about what changed and more about what can be shown. Less about what was learned and more about what was completed. Less about the quality of professional decision-making and more about the visibility of implementation.
That difference matters because educational leaders are rarely resisting accountability itself. In my experience, most principals want to be accountable. They want to know whether their work is making a difference. They want to understand whether learners are growing, whether staff are improving, whether the school’s strategic direction is producing meaningful change, and whether the community is being served well.
The frustration often begins when accountability becomes disconnected from the professional judgement required to produce those outcomes.
I do not think accountability and judgement are opposing forces. In fact, I think we need to turn that assumption around. Accountability becomes stronger when judgement is made visible, disciplined, evidence-informed, and open to professional scrutiny.
Accountability is not weakened by professional judgement.
It depends upon it.
One way to see this is to think about what leaders are actually asked to account for. Imagine sitting with a principal at the end of the year and asking, “How has the year gone?” Very few experienced leaders would begin by listing everything they completed. They would not simply say, “We held the meetings, completed the reports, implemented the framework, and delivered the initiative.”
They would tell you a much more complex story.
They would talk about the students who improved, the students who did not, and the patterns that became visible over time. They would explain why one priority had to be sequenced differently because the school’s staffing context changed. They might describe how attendance data revealed one issue, but conversations with families revealed another. They would talk about the decisions they made, the assumptions they had to reconsider, the evidence they trusted, and the evidence that made them uncomfortable.
In other words, they would account for their judgement.
That is the part of accountability we sometimes fail to name. Leaders do not simply account for activity. They account for the thinking that connects activity to purpose. They explain why one decision was made rather than another. They explain what evidence informed the decision, what the context required, what trade-offs were made, and what happened as a result.
That is a very different form of accountability from simply proving that a process was followed.
It is also closer to the actual work of leadership.
Years ago I came across Donald Schön's work on reflective practice, and it gave language to something I'd already been noticing in schools.
Leadership isn't difficult because principals don't know enough. It's difficult because they spend their days making decisions in situations where no procedure can possibly anticipate every variable.
Schön described professional work as practice carried out in situations that are uncertain, complex, and resistant to purely technical solutions.
When I first read that, I remember thinking, "That's exactly what schools feel like."
Every leader listening to this will recognise it.
Policies matter.
Standards matter.
Research matters.
But eventually every leader reaches a point where no document can tell them precisely what the next responsible decision is.
Someone still has to exercise judgement.
That is exactly the territory school leaders occupy.
A school is not a neutral setting where a fixed strategy can simply be dropped into place. It is a living community shaped by history, relationships, staffing, culture, aspiration, pressure, learner need, family experience, system expectation, and the unexpected events that arrive during the year. Professional judgement is not a luxury in that environment. It is one of the ways leadership becomes responsible.
This is also why Gert Biesta’s work is so relevant to education. Biesta continually reminds us that education is not only a technical enterprise. It always involves questions of purpose, value, and judgement. What is educationally desirable? What kind of growth are we seeking? What matters for these learners, in this community, at this time?
Those are not procedural questions.
They are judgement questions.
And if accountability is going to remain connected to the real purposes of education, it has to leave room for those questions to be asked seriously.
This is where I think the common debate about accountability can become unhelpful. We often place accountability on one side and autonomy on the other. Systems want accountability. Leaders want autonomy. Systems want fidelity. Leaders want professional discretion. Systems want evidence. Leaders want trust.
I understand why that debate exists, but I do not think it gets us to the heart of the issue.
The stronger question is not whether leaders should be accountable or autonomous. The stronger question is whether accountability is being defined in a way that allows leaders to exercise the professional judgement required to achieve the outcomes for which they are being held responsible.
Because if leaders are accountable for outcomes, but have very little room to interpret context, sequence priorities, adapt implementation, and respond to the realities of their school, accountability begins to take on a strange shape. Leaders remain responsible for the results, but the professional space needed to pursue those results becomes narrower.
This is one of the tensions I explore in The Sustainability Myth through the Judgement–Compliance Gap: the widening distance between the professional judgement effective leadership requires and the compliance increasingly demanded by contemporary systems.
That gap does not mean accountability is bad.
It means accountability can become distorted when it is reduced too far.
Let me make this more concrete.
Imagine two schools implementing exactly the same literacy initiative.
The first school serves a highly mobile community. Students arrive throughout the year. Many are learning English as an additional language. Attendance is uneven. Families may be navigating economic pressure, housing instability, or disrupted experiences of schooling. The teachers are committed, skilled, and deeply invested, but every decision about literacy is also connected to language acquisition, attendance, trust, transition, and continuity of learning.
The second school serves a relatively stable community. Enrolments are consistent. Attendance is strong. Families are highly engaged. Most students arrive with established literacy foundations. Teachers have worked together for years and share strong instructional routines.
Both schools receive the same literacy priority.
Both schools should be accountable for improving literacy.
But should they implement the initiative in exactly the same way?
Almost nobody who understands schools would say yes.
The first school may need to sequence the work differently. It may need to strengthen language supports, connect literacy improvement with attendance strategies, and pay close attention to newly arrived learners. The second school may be able to move more quickly into instructional precision, richer texts, and more ambitious growth targets.
The same priority may be entirely legitimate in both schools.
The responsible pathway may differ.
That is the point.
The moment we acknowledge that different contexts require different responses, we have already accepted the need for professional judgement. We have accepted that accountability cannot simply mean identical implementation. We have accepted that meaningful accountability requires leaders to explain how their decisions served their learners in context.
Context does not remove accountability.
It changes what responsible accountability must ask.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is the point where many accountability conversations begin to drift.
Not because anyone intends them to.
Simply because implementation is easier to observe than judgement.
It's easier to ask whether something happened than to ask whether the right professional decisions were made along the way.
One question measures activity.
The other asks us to think.
Schools need both.
But they're not the same conversation.
And this is where I find the distinction between implementation accountability and improvement accountability useful.
Implementation accountability asks, “Was the work done?” Was the process followed? Was the initiative delivered? Was the documentation completed? Was the evidence collected?
Those questions can matter. Implementation discipline matters. Without it, school improvement can become symbolic, fragmented, or inconsistent. Schools can say the right things without actually doing the work. So I do not want to dismiss implementation accountability. It has a legitimate place.
But improvement accountability asks a deeper question.
Did the work make a difference?
What changed for learners?
What evidence tells us whether progress is real?
What did the context require?
What did we learn?
What should we improve next?
Those questions require judgement.
Viviane Robinson’s work on student-centred leadership helps us understand this because it keeps leadership connected to the quality of teaching and learning, not just the appearance of activity. Fullan and Quinn’s work on coherence points in a similar direction. Improvement depends on shared purpose, disciplined focus, and aligned action, not simply the accumulation of initiatives.
This is where accountability can become paradoxical.
A school may be able to demonstrate that work is happening while still not being clear about whether the work is improving learning. A leader may have evidence of activity without evidence of impact. A system may become more confident that processes are visible while becoming less attentive to whether those processes are actually serving the intended purpose.
That is why compliance alone cannot carry the full weight of accountability.
Compliance can show that something happened.
Judgement helps us determine whether it mattered.
Now, I want to be careful here, because there is an important concern that deserves to be taken seriously. If we emphasise professional judgement too strongly, some people may worry that leaders can simply justify anything by appealing to context.
That would be a misunderstanding of professional judgement.
Professional judgement is not personal preference. It is not instinct without evidence. It is not a licence to ignore expectations, avoid scrutiny, or resist change. Professional judgement is disciplined. It is shaped by evidence, ethics, research, context, experience, and openness to challenge.
Cranston’s work on professional responsibility is helpful here because it gives us a stronger way of thinking about accountability in schools. He argues that school leadership should be understood through the lens of professional responsibility rather than narrow accountability. That is not a move away from responsibility. It is a move towards a deeper form of it.
Professional responsibility asks leaders to account for more than compliance. It asks them to account for the quality of their reasoning, the evidence they considered, the trade-offs they made, the outcomes they pursued, and the learning that followed.
That is a much higher standard than simply saying, “We completed the task.”
It asks leaders to say, “This is the outcome we were pursuing. This is the evidence we considered. This is what our context required. This is why we adapted the approach. This is what changed for learners. This is what still needs to improve.”
That is not weaker accountability.
That is more intelligent accountability.
Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s distinction between technical and adaptive work is also useful here. Some problems can be addressed through known solutions and established expertise. But many of the challenges school leaders face are adaptive. They require learning, judgement, experimentation, and the navigation of competing values. Treating adaptive work as purely technical may create the appearance of accountability, but it can also narrow the space where real leadership is needed.
So what does this mean in practice?
It does not mean adding another framework.
It does not mean turning accountability conversations into something more complicated.
In many cases, it may mean beginning the conversation in a slightly different place.
Instead of starting with, “Did we implement this correctly?” we might begin with, “What outcome are we trying to improve?”
Then we might ask, “What evidence tells us whether we are making progress?”
And then, “What does our context require us to do next?”
Those three questions change the conversation.
They do not remove accountability. They strengthen it by reconnecting action with purpose. They keep the focus on learners. They invite evidence without allowing evidence collection to become the work itself. They honour context without using context as an excuse. And they make professional judgement visible enough to be discussed, challenged, refined, and improved.
That may be one of the most important shifts available to school leaders.
Because many accountability conversations are already happening. The question is whether those conversations are helping leaders think more clearly about impact, or simply asking them to prove that activity has occurred.
The more I reflect on this idea, the less interested I become in asking whether schools have enough accountability.
I find myself asking a different question.
What kind of accountability are we trying to build?
Because if accountability only tells us whether activity occurred, we may become very good at proving that work happened.
If accountability also invites leaders to explain their judgement, examine evidence honestly, and learn from what they discover, then accountability becomes something quite different.
It becomes part of professional learning.
Perhaps that's the question I'd leave with you this week.
When you ask someone to be accountable...
What are you really asking them to account for?
If this conversation resonates with something you're experiencing in your own leadership, I explore the deeper argument in this week's Leadership Paper, The Sustainability Myth.