Insights from Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Spain show strong agreement on what makes innovation last in schools. Innovation is not described as novelty or technology alone. It is seen as purposeful change that improves learning, inclusion, organisation, or wellbeing and continues to matter over time.
School leaders outline common obstacles that make sustaining innovation difficult. One is risk avoidance. Under pressure, schools tend to fall back on familiar routines. Innovation can feel risky when accountability is high and mistakes are penalised. Another challenge is overload and fatigue. When many initiatives compete for attention, staff struggle to focus and innovation loses momentum.
A third recurring issue is reliance on a few champions. When innovation depends on one or two highly motivated people, it often fades when they move on or burn out. Sustained innovation requires collective capacity, not individual effort. Leaders also point to compliance-oriented environments, where ambition to innovate clashes with narrow measures and administrative demands. In such contexts, innovation can feel hard to justify.
Psychological safety appears as a decisive condition across countries. Innovation lasts when people feel safe to try, fail, and learn without fear of blame. Closely linked to this is the lack of protected reflection time. When reflection is not built into routines, schools struggle to review what works and to adjust practices before moving on to the next initiative.
Despite different national contexts, three shared competence areas stand out clearly.
First, purpose and educational value. Innovations last when leaders and teams can judge what is worth sustaining and why. When change is clearly linked to improvements in learning or wellbeing, it is easier to embed. When innovation feels like an extra task or trend, it fades.
Second, strategic continuity and improvement cycles. Schools that sustain innovation plan beyond the initial push. They start small, check what works, adjust based on feedback, embed practices into routines, and spread them gradually. Innovation is treated as continuous improvement, not one-time delivery.
Third, people, culture, and shared ownership. Across countries, innovation lasts when it becomes collective work. Leadership is described less as directing change and more as creating conditions for trust, learning, and shared responsibility. Internal sharing and peer learning help practices spread beyond small groups.
Motivation follows the same pattern. Financial incentives are rarely central. What keeps people engaged is meaning, visible benefit for students, recognition, and opportunities to learn together. External rewards can help, but they can also reduce innovation to formal compliance if they replace professional ownership.
Looking ahead, school leaders across all three countries point to growing pressures. Digital transformation and AI are accelerating. Attention to wellbeing and inclusion is increasing. Schools face rising complexity and overload. These pressures raise the bar for sustaining innovation, while also making it more necessary than ever.
A clear conclusion emerges. The main challenge is not lack of knowledge. School leaders largely agree on what helps innovation last. The real difficulty lies in maintaining the mindset and conditions needed to keep applying these principles when daily pressures rise. Sustaining innovation is therefore not only a technical task. It is a challenge of attention, culture, and leadership habits embedded in everyday school life.