Of course, what works best for children with special needs depends upon the precise nature of an individual’s particular needs. That said, we can draw some generalisable conclusions by thinking about some of the more common areas of need schools have to contend with.

For instance, a child with a working memory deficit is likely to benefit from having information carefully sequenced and instruction broken into manageable chunks. But all children have limited working memory capacity and so all children will benefit from having instruction chunked.

Dyslexic children have the best possible chance of learning to read fluently if they are taught using a systematic synthetic phonics programme. This is equally true of children who are not dyslexic.

Students with an attachment disorder are likely to benefit from a structured environment, consistent rules, professional distance and focusing feedback on behaviour not the child. A child with an autistic spectrum disorder is likely to benefit from orderly routines and a calm environment. And a child who has ADHD is likely to benefit from clear boundaries and consistent, proportional consequences, but so is every other child.

If an explanation is too complicated for a child with limited working memory, simplifying and sequencing it is unlikely to make it worse for anyone else. If routines are too ambiguous for an autistic child, making them more predictable won’t disadvantage anyone. If a child with ADHD struggles because expectations are inconsistent, greater consistency will improve the classroom for everyone. What some children require in order to succeed, others will find helpful.

Of course, some children do need genuinely different or additional provision. It would, for instance, be absurd not to give a child with a visual impairment a text they’re unable to see. It’s essential to distinguish between accommodation, which changes how a child accesses learning, and intervention, which addresses an underlying difficulty through additional teaching. In both cases, SEND provision should, as far as possible, act as an on-ramp to the same ambitious curriculum rather than a detour into a quiet cul-de-sac.

While not all children are equally able, all children are more likely to achieve well if their teachers have high expectation of what they are capable. Those with educational disadvantages need explicit instruction, clear modelling, well-designed scaffolding which is removed as rapidly as is possible and lots of guided practice. But this is what’s most likely to benefit all children.

The late, great New Zealand professor of education, In his wonderful book, The Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nuthall said, “Ability appears to be the consequence, not the cause of differences in what students learn from their classroom experiences.” (p. 123) You may need to reread that sentence for its implications to sink in. We tend to believe that differences in children’s ability cause some to learn more and others to learn less but what Nuthall suggests is that children’s academic ability is — to some extent — a product of what happens in the classroom.

So what is it that occurs in classrooms that result in children becoming more able? Siegfried Engelmann, the creator of Direct Instruction wrote that, “The curriculum will largely determine the extent to which children are smart.”1 If some children are given a less challenging curriculum than others we ensure they will become less capable. Our determination of their ability to access the curriculum becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The single most important difference between children is the quality and quantity of what they know. This is not to discount the profound differences between children’s socio-economic backgrounds, or their relative fortune in the genetic lottery. Instead it is to observe that most of the differences between children are not amenable to the actions of teachers: we cannot solve social disadvantage and have no ability to meaningfully address children’s physical or mental endowments. However, we have enormous potential to determine what children encounter in our classrooms. The quality and quantity of what children know is the area on which we can have the most impact and so is, in my view, the most important for us to influence.

So, if knowledge is the aspect of difference over which schools have greatest control, then the question becomes how best to ensure that all children, not matter the labels they’ve been assigned, acquire as much of it as possible. The complexity of some children’s needs complicates the process, sometimes profoundly, but it rdoesn’t change the basic conditions under which learning is most likely to occur. If anything, it makes the need for effective teaching more acute.

While there will always be exceptions, by and large, the types of pastoral support and instructional practice that work best with children with SEND will be likely to get the best results with all children. If you want to know what good practice looks like then a good first step is to speak the SEND Co-ordinator at your school; very likely they will have some wise and useful insights that will help teachers in teaching all students.

Identifying a child as having a need can — often does — lower expectations. When we rationalise why children find it difficult to engage with an academic curriculum, it’s a small step to finding reasons for them not to have to struggle at all. Scaffolds become permanent, ambitious texts are replaced with more ‘accessible’ ones and support intended to provide access slides into approaches which inadvertently create dependence. Rather than find ways to protect children from the curriculum, good SEND provision provides them access to the same ambitious curriculum that all children are entitled to.

The children who are most disadvantaged, most at risk of failing, will be those that most need their teachers to be aware of effective practice. Advantaged children are more likely to thrive regardless of what their teachers do but they too will still benefit from the kinds of practice children with SEND need. The quality of teaching in a school should be judged by how well it works for those least able to compensate for its weaknesses.

An easy answer to these questions is place the blame at the feet of school leaders. It can seem pretty obvious that if a good headteacher leaves and is replaced by a less good one then decline will be inevitable. Of course, sometimes that’s exactly what happens. There’s no doubt that principals make an enormous difference and poor appointments can cause considerable damage. But this explanation might be a little too easy, conveniently turning the trajectory of a school into a neat narrative about the success or failure of individuals, heroes and villains, good leaders and bad ones. If standards slip, it’s as easy to blame the incoming head as it is for them to claim credit for anything that starts to improve.

But this neat story is both unfair and insufficient. Incoming heads inherit organisations already travelling down established tracks. They don’t just start driving a train, they also have to contend with the rail network the train’s travelling on. As a new head you have to get your head around existing staffing decisions, budgetary constraints, accumulated exceptions, unresolved problems, established routines, hidden dependencies and layers of institutional memory. The consequences of these decisions — made long before a new head is appointed — may not become visible for years. A headteacher can accelerate decline or arrest it, but, unless they’re launching a brand new school, they never begin with a blank canvas.

Schools aren’t set in amber. Staff leave, routines drift, temporary fixes become permanent and the reasons behind established practices are forgotten. None of these changes matters much in isolation, but together they accumulate. None of these shifts matter individually and can all be justified reasonably but they accumulate. And this accumulation leads, inexorably, to entropy.

Of course, schools aren’t closed thermodynamic systems and a headteacher isn’t one of Maxwell’s demons.1 Thinking in terms of entropy captures schools’ seemingly natural tendency to slide towards disorder unless energy is continuously spent maintaining order.

But deterioration sis hard to see in the present. A school can seem stable even though parts of the puzzle are being slowly taken away and put in the wrong places. If you walk the corridors behaviour seems mostly fine. The school’s still oversubscribed and, crucially, results remain within the acceptable range. From the outside, nothing appears to have changed.

Meanwhile, for those on the inside, getting anything done requires more and more effort. In most schools, competent people compensate. Because the deputy understands the timetable well enough, she can patch it whenever staffing changes. Heads of year increasingly have to intervene personally in incidents that would have been routine. Department leaders spend more time explaining procedures that used to well understood by everyone in the team. But good people can conceal weak systems for only so long.

Stability is an active state

We tend to imagine stability as the absence of change. If behaviour’s good, then presumably the behaviour system is stable. If the curriculum is coherent, the job’s done. As soon as expectations seem to be embedded, we turn our attention elsewhere. Sadly, however, this isn’t how schools (or any other human organisations) work.

Biological systems offer a more useful analogy. The human body is able to keep its temperature within a narrow range because a vast number of processes are constantly adjusting to changing conditions. Blood vessels dilate and contract, sweat evaporates, muscles shiver and hormones alter metabolic activity. What appears stable is actually homeostasis, the process by which living systems maintain relatively stable internal conditions despite changes in its environment.

For a school’s corridors to remain calm, staff must actively monitor students’ behaviour. Although students get used to corridors being a particular way — what we see around us becomes what we think is normal — as existing staff and students are replaced by incomers, expectations are tested. Stability depends on staff repeatedly noticing, reinforcing and repairing. What we accept becomes acceptable. What we permit we promote.

Culture is perishable. Shared expectations only remain shared if they’re continually communicated and renewed. For schools to achieve homeostasis, a huge amount of regulation and maintenance must go on. Remaining excellent after losing twenty members of staff is a spectacular — but usually uncelebrated — success story

Different elements of what makes schools successful decay at different rates. While knowledge encoded in policies can survive for years,2 tacit knowledge — the assumptions, habits and expectations people acquire simply by spending time in a school — is more fragile.

Success is perishable, but unevenly so. Some things need renewing constantly, others can coast for much longer. Each of the the different ingredients of a successful school (student behaviour, precise focus on effective teaching routines, staff expertise, professional trust etc.) don’t experience entropic forces in the same ways or at the same speed.

Good behaviour can evaporate in a matter of weeks if students get the the impression that expectations aren’t being reinforced but this isn’t how it usually happens. Many staff and some departs continue to operate like benign dictators in a failed state. They uphold orderly disciple with warm ferocity. Some corridors will become chaotic imediately whilst others remain a pocket paradise. As each new cohort tests what will actually be tolerated, standrds decline year on year unless it is actively arrested.

Trust can erode quickly or slowly after repeated inconsistency. One of the keys to maintaining professional trust is under promise and over deliver. It’s not enough to be honest with staff, you also have to do what you’ve committed to. Staff appreciate it when their leaders stand up and admit they’ve made a mistake, but they quickly get intolerant if they keep making them.

The hidden cost of staff turnover

Although staff turnover is an obvious source of entropy, we often think about it primarily in terms of vacancies: when one teacher leaves, another needs to be recruited to fill the gap. But teachers aren’t interchangeable units of labour. An experienced head of department knows which bit of the curriculum new teachers usually find difficult to teach, why a unit’s place in the sequence was moved, which routines are essential, which parents need a phone call rather than an email and which colleagues can solve problems on their own and which need some hand holding.

Most of this knowledge is tacit. It’s not that anyone deliberately decide not to write it down, it’s more that to attempt to do so would be incredibly inefficient. I remember a line manager telling me I should record more of what I did because “what if I was knocked over by a bus tomorrow?” I could see her point but the stuff I knew and did had taken years to accumulate through experience. I knew things because I was there when problems emerged, watched others solve similar problems and encountered enough cases to recognise patterns. How would you even start writing all this down?3

When experience staff leave, schools lose compressed experience. A replacement may be excellent — they may even possess greater expertise in some areas — but they don’t automatically inherit the accumulated knowledge of how this particular school works. As with institutional resilience, this loss of tacit knowledge is hard to see. It’s usually not til it’s gone that it’s absence hits us.

Imagine a department of eight teachers. One teacher leaves and another arrives. Nothing may have changed on the staffing spreadsheet but the lived experiece of the team might be very different. Suppose the departing teacher had taught every examination specification used by the department, mentored several colleagues, remembered the reasoning behind the curriculum and was the person everyone asked when an unusual problem arose. Their replacement is in their third year of teaching. If recruitment endangers organisational knowledge maybe we should put more of a premium on retention.

Schools tend to think about succession in hierarchical terms: who might become the next headteacher, deputy or assistant head? But succession risk exists at every level. The most consequential departure may be that of someone whose importance has gone largely unnoticed by senior leaders.

How many schools deliberately survey who possesses vital institutional knowledge? If only one person knows how an important process works, a school doesn’t really possess organisational knowledge. In actual fact, it has a dependency it might not even be aware of.

Institutional memory and informational decay

As I explored in my last post, schools lose the reasoning behind decisions as well as staff who made them

Most decisions are made in response to particular problems. Over time, knowledge of what that problem was erodes despite the ‘solution’ continuing to cast its shadow. As a result, schools often either preserve practices whose purpose has long been forgotten, or remove them without understanding what useful functions they may still perform.

Schools posses huge volumes of information. Policies documents and handbooks tell staff what to do but rarely record why the rule exists. Shared drives fill with documents and lesson slides, while their context disappears. When I visit schools I regulary ask questions about what I notice — Why are you teaching that there? Or, Why is that teacher teaching this so differently to another? — and listen to explanations that are, at best, garbled. I wait as people search through their laptops to try and find the version of a document they want if the certain knowledge that even if they can find it, were they to leave, no one else would even know to look for it.

Institutional memory, the continuing ability to explain why important things are done, is one very good reason why we develop rituals: memory survives socially. Through repetition, we hear messages we’ve heard many times before, ingraining ideas and ways of behaving ever deeper into consciousness. But what’s repetition for some is always new for others. New staff and students have their school taught to them through its rituals. And if this chain is broken meaning drains away.

Maintenance debt

Once schools start to forget why they do what they do, it becomes increasingly expensive to maintain the status quo, with time and attention devoted to servicing decisions whose original purpose is no longer understood. In software engineering, teams incur what they refer to as technical debt by choosing quick fixes that create extra work later. As shortcuts accumulate, increasing effort is spent maintaining the compromises they’ve created.

Whenever they shortcut the hard work of resisting entropy through workarounds, temporary fixes and sensible exceptions, schools incur a similar debt. Those responsible may fully intend to return when time allows and replace the bodge with something more durable, but we all know what paves the road to hell. People move on, circumstances change and temporary solutions endure. Eventually, all that remains is something clunky enough to just about work, whose upkeep is now someone else’s problem.

Sometimes, though, maintenance debt begins with something much more reasonable: an exception. Every exception to a rule can be justified. Let’s say the rule is that if a student misses a lunchtime detention this automatically escalates to an afterschool detention. What happens if a student has a medical appointment, or can only get home on the school bus? There are always excellent reasons to depart from the accepted process.

But what happens when reasonable exceptions accumulate? Staff become increasingly uncertain about what should happen. Policy and practice drift apart, and teachers start creating their own ways of making the system work. The same process appears elsewhere: a class is exempted from a common assessment becuase their teacher has been off long-term, a staffing workaround caused by an ECT walking out midway through the first term complicates the timetable, or the Head of Year 8 creates a parallel spreadsheet on students causing concern because the MIS is too unwieldy. Each decision makes sense in context, but together they make the organisation harder to predict, understand and maintain.

Exceptions should always be exceptional. As soon as they become routine, they start degrading the system and creating a maintenance debt that’s easy to miss. Staff end up spending time and attention on chasing kids to go to intervention sessions, keeping track of who’s allowed to wear trainers because or their “sore feet” and which parents have been promised either that their children don’t have to complete homework and that tbey should be given more of it.

The dilemma is that if we preserve too we get bogged down by the accumulation of unnecessary complexity. On the other hand, when too much is stripped away, we risk removing something that turns out to be vital. Robust schools can absorb long-term absence, a difficult cohort or an unexpected shock without the wheels coming off, but more fragile schools depend on everything going right all the time. Each new year, term and week is another spin of the roulette wheel. Sooner or later, a school’s run of luck will end and the debt they’ve piled up will need to be paid.

The price of efficiency

Schools often increase their vulnerability by trimming away whatever looks surplus. Duplication seems inefficient, unused capacity is expensive and so any role that isn’t at capacity is ripe for trimming. Financially led curriculum planning intensifies this pressure because staffing models are built backwards from what schools can afford: contact ratios rise, smaller classes become harder to justify and apparently spare leadership or administrative capacity is squeezed out. On paper, the model becomes leaner but in practice, each saving removes some of the capacity schools rely on when maintainance debts are due.

Organisational researcher, Louis Bourgeois described organisational slack as, “that cushion of actual or potential resources which allows an organization to adapt successfully to internal pressures for adjustment or to external pressures for change in policy.” He continues by adding that slack also allows organisations “to initiate changes in strategy with respect to the external environment.” Although this thinking is already embedded in schools in the form of prudent financial reserves, we’re much less comfortable applying the same logic to staffing, time and attention.

When considering the available slack in your school, what matters is how easy it is to access and redeploy. Spare money, spare time, duplicated expertise and an underloaded member of staff may all count as slack, but they offer very different kinds of protection when circumstances change. You can’t just redeploy a MFL teacher to successfully teach chemistry. Mao and colleagues found that both ‘absorbed slack’ (resources already tied up in existing operations) and ‘unabsorbed slack’ (resources able to be redirected more freely) were associated with greater organisational resilience. But just having spare capacity isn’t enough. Obvously just because you have £40,000 in your staff budget doesn’t mean you’ll be able to hire an experienced teacher halfway through October. Slack only has value if we can be used to learn, adapt and recombine it in response to new problems.

Interestingly, Essuman et al found that slack also improves resilience indirectly, through organisational attention. Spare resources gave organisations the capacity to notice emerging problems, make sense of them and act before they devolved into crises. The more time and attention staff have, the more likely they are to notice unusual patterns in, for instance, attendance data or assessment outcomes. What can look like waste in the short term — spare time, additional staffing or overlapping expertise — may prove costly to eliminate.

For obvious reasons, industries like aviation or nuclear power don’t pursue efficiency at any price. They know that reliability depends partly on the capacity to absorb error and surprise. Research on high-reliability organisations suggests that dependable performance under difficult conditions depends less on assuming that systems will work than on assuming they could fail and actively working to forestall potential failure.

Because their associated risks of failure seem so much less dramatic, schools can easily move in the opposite direction. Roles disappear because another staff member with a couple of frees on their timetable can absorb the work. It’s common for a department to lose its second in charge and for them not to be replaced because the head of department “appears to be coping.” Maybe they were, but is coping the limit of ambitions? And, now their support has been pared down will they continue to cope? In a system obsessed with efficiency, teaching allocations creep ever upwards and administrative tasks are redistributed whenever someone leaves. Each individual decision makes the staffing model look more efficient on paper but every such gain in efficiency reduces the margin for error.

Inefficiency may be the price of reliability. What looks like slack under normal conditions becomes resilience as soon as anything goes wrong.

Initiative sediment

Schools have another vulnerability: we always want to improve them, no matter how successful they are.. Dylan Wiliam’s famous aphorism captures the impulse neatly: “Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.”4 On the face of it that’s hard to argue with but Voltaire’s warning that “perfect is the enemy of good” points to the potential risk. As soon as continual improvement becomes an expectation, perfectly sensible ways of doing things can start to look like problems just because they’ve stayed the same for too long.

This impulse creates a bias towards what psychologists call subtraction neglect. When trying to improve something, we’re much more likely to think about what we could add than what could be removed.5 New priorities — iteracy, retrieval practice, attendance, adaptive teaching, oracy, metacognition, belonging, AI — are stacked onto existing ones because they’re obviously important, The problem is that trying to focus on them all will likely lead to most being done badly. Over time, ‘improvement’ becomes synonymous with doing more. Inevitably, attention fragments, embedded procedures are disrupted and maintenance is seen as complacency. Ironically, the drive to improve can make schools worse.

Every school improvement initiative is heralded as the thing that will lead to rocketing outcomes, tranquil classrooms and harmoniously coordinated teaching. Of course, this rarely comes to pass. Whoever launched the initiative leaves to inflict their ideas on another school and another shiny new initiative replaces the last. But old initiatives don’t just disappear. Traces of them clog up shared drives and defunct laminated posters continue cropping up in classrooms for years, a phenomenon Heusinkveld and Benders describe as organisational sedimentation. Sometimes this sedimentation is so entrenched that it leads to schools doing some very strange things. Incredibly, I worked with several schools over the past six months who are still training their heads of department for deep dives that will never happen. Usually the discrepancy between what’s current and what’s defunct is less stark, but staff still have to work out which layers are current and which are the fossilised remains of school improvement plans past.

William Ocasio’s attention-based view of organisations explains why this is can be a serious impediment. As he puts it, “What decision-makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on.”6 Attention is channelled by the rules, resources, relationships and routines of an organisation. Every new initiative therefore changes not only what staff have to do, but what they’re expected to notice, discuss and act upon.

Every new initiative makes a claim on a school’s collective attention. As initiatives accumulate, attention fragments across more and more demands making it ever harder to get relatively simple things done. The effort required to produce dependable outcomes keeps on rising.

In healthy schools, low effort produces high reliability. Behaviour systems work, assessments generate broadly trustworthy data and new staff quickly understand what’s expected. As entropy increases, the same level of reliability requires more effort.

Hard work, so often seen as a proxy for effectiveness, might actually suggest too much effort is being spent overcoming unnecessary friction created by accumulated complexity.

Knowing less, measuring more

If your effort-reliability ratio is rising you’re likely to be heading into trouble. As Leaders have to expend more effort on keeping everyday plates spinning, they become less able to see what’s going on and more dependent on proxies to try to make sense of their school.

Some reliance on proxies is unavoidable. We understand, for instance, that attendance figures stand in for patterns of absence, and assessment data only snapshots what students know and can do. Leading a school necessitates compressing vast quantities of messy information into a form that can be quickly interpreted and acted on.

But when leaders become increasingly distant from the thing being measured, proxies increasingly come to replace what they measure. As long as metrics increases twe don’t have to worry about the welfare of individual children. But metrics are only meaningful when they’re interpreted in context. A principal who’s worked in a school for fifteen years will know their staff well, understand why systems were introduced and have a good grasp of the context behind any blips in the data. But a newly appointed head, given exactly the same information, will have far less of the knowledge needed to make sense of it.

The understandable response is to ask for more information. If data suggests a department might be inconsistent, leaders introduce a new tracker. Because the tracker doesn’t give the full picture, subject leaders are required to add written commentary. Because the commentary varies between departments, a standard template is introduced. Completing the template then needs monitoring, which creates deadlines, reminders and further checking. Before long, staff are making vastly greater efforts for increasingly unreliable outcomes.

This negative feedback loop leads to an overvaluing of proxies. Producing proxies consumes attention; reduced attention makes the underlying work of teaching kids harder; and declining reliability creates pressure for still more evidence.

The weight of history

As we’ve seen, schools don’t make decisions in isolation: each choice alters the conditions in which the next is made, a process known as path dependence.

My favourite example of path dependence is the QWERTY keyboard. No one today would design a keyboard by asking what 19th century typewriter used and yet the solution to very specific mechanical problems has completely shaped the way virtual keyboard on smart phones are laid out. Originally, pressing a key swung a metal arm, called a typebar, towards the paper. If two commonly used typebars (T and H, S and T or A and N, for example) were positioned close together and struck in rapid succession, they could collide and jam together. The logic of the QWERTY keyboard was to prevent jams by separating the position of these letters. Athough typists can learn to touchtype at very high speeds, these arrangement has the unintended consequence of slowing down the maximum speed of typing.

However, once enough typists had learned the layout, manufacturers built machines around it, training courses taught it and employers came to expect it. Even after the mechanical constraints disappeared with the invention of electrical typewriters, changing the keyboard became impossible because everyone had accepted QWERTY as inevitable even though there are more efficient ways to design a keyboard.

The paths we’ve walked down constrain the choices available to us. Policies and interventions don’t exist in a vacuum. There is no Platonic Ideal. Their effects depend on the history of the system into which they are introduced, a phenomenon known as hysteresis, the tendency of a system’s past states to continue shaping its present behaviour.

This helps explain why two schools within the same Multi Academy Trust can adopt identical behaviour policies and end up with very different behaviour. In School A, consistency over years has built habits, expectations and trust. Staff expect colleagues to follow through, students expect rules to mean what they say, and leaders don’t need to make much effort for things to tick along.

The leaders of School B, observing the success of the neighbours may decide to adopt their behaviour system but there’s no guarantee they’ll get the same results. Years of inconsistency have taught students that consequences are negotiable. Staff expect to be undermined by leaders making exceptions, and the ghosts of initiatives past haunt the corridors. Past conditions continue to exert an influence even after those conditions have changed. Introducing a better policy won’t erase the habits, expectations and informal routines produced by years of what came before.

The same hysteretic process applies when two departments adopt the same curriculum. Even though materials are the same, the results they produce are very different because one has deep shared expertise while another is rebuilding after half the team left the previous year. Copying the visible structures of successful schools (a practice institutional theorists refer to as mimetic isomorphism) is so often disappointing for precisely this reason. You can copy a curriculum or behaviour policy, but you can’t copy the accumulated history of implementation, expertise and shared expectations that makes those structures work.

Because exam results are lagging indicators, entropic decline is so easy to miss until it’s too late. Students sitting GCSEs today began secondary school years earlier, so current outcomes still contain traces of previous staffing, curriculum choices and leadership. By the time results fall, a school’s deterioration may have been underway for years.

Finland early PISA success created an international fairy tale about the exceptional quality of Finnish schooling, despite ongoing declines in outcomes. Finnish PISA scores have been in free fall since the mid-2000s, with 2022 results lower than in any previous cycle across maths, reading and science. The OECD now describes the decline as one that “began much earlier.” Although Finnish authorities point to changes in funding, inequality, motivation and the wider social environment, the real problem was the at the conditions responsible for Finland’s success had been systematically dismantled and replaced with approaches that made things worse. But, by only looking at the outcomes of children educated under the outgoing system, other countries were desperate to import the disaster policies Finland was currently enacting7

As shared understanding weakens, schools often compensate by writing more things down, while individual staff create workarounds because formal processes are too clunky. At the same time, slack disappears: timetables tighten, spare capacity is allocated and everyone becomes busier.

Although none of these signs proves a school is in decline, they suggest day-today operations may be too dependent on the past while losing the capacity to absorb what the future may present.

Subscriber bonus: Designing against entropy

The argument so far has been diagnostic. Good schools become ever more fragile when:

• Experienced staff leave faster than they’re replaced

• Exceptions accumulate

• Initiatives pile up

• Slack is trimmed away

So, what should we do about it? Because maintenance is never finished, there’s no magical solution to organisational entropy. It is a depressing fact of life. But by accepting this fact, schools can take the following steps to slow decay, make it easier to spot and reduce the damage when it sets in.

Read more

Before that, I argued that schools can be better understood by applying the metaphor ofof ecosystems rather than that of machines.

This week I’m going to explore what schools might look like through the eyes of an anthropologist.

Making the familiar strange

If an anthropologist from a culture totally unfamiliar with the concept of school were to spend a year embedded in a range of different secondary schools, their field notes would describe a culture dominated by bells, timetables and ritual.

You can imagine them noting that at regular intervals an electronic signal triggers the coordinated movement of several hundred adolescents between specialised rooms. They’d observe adult members of the tribe standing at classroom thresholds, regulating entry according to conventions that vary subtly. Where some require silence before admission, others exchange informal greetings before allowing newcomers to cross the boundary. On the whole, they’d see that students tend to comply, apparently finding these rituals entirely unremarkable. To the outsider it might all appear completely arbitrary but to those within schools it’s just the way things are.

Our anthologist might note the production of sacred texts being produced during lessons and inscribed according to strict conventions. Dates must appear in prescribed locations with different coloured ink carrying distinct symbolic meaning — black or blue records original thought, red means error, green signifies redrafting, purple denotes reflection. Throughout the day they’d see other adults materialise in rooms without warning, observe proceedings in silence, make cryptic marks on portable tablets and disappear without explanation.

There are countless other examples of school-based ritual behaviour: the fact that students are all dressed in identical uniforms; the expectation that they move briskly in some places but are expressly forbidden to run in others; that conversation may be encouraged in one room but be unacceptable in the next. Students queue — with or without complaint — stand when instructed, and file into large halls where hundreds sit facing a single speaker.

None of this would strike a trained anthropologist as irrational. Human societies have always organised themselves through rituals whose purposes are very often inscrutable, even to those performing them. Ask anyone in a school why students line up, why assemblies matter, why books must be written in using particular colours for particular purposes or why senior leaders wander the corridors carrying clipboards and you’re likely to get an explanation rooted in “efficiency,” or “practicality.” Anthropology teaches us to be suspicious of such answers. Rituals don’t endure because they’re the most efficient way of doing something but because they address deeper social issues that, over time, become part of the background of everyday life.

Why we gather

We tend to assume schools are rational places because they’re so concerned with knowledge, evidence and examination results but from an anthropological perspective, schools are cultures, held together by shared beliefs, symbols, stories and ceremonies. The question that might most interest an anthropologist is, what social function do these familiar rituals perform?

Interpreting the culture you belong to is a bit like trying to explain your family dynamics to a new partner - everything that’s obvious to you doesn’t make any sense to them. Our own customs — what we do and how we think about it — are so familiar that they just feel like common sense. Students line up because doing so creates calm. Assemblies exist to communicate information. Using different coloured inks in exercise books makes it easier for an accountability audience to work out how students’ work has been produced. While these answers aren’t necessarily wrong, they only scratch the surface. Anthropology invites us lift the cultural rug, and peer behind the societal sofa to better understand what’s going on.

Educational debates are often framed in terms of effectiveness — do routines improve behaviour? Do policies raise attainment? — important as these questions are, they’re not the questions that most interest an anthropologist. TInstead the focus is on why customs evolved, what problems it originally solved, what social functions it performs. It takes careful detective work to establish whether a ritual has continued meaning or whether it’s become an empty habit whose original meaning has long since slipped from memory.

Writing about religion at the beginning of the twentieth century, the great Émile Durkheim argued that the significance of a ritual has little to do with the beliefs it appears to express. Although religious ceremonies may seem to concern the divine, their most enduring effect is profoundly human. Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred (rituals set aside and invested with collective significance) and the profane (the everyday routines of daily life) applies well to schools. If the school hall is used everyday as a canteen it’s profance, but when used for a school play or a prize giving ceremony it takes on a sacred quality. Through repeated acts of gathering, singing, speaking and remembering, societies continually renew what Durkheim called social solidarity: the shared sense that individuals belong to a moral community larger than themselves. As he put it, sacred practices “unite into one single moral community” those who participate in them1

If their only purpose is transmitting information, morning staff briefings could be replaced with an email. Whole school assemblies are possibly not the most efficient mechanism for making announcements. Prize giving ceremonies consume countless hours of rehearsal and organisation for handing out certificates that could easily be collected in tutor time. Judged solely by efficiency, these practices don’t make much sense. They persist because they are excuses for members of a community to gatther together. For a few moments, teachers cease to be individuals working in separate classroom and become a staff body. Students experience themselves as part of a single school. Schools repeatedly enact their identy through these shared rituals.

In Modes of Religiosity, Harvey Whitehouse extended Durkheim’s insight by distinguishing between two different modes of ritual: doctrinal and imagistic. Doctrinal rituals are frequent, familiar and emotionally unremarkable, providing the steady rhythm of everyday life. Imagistic rituals are rare, emotionally intense and disproportionately memorable. Schools depend on a mix of the two. Tutor time, corridor routines, assemblies and the countless small conventions governing movement, speech and attention become so habitual that they’re scarcely noticed. Prize giving evenings, school productions, and leavers’ assemblies are moments when ordinary routines give way to ceremony and ask participants to reflect, celebrate, or remember collectively.

It’s unlikely you can remember the details of any of the speeches your headteacher made, but you’ll almost certaintly recall details of some of the events at which such speeches were made. Those memories become part of a school’s collective story. Although the stated purpose of schools may be to teach knowledge, through shared ritual they also recreate the culture within which that knowledge is passed on.

The consolations of ritual

If rituals bind communities together, they also make them more predictable. Human beings have always used repeated, formalised actions to impose order on otherwise uncertain situations. Psychologists Michael Norton and Francesca Gino have shown that rituals reduce anxiety and increase our sense of control even when there’s no plausible way they could influence outcomes. Their power lies in changing our relationship to uncertainty. A familiar sequence of actions replaces hesitation with expectation, reducing the cognitive effort of deciding what we should do. By replacing uncertainty with familiarity, our attention can shift from navigating a situation to engaging with it.2

Schools operate under conditions of almost permanent uncertainty. Every lesson begins with thirty or so students arriving in a range of different emotional states, all with their own concerns and levels of readiness to learn. No reachers can predict precisely how an explanation will be understood, or how misconceptions might derail a lesson. Vavigating all this without familiar rituals would be impossible. Seating plans mean students don’t have to wonder where to sit. Entry routines mean they how to start lessons. Registration follows a universal script. These practices exist because they remove extranious choices from an environment saturated with complexity.

Wendy Wood has shown that much of our everyday behaviour unfolds in stable contexts with around 40 per cent of participants’ daily actions were performed in almost the same place each day.3 Rather than relying on repeated acts of conscious will, habits develop as behaviours are repeated in these stable environments. Students don’t consciously decide to sit down, open an exercise book or begin the starter activity. The bell rings and a chain of routines unfold almost automatically. What we think of as habits are, in fact, learned cue-response associations that reduce the need for conscious choice. By removing countless small decisions from our conscious awareness, routines preserve attentional resources for tasks that genuinely demand judgement, problem solving and reflection.

Unnecessary decision, ambiguous expectation and avoidable uncertainty all eat up a portion of our strictly finite capacity for attention. Well designed rituals are an attentional technology which conserves the scarce attentional capacity on which teaching, learning and organisational improvement depend.

Symbolic boundaries

Like any other culture, schools need to solve two problems: reducing uncertainty and deciding what’s acceptable. A blazer draped over the back of a chair feels fine but the same blazer lying crimpledon the floor doesn’t. Running is encouraged on the playing fields but unnaceptable in corridors. Context changes meaning. In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas describes dirt as “matter out of place”. Mud belongs outside but when smeared across a polished floor it becomes dirt. Although the matter might be identical, the system of classification through it’s interpreted very different. Because maintaining order requires shared systems of classification, cultures need to create symbolic boundaries which distinguish what’s appropriate from what is not.

Schools are engines of classification. Talking is required in a classroom discussion but strictly forbiddden in an exam. Paper on a desk suggests activity but on the floor smacks of disorder. School have developed intricate maps of where particular behaviours belong. Staff and students internalise these classifications to the point that hey come to see them as natural.

Ritualised behaviour communicates a school’s understanding of itself. School uniform does nothing to improve learning, yet schools in certain parts of the world invest considerable energy in maintaining these visible markers of cultural belonging. Expectations about equipment, exercise books, movement around the school site and the myriad of countless small routines that punctuate the school day might seem arbitrary but they’re all carriers of ritualised symbolic meaning. Schools which insist on silent corridors are making a ritualised statement about discipline, self control and respect. Schools that encourage conversation between lessons ritualise openness, warmth and relationships.

This helps explain why arguments about seemingly minor rules get so heated. Outsiders often ask why schools concern themselves with ties, trainers or tucked in shirts when there are more important educational issues to address. The question assumes these rules exist only for their immediate practical consequences. But systems of classification define belonging, distinguishing in-groups from out-groups.

When I first visited King Soloman Academy I was struck by how many ritualised behaviours felt alien. If a teacherwas impressed by something they’d instruct the class to give two claps — CLAP, CLAP — whereas to show spontaneous appreciation, students clicked their fingers instead of clapping. As an outsider, I was deliberately placed outside the school’s symbolic boundary and made to feel slightly uncomfortable whilst those within strengthened their cultural bond. Schools enforce ritualised behaviour to sustain the symbolic order on which their cultural identity depends. Shared classifications tell us not only what belongs where, but who belongs within the community.

Liminality

But cultures also provide recognised ways of crossing boundaries. Like any society, schools need to mark the moment when one identity ends and another begins. The first day of Year 7, the silence of the examination hall, the signing of school shirts and the final leavers’ assembly all announce that someone is becoming somebody else. Victor Turner described these moments as liminal: states of being “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”4

The move from primary to secondary school is one of the most obvious liminal moments. Induction days, welcome assemblies, tutor activities and carefully managed first weeks formally acknowledge that one identity is ending and another has begun. The rituals surrounding transition help new students cross the threshold to become fully fledged members of the secondary community.

GCSEs provide one of the clearest examples of liminality in school life. Year 11s are no long students — they become ‘candidates’ who are no longer ordinary members of the school community — but they haven’t yet become school leavers. The silence of the examination hall, the numbered desks, the invigilators’ scripted announcements and the opening of sealed papers all serve practical purposes, but also create a highly formalised ceremony. Years later, almost no one remembers the questions they answered but everyone can recall the febrile mixture of anxiety and anticipation in the hall, the muted rustle of exam papers, and the slow tock of clock on the wall.

At the end of Year 11, the ritual nature of school is made explicit. Proms, shirt signing and leavers’ assemblies contribute nothing to academic outcomes, yet we invest considerable resources in making them happen. The final days of school sees normal order inverted in a kind of educational Saturnalia. Previously, students would have been told off for writing on their uniforms but now they’re actively encouraged to cover their shirts with nonsense. Teachers who’ve spent years enforcing rules now pose for selfies and exchange hugs. For a brief period the hierarchy is relaxed while students navigate the liminal threshold between school and adulthood.

The evolution of ritual

Anthropologists have long observed that neighbouring societies borrow customs from one another until it becomes almost impossible to disentangle invention from imitation. Schools have existed in fairly familiar forms for thousands of years — ever since Sumerian eduba, or ‘scribe schools’ were established to teach the mysteries of cuneiform to budding scribes. We often bemoan the fact that schools have remained unchanged but they stay the way they are because, largely, they work. Classrooms, homework, detentions, kids complaining about school and teachers complaining about ‘kids these days’ are all centuries old traditions.

Despite the range of competing educational philosophies, lesson structures, behaviour routines, marking conventions and classroom layouts are strikingly similar across the modern school system. This reflects more than a gradual accumulation of evidence. Faced with uncertainty, school leaders imitate schools they perceive to be successful. DiMaggio and Powell called this mimetic isomorphism: the tendency of organisations operating under uncertainty to become increasingly alike by copying practices associated with legitimacy and success. Borrowing Max Weber’s image of the “iron cage”, they argued that organisations can become trapped by their own pursuit of legitimacy. As they say, “Organizational fields tend to become more homogeneous over time.” And, “The greater the extent to which an organizational field is structured, the greater the degree of isomorphism.”5

Faced with uncertainty, following the example of more successful schools seems like a reasonable bet, but this means school end up imprisoning themselves inside cages of their own unwitting construction. Imitation privileges what’s easily visible. It’s easy to observe another school’s lesson routines, behaviour systems or marking conventions, but much more difficult to see — and therefore harder to copy — the culture, professional expertise and years of refinement that make those practices effective.

In “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” Meyer and Rowan argue that organisations don’t operate solely on the basis of efficiency. Instead, “Organizations are driven to incorporate the practices and procedures defined by prevailing rationalized concepts of organizational work and institutionalized in society.” So, if a school wants to be seen as modern, rigorous and professionally managed, it’s likely to adopt practices that have come to symbolise those qualities regardless of whether there’s a direct causal connection with improved outcomes.

For instance, at some point in the last fifteen years, some school leader somewhere decided students should respond to feedback using purple pen. Whatever the rationalisation, the choice was almost certainly arbitrary. The most probable underlying reason is just that purple pen made students’ responses easier for inspectors to distinguish from teacher’s comments and students’ original work. Despite this, the plague of purple pen escaped its original context and proliferated across the system. And, once associated with successful inspection outcomes, it came to signal some notional concept of ‘best practice’. because it was easy to see, consultants started to recommended it and visitors from neighbouring schools enthusiastically copied it. Before long, thousands of students were writing in purple ink for on better reason than because school leaders hoped inspectors would like it.

The same story could be told about visualisers, retrieval practice, knowledge organisers, silent corridors or greeting students at the classroom door. Each of these began with a solution to a locally identified problem.6 But when these hihgly copiable practices become detached from their active ingredients, they have the tendency to become empty rituals or, in the worst cases, to lethally mutate. Meyer and Rowan described this process as decoupling. The ritual demonstrates conformity to accepted norms while everyday practice drifts towards local realities. Over time, the visible structure acquires a ceremonial significance of its own. In schools, rituals continue to be performed because they have become a recognised marker of ‘good’ schooling, even if no-one remembers what problem it was originally meant to solve.

As I’ve argued before, retrieval practice offers a salutory example. Used thoughtfully, it is one of the strongest evidence informed strategies available, strengthening long term retention through repeated retrieval. Yet in many schools it’s become ritualised into a mandatory starter activity regardless of whether retrieval was the most appropriate way to begin lessons.

Ideas are rarely copied in their entirety. We borrow what’s easy to imitate, jettisoning the deeper beliefs, assumptions and purposes that originally gave a ritual meaning. That is one reason why edu-fads spread so quickly to so little effect. Schools may think they’re adopting practices that will improve student outcomes but in most cases they’re just adopting the outward symbols of legitimacy, hoping that success will arrive through some mysterious form of osmosis. Sometimes — more by luck than design — it does, spreading the fad ever wider.

After the paywall

• Why do sensible rituals become empty rituals?

• Why do schools forget the problems their customs were created to solve?

• And what would it mean to lead like an anthropologist rather than an inspector?

Read more

This got me thinking about another way of understanding the same constraint: economics. Ecologists and economists are both interested in scarcity, just from different directions. This post will discuss attention from an economic perspective.

If a headteacher wanted to spend £100,000 on a new management information system they would need to make a business case, go through a procurement process and get it approved by governors. They’ll need to be able to explain where the money will come from, what else it could have been spent on, ideally, how they’ll know whether it’s been worthwhile? Everyone accepts that if we’re spending public money, this is a resoanble process to go through.

But, if the same headteacher decided to launch a new programme of book scrutiny., the financial cost would be negligible. But that doesn’t mean there are no costs. First there’s the time spent planning and discussing what the scrutiny process should look like, then there’s the time dedicated to launching it on an INSET day. Departments will then need to discuss how they will meet expectations. And this is all before teachers begin preparing books because they know the scrutiny is approaching. Leaders will need to spend time reading the books, writing reports and agreeing next steps. The findings will then probably reappear in line management meetings, with reminders sent out before the next scrutiny. And so on. Individually, each activity may not seem especially costly but collectively, they will occupy a hundreds, if not thousands of hours of thinking and action.

Quite rightly, schools are meticulous about accounting for money, with every significant expenditure needing to be justified. Do time and attention deserve the same discipline?

Well, according to William Ocasio, organisations become what their members collectively pay attention to.1 In schools, what leaders look for occupies teachers’ minds, just as what teachers look for occupies students’ minds. Attendance, belonging, curriculum coherence or retrieval practice all gain prominenince the more they’re discussed. Over time, patterns of attention become patterns of behaviour, and patterns of behaviour are cemented as culture.

School leaders decide where hundreds of people’s attention will be directed every day. Each time staff are asked to think more about one priority, they’ll inevitably think a little less about something else. In economic terms, every shift in priorities carries an opportunity cost.

Opportunity costs only exist when resources are scarce. Economists use the term scarcity to describe the limited availability of a resource. Every use of that resource means forgoing an alternative use. Spending on one project means there’s less money to spend on another. Time works in the same way, which is why teachers forever complain that there’s never enough of it.

We focus on time because schools are frantically busy places, especially at pinch points in the year. On any given day, teachers might teach five lessons, log behaviour incidents, report safeguarding concerns, answer emails, contact parents, mark students’ work and prepare for tomorrow’s lessons. Every task feels important and nothing can be easily ditched. Schools respond by trying to protect time. Teachers are given non-contact periods, time is set aside for trainign on INSET days and schools try to juggle the calendar to avoid too many meetings piling up in the same week. All of these decisions reflect an awareness that time is scarce but that’s not quite right.

One year I had two free periods every Friday afternoon. Every week I’d make an optimistic list of everything I intended to achieve. Every week I’d sit down convinced I was finally going to catch up. By half three I knew that list was coming home with me.

Although there were no extraneous demands on my time, I’d find myself popping down to staff room for a coffee and get chatting, or I’d start thinking about a new scheme of work. Then I’d remember an email I’d forgotten to send, or wonder whether I’d followed up a conversation with a parent. Before I knew it, it’d be the end of the day and, once again, I’d have achieved nothing. I had the time I needed but I lacked the ability to keep my attention on one problem for long enough to make progress.

It turns out this isn’t just a personal failing. Research into task switching suggests my experience is far from unusual. Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans found that switching between tasks carries a reliable cognitive penalty. Each time we switch between tasks we not only lose time, we also increase the likelihood of mistakes as we force our mind to reconfigure itself for the new task, even when we know exactly what’s coming next.2 Further research by Sophie Leroy suggests the cost doesn’t end once we’ve made the switch. When we leave one task unfinished, part of our attention remains attached to it, a phenomenon she calls “attention residue”. Some of our thinking is still occupied by what we’ve left behind.3

Task switching isn’t always something we choose to do. Schools can be designed in ways that make it almost unavoidable. A teacher may have plenty of non-contact time on paper while spending much of it repeatedly disengaging from one problem and reorienting themselves towards another. These switching costs accumulate, leaving attention fracturing into dozens of jagged pieces. Research has found that, after an interruption, knowledge workers took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their original task, often after completing several other tasks first.4 The result is that all too familiar dismay at having worked hard without ever having achieved anything. And once attention is fragmented, its scarcity changes the way we think.

In their book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Mullainathan and Shafir draw on a wide range of experimental and real-world evidence to show how scarcity narrows attention. In one series of studies, they asked participants to think about an expensive car repair before completing tests of fluid intelligence and executive control. They found that those on lower incomes performed significantly worse after they’d been reminded of their finacial situation, suggesting that the immediate demands of scarcity consume the mental resources available for other, more rarified tasks.5 This narrowing of attention results in an effect they call tunnelling: when a resource becomes scarce, immediate demands dominate our thinking, making it harder to focus on longer-term, more strategic concerns.

Schools can create a kind of attentional scarcity, with the same tendency towards tunnelling. So, if a book scrutiny is coming up, teachers will think about the state of their exercise books rather than about teaching the curriculum. Or, if an inspection is looming, senior leaders start thinking about accumulating evidence rather than school improvement. Attention narrows onto whatever is most pressing until what’s urgent crowds out what’s important.

Expertise, interruptions, routines, stress and fatigue all influence how much attention is available for what matters most. An experienced teacher can deal with low-level disruption, explain difficult concepts and adapt lessons to students’ needs more effortlessly because the thinking required has been automatised. Novices have to think through every decision consciously. Even though experts and novices have the same hour available, an expert will have far more attention left for anything unexpected.

And even experts are undermined by interruptions, stress and fatigue. Each interruption breaks concentration, each stressful decision occupies working memory and each hour of sustained effort exhausts cognitive resources. Creating more time certainly helps, but it won’t result in more attentional capacity. Creating time is a scheduling challenge whereas as protecting attention is organisational design challenge, depending on predictable routines, coherent systems and stable priorities. For teachers and leaders to be effective, they need not just time but the conditions that make sustained thought possible.

Protecting attention is therefore as much a leadership responsibility as creating time. Every new initiative, policy or priority reshapes where that attention is directed. Each new school improvement initiative draws on a scarce resource. But because attentional costs are easily overlooked, we struggle. to understand why well planned, evidence informed strategies fail to pay off. So how can we better calculate attentional costs?

Economists distinguish between price and cost. The price is what you pay to acquire something, whereas the cost includes everything required to own, maintain and use it. In schools, we’re good at calculating prices but routinely ignore costs, because they’re parcelled out in small instalments. We don’t notice a single email explaining a new policy, a departmental discussion about what it means in practice, or a line management conversation checking how it’s progressing. Individually, each of these may only occupy a couple of minutes. But when they’re added up over the course of a year, they amount to a substantial investment in organisational attention.

Organisational tunnelling is easy to see from the outside. At the moment, many schools have their collective attention focused on the educational buzz word du jour: belonging. It’s dominating conference programmes, all over school improvement plans, shaping staff development and — most importantly — featuring prominently in inspectional reports. Whether this emphasis is justified isn’t the point. Once an issue becomes the focus of collective attention, it draws attention away from everything else.

In his classic, 1937 article, “The Nature of the Firm,” the economist Ronald Coase observed that organisations incur costs simply by coordinating people’s activities. Communicating, coordinating, checking, clarifying and following up all consume scarce resources. He referred to these as transaction costs. In schools, these costs are often paid in attention. Deciding what you want to happen is easy. The hard part of school improvement is making sure staff think about the right things, at the right times, so that new ways of working become routine.

The way many schools approach instructional coaching illustrates the point. The strong evidence base and relatively low financial costs of instructional coaching make it an attractive investment, yet embedding it can take years. Coaches need training; teachers need repeated opportunities to observe, practise, receive feedback and refine their practice. Leaders, meanwhile, calibrate expectations, monitor implementation and induct new staff. It’s not that coaching doesn’t work but that the effort required to make it pay off isn’t something schools have thought through.

Dean Fixsen et al’s research on implementation suggests that what we tend to think of as implementation is really only adoption.6 Successful implementation comes from the gruelling commitment to coaching conversations, observation, feedback and refinement needed to change everyday practice. Obviously, this all requires a substantial investment of attention and whether that investment pays dividends depends on the outcomes. If a coaching policy establishes routines that reduce cognitive effort and develop greater expertise, the initial investment will be repaid through more effective use of attention. If not, the attentional costs continue accumulating without generating much return.

As we know, not every investment of attention pays off. One of the most predictable mistakes we make is to continue investing simply because we’ve already invested so much. This is the sunk cost fallacy: allowing past expenditure to justify future expenditure. Althought the attention already spent can’t be recovered, will investing more attention produce worthwhile returns? If we’re serious about school improvement, we need the courage to find out if our investments are paying off by asking questions like these:

• Is the initiative becoming easier to sustain?

• Are routines replacing reminders?

• Is expertise replacing compliance?

• Is less attention needed to achieve the same or better outcomes?

If the answer’s no, you may be accumulating attentional debt without generating attentional returns.

School improvement is a bit like buying a house. The purchase price is only the inital outlay. The real cost emerges over time through mortgage payments, maintenance and repairs. The attnetion required to adopt a policy is its purchase price. The cost is measured in everything that follows. How many meetings will it generate? How much monitoring will it need to become routine? How often will you need to return to it? These are all investment questions and wise investment requires an understanding that although two initiatives might look likely to produce similar improvements, they can demand very different burdens on attention over time.

How to calculate Attentional Return on Investment

All this is to say that only those initiatives eventually begin paying back our attention invested in them are worth the resources they consume. A well-designed behaviour system is a good example. Introducing a new policy and seeing it through requires a large upfront investment of attention. Teachers have to agree expectations, students have to learn routines and leaders have to reinforce them consistently. If the system is well designed, though, the investment starts to pay off relatively quickly. Because predictable routines replace continual decision-making teachers have more time to focus on students’ needs and students have more space to focus on the curriculum they’re trying to master. Time hasn’t been created, but attention has been released.

After the paywall:

• The formula for calculating AROI

• attentional debt

• leadership incentives

• An AROI checklist

Read more

However, this has also been a period in which many schools have struggled to improve despite becoming increasingly evidence-informed. Leaders pore over dashboards in an effort to maximise outcomes. Underperformance is identified earlier, interventions become more tightly targeted and progress is measured with ever greater precision. Students are tracked to within an inch of their lives in the belief that improvement should always be measurable and continuous. Any slack, any inconsistency or plateau becomes evidence that someone isn’t working hard enough.

The result is that many schools have come to resemble finely tuned machines whose purpose is to convert effort into outcomes as efficiently as possible. Teachers and students become components to optimise, bottlenecks to remove or sources of variation to eliminate. Yet despite all this tightening, improvement often proves stubbornly elusive, while exhaustion and burnout become increasingly common.

The current path feels increasingly unsustainable. Thinking of schools as machines and people as components to optimise may produce short term gains, but it also risks creating organisations that are efficient without being healthy, productive without being resilient. If that’s true, perhaps we need a different way of thinking about what schools are and how they improve. One that helps explain not only why some changes succeed, but why others fail despite the best of intentions.

Seeing like an ecologist

The metaphors we choose determine the questions we ask, the problems we notice and the solutions that seem most plausible. The most powerful metaphors are the ones we no longer notice; they’re just common sense. if schools are imagined as machinee, it encourages us to talk about pulling levers, fixing problems, implementing interventions, delivering programmes and driving improvement. This language feels natural because its metaphorical underpinning has become invisible. Escaping its influence requires us to adopt another way of seeing.

What might change if we began to see schools as ecosystems instead of machines? Instead of viewing schools as collections of discrete parts assembled into a functioning whole, we might understand them as living systems: dynamic networks of relationships, feedback loops, dependencies and adaptation. Improvement could become less about pulling the right levers and more about cultivating the conditions in which healthy systems can grow and the individual within them can flourish.

Imagine returning each spring to the same patch of woodland. One year birdsong is absent. The obvious response would be to introduce more birds, but that would tell us nothing about why they disappeared. Perhaps the insect population has collapsed. Perhaps the fungi threading through the soil have been damaged. Perhaps deer have gradually browsed away the undergrowth where birds once nested. By the time the birds disappear, something much more fundamental has already changed.

The biologist Eugene Odum believed this was how nature should be understood. In the classic text, Fundamentals of Ecology he argued that “the ecosystem is the basic functional unit in ecology.” A bird’s fate is woven into the woodland that sustains it. Soil, fungi, insects, plants, weather and predators continually shape one another. As Odum observed, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Every disturbance to the soil, every new species and every shift in climate alters the conditions under which everything else lives. Applying this ecological way of seeing to schools encourages us to notice relationships before components. Just as every organism helps shape the ecosystem it inhabits, every member of a school helps shape the organisation they inhabit. Culture grows from the accumulated effects of thousands of interactions between people, routines, incentives and expectations. Every cohort inherits an organisation already shaped by those who came before, and every decision contributes, in however small a way, to the environment experienced by those who follow.

In The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, W. Edwards Deming expressed a similar idea. He defined a system as “a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system.” Understanding a system means understanding the relationships that hold it together. Improvement, therefore, depends on understanding how changes in one part reshape the performance of the whole. For example, a new marking policy affects workload, which changes time available for planning, which has an impact on lessons, which, in turn, affects behaviour. Behaviour reshapes morale, trust and expectations. Every initiative changes the conditions under which the next must succeed. Schools continually recreate the environment in which teaching and learning take place.

Rather than our current obsession with finding and fixing individual components, the language of ecosystems encourage us to look for patterns of interaction, feedback, adaptation and emergence. In choosing a different metaphor, alternative approaches to school improvement can be imagined.

What follows explores some of ecology’s most illuminating ideas and offers suggestions on how they could be applied to school improvement.

1. Hidden networks: The unseen relationships that hold organisations together.

2. Carrying capacity: Why attention is the school’s limiting resource.

3. Keystone and invasive species How fashionable ideas colonise schools and crowd out better ones and developing the people, practices and relationships on which school improvement depends.

4. Islands: The benefits and dangers of organisational isolation.

5. Fragmentation and extinction debt: Why decline occurs before its symptoms are visible.

6. Monoculture and requisite variety: The tension between consistency and adaptability.

7. Reciprocity: How sustainable school improvement replenishes what it draws upon.

8. Rewilding: How leadership can be conceived as the cultivation of conditions rather than the exercise of control.

1. Hidden networks

If schools are ecosystems, then their most important features may also be their least visible. Ecologists have generally understood forests as collections of individual trees competing for sunlight, water and nutrients but Suzanne Simard’s research has transformed this understanding. Beneath the forest floor lies an intricate network of mycorrhizal fungi connecting the roots of different trees. Through this subterranean web, trees exchange water, nutrients and chemical signals. Although there’s also competition for resources, the forest flourishes due to the relationships hidden beneath the surface.

An organisational charts shows reporting lines, but doesn’t really tell us much about how a school actually functions. Looking back on schools I’ve worked in, the people who seem to hold everything together are not those we might expect. There’s the site manager whose knowledge meant he could spot problems long before anyone else noticed them; the head’s PA who knew everyone and kept relationships running smoothly; the wise old teaching assistant who understood the most vulnerable children inside out and would know exactly what to do no matter what went wrong.

These relationships are easy to overlook precisely because they aren’t formally designed. If these hidden connectors were to leave, the effects of their absence would ripple outwards, effecting many other elements of the whole. Obviously, formal structures would remain intact, but the organisation will function differently, often less smoothly. Importantly, hidden networks aren’t inherently good; they transmit norms. Collegiality, curiosity and generosity are contagious, but so too are cynicism, complacency and low expectations.

The mechanistic view of school improvement depends on leaders telling everyone else what to do. The levers available to do this are limited: staff briefings, handbooks, INSET days etc. How much more successful might the work of leading a school be if we had a better map of how these connections worked? An ecological perspective suggests that school improvement should begin by making these hidden networks more visible byt asking these questions:

• Who do colleagues naturally turn to for advice?

• Where does expertise already reside?

• Which relationships enable departments to learn from one another?

• Who connects otherwise separate parts of the organisation?

Equally important, we also need to know where there are gaps:

• Which teams rarely interact?

• Which individuals carry too much of the school’s informal knowledge?

• Which crucial relationships depend upon a single person?

Viewed like this, some of the most powerful school improvement strategies are attempts to reveal and strengthen mycorrhizal networks. Cross-department planning, coaching, subject associations, mentoring, instructional coaching and protected time for professional conversation can all increase the number and quality of connections through which knowledge can travel. Every new connection creates another pathway along which expertise, trust and professional judgement can flow. When it works, the result is a healthier organisational ecology, in which ideas spread more quickly, innovation becomes less dependent on chance encounters and valuable knowledge is less likely to disappear when experienced colleagues move on.

This also changes how we think about succession planning. Replacing a colleague preserves the formal structure, yet the greater loss may lie in the relationships, judgement and organisational memory that disappear with them. Resilient ecosystems contain redundancy, with several pathways capable of performing similar functions. Schools need the same quality. Shadowing, co-leadership, shared curriculum design and sustained induction help ensure that expertise remains a property of the organisation.

If we’re only able to see formal structures, we risk mistaking the map for the territory.

2. Carrying capacity

Ecologists have long recognised that every environment has limits. The idea of carrying capacity emerged from nineteenth-century studies of population growth. Building on Malthus’s observation that populations are constrained by finite resources, Pierre François Verhulst developed the logistic model of population growth, showing that populations cannot increase indefinitely but eventually level off as they approach the limits of their environment. Ecologists later adopted the term carrying capacity to describe the maximum population an environment can sustain without degrading the resources on which it depends. Beyond that point, growth becomes self-defeating and the system begins to consume the conditions that made growth possible.

Read more

Optimism, n. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Open any social media app and you’ll be inundated with injunctions to manifest success, trust the process, believe in yourself and never allow negative thoughts stand in your way. Good things will be yours if only you believe hard enough.

There are even people who tell us the reverse: that all the bad things that happen to us are the fault of our own negativity. This is, I’m happy to say, bullshit. Dangerous bullshit: I know I haven’t revised for my exams, but if I believe in myself strongly enough, I’ll definitely get an A. Or, I’ve just had a few pints at the pub and I feel fine to drive home. I just have to think positively and nothing bad will happen! Or, If I visualise perfect health that lump I’ve been ignoring will turn out to be nothing.

In The Uses of Pessimism & the Danger of False Hope, philosopher and fox-hunting enthusiast, Roger Scruton argues against unbridled or, as he puts it, ‘unscrupulous’ optimism, piling many – or most – of the world’s ills at its door. If we always look on the bright side of life then we fall into ‘the best case fallacy’.1 In Scruton’s words, this leads inexorably to “a kind of addiction to unreality that informs the most destructive forms of optimism: a desire to cross out reality, as the premise from which practical reason begins, and to replace it with a system of compliant illusions.”

This is in no one’s interest. Self help gurus often point to research which reveals that ours brains can't distinguish between imagining positive outcomes and experiencing them, leading to similar neural responses and potential benefits from positive thinking.2 But there’s an obvious downside to this: if you can’t tell the difference between thinking positively and achieving a positive outcome, why would you bother to put in the hard work to make your dreams come true?

Those who wax lyrical on the boundless possibilities offered by an exciting future and urge change, progress and the uncritical veneration of the new are recklessly overconfident. They ignore the lessons of the past, the realities of the present as well as the full range of possibilities offered by the future. This isn’t merely a psychological curiosity. As well as distorting our private decisions, unscrupulous optimism shapes public policy, institutional reform and billion dollar procurement programmes.

Consider the Los Angeles Unified School District's ambitious plan in 2013 to provide every student with an iPad, preloaded with Pearson curriculum at a cost of almost $1.3 billion. A classic case of optimistic ambition outpacing reality. Students hacked the iPads to bypass restrictions within days, the Pearson curriculum was incomplete, buggy, or missing key features, teachers were not properly trained to use the devices effectively, and schools lacked the infrastructure to support usage. This was a perfect storm of rushed execution, poor planning, and murky contracts. Needless to say, LAUSD pulled the plug, struggled to ever get compensation from either Apple or Pearson and ended up selling off the iPads at a huge loss.3

How did it all go so wrong? It’s not as if this was the first such disaster. In 2012, one year earlier, plans to hand out laptops to students in Hoboken, New Jersey went pear shaped for some of the exact same reasons: insufficient teacher training and lack of infrastructure.4 In 2014, Baltimore County Public Schools launched a district wide one to one device rollout. Costs rose to more than $275 million, the programme became embroiled in procurement controversies, and critics argued that the district had failed to produce convincing evidence of improved educational outcomes.5 Remarkably, the exact same thing had already happened in Los Angeles one year before the iPad debacle with the district handing out netbooks with inadequate preparation, poor software and lack of infrastructure and support!6 None of these failures was unforeseeable. They were the entirely predictable consequences of assuming technology could solve systemic organisational problems.

The triumph of hope over experience

Although these feel like fairly extreme examples of the best case fallacy, this sort of thing plays out in schools regularly. We routinely launch new policies, spend money on new systems, train teachers in trendy-sounding pedagogical gimmickry and almost never run pilot programmes, or have a clear evaluation plan in place.

Rob Coe’s called his 2013 lecture on improving education The Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In it he observed,

Despite the apparently plausible and widespread belief to the contrary, the evidence that levels of attainment in schools in England have systematically improved over the last 30 years is unconvincing. Much of what is claimed as school improvement is illusory, and many of the most commonly advocated strategies for improvement are not robustly proven to work. Even the claims of school effectiveness research – that we can identify good schools and teachers, and the practices that make them good – seem not to stand up to critical scrutiny. Recent growth of interest in evidence-based practice and policy appears to offer a way forward; but the evidence from past attempts to implement evidence-based approaches is rather disappointing. Overall, an honest and critical appraisal of our experience of trying to improve education is that, despite the best intentions and huge investment, we have failed – so far – to achieve it.

Without such an honest and critical appraisal of our efforts we’re gambling with children’s futures. And the problem with gamblers is that they don’t actually see themselves as risk-takers. They convince themselves that they can beat the odds, that they’ve discovered a fool-proof system to buck the odds. When education leaders estimate the best case and ignore the worst, they might argue the odds look good but, in fact, they are wilfully refusing to acknowledge reason or reality.

Of course, optimism doesn’t have to be unscrupulous. The best leaders have a strong sense of practicality which roots them in the real world. If we recognise the constraints which bound reality and accept that change is difficult and unpredictable we’re less likely to go wrong.

We’re all flawed. We all make poor and irrational decisions, and we’re all hostages to bias and assumptions. To err is human. This is as true of teachers as it is of students; everyone makes mistakes. The solution isn’t to just hope for the best but to be “judiciously pessimistic.”

Judicious pessimism teaches us not to idolise human beings, but to forgive them their faults and to strive in private for their amendments. It teaches us to limit our ambitions in the public sphere, and to keep open the institutions, customs and procedures whereby mistakes are corrected and faults confessed to, rather than aim for some new arrangement in which mistakes are never made. (Scruton p.37)

Instead of seeing only obstacles to be overcome, we would do better to recognise and understand the constraints we face. Some things cannot be done well and shouldn’t be considered. We need to recognise the temptation to assume order will always emerge from a sea of chaos but, in fact, entropy is inevitable; things fall apart. If the dice fall as we wish then we assume it’s as a result of our actions.

Why arguments for coursework are unscrupulously optimistic

Consider the repeated calls to reintroduce coursework into England’s national examinations. The argument is seductive: coursework seems more authentic, allows students to demonstrate a wider range of skills and reduces the pressure of a single exam. All of this may be true. The problem isn’t the principle but the implementation. Once coursework counts towards high stakes qualifications, every incentive shifts. Parents help, tutors rewrite, AI drafts, teachers feel pressure to offer ever more detailed feedback. Schools interpret the rules differently. Moderation becomes increasingly expensive and increasingly unreliable. Before long, the grade reflects not merely a student’s attainment but the resources, expertise and integrity they have access to. This all emerges naturally from thousands of well intentioned people responding rationally to perverse incentives. Every teacher wants their students to succeed. Every parent wants to help. Every school wants good results. Together, these perfectly understandable actions produce a system that is less fair, less reliable and less valid than the one it replaced.

But there’s a deeper, even more uncomfortable truth. The more we rely on teacher judgement, the more we expose ourselves to the biases, expectations and stereotypes that inevitably accompany human judgement. Research has consistently found that teacher assessments can disadvantage students from poorer backgrounds and some ethnic minority groups relative to externally marked examinations.7 None of this implies that teachers are especially prejudiced, only that they’re human.

During the pandemic, despite schools acting in good faith, grades drifted sharply upwards. Although some wanted to interpret this as evidence that teachers had suddenly become better judges, a more plausible explanation is that, when external constraints disappeared, the incentives acting on teacher judgement changed. The system behaved predictably. External assessment isn’t perfect, but it provides a degree of protection against the unconscious biases that flourish whenever assessment becomes personal.

Running an optimism audit

Complex systems don’t fail because individuals behave badly but because ordinary people respond predictably to the incentives the system creates. To hope that everyone will exercise restraint is a wager against human nature, and history suggests it’s a very poor bet.

Read more

Christopher Nolan has occupied a similar place in my cinematic life. I’ve watched every film he’s directed since Memento, and have rarely been disappointed. So when I heard he was tackling The Odyssey, excitement scarcely covers it. That excitement peaked when Tom Holland (the other one, not the actor playing Telemachus) said of the film, “It is by some way the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen. It honours Homer while simultaneously making something new of him.”

Needless to say, I bought a ticket for opening day. I walked into the cinema expecting to love it. Perhaps inevitably, I was a bit disappointed.

To give it its due, there’s a lot to like. It looks fabulous, is visually staggering and has some wonderful set pieces, even if the sea monster, Scylla jerks about like a Ray Harryhousen escapee. As an epic, it earns its three-hour running time; there’s a hell of lot of action to get through. But even so, it manages to pack an astonishing amount of portentous hanging about into those three hours.

For my money, the film’s central problem is Odysseus himself. Homer’s first defining word for him is polytropos: many-turning. It conjures a man of twists, evasions, disguises and contradictions. A wily fox. Homer’s Odysseus is resourceful, vain, deceitful, courageous, reckless and, at times, monstrous. Nolan gives us the opposite. His Odysseus is worthy, a trier, a fundamentally decent man doing his best in a violent, disintegrating world. We keep being told how smart he is but we don’t really get to see it. By making him more obviously heroic he’s easier to admire, but much less interesting.

The set pieces suffer from the same flattening. Individually, they’re often spectacular. Collectively, they blur together. Watching Odysseus and co run into the sea for the fourth time definitely felt like three times too many. The hapless crew charge, retreat, regroup and sail on, but the action rarely changes our understanding of anyone. The scale increases while the drama remains oddly static. The action with the Cyclops is fun but then more or less the same thing happens with the Laestrygonians: the crew blunder into a hostile landscape, discover its inhabitants are both enormous and unfriendly, and hoof it back to the sea. What initially feels thrilling starts to feel like lack of imagination.

Homer largely avoids this problem because each encounter alters our understanding of Odysseus. The Cyclops episode exposes his ruinous hubris. The Laestrygonians reveal his uncanny instinct for self-preservation, and perhaps something darker. Odysseus alone anchors his ship outside the harbour, allowing him to escape while the rest of his fleet is annihilated. Homer leaves us to wonder whether this was foresight, luck or selfishness. The monster encounters encompass moral tests that expose different facets of our many-turning hero. Nolan nails the spectacle but loses any sense of progression, leaving several of the film’s biggest sequences feeling like expensive variations on the same idea.

Even Circe, in many ways one of the film’s successes, is a missed opportunity. Her island shack is creepy, disorientating and genuinely dangerous. Yet Nolan removes the quality that makes her most threatening in Homer: her allure. In the poem, Odysseus remains with her for a year. He isn’t merely detained, he lingers, enjoying himself and his divine lover. His desire to return to Penelope proves considerably less urgent when presented with an immortal enchantress and a comfortable bed. Nolan will have none of that. His Odysseus remains resolutely homeward-bound, his honour never seriously endangered. Circe may threaten his body, but she’s never allowed to compromise his virtue.

The same thing happens with Calypso. Nolan compresses several episodes into her island, folding the Lotus-Eaters and the Phaeacians into a single narrative stop. It’s an efficient piece of storytelling, but it further reinforces the impression that Odysseus has only one desire: to get home as quickly as possible. The only reason he tarries so long with the Ursula Andress-esque goddess is because she fed him lotus blossoms to heal his mind and, as a result, he conveniently forgets his past life.

Homer’s hero is constantly delayed, sometimes by force, sometimes by temptation, often by his own choices. Nolan’s bounces from pillar to post with no control or agency. The journey becomes a series of obstacles rather than a record of a man whose own appetites repeatedly divert him from his destination. This happens repeatedly. Whenever Homer complicates Odysseus, Nolan absolves him. The result is a hero who’s consistently noble but never surprising. By sanding away his flaws, Nolan removes much of what makes him recognisably human and all of what made him so fascinating for so many hundreds of years.

The visit to Hades is the film’s greatest biggest disappointment. Eliot Page’s rather ponderous, plot-carrying Sinon is given extraordinary expository prominence while Agamemnon, introduced brilliantly as a menacing, Darth Vader like figure in black armour, turns out to be little more than a whiner. More surprising still, Achilles is absent altogether. Fleet-footed Achilles, arrogance and brilliance personified is the philosophical hinge between the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, he chooses a short life crowned with everlasting glory over a long life lived in obscurity. When Odysseus meets him among the dead, he bitterly regrets that decision. Better, he says, to be the poorest servant among the living than king over all the dead. It’s one of the bleakest moments in all literature. Glory doesn’t survive death in any meaningful sense. Honour counts for nothing in Hades. By excluding Achilles, Nolan sidesteps Homer’s most devastating challenge to heroic culture.

The film also weakens the relationship between Odysseus and his crew. Their growing distrust is presented as unreasonable and feckless. He goes from celebrated commander to “lucky bastard” to harbinger of doom largely because he fires an arrow at the very impressive CGI monster that’s eaten a bunch of his men. His decade as a war hero appears to count for nothing, leaving the impression that his men are simply feckless, superstitious ingrates.

Homer tells a more compelling story. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and then, having escaped, can’t resist boasting to the cyclops just who is responsible for outwitting it. His pride and vanity ensures Poseidon’s vengeance. Later, he withholds information from his crew, manipulates them and repeatedly places his own appetite for glory above their safety. He insists on hearing the Sirens while his men must row deaf to their song. He chooses to sail past Scylla knowing some of them will die without warning them. His brilliance repeatedly ensures his own survival, but it also creates the disasters from which he must escape and which dooms every single one of his followers.

Rather than presenting his crew as merely merely weak men failing a great leader. Homer shows Odysseus’ men as being in the service of narcissist whose genius can’t be separated from his hubris. Homer asks whether extraordinary intelligence is compatible with trustworthiness. We are asked to decide whether Odysseus is admirable or simply self-serving. Nolan answers the question by removing the problem.

For all that, the film contains one genuinely inspired idea. Spoilers follow.

Nolan recasts the mysterious Sea Peoples as the returning Greeks themselves. As Matt Odysseus-ish Damon confesses to Penelope, he violated Zeus’s laws of hospitality through the sack of Troy and the deception of the Trojan Horse. As such, they become the agents of the collapse of their own civilisation. It’s an elegant piece of historical myth-making. The Trojan Horse becomes a meta Trojan Horse. As it infiltrates Troy, it also infiltrates the whole of Mycenaean culture. Odysseus’s supreme act of cunning contains the seeds of his own civilisation’s destruction. The Greeks win the war but lose the world. It’s precisely the kind of morally ambiguous idea the rest of the film too often avoids.

On balance, I thought it was OK. I quite liked it. It’s ambitious, immersive and frequently spectacular. Nolan has made a magnificent adaptation of the events of Homer’s poem, but he’s failed to adapt its hero. Homer’s Odysseus is difficult to love because he’s deceitful, vain and dangerous. Nolan’s Odysseus is brave, loyal, honourable and a bit boring. He’s a good man doing his best, and that turns out to be far less memorable than the many-turning man Homer created nearly three thousand years ago.

In an interview with Tes, AQA chief exec Colin Hughes argues that the system lacks the necessary urgency. AQA, he says, would be ready to deliver digital exams “tomorrow morning” if asked, even if the practical transition would need to be phased in over several years. Hughes claims students are “slightly baffled” that exams remain on paper, resistance to onscreen assessment “just doesn’t stack up” and, on the overwhelming majority of fronts, he sees “almost no downside”.

The strongest case for digital exams is that the current system may prevent some students from demonstrating what they know as accurately as they could. For some students, typing may remove a barrier that has nothing to do with the subject being assessed. In such cases, could digital assessment improve validity by reducing the extent to which an exam measures handwriting fluency alongside subject knowledge?

The accessibility case extends beyond typing. Digital platforms can support enlarged text, alternative colour settings, screen readers, adjustable layouts and other assistive features more easily than paper. Properly designed, onscreen assessment could offer some students a more direct route to demonstrating what they know, while reducing the need for cumbersome or inconsistent adjustments.

Hughes suggests that controlled assessment will become more important in the age of LLMs. Coursework completed beyond direct supervision is increasingly difficult to authenticate, and teachers are left to determine how much of a final submission reflects the student’s own thinking. Timed, secure assessment offers a clearer basis for judgement and may become increasingly necessary if qualifications are to retain public confidence.

Young people are often described as digital natives, yet familiarity with social media tells us very little about whether they can type efficiently, manage files, use spreadsheets, navigate complex software or work productively on screen. Access to these skills is uneven, and students from more advantaged backgrounds may gain them informally through regular access to laptops and other devices. A more deliberate approach to digital fluency could therefore be defended as an attempt to reduce inequality rather than deepen it.

There are substantial administrative benefits as well. Fully digital delivery could reduce printing, transport, scanning and physical storage, while allowing papers to be distributed instantly and responses to be captured securely at the point of submission. It could possibly provide richer information about how students interact with questions, allow problems to be identified more quickly and give awarding organisations tighter oversight of the assessment process.

Questions could include dynamic sources, audio, video, simulations or interactive data. Some assessments could become adaptive, allowing the level or sequence of questions to respond to a student’s performance. Accessibility features could be built into the platform rather than added afterwards. From this perspective, onscreen assessment isn’t merely a cheaper way of delivering the same exam but a possible route to assessments that are more flexible, inclusive and responsive.

The central question shouldn’t be whether digital exams are possible or popular but whether they allow us to make more valid, reliable and fair judgements about what students know and can do. But on that question, boosterism runs well ahead of the evidence.

Better answers, or a different assessment?

The most striking part of Hughes’s argument is AQA’s finding that students using typed short-answer boxes tend to give better answers, with particular benefits for lower-performing students. If typing allows students to reveal knowledge that handwriting would otherwise obscure, this is potentially important. An assessment shouldn’t reward the physical ease with which a student can form letters when handwriting is irrelevant to the subject being assessed.

One difficulty is that higher scores don’t, by themselves, tell us that an assessment has improved. All this tells us is that changing the response medium has changed performance. Whether that change is desirable depends on why it occurred. Perhaps students type better answers because handwriting imposes an irrelevant burden. Perhaps editing is easier, composition is faster and ideas can be revised with less friction. Equally, students may perform better because they’re more fluent with keyboards, more familiar with digital interfaces or more adept at navigating the particular design of the response box. The phrase “better answers” conceals all of this. Better in what sense? Longer, clearer, more accurate, more developed or simply more highly rewarded? Unless AQA can show that typing improves the validity of the inference rather than merely raising scores, the finding proves less than Hughes suggests.

As yet, independent research has not supported what Hughes would like to be true. A 2024 Cambridge review found that typed and handwritten responses can differ in scores, length, language, planning and revision. The direction of those differences isn’t consistent, and comparability can’t simply be assumed where both modes are treated as equivalent. Ofqual’s 2025 review reached a similarly cautious conclusion. Students are often positive about onscreen assessment, but working on screen can create greater cognitive demands, particularly for reading. The review found no clear and consistent overall pattern in performance because mode effects vary by subject, task and student characteristics. It also noted that much of the available research doesn’t come from live, high-stakes English examinations.

A separate study reported in 2025 from Broc et al found that students typed substantially more and achieved higher scores than when writing by hand. That may indicate that typing removes a barrier, but it also raises an obvious question about whether the two modes are assessing the same thing. The study’s recommendation that schools may need to teach touch typing also exposes the potential curricular consequences of changing the medium of testing.

AQA’s experiments may therefore be promising, but ‘students tend to give better answers’ is a long way from being conclusive. However, even if it wasn’t, students whose handwriting places them at a significant disadvantage can already apply for access arrangements that allow them to type their exams. The existence of a genuine barrier for some students is therefore an argument for making appropriate accommodations easier and more consistent, not for requiring all students to use a keyboard.

The medium is the message

Assessment researchers have a name for the problem: construct-irrelevant variance.1 This occurs when differences in scores are caused by something other than the knowledge or capability the assessment is intended to measure.

In a digital history exam, for instance, performance might vary partly because students differ in typing speed, familiarity with the platform, ability to navigate between windows or confidence reading extended material on screen. The result would still reflect historical knowledge, but it would also reflect competence with the medium. This doesn’t mean any difference between paper and screen invalidates an assessment. Every exam places incidental demands on students. Handwriting, reading speed, working memory and familiarity with examination conventions already affect performance to some extent.

The question is whether these demands are necessary to the thing being assessed and whether they affect some groups more than others. If keyboard fluency changes a student’s history grade despite keyboard fluency forming no part of the intended history construct, the resulting variation is irrelevant to what the examination claims to measure. Short-answer text boxes may reduce construct-irrelevant difficulty for students whose handwriting is slow or effortful but they could equally create construct-irrelevant difficulty for students who think well but type slowly, navigate clumsily or struggle to review writing on screen.

Digital exams shouldn’t be adopted wholesale regardless of the subject being assessed. A format that helps with a short science response or a maths paper may hinder an English literature essay, a geography source question. The case has to be made subject by subject and task by task.

Typing isn’t digital fluency

Hughes says that “being able to use keyboards is a really important skill that we should be supporting students with from a much earlier age”. There’s nothing unreasonable about teaching students to type, but typing is just one narrow aspect of digital competence. One student may be able to type quickly while being unable to evaluate a source, verify an output, protect personal information or adapt to unfamiliar software. Another student may type slowly but exercise excellent judgement and learn new systems with ease. Reducing digital fluency to proficiency with a QWERTY keyboard mistakes familiarity with one current interface for preparation for the future.

Keyboards may remain common for decades or they may go the way of the mouse or the floppy disk. The history of computing offers little reason to assume that today’s dominant input device will retain its position indefinitely. Speech recognition is improving rapidly, stylus input allows handwriting to be captured and converted digitally, predictive systems increasingly complete or transform what users produce, and emerging interfaces combine voice, touch, gesture and visual input. The likeliest future isn’t one in which the keyboard is simply replaced by another universal device. It’s one in which people move between several modes according to the task. They may speak a first draft, type a precise correction, annotate with a stylus, manipulate information by touch and rely on software to translate between formats. Building the future of national assessment around keyboard fluency risks confusing preparation for one current interface with preparation for a digital world defined by constant changes of interface.

Digital fluency ought to involve judgement, adaptation, verification and purposeful use. Keyboard speed is narrower and more contingent. It may be worth teaching, but making it consequential in unrelated examinations is another matter entirely.

The typing curriculum

Once keyboard speed influences examination performance, schools will respond rationally. They may introduce touch-typing schemes, digital readiness audits and extra rehearsal of the examination platform. Departments may be told to build screen navigation, digital annotation and onscreen proofreading into curriculum plans. Assessment creates incentives which inevitably backwash into the curriculum. Lessons spent preparing students to operate the assessment platform are lessons not spent on teaching subject content.

Hughes might reply that this is precisely what schools ought to be doing. If students can’t use keyboards or screens properly, he says, the system has failed them. There’s some force in that argument, but it still confuses two different questions. Digital fluency may be worth teaching, but it doesn’t follow that a student’s GCSE grades should depend on it. First aid is useful. Financial literacy is useful. Cooking is useful. Their value doesn’t make them legitimate hidden components of every GCSE.

A digital exam that requires schools to teach typing creates a new condition of success and then instructed schools to compensate for the inequality it introduces. And, of course, the cost won’t fall evenly. Well-resourced schools can provide regular access to devices and sustained practice. Others may offer a few sessions in a computer room and hope for the best. Students with regular access to laptops may arrive with a substantial advantage in familiarity with the medium.

That isn’t merely an implementation problem. It is part of the validity problem; familiarity with the assessment hardware will influence the grades awarded.

Adding another inequality

Hughes sees the teaching of digital fluency as a means of promoting equality. Although it’s right that leaving existing differences untouched advantages students with better access to technology, universal digital exams would expose these differences to high-stakes assessment.

Fair digital assessment would require much more than placing a computer on every desk. Students would need sufficiently comparable keyboards, screen sizes, software response times, accessibility settings and opportunities to practise. Schools would need dependable networks, replacement devices, charging capacity and technical support.

This would also create an enormous financial problem. Ofqual’s proposals rule out students using their own devices, which means schools would have to provide sufficiently consistent devices. A secondary school with a cohort of 200 Year 11 studentswould probably need at least 220 exam-ready devices once contingency capacity was included. Even at a relatively modest £350 to £500 per machine, that represents £77,000 to £110,000 before secure storage, charging, network upgrades, software, technical support and modifications to examination rooms are considered.

A cautious estimate would therefore place the initial cost for a typical secondary school somewhere between £120,000 and £230,000. Across England’s state secondary sector, the capital bill could easily fall between £400 million and £800 million, with colleges, special schools, independent schools and other examination centres pushing the total higher. Devices would then need replacing every few years, while networks, licences, security and technical staffing would create continuing costs. Existing school devices would reduce the additional expenditure in some centres, but ordinary classroom provision isn’t necessarily sufficient for simultaneous, secure, high-stakes examinations. A school may own hundreds of laptops without possessing hundreds of identical, charged, reliable and examination-ready devices available at the same time.

The precise figure will vary enormously, but the order of magnitude is clear. Fully digital exams wouldn’t be a minor technical adjustment. They’d require a national infrastructure programme costing hundreds of millions of pounds, much of it paid for by schools unless government or awarding organisations provide substantial additional funding. Digital exams would add another source of inequality which schools were responsible for addressing.

Screens vs paper

Paper’s advantages are easy to miss, largely because we’ve stopped noticing them. Students can underline, annotate, sketch, cross-reference, turn pages and spread materials across a desk without first learning an interface. They can see where they are in a paper, move backwards and forwards and use space in idiosyncratic ways.

Of course, paper isn’t cognitively effortless — handwriting and physical navigation impose demands of their own — but these demands are familiar, stable and already built into existing examination practice.

Digital systems can reproduce many of paper’s functions, but reproduction isn’t equivalence. Scrolling changes how information is located, split screens reduce usable space and moving between a source and an answer box requires navigation. Digital annotation tools must be learned, while reviewing several pages of writing on a screen isn’t the same as seeing them laid out on paper. None of these difficulties is insurmountable, but each consumes attention. That may make little difference in a short-answer test, but it becomes more significant when students are comparing sources, interpreting diagrams or sustaining a complex argument.

Ofqual’s research makes precisely this point. Mode effects can arise during the presentation of material, the thinking required, the production of a response and the process of reviewing it. However well designed they are, digital exams introduce mode effects, technical fragility, inequality and cognitive demands that have nothing to do with the subject being assessed.

Controlled assessment isn’t digital assessment

Hughes is also right that artificial intelligence creates serious problems for unsupervised coursework. If students can generate or substantially improve work using AI, it becomes harder to know whose knowledge and capabilities are being assessed. Timed, controlled conditions may therefore be fairer than work produced beyond direct supervision. But this is an argument for controlled assessment, not digital exams.

A paper examination is every bit as timed and controlled as an onscreen one. Moving an exam onto a screen doesn’t solve the problem of AI-assisted coursework because the important feature is secure supervision rather than the response medium.

Hughes still believes coursework remains “very much the best way” to assess some aspects of history and English literature, but this now feels more like wishful thinking than a workable position. Supervised drafting, staged submission, oral defence and greater reliance on work completed in class may make malpractice harder, yet each would add substantial complexity and workload without eliminating the central problem: once students can use AI between stages, it becomes increasingly difficult to know which parts of the final submission are genuinely theirs.

Coursework may theoretically assess some capabilities better than timed exams, but its validity now depends on being able to authenticate authorship. Unless a system can do that with reasonable confidence and without creating an administrative circus, calling coursework “the best way” is no longer enough. It may be the best method in theory while becoming progressively less defensible in practice. Replacing a valid form of assessment with a less suitable one because the latter is easier to secure would be an administrative solution to an educational problem.

Accessibility supports flexibility

The strongest case for digital exams is accessibility. Some students will find typing easier than handwriting, while screen readers, adjustable text and assistive software may remove barriers that paper preserves. However, this is an argument for flexibility rather than universal compulsion. Where technology allows a student to demonstrate knowledge more accurately, it should be available. Existing arrangements for word processors and reasonable adjustments can be improved, broadened and made more consistent.

Universal digitisation would solve some problems while creating others. Some students may find screens tiring or difficult to navigate, while others may plan and review their thinking more effectively on paper. There is no reason to assume that the format best suited to one group should become the compulsory norm for everyone.

An accessible assessment system should respond to meaningful differences. It shouldn’t impose one medium and treat any resulting disadvantage as a temporary inconvenience.

Mixed-mode assessment would, of course, create its own comparability difficulties. AQA acknowledges this in its response to Ofqual, which is another reason the transition can’t plausibly be described as having “almost no downside”.

Why is the ambition so small?

The strangest feature of the debate is how little ambition it displays. Digital technology could allow us to rethink how complex performances are assessed, yet the flagship proposal appears to be placing a traditional examination paper on a screen and asking students to type into boxes.

Comparative judgement offers a more interesting example of what digitisation might make possible. Instead of asking examiners to assign marks by working through increasingly elaborate criteria, judges compare pairs of responses and decide which is better. Repeated comparisons can then be used to place scripts on a quality scale.

Comparative judgement isn’t magic. Its validity depends on the quality of the task, the expertise of the judges and what they attend to when making decisions. It may suit some subjects and performances better than others, while translating a rank order into defensible grades raises further questions.

AQA’s 2023 account of the pros and cons of comparative judgement feels out of step with the progress being made by outfits like No More Marking. Fixating on questions about scaling, validity, feedback and the number of comparisons required feels very behind the curve.

Comparative Judgement addresses a genuine assessment problem. We find relative judgements of complex work easier and more consistent than assigning independent scores against lengthy criteria. Digital systems can distribute scripts, collect many judgements and combine the results efficiently, and research has found comparative judgement capable of producing reliable and valid assessments of complex performance in suitable contexts. Why, then, is placing old exams on screens treated as urgent while more ambitious attempts to improve the quality of judgement remain peripheral?

Comparative judgement isn’t necessarily the answer (even though it’s undoubtedly cheaper, easier and more valid and reliable than traditional assessment) but its approach uses technology to improve the process of assessment, rather than merely changing the mechanism through which students enter text. Where digitisation amounts only to typing the same responses into the same boxes, it’s stationery reform rather than assessment reform.

The most important bits are already digitised

The strongest argument for digital exams is administrative efficiency. Digital delivery may reduce printing, transport, scanning and storage costs. It may allow richer data, faster processing and tighter control over the examination process.

These are real benefits, but have largely already been secured. Students write on paper, their scripts are scanned and examiners mark them onscreen. Responses can be distributed electronically, marking can be monitored centrally and scripts can be stored and accessed digitally.

This hybrid system keeps the simplest and most familiar technology in front of students while digitising the administrative process behind the scenes. It captures most of the administrative prize without requiring schools to build and maintain a national digital examination infrastructure.

Of course, scanning doesn’t capture every possible advantage. Fully digital assessment can support adaptive pathways, new item types, instant capture of responses and integrated accessibility features. Where these improve validity or access, they deserve serious consideration. But those benefits have to be demonstrated rather than inferred from bandying about the word “digital”. Conventional questions typed into conventional answer boxes offer a meagre educational return.

“Almost no downside” for whom?

Whether or not students find paper exams “baffling” (I’d like to see the research on which Hughes bases this claim!) or whether AQA is able deliver digital exams tomorrow is besides the point. (Schools definitely are not ready.) The case for digital exams stands or falls on whether they produce a more valid, reliable and fair assessment of a particular body of knowledge.

Where digital delivery improves assessment, we should be using it. Where adaptive testing, simulations, comparative judgement or assistive technology offer a genuine advance, exam boards should explore them seriously. But, where digitisation merely transfers costs and introduces new sources of irrelevant difficulty, we should remain sceptical.

To think that there “almost no downside” to moving to digital exams seems spectacularly ill judged, especially when the devices, training, infrastructure, curriculum time and new sources of inequality will appear on someone else’s balance sheet. Exam boards may gain efficiency, but schools and students will be burdened with the costs. The question isn’t whether exams can be put on screens — plainly they can — the question is whether doing so improves the reliability and validity of assessment. Until that case is made subject by subject, task by task and group by group, digital exams remain an expensive way of confusing novelty with progress.

The lesson might be carefully explained, intelligently sequenced and understood well enough by students, but if the wrong person walked in at the wrong moment or if students didn’t visibly grasp a new concept or master a new skill in less than twenty minutes it was assumed the teacher was at fault. This was the era of bizarrely convoluted and unrealistic demands for differentiation, multiple mini-plenaries where students were expected to constantly demonstrate their learning instead of actually, you know, learning anything, compulsory group work and the inexplicable obsession with ‘pace’. If lessons were too quick or slow slow they were unsatisfactory but what pace was just right? No one knew. Essentially, it was just vibes.

Lesson observation had become one of the profession’s strangest rituals: half quality assurance, half theatre criticism, half séance. Observers entered classrooms for a brief period and then spoke as if the hidden life of learning had disclosed itself. Teachers prepared not just to teach, but to be seen teaching. The lesson had to communicate its own effectiveness to someone who often didn’t know the class, didn’t know the curriculum as the teacher knew it, and would be gone before the most important consequences of the lesson could possibly appear. But no one had really questioned the need for any of this. It was just the way it was.

I’d been worrying away at this on The Learning Spy for several years before “poor proxies” became part of the common vocabulary. In 2011 I’d asked what lesson observations were for; in 2012 I’d asked whether teacher observations were a waste of time; by 2013, the concern had hardened into something more serious. Lesson observation, at least as commonly enacted, distorted teaching, pushed teachers to focus on performance rather than learning, and created a system more interested in short-term fluff than real improvement.

The pre-2013 classroom was shaped by a whole ecology of inspectable improvement. Ofsted’s shadow was long, but it wasn’t only Ofsted. National Strategies, perverse Assessment for Learning rituals, APP grids, graded lessons, , three-part lessons with starts, mains and, er, puddings, VAK, sub-levels, and a whole raft of other unevidenced mumbo jumbo all combined to instil a very relief belief that learning could and should be made visible. Famously, John Hattie wrote a very influential book about the concept of Visible Learning.

Teachers learned to adapt, to play the game. If observation forms asked for visible progress, teachers provided visible progress. If book scrutiny rewarded written feedback, written feedback multiplied. If school policy prized student activity, activities were arranged. What may have begun as a set of suggestions ended as instructions.

The mythology was remarkably durable. Although Ofsted insisted it had “no preferred teaching style,” schools, rationally, didn’t believe them. In a post from December 2013 (in which I correctly predicted the imminent demise of grade observations) I noted the absurdity that schools with vulnerable data were especially exposed to the tastes of individual inspectors, and that too many schools were doing things that weren’t required by the framework because they didn’t know what kind of inspector they’d be saddled with.

Lesson observation had become more than a way of seeing teaching; it shaped teaching. If teachers thought an observer wanted less teacher talk, they spoke less. If they thought progress was expected to be made visible, they inserted a meaningless progress check. And if they thought independent learning was expected, they spent hours putting together nonsensical group tasks which — all too often — interfered with the teaching ont heir subjects. When accountability rewards compliance, teachers will — if they can — comply.

Although manyu of us knew something was wrong, we lacked the language to say so without sounding defensive. We might have instinctively felt a lesson could dazzle and leave little behind. Or a lesson which looked slow, awkward might be be doing more intellectual work than one fizzing with group work and lolly sticks.

In Rob Coe’s 2013 lecture, Improving Education: A Triumph of Hope Over Experience, he listed familiar classroom signs that were easily observed but not necessarily about learning: students being busy, especially producing written work; students being engaged and motivated; students receiving attention, explanations and feedback; classrooms being calm and controlled; curriculum being covered; and some students producing correct answers, regardless of whether they understood, could reproduce those answers independently, would remember them later, or had already known them.

It was a devastatingly simple list. Coe wasn’t saying that engagement, order, feedback, coverage, written work or correct answers were worthless — in fact, he went to pains to make clear this wasn’t the case. His argument was that such activities couldn’t bear the weight of conclusions being loaded onto them. He wasn’t attacking visible evidence, but the over-claiming that came bindled with them.

Schools had become too confident that learning could be recognised by its surface features. The notion that such things were ‘poor proxies for learning’ gave teachers and leaders a way to ask a question that had beenneglected for far too long: are we sure this means what we think it means?

The later evidence on lesson grading made the point harder to ignore. In 2014, I wrote about the reliability problem in graded observations: if one observer judged a lesson outstanding, the probability that a second observer would give a different grade was between 51% and 78%. If a lesson was judged inadequate, there was a 90% chance that a second observer would grade it differently. If observation judgement depends so heavily on who happens to walk through the door, we should be wary of building careers, reputations and school improvement plans on it. The issue wasn’t that observers were stupid or malicious but that they were being asked to infer too much from too little.

It’s hard now to recreate the force of that moment because so many of the old orthodoxies have happily been swept away. Few people now defend the graded twenty-minute observation or the idea that progress must be visible every lesson. Ofsted later drew a line under grading individual lessons, and the profession became more comfortable saying that teachers were allowed to talk, explain and teach.

But these myths are like bindweed. It’s not enough to root them out once, we have to contintually guard against them growing back. Visible proxies are attractive because learning is devilishly hard to perceive. Learning is slow, internal, fragile and often unavailable at the point we want evidence of it. learning, to be worthy of the name, must be flexible and durable. It must last beyond the narrow slice of the present. But, obviously, all we get to see is the here and now; we have to make guesses about elsewhere and later. An observer visiting a classroom can see behaviour, hear answers, glance at books, note participation and feel the mood of the room. What they can’t see is whether what has been taught will still be available next month, in a different context, without the teacher’s cues.

Compared with that stubborn invisibility, proxies are wonderfully compliant. They can be written into policies, and checked. That, I think, is the enduring value of Coe’s argument: it didn’t tell us to stop looking but stop being so easily satisfied by what is most easily available.

But recently, Jon Hutchinson made an interesting challenge in a comment on LinkedIn about a post I’d made about the danger of over-relying on presentation stanrds in students’ exercise books as a proxy for learning.

As a counterpoint, it’s depressing for many primary teachers to insist on children completing their work to a high standard of quality, secure in the knowledge that when they get to secondary this will often be allowed to atrophy really quite rapidly. As you say, there’s nothing clever or humane about allowing children to scrawl illegibly, but over time this is often what we see. Sure neat presentation isn’t a proxy for learning, but neither is sloppy presentation a proxy for thinking.

fwiw, I am increasingly of the opinion that Coe’s poor proxies for learning is one of the most damaging ideas in education. It moved rapidly from ‘these things don’t guarantee learning’ (true) to ‘so it’s not important to focus on them (speculation) to ‘they should be avoided’ (nonsense)

Good ideas are so easily reduced to unhelpful slogans. If Jon’s right, “engagement isn’t learning” may have morphed into, “engagement doesn’t matter”. “Although none of this follows from Coe’s argument, schools rarely run on logical entailment. Slogans, incentives and half-remembered CPD are more commonly the mood music of the moment.

Maybe phrase “poor proxy” is too self congratulatory? Maybe pointing out the differences between performance and learning is too smug to be practical in the hurly burly of the classroom? Maybe the phrase has becomea way of ending conversations rather than spurring deeper thought?

There’s some cultural evidence for this, even if the case is difficult to prove empirically. In blogs, on social media, in CPD providers’ materials, “poor proxies” has sometimes been used as a badge of being ‘in the know'. Engagement has come to be treated with suspicion and enjoyment as embarrassing. In the name of ‘raising standards’ and ‘knoweldge rich,’ a more austere age of education was — unintentionally — ushered in.

Did the poor proxy kill off one theatre of teaching, only to create another? Post Coe, at least in some schools, the approved performance has become retrieval starters, cold calling, silent compliance, knowledge organisers, cognitive load slogans, mini-whiteboards and everyone “thinking hard”. These are, at least in theory, better than what went before but, in practice, are just as prone to becoming empty rituals. The point isn’t to identify which is worse but that we should acknowledge that ritualised teaching is never useful if no one knows why they’re doing what they’re doing.

We have a remarkable talent for turning correctives into costumes. We’ve torn down the false idols of pace and engagement and instead begun to worship effort and rigour. The idols may have changed but the idolatry remains.

Obviously, a teacher who cares whether students are interested isn’t shallow. A teacher who wants students to enjoy the lesson isn’t necessarily pandering. Values relationships doesn’t mean the curriculum has been forgotten. And, I’m forced to acknowledge, a school caring about presentation, confidence, participation and atmosphere may also be attending to real conditions that make learning more likely.

There is a deadening version of evidence-informed education which seems embarrassed by anything too human. It can make warmth sound soft, enthusiasm sound unserious and enjoyment sound like a guilty secret. It can forget that students are not disembodied working memories waiting to be loaded but social, anxious, status-conscious, effort-avoiding, approval-seeking, meaning-making creatures. They learn through attention and memory, certainly, but attention and memory are affected by trust, belonging, confidence, interest, clarity, success and the emotional weather of the room. If “poor proxies” are used to dismiss all that, then they’ve become poor thinking.

The trouble is, all this is prone to infinite regress. The criticism of proxies can itself become a proxy. The person least impressed by engagement and most suspicious of enjoyment can claim to be the most rigorous. Teachers who strive for visible struggle appear more intellectually honest than those whose students are succeeding fluently. But fluency can be shallow and struggle can be stupid. Students can think hard about the wrong things. They can think hard about deciphering instructions, managing anxiety, second-guessing the teacher, navigating classroom dynamics or enduring confusion. Hard thinking is only useful when it’s about the right content and is likely to leave useful residue behind.

The distinction between learning and performance helps, but doesn’t solve everything. Immediate performance can mislead us. Students can succeed now because the model is still visible, the teacher’s prompts are fresh, the task is familiar, or the answer has been smuggled into the question. Equally, making things harder doesn’t magically make learning better. Desirable difficulties have to be desirable. Undesirable difficulties are just difficulties. Forgetting this gives us a new proxy: if it looks effortful, it must be learning.

A blood pressure reading, cholesterol level or test result can be vitally important, but the numbers aren’t a patient’s health. A doctor who ignores the numbers is reckless but one who treats only the numbers is also reckless. Measures matter because they points beyond themselves. They become dangerous when they replace the thing they were meant to illuminate. If schools ignore proxies they make themselves wilfully blind, but worshipings proxies is a direct route to a different kind of blindness.

For instance, used well, book scrutiny can tell us a great deal. It can suggest whether students have had enough practice, whether the curriculum is coherent, whether writing is improving, whether misconceptions recur, whether tasks are worth doing, and whether students are developing fluency over time. But, as Campbell’s Law tells us, once everyone knows what books are supposed to look like, they become increasingly meaningless. The artefact improves and the evidence worsens.

Lesson observation follows the same logic. Most observers are looking for sensible things: clarity, participation, checking for understanding, routines, behaviour and challenge. But the visible texture of the lesson can flatter us. A lesson can appear fluent if it’s over-scaffolded. It can seem demanding if students are busy. It can look successful if the questions are too narrow and calm because very little is being asked.

If students can do the thing now, surely they have learned it? Sometimes, yes. Often, not yet. All instruction begins with supported performance, so there’s nothing wrong with students succeeding with cues, models and prompts. The mistake is treating that supported performance as the final claim rather than the beginning of one.

This is why I still think the argument against poor proxies is stronger than the argument against the argument. Jon is right that the phrase can be misused. He’s right that some people have used it to sneer at things that matter and that the evidence-informed world has replaced one set of inspectable superficialities with another. But the belief that proxies are inherently bad hasn’t built entire accountability systems. The thoughtless worship of poor proxies has.

Proxy worship writes policies, designs learning walk protocols, produces book scrutiny pro formas and shapes appraisal targets. It fills CPD calendars, tells teachers what will be approved and students what success is supposed to look like. It creates the conditions in which everyone can work hard to improve the appearance of learning while learning — the retention and transfer of what we what students to master — is ignored.

That was true before 2013, when schools were seduced by the visible signs of progressive busyness and it can still be true now, when schools are seduced by the proxies of evidence-informed seriousness. The costumes have changes but the appetitie for easy reassurance remains.

The lesson, then, is that the poor proxies argument has to be turned on itself. “Thinking hard” can be a poor proxy, as can retrieval practice, silence, cold calling, knowledge organisers and all the rest. A school can wear the trappings of rigour and still leave students understanding little.

The better position is to embody “proxy humility.” Look at books, but don’t be seduced by what you see. Notice engagement, but ask what students are engaged in. Value calm classrooms, but ask whether calm is serving thought. Care about accuracy, but distinguish immediate performance from durable learning. train staff to use assessment routines, but remember that every assessment samples only part of the domain. And continue to watch lessons, but resist the temptation to believe that what you notice is the same as what students learn.

We should always distrust easy inferences but even scepticism can become lazy. We need proxies but we should never rely on them. The enemy was never engagement, order, feedback, written work or any other visible trace of learning. The enemy has always been our insatiable hunger for easy answers.

Of course (of course!) there are a great many schools led by honest, expert and humane leaders who balance their responsibility for getting the best outcomes for their students with the need to nurture staff. Sadly though, there are still a great number of schools where treating teachers and middle leaders as something between an inconvenience and a punch bag is the norm.

This is the first of what may turn out to be a number of such letters of encouragement and support.

Rather than congratulating you on your appointment, permit me to begin with a small discourtesy. Your new title is less impressive than it sounds. You’ve not been given power., just greater proximity to power. As you’ll soon discover, this is a very different (and much less impressive) thing.

You’re now close enough to senior leadership to be implicated in its decisions, while still being close enough to the chalkface to suffer the consequences. You’ll be asked to implement policies you had no hand in designing, defend decision you haven’t made, and do your best to polish the turds of others. Without doubt, you’ll be blamed for failing to square these circles with sufficient positivity, as though swivel-eyed cheerfulness was a rational alternative to a coherent school improvement strategy.

Even the best schools tend to be oddly hierarchical workplaces. You’ll feel the temptation to mistake responsibility for authority. It’s an easy mistake to make because it’s often encouraged. Responsibility is being blamed for outcomes.; authority is what’s required to get the outcome you’re responsible for. In a well-run school, these things are closely related. However, in other schools they’re kept separate with dogmatic commitment.

When you’re inevitably told that you’ve been empowered to act as the situation requires you should be sceptical. Those most eager to bandy terms like empowerment are the least willing to cede power. You may be empowered to convene meetings, write action plans, make spreadsheets, weather parental complaints and produce evidence of impact. (Although you should not even take these meagre concessions for granted.) Whether you’re empowered to insist, refuse, or change is quite another matter.

Your first obligation, then, is not to be a nodding dog. Enthusiasm is cheap, and often demanded by those who make discussion difficult. Your first obligation is to remain serious. By serious, I don’t mean solemn — solemnity is frequently the counterfeit of thought — I mean that you must preserve an allegiance to reality. Students either understand or they don’t. Teachers either teach the curriculum or they don’t. A routine either helps or it doesn’t. A promise either becomes action or it doesn’t. Line managers may prefer a fog of intentions, but you need to develop a taste for facts.

This may mean you’re perceived as “difficult.” This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every institution needs dissent, but not every dissenter is worth having. There’s the dreary staffroom rebel who has mistaken grievance for principle, the professional miserablist who opposes whatever exists because they are offended by existence itself. Avoid these types, especially when you find them in yourself.

A useful dissenter - one who possess the under-appreciated art of professional scepticism — asks better questions. What problem is this solving? What evidence would we need to show it had worked? What will teachers stop doing? What proxies are we confusing with learning? What would we do differently if we cared more about the subject than in the appearance of compliance? These questions won’t always be welcomed. Institutions often prefer agreement, particularly from those they intend to hold accountable later but your value lies precisely in your refusal to make yourself agreeable at the expense of what is most needed for the most disadvantaged students.

On that, too many decisions in schools are taken for the convenience of adults rather than the benefit of children. No one stands up in briefing and says, “We’ve decided to make life easier for ourselves by lowering the quality of what children receive.” It comes wrapped in softer paper — wellbeing, realism, compassion, context, nuance —all fine words but all capable of becoming alibis for lowering expectations.

Adult convenience is often rooted in the desire to avoid a difficult conversation. Whether you’re managing up by having to train your line manager or managig down to keep your team on track, I have a magic phrase for you: “I’m afraid we’re going to have to have a difficult conversation.” The effects are always electric. Like the fear of ripping off a plaster, the anticipation of these conversation can be worse than the reality. But once you’ve uttered these words, the plaster is well and truly off and the conversation is going to be had.

Make sure you say what you need to say as clearly and politely as possible. If a colleague isn’t following the curriculum, say so. If behaviour is deteriorating because leaders aren’t upholding routines, say so. If your line manager has promised support three times and nothing has happened, make sure you know that his isn’t acceptable. Courtesy matters, but courtesy at the cost of clarity is evasion.

Under pressure, it can be hard to clear. Avoid abstractions: they are a fog. Write down in advance exactly what the issue is. A line manager who keeps promising vague actions is of no help to anyone but saying so will invite defensiveness. Better to say, “Last time we met, we agreed that behaviour support would be arranged before the end of the week. That hasn’t happened, so I need to know whether the support is still coming or whether I’m expected to manage this without it.” Separate motive from effect. You never need to accuse anyone of bad faith but you do need to make the consequences. Bring it back to the effects on children.

You need a decision, not sympathy. Warm noises are not action. If you’re managing up, ask who will take the next step, when it’ll happen, and what you should do if it doesn’t. If you’re managing down, agree what will change, what support is needed, and when you’ll review it. Shut side doors before they open. Workload, context and difficult classes may be relevant, but must not be allowed to become escape tunnels from the issue at hand. Finally, write down what’s been agreed. Commit to sending a dutiful email. This prevents the conversation being reinvented later. A difficult conversation is mutually difficult. Head off the need to have them again.

One of the hardest tasks for any Head of Department is managing a senior member of staff who also teaches in your subject. Problems tend to be more political than technical. They wield their seniority like a weapon. Their timetable is less negotiable, their preferences more weighty, their omissions more awkward to deal with. The behaviour of such individuals is always open secrets and always the cause of much resentment.

There can then be an expectation, usually unspoken (although don’t be too surprised if it’s actually uttered aloud) that your demands should be softened for those deemed too lofty to follow the expectations laid down for mere mortals.

This is the most contemptible bullshit and it should always be called out as such. The more senior a member of staff is, the higher the standard to which they should hold temselves and be held to by others. If a senior colleague treats the curriculum as optional, routines as advisory, assessments as someone else’s problem and departmental decisions as suggestions for lesser mortals, they don’t merely underperform, they license everyone else to do the same.

You’ll be told they’re very busy, that they carry whole-school responsibility and are subject to pressures you may not fully understand. Expecting them to follow every departmental routine in the same way as everyone else is tantamount to a breach of professionalism. You may even be told that you need to be realistic.

Very well, be realistic. Be realistic about the children still sentenced to sit in their classroom. Be realistic about the colleagues who’ll make up the deficit. Be realistic about the curriculum that’ll be skipped, the routines that’ll rot, the assessments that’ll be distorted, and the burden that’ll drift, as burdens always do, towards the most conscientious. In schools, as in politics, the cost of appeasement is never paid by those who are appeased.

There is, of course, a real distinction to preserve here. Not every failure is defiance. and every missed expectation is due to laziness or incompetence. People do struggle, and humane leadership requires more than pointing at standards and relying on shame. But standards must always remain visible, otherwise support becomes a place to hide rather than a route back to doing the job properly.

A standard without support can be cruel just as support without a standard can be directionless. If a colleague can’t meet a reasonable standard, help them. If they won’t meet it, don’t pretend that coaching will help. If the standard itself is unhelpful, challenge the standard. What you mustn’t do is collaborate in the small, shabby lie that lowering expectations is an act of kindness.

Such complicity is a tax levied on the most vulnerable. It’s an arrangements that allows those with power to feel good about themselves while those less powerful absorbs the consequences. The children lose teaching, good staff lose time, departments loses trust. Senior leaders losesnothing except, one can hope, the ability to look in the mirror without flinching.

Dysfunctional schools run on insinuation. Every squalid compromise is tacit, nothing is ever agreed or owned. You’re encouraged to infer, absorb and manage. Only when outcomes are disappointing, will you discover that obviously failed to understand. Shoddy systems ensure the fingerprints are always smudged. The only way out is to demand detail. What exactly is expected? Of whom? By when? With what support? And what will happen if none of this works out?

There is, of course, a social cost to this. Those who thrive in fog rarely thank you for opening a window. But that’s no argument against opening it. What can be hidden behind euphemism can also be exposed by a clear statement. And, in a school, clarity should not be stylistic preference.

You may also have to contend with senior leaders who know little about your subject but is convinced you should do what they want. This is the genericist. They believes that teaching is teaching, and learning is learning whether one is teaching Macbeth, simultaneous equations, netball, the Qur’an, covalent bonding or the causes of the English Civil War.

Don’t despise the genericist. Contempt is a luxury that usually impoverishes judgement. But neither should you indulge their nonsense. There’s no pure art of teaching that floats above the curriculum, waiting to be dropped with equal ease onto Milton and mitosis. Your subject — like all subjects — has its own specialised pedagogical approaches upon which mastery depends. If the school you find yourself in has developed a generic lesson architecture which prevents students from developing subject-specialist perspectives, don’t begin by denouncing it. Rather, work out precisely how it gets in the way and, if called to explain why you have “adapted” the centralised lesson planning proforma, say, “The current model leaves too little time for independent composition.” Or, “Students are recalling information without learning when or how to use it.” Or, “We’re moving too quickly for students to do the thinking demanded by later assessment.”

Rigid lesson architecture is an ingenious modern folly. It allows schools to confuse consistency with quality. If a lesson appears to have all the correct components (a starters, reviews, models, checks for understanding, independent tasks, plenaries) its easy to be fooled into assuming that learning, when surrounded by so much funky pedagogical stuff, absolutely must be happening.

But, as you well know, a lesson isn’t good because it comes on a slide deck packaged with approved ‘dual coded’1 logos but because it causes students to know something worth knowing or do something worth doing. Architecture that enables this is useful anything that prevents it is an obstacle course arranged in front of a fire exit.

Don’t rush to rebellion. Rebellion can be intoxicating, and — as I’m sure we both know to our cost —intoxicated people rarely write good emails. Interpret and translate before you defy. If retrieval is required, make it serve your subject. If modelling is a must, model what and how need to understand the mechanics of your subject. If independent practice is required, insist that reading, annotating, playing, discussing, planning, drafting, performing and revising can all be disciplinary practices. The line to use is simple: enact the school’s lesson intelligently within the bounds of your subject. It’s harder to punish intelligence than defiance, though there are no doubt some so petty and limited they may try.

Beware the tyranny of proxies. Schools are helplessly attracted to what can be most easily observed and audited. Exercise books, trackers, seating plans, slide decks and curriculum documentation are all conveniently static. Learning, inconsiderately, hides in memory, judgment, fluency, discrimination, taste and attention. It’s rarely available for inspection on demand.

And so proxies become idols. A filled page is mistaken for learning, green pen for feedback, silence for attention, completed worksheets for progress, colour-coded spreadsheets for understanding and lesson plans for pedagogy. Used sensibly, these things can be useful indicators. Too often they are not used sensibly. Never sneer at proxies — only a fool rejects all signs because some mislead — but always ask what signs are meant to signify, and whether anyone still remembers.

The great moral hazard of middle leadership is to become a courier of nonsense. Or, more bluntly, a shit funnel. When unconvincing instructions arrive from above with no notice too many heads of departments decide that challenge is dangerous, funnel unreasonable, unhelpful demands downwards. In that moment, you’ve not merely obeyed the machine, you’ve oiled it. Your job is to act as a shit umbrella and protect those you lead as far as possible.

There will be times when you must pass on decisions you dislike. Not everything you don’t like is bad. Be open the possibility that it might be positive. However, there will be times when pushing back is ineffective and the only option is to carry out policies with which you disagree. Avoid the temptation to bullshit you team. Never tell teachers something is “really useful” when you mean “unavoidable”. Say instead, “This is the whole-school expectation. Here’s the most intelligent and least damaging way we can make it work.” Honesty is always important.

We all wanted to be trusted but to be trustworthy you must be honest. This is more than an absence of deceit. You most commit to doing what you’ve said you’ll. Over committing — promising what you’d like to happen but which you know is unrealistic — is always worse than disappointing people at the outset. If you don’t think you can do something, say so. Under promise and over deliver. The alternative is to be unreliable. You can let people down once and after the second time your apologies will wear thin. You will have painted your self as someone whose word cannot be trusted.

The other essential component of trust is expertise. You must know your subject, your team, your students inside out. If those who depend on you cannot rely on you to know what you’re talking about then this too makes you untrustworthy. If you don’t know, say so. But commit to finding out. Admitting ignorance is an act of courage but remaining ignorant is irresponsible.

Courage, in schools, is usually administrative. It’s the follow-up email, the precise question in a meeting, the refusal to turn “someone should” into “you must”. It lives in repeating a reasonable request calmly until evasion becomes embarrassing. Keep records. Not because you’re trying to catch anyone out, but because memory is a poor defence against institutional amnesia. If coaching is promised, note it. If a behaviour concern is escalated, note it. If cover is agreed, note it. If nothing happens, note that too. School that runs on vagueness and hope may resent the written word, but civilisation has always depended on record keeping.

There will always be forces beyond your control. Within your department, resist the pull of weather. Dysfunctional schools produce storms: moods, rumours, grievances, sudden fronts of panic, low pressure systems of resentment and fear. The work of middle leadership can easily descend into meteorology. Who’s upset? What’s SLT saying? Who’s leaving? What’s the latest initiative? Why has someone from the trust appeared near Year 8?

Focus on what you know is most important. Can students do what you need them to do in order to be successful? How do you know? What interventions work best? How do you know? Which team members are implementing the curriculum as intended? Which are finding ways to go above and beyond? How do you know? Departments that focus on their subject can be an oasis of excellence. Departments that focus on the weather become a microcosm of the school.

Protect your best people. This instruction is both obvious and widely ignored. In weak institutions, competence is punished. Reliable teachers get the most difficult classes, the shortest deadlines, the most unreasonable explanations. Don’t allow excellence to be taxed into mediocrity. If someone is carrying too much, reduce their burden. If they’ve done enough, stop asking. If you need their help, admit the cost. Never confuse consent with capacity.

Don’t waste your capacity to fight the good fight. There are, in every school, a hundred provocations every week. Most aren’t worth your blood pressure. They may irritate, but save your opposition for what damages your subject, burdens teachers pointlessly, misleads parents, excuses weak practice, invalidates assessment or harms students. Don’t spend your professional capital heedlessly.

Compromise can be a form of cowardice but, when intelligently chosen, it’s not surrender. But never compromise on the principles you hold dear. Of course, your school is not a salon convened for the satisfaction of your ideals. You will have to make concessions, to absorb, adapt, blunt, delay and survive initiatives you don’t believe in. The route to senior leadership lies in dreaming up plausible sounding strategies that burden colleagues and distract students and then, once promotions have been secured, quietly abandoned. This doesn’t happen in good schools, but it does happen in many. Don’t get sucked in. If compromise leaves what you know to be important intact, swallow your pride. But when it requires you to pretend falsehood is truth, spit it out. There’s a difference between playing the game and being a sucker.

Great teachers and capable middle leaders are not an inexhaustible natural resource. You are an increasingly scarce and precious resource. Any senior leader who treats you as infinitely replaceable is engaged in a unacceptable form of institutional self-harm. Schools struggle to recruit judgement, steadiness, subject knowledge, humour, stamina and the ability to make sensible decisions under pressure, only to squander these qualities through neglect, vanity and badly designed systems. This is not leadership.

Nurturing staff is not a sentimental extra. It’s one of the central responsibilities of leadership. Good staff thrive when they’re trusted, protected, developed, listened to and given the authority needed to discharge the responsibilities placed upon them. Deny people those conditions for long enough and school shouldn’t be surprised when its best people start wondering whether all this pain is compulsory. It isn’t.

There are great schools out there. Not perfect schools, obviously, but schools with serious leaders, humane systems, strong departments and enough intellectual confidence to value what you offer. They will snap you up. This shouldn’t make you arrogant, but it should prevent you from being grateful for mistreatment. A school that fails to nurture its strongest teachers and middle leaders is eating its seed corn and being disappoint with the harvest. Lack of trust is corrosive and the only way to build it is to know its parts: honesty and expertise.

Do not, under any circumstances, make martyrdom your professional identity. If you’re denied authority, ignored when you ask for support, blamed when support doesn’t arrive, and instructed to smile more while carrying the consequences, you should draw the obvious conclusion they don’t deserve you. Leaving isn’t failure. Some arguments can only be won by getting the hell out of Dodge.

Until then, be constructively difficult. Be courteous, but not tame. Be loyal, but not pandering. Be kind, but don’t collude. Be sceptical, but not sour. Be ambitious, but not at the cost of honesty. Never mistake obedience for professionalism, defiance for courage, or activity for improvement. Don’t lower expectations and then flatter yourself that you’re compassionate.

A Head of Department is incapable of rescuing a dysfunctional school through their own endeavours. You don’t have access to the levers that need to be pulled. You don’t control the timetable, the staffing, the behaviour system, the budget, or the accountability processes. But you can make your department harder to deceive. You can build a space where you are trustworthy, if not trusted, where your subject is treated as more than a delivery vehicle for generic routines, and where the needs of the most vulnerable students aren’t sacrificed on the altar of compliance.

And for God’s sake, take time to laugh at the absurdity.

In faith and until next time.

Inspection, in all its forms, has become curiously vulnerable to book scrutiny. We want to know whether students are learning, whether teaching’s effective and whether the curriculum’s coherent, but these are awkward things to establish. So we reach for visible proxies: full pages, neat presentation, written comments, coloured pen, student responses, evidence of challenge, evidence of progress, evidence of pride. Before long, the proxy hardens into the standard, and books are no longer being used to ask better questions but to avoid them.

Common problems with work scrutiny

The trouble starts when we treat book scrutiny as if it tells us anything meaningful about learning. Exercise books may give us traces of what’s happened, but these traces bear only a passing resemblance to the thing itself. A date tells us when work was done, not whether anything was understood. A teacher’s comment tells us feedback was given, not whether it changed anyone’s thinking. A polished paragraph tells us words ended up on the page, not whether the student can recreate the argument again without help. A book offers evidence, but tells nothing about the reliability or validity of that evidence.

If we’re only interested in what we can see in a set of books rather than in figuring out what conclusions we’re entitled to draw from what we see, we’re likely to make invalid inferences. A sample of books may tell us what kind of tasks students have been given, how much they’ve written, whether the school’s presentation policy has been followed, whether teachers are leaving written comments, and whether students are copying down what’s put in front of them. But it can’t tell us whether students understand the work, whether teachers’ explanations are effective, whether classroom interactions are improving performance, or whether the curriculum is being remembered. You might think it can, but, as I intend to show, this belief is profoundly damaging to the project of education.

Book sampling has some value as a low-stakes fact-finding activity, but it becomes much more dubious as an accountability tool. Once teachers know what’s being sampled, the sample changes. If leaders make it known they want to see written comments, written comments will appear. If they inspect student responses, student responses will multiply. And, most egregiously, if leaders fixate on presentation, presentation will, on the whole, improve, but at what cost? None of this means students are learning more, just whether teachers have learned how to satisfy the system.

Work sampling pro formas, no matter how well intentioned, make all this worse.

They tell us what to notice before we’ve had a chance to think. If there’s a box to tick about marking frequency, coloured pens, written responses, presentation or evidence of progress, what matters has been pre-determined. The best we can hope to find is what we were looking for in the first place. We’re no longer looking at students’ work to understand what it reveals; we’re looking to see whether the book conforms to an official picture of what learning’s supposed to look like.

Counter-intuitively, the way to get the best out of teachers is, unless we really don’t trust them, to withhold our preferences and allow them to make professional judgements based on how well they know their students and their subjects. If, explicitly or implicitly, leaders say what they’re looking for, teachers will make perfectly rational choices, adapting to the preferences of those judging them.

Lerner and Tetlock distinguish between being accountable to an audience with known views and being accountable for the quality of one’s reasoning. When people know what their audience wants, they tend to shift towards the audience’s preferences. When they expect to justify their thinking to an audience whose views are unknown, they’re more likely to think carefully, consider alternatives and make better judgements. In book scrutiny, we’re more likely to get better outcomes if we avoid asking, “Has the teacher marked in the approved way?” or “Does the book meet my idea of pride?” and instead focus on asking, “What was the teacher trying to achieve, what evidence did they use, what happened as a result, and what might they do next?”

The injustice of beautiful books

We should never lose sight of the tendency for managerialism to cosplay as rigour. What does it matter if dates are on the “correct” side of the page, titles underlined, sheets glued in and green pen used? These are wonderfully auditable but also arbitrary. The more precise the rules become, the easier they are to inspect and the less likely they are to have much to do with learning. You may think that asking students to “take pride in their work” is a meaningful way to assess standards, but what does it actually tell you?

It might tell you that a student has fluent handwriting, good fine motor control, spare attention and a secure grasp of school routines. It might tell you they care about adult approval or that the teacher has created calm conditions in which neat work is possible.

A neat book can conceal shallow thinking, just as a scruffy book can contain effortful thought. A beautifully highlighted paragraph may have been copied from the board, while a messy answer may be a student’s first attempt to grapple with a difficult idea. If we mistake surface care for intellectual quality, we reward students for being neat rather than for working hard.

“Pride” isn’t equally easy for every student to display in the approved form. For some, neatness is cheap: they can write quickly, organise space, copy accurately and still attend to the explanation. For others, the same requirements consume the working memory we’d rather they spent on the subject. Slow handwriting, weak transcription, poor spelling, visual processing difficulties, dyspraxia, dyslexia, gaps in schooling or anxiety can all mean the effort to make the page look acceptable comes at the expense of understanding.

Beautiful-book culture takes behaviours that are easier for already fluent students and recasts them as moral virtues. Students who can produce neat work are praised for pride; students who struggle are told they should be ashamed of what might be their best efforts. We think we’re raising standards, but we may simply be increasing the cost of access to the curriculum.

Presentation matters when it serves thinking. A disorganised calculation may hide errors, a messy diagram may obscure a relationship and an illegible sentence is tough to improve. But once presentation becomes an independent standard, detached from utility, it becomes ceremonial.

Thirty copies of a single thought

Many’s the time I’ve opened a student’s book and been blown away by the quality of work. Their explanations are lucid, and writing style seems impressively mature. Clearly, this student’s really got it. Then, on opening the next book, I find the exact same paragraph. By the time I’ve seen the fourth identical explanation, my admiration has curdled into disappointment.

Copying is not necessarily always useless. I can see arguments that sometimes students need accurate models, or need to rehearse language, structures, diagrams or procedures before they can use them independently. But getting a class of students to copy the same stuff into their books is, in the main, an oddly valueless task.

So why does it happen? Partly because copying is tidy. It fills pages, creates a record and ensures every student has something plausible in their book. And it prevents the terror of the blank page. In a culture where quality of work is mistaken for quality of thought, copying feels safer than either messy independent attempts, or worse still, a rich classroom discussion where nothing is recorded.

It’s also, I think, a misunderstanding of the “I do, we do, you do” model. The “I do” phase should be a space where the teacher models expert thinking, not an invitation for students to simply write down someone else’s words. A model should make the invisible visible: why this word rather than that one, why this step comes next, why this misconception is tempting, why this example matters, why this answer is better than that answer. The point is not transcription but attention to the decisions that make the model work.

If the lesson ends with everyone having copied the teacher’s answer, the most important part of the sequence has probably been skipped. The “we do” phase should involve students making decisions with support, and the “you do” phase should require them to attempt something independently. Copying a sentence prompt, or a paragraph plan can help prepare students for independent work, but it can’t replace it.

So what should we do if we find evidence that students are copying? Punish the teacher? In my view, the only sensible approach is to ask what systemic pressures are causing the behaviour and, perhaps, to consider whether students can do something independently as a result of the copying. Was it building fluency? Was it preserving a model students would later use? Was it followed by a fading scaffold, a worked example with gaps, a comparison task, a retrieval attempt or an independent application? If not, the copying is more for adult convenience than for the students’ benefit.

Quality is subject-specific. A non-specialist may see long answers, difficult-looking vocabulary and tidy presentation and assume challenge. They may see short answers, repeated practice or a familiar text and assume low expectations. But quality in mathematics, English, science, history, art and music lives in different places. It takes subject knowledge to know whether the work is demanding, accurate and worth doing.

In some subjects, exercise books don’t provide even a rough map of the territory; they’re a postcard from a distant corner. What can a book tell us about a student’s singing, tackling, painting, throwing, experimenting, speaking or designing? If written records have been carefully designed by a subject specialist they may be useful but, more often, giving students exercise books in some subjects is utterly pointless.

This is also why the distinction between the quality of work and the quality of marking matters so much. A book full of weak work and compliant marking shouldn’t reassure anyone. A book full of strong work and little written marking should make us curious rather than cross. If the work’s excellent, we should want to know how that excellence was produced. If the work’s poor, the presence of coloured pen, written comments and dutiful student responses shouldn’t reassure us.

The problem with practising bad writing

Beautiful-book culture also creates a particular problem for writing. If full books are treated as evidence of rigour, then teachers and students are pushed towards producing more writing, whether or not that writing is any good.

This is especially damaging when students are asked to write at length before they know enough to write well. They fill pages with clumsy sentences, vague claims, weak evidence, bolted-on quotations and half-formed explanations. The result may look like effort, but it can easily become rehearsal in doing the wrong thing. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. If students repeatedly practise poor writing, they don’t become better writers. Instead, they become more fluent at writing badly.

There’s a strange romance in schools about extended writing, as if more words automatically mean more thought. Sometimes they do. A developed paragraph, a sustained explanation or a full essay can force students to organise ideas, make connections and think hard. But only if they have the knowledge, models, vocabulary and sentence control to make the writing purposeful. Without that, extended writing becomes a kind of fog machine. It fills the page while obscuring the problem.

The pressure to fill books makes this worse. It rewards visible quantity over invisible improvement. A student who writes three poor pages may look more industrious than one who spends ten minutes improving a single sentence, comparing two examples, correcting a misconception, rehearsing a quotation or planning the structure of an argument. But the second student may be doing much more valuable work. Good writing often improves through selection, imitation, sentence-level practice, oral rehearsal, precise feedback, redrafting and attention to examples. Much of this can look unimpressive in a book.

This is another reason book scrutiny misleads. A book full of writing may tell us that students have written a lot. It doesn’t tell us that they’ve learned to write better. It may even tell us the opposite: that they’ve been left to practise errors, misconceptions and weak habits at scale. The idea that this will somehow make students better writers is naive.

Instead, as outlined in my book, Writing Fitness, the best way to build students’ writing stamina is to do less for longer, eliminate gaps, practise to the point of automaticity and move on only when essentials have been mastered.

What are students’ exercise books for?

To be clear, I’m not arguing that standards don’t matter, or that we should encourage illegible scrawl on dog-eared paper. Students need to set out work so that teachers, and ultimately examiners, can decipher what they’ve written. Care’s worth cultivating and accuracy really matters. There’s nothing progressive, humane or clever about allowing students to produce work no one can read.

But care isn’t decoration, order isn’t understanding and pride isn’t compliance. The problem begins when presentation replaces thought. A well-set-out calculation can help a student spot an error. A labelled diagram can make a process easier to retrieve. A paragraph plan can reduce the burden of composition. These things are valuable because they make thinking easier. The trouble starts when the ritual remains after the reason’s disappeared. The problem isn’t the ruler. The problem is the worship of the ruler.

Before we argue about whether exercise books should be beautiful, we need to ask a simpler question: what are they for? The answer’s less obvious than it seems because schools often expect books to do several incompatible jobs. In a single subject they may be a place to think, a record of practice, a revision resource and evidence for accountability purposes. We shouldn’t be surprised if a single artefact does none of these jobs particularly well.

If a book’s a place to think, it should contain false starts, crossings out, half-formed sentences, abandoned plans and rough attempts. Thinking usually looks untidy before it looks fluent. A page of real working may look like the wall in a detective film: arrows, fragments, wrong turns, a suspect circled too early, a clue that later turns out to be useless.

If a book’s a record of practice, it should show what students have attempted, what they found difficult, what improved and what still needs attention. It should help teachers to see whether tasks are too easy, too fragmented or too hard. It should show whether students have had enough practice, whether errors are recurring and whether explanations have been followed by application.

If a book’s evidence for other adults, it’ll probably start to look suspiciously polished. The neater it becomes, the less certain we should be that we’re looking at learning rather than performance. A useful map simplifies the territory so we can navigate it. A bad map gives false confidence. Many exercise books are more stage prop than map; arranged for the benefit of whoever’s expected to inspect them.

Research on student notebooks, especially in science, is useful here, but not in the way beautiful-book enthusiasts might hope. When notebooks are useful, it’s because they’ve been designed to capture reasoning, not because they’re neat. A science notebook that records predictions, observations, explanations and revisions of thought is doing a different job from a book filled with copied slides and glued-in worksheets. The value lies in the thinking the book’s been designed to reveal, not in the book’s appearance.

Handmade revision guides?

The least convincing claim is that exercise books are an opportunity for students to create their own bespoke revision resources. This is, at least in my view, bollocks. Revision resources need to be accurate, complete, organised and designed by someone who understands the subject inside out. Exercise books are none of these things. They provide a record of students’ encounters with the curriculum, not reliable maps of the curriculum itself. They may contain moments of genuine insight, but they may also contain misconceptions, half-truths, fragments, hurried notes and things copied without comprehension.

To think that this could make a useful revision guide is eccentric. Why would we expect novices to revise from materials produced by novices? A student’s notes are amateurish because students are amateurs. That’s not an insult; it’s the point of schooling. Students write down what seems important at the time, not necessarily what is important. They preserve misconceptions with the same confidence as correct ideas.

Exercise books are, for the most part, full of half-copied explanations that made sense only when the teacher talked around them; worksheets with two missing answers and one wrong one; spider diagrams with one useful idea and six titles in bubble writing; definitions that were nearly right but never corrected; model paragraphs that looked persuasive at the time but depended on knowledge the student no longer has; pages of notes taken while the student was also trying to listen, think, spell, keep up and avoid making the page look a mess. Forcing students to revise for exams from such a source would be a sure-fire way to lower outcomes.

Good revision, as we know, requires retrieval, spacing, carefully chosen examples, purposeful practice and opportunities to check and correct. Students need to remember, apply, compare, explain and improve. Their exercise books may contain some raw material for that process, but they’re not the process itself.

Worse, the belief that students can or should revise from their books privileges students who can already listen, select, summarise, organise, spell, write fluently and separate the essential from the incidental. In other words, it privileges students who are already relatively expert. For everyone else, the exercise book becomes a museum of partial understanding. A museum’s a fine thing, but it’s not a workshop. You can learn from a museum if you know what you’re looking at, but you can also wander around one for hours and learn little.

If we’re serious about revision, we should give students better materials than their own amateur records of learning. They need carefully designed summaries, model answers, worked examples, glossaries, diagrams, key quotations, timelines, cumulative quizzes and practice questions. These should be shaped by the curriculum, not accidentally assembled from the residue of lessons.

Exercise books may remind students what they’ve done, preserve useful practice and show old mistakes worth correcting. But they shouldn’t be treated as the main source of revision. Asking students to revise from their own books is rather like asking patients to treat themselves from the notes they took during the consultation.

Making a novice’s notes neater doesn’t make them more expert. A misconception is still a misconception no matter how beautifully underlined. A pristine exercise book may be easier to revise from than a chaotic one, but that doesn’t make it an effective revision resource.

The cost of beautiful books

A good exercise book is a working document. It should help students think, help teachers diagnose and help departments see whether the curriculum is doing what they hoped. Once it becomes a performance for other adults, its value begins to leak away. The book stops being a map that helps us navigate and becomes a prop that helps us pretend we know where we are.

This is the opportunity cost of beautiful books. Every hour spent standardising presentation is an hour not spent asking better questions. What do students need to know? What have they misunderstood? What needs more practice? Which explanation worked? Which examples helped? Which tasks generated confusion? Which students looked successful but remembered little? Which students looked untidy but understood more than we thought?

Opportunity cost isn’t theoretical. Time spent checking compliance can’t also be spent improving explanations, planning better questions, comparing student work, discussing misconceptions, designing practice or agreeing what high-quality work looks like in the subject. The cost of book scrutiny isn’t measured only by whether it finds anything useful but by the work it displaces.

We made a similar mistake with marking. We treated marking as if it were feedback, when feedback is only feedback if it changes the student’s thinking or action. A comment in a book may be useful feedback, but it may also be a performance of feedback. There are often better ways to find out what students know: a hinge question in the middle of a lesson, a short quiz, a whole-class response on mini-whiteboards, a carefully chosen sample of independent work, or an assessment completed under known conditions. If we want to know whether students can write an essay, perhaps we should collect the essay. If we want to know whether they understand today’s concept, perhaps we should check that today rather than write the same comment in thirty books two weeks later.

People pay attention to what gets inspected. If we praise full pages, coloured pen, glued-in sheets and uniform presentation, teachers will produce those things. Not because they’re foolish, lazy or cynical, but because systems train people. Whatever gets noticed becomes important. Students learn the same lesson. They learn that schoolwork is often about making the page look right, and that the appearance of effort can matter more than the substance of thought.

None of this means we should stop looking at books. It means we should look at them differently. A book can tell us useful things. It can show what tasks students have been given, whether they’ve had enough practice, whether work’s too easy or too fragmented, whether explanations have been followed by application, whether errors are recurring, whether the curriculum has coherence and whether students are being asked to think hard enough about the right things.

But a book can’t, on its own, tell us what a student knows. A book isn’t a brain scan. To know what students know, we need to ask them. We need to listen to their explanations, look at their independent work, compare responses across classes, use assessments carefully and see whether they can use what they’ve been taught when the surface of the task changes.

The best conversations about books aren’t really about books. They’re about curriculum, instruction, practice and assessment. What was taught here? Why was it taught in this order? What were students expected to think about? What did they get wrong? What did the teacher do next? What will be revisited? What should now be easier because of this work? Those questions might actually improve teaching, which is a long way from checking whether every date has been underlined.

A sane approach to accountability should make teachers more likely to do the right thing, not more likely to comply with a senior leader’s partial understanding of quality across the curriculum. Beautiful-book culture teaches teachers to protect themselves by making books more inspectable. The safe option is no longer better thinking, better explanation or better practice. It’s showcasing pages that survive scrutiny.

Beautiful books became popular because they offered a visible solution to an invisible problem. Learning is hard to see, so we’re desperate for something easy. We want evidence of care, progress, pride and rigour and neat books can seem to provide it. The danger of using books as a proxy is that we mistake what’s visible for what’s important.

So, yes, students should take pride in their work, but pride should mean doing justice to the content, not decorating the container. Yes, books should be usable, but usable for whom? The student thinking now? The teacher planning the next lesson? The adult looking for reassurance? Until we answer that question, beautiful books will remain an attractive distraction.

I’d rather see an ugly book full of hard thinking than a beautiful book full of compliant emptiness. I’d rather students revised from materials designed by someone who knows the subject than from their own amateur notes. And I’d rather we stopped pretending that the correct side of the page is a serious educational concern.

The exercise book is only ever a map, and rarely a good one. Sometimes it helps students think, practise and improve. Sometimes it helps teachers see what happened and decide what should happen next. But the map mustn’t be confused with the territory. The question shouldn’t be whether books look cared for but what they’re doing and whether they help students think better. If they don’t, their beauty is only evidence that we’re looking in the wrong place for the wrong things.

Then comes the reveal. Miyagi throws punches and Daniel’s arms move almost before he knows what he’s doing. The chores weren’t chores at all. The movements had been encoded in his body. Daniel had been learning without knowing he was learning, and suddenly all that apparently pointless activity had meaning.

It’s a brilliantly seductive idea. Expertise, smuggled in under the cover of mindless routine. Mastery, acquired through obedience — the body learning what the mind doesn’t yet understand. The scene offers one of the great fantasies of education: if students perform the right actions often enough, meaning will eventually reveal itself.

There’s some truth in this. We can learn habits, movements and routines before we can explain them. Fluency often precedes our ability to analyse. We sometimes understand what we’ve been taught only after repeated practice has ingrained the pattern. But there’s also something deeply misleading about the fantasy. Daniel’s routine works because Miyagi understands exactly what the movements are for. The hidden structure is only hidden from Daniel (and maybe from us) but not from the teacher.

If we were to strip out Miyagi’s understanding all you’d be left with is a kid performing monotonous routines. Schools are full of these routines, where the original purpose has been lost and no one’s sure why we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing.

Ritual without meaning is mimicry

Whenever a practice is mandated, there’s an inexorable tendency for it to lethally mutate. I’ve argued this before about retrieval practice.

But the problem isn’t that retrieval becomes ritualised. Rituals aren’t empty. They have deep symbolic meaning preserved through repeated form, marking what a community values and making significance habitual. A Remembrance Day silence isn’t just two minutes without speaking. Standing, stillness, the poppy, the sounding of the Last Post: each repeated element carries meaning because the form has been preserved. The ritual teaches attention, gratitude and collective memory without needing to explain itself from scratch every year.

Of course, not everyone involved in a ritual understands it in the same way. If we don’t explain why we’re asking kids to be silent, why should they take it seriously? In religious traditions, the congregation may not grasp every symbolic layer of the words, gestures and timings. Rituals often require a priest class. Someone has to be inducted into the mysteries, to know why this word is spoken here, why this action comes before that, why the form matters.

The same is true of classroom routines. Students don’t need to understand the New Theory of Disuse before they can benefit from retrieval practice, any more than Daniel LaRusso needs to understand defensive blocking before building muscle memory.1 But the teacher needs to know. Structure can be hidden from novices but not from the teacher responsible for implementing the practice.

In this sense, retrieval practice probably should be ritualised. Students should come to expect that remembering is part of learning, that forgetting isn’t shameful, that answers need to be produced rather than merely recognised, that errors can be repaired, and that important knowledge will return. A well-designed ritual reduces uncertainty and helps students internalise the rhythms of successful study.

The danger isn’t ritual but mimicry. Mimicry results in a cargo cult, copying outward form with no understanding of the underlying purpose. Five questions appear, five minutes pass, answers are revealed, green pens are deployed, and the lesson moves on. It looks as if retrieval practice has happened, but the mechanisms that make it work are missing: no real search of memory, no successful struggle, no feedback worth having, no planned return. The movement is retained but the meaning is lost.

Three recent studies help clarify what gets lost in the move from ritual to mimicry. The first asks whether retrieval practice is working for all students, especially those most likely to struggle. The second asks whether we’re retrieving isolated fragments or the relationships that make knowledge usable. And the third looks at whether our systems reward spaced return or merely task completion. Together, they suggest that retrieval practice requires more refined judgement and deeper understanding of the essential processes.

1. Not yet for all students

The first of these studies, “Trends in testing effect research: from lab to classroom, but not yet for all learners” by Wilschut, Sense and van Rijn, captures the state of play neatly. Testing effect research, they state, has travelled from tightly controlled laboratory experiments towards more authentic classroom settings, with the field moving from proving the effect to investigating how it works within the messiness of real classrooms.

Read more

There’s no shortage of explanations for the ‘boy problem’. They don’t read enough. They rush. They don’t revise properly. They need shorter tasks. They need more competition. They need texts they can relate to. None of these ideas are implausible. They might even be right about boys in general but they’re certainly not true of every boy (just as they might also be true of many girls!)

We do what we always do when we see a pattern: we start explaining it. The trouble is that our explanations bypass other sources of evidence. Before we’ve considered attendance, prior attainment, reading age, class allocation, teacher absence, behaviour, curriculum time, option choices, or whether the difference is meaningful once other variables are considered, we default to the most obvious cause: there’s something about gender that causes boys to do less well than girls in school.

Whenever the ‘boy problem’ is raised, someone is bound to suggest a “boy-friendly” curriculum: more action, more choice, more movement, less writing, greater relevance. Of course, no one wants boys drifting through school bored, alienated and underperforming but good intentions don’t translate stereotypes into causes. We move from observation to cause, and from cause to policy, almost without noticing. The graph shows an effect; we think we can see the cause.

In the 1940s, the Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte showed how easily human beings mistake sequence for causality. In The Perception of Causality, first published in French in 1945, he demonstrated that very simple visual sequences create the appearance of causal connection. If one shape moves, touches another, and the second shape moves away we don’t merely see one event followed by another, we see one thing causing another thing happen.

Causality cannot be directly observed, only inferred. Yet some sequences are so compelling that our inferences feel like perception. We we see something happen we believe we can see its cause. Classrooms produce the same illusion. The behaviour in Miss Crumb’s class is unruly, so Miss Crumb must be ineffective. Gavin doesn’t complete his work, so he must be feckless and work-shy. Parvinder hands everything in on time, so she must be conscientious. We may sometimes be right, but the ease with which we jump to conclusions should worry us. In reality, life is dense with competing causes: prior knowledge, relationships, routines, attendance, sleep, anxiety, curriculum, peer status, home life, task design, teacher absence, reading fluency, classroom norms, health, habit, memory and chance. Because this is all a bit messy and hard to make sense of, w e prefer simpler stories.

This is how poor reasoning often works in schools. We begins with something visible: a gap, a pattern, a graph, a behaviour, a lesson that went badly and then we add in the most convenient, plausible explanation because it fits what we already believe. Once an explanation feels plausible, it becomes true. From there it’s a just a hop, skip and jump to policy.

Once we’ve settled on a cause, we’re quick to make moral judgements. In A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739-40, David Hume noticed that writers often begin by describing how the world is, then suddenly start telling us how it ought to be, without explaining the move. One minute they’re making factual claims; the next they’re making moral ones. The grammar changes from “is” to “ought”, but the argument supplying that change has gone missing.

Hume wasn’t saying facts are irrelevant to moral reasoning but that facts don’t contain values inside them. A description of the world doesn’t, in itself, tell us waht we should approve, resist, tolerate or change. To reach an injunction, we must add a value judgement. We have to say what we care about.

Boys are more restless, therefore school should be redesigned around restlessness. Some children arrive in school with lower prior attainment, therefore academic expectations must be lowered. A pattern exists, therefore it must be accepted, accommodated and declared inevitable. But the existence of a tendency doesn’t tell us how to respond to it. Reality offers constraints but doesn’t give us commandments.

One version of this mistake is the naturalistic fallacy: because something exists, or appears natural, it must be desirable, inevitable or right. In Principia Ethica, philosopher, G. E. Moore objected to attempts to define “good” as some natural property such as pleasure, usefulness, survival, evolutionary success or social approval. Even if something is pleasurable, adaptive, efficient, popular or widely desired, we can still ask whether it is good. Natural facts can inform our moral reasoning, but they can’t reason for us.

In education, “natural” can so easily become an excuse. Children are naturally curious, so direct instruction must be deadening. Adolescents naturally test boundaries, so firm discipline must be unrealistic. Boys are naturally more active, so schools must become more “boy-friendly”. Claims begin as observation, but harden into policy.

Another version of the same mistake runs the other way. Because something ought to be true, we convince ourselves that it is true. This is the moralistic fallacy. It feels nobler than the naturalistic fallacy because it usually begins with a decent moral impulse. We want equality, so we deny difference. We want parenting to determine children’s futures, so we resist evidence suggesting its effects are more complicated. We want schools to overcome disadvantage, so we treat any persistent gap as proof of failure. We want merit to be rewarded, so we overstate how much success is under an individual’s control and how much is down to luck.

The problem isn’t our the values — equality is worth defending, parents do matter, schools should make a difference and merit should count — but when we allow values to settle empirical questions in advance. If a finding threatens our preferred moral story, we don’t get to make it disappear by disliking its implications. Denial leaves us designing interventions for a reality that doesn’t exist.

Both fallacies are ways of avoiding difficulty. Where the naturalistic fallacy turns reality into an instruction, the moralistic fallacy turns morality into a filter on reality. One says, “This is how things are, so this is how they should be.” The other says, “This is how things should be, so this is how they must be.” Sadly, the world is not always as we might wish it was, and the way it is doesn’t decide what we should do.

We can believe children should be creative, independent, collaborative and self-regulating, but those aspirations don’t tell us how novices learn. We can believe all children should achieve highly, but that doesn’t mean all children arrive at school eually likely to acheive.

The OECD’s Building Strong Foundations for Life offers a useful recent example. Its 2025 International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study reports that, at age five, girls outperform boys across the three broad dimensions assessed: foundational learning, executive function, and social and emotional development. The executive function chart is especially arresting. In country after country, girls are way ahead of boys.

It’s easy to look at this and think we’ve seen the cause. Five-year-old girls have better executive function than boys. Therefore boys are less ready for school. Therefore boys need a different kind of early years provision. Therefore settings should become more boy-friendly: more movement, more play, more choice, more competition and more activities designed around what boys supposedly are.

But this is correlation not causation. It tells us that girls, on average, score higher on particular measures in particular jurisdictions but not whether the gap is biological, maturational, cultural, pedagogical, artefactual, or some tangled combination. It also reports that 36% of variation in foundational learning scores and 22% of variation in executive function and social and emotional development scores occurs between early childhood education and care centres or schools. Clearly, context has a lot to answer for.

Executive function sounds like a thing children possess in greater or lesser quantities, but it’s something we can never observe directly. We infer it from performance on tasks: waiting, switching, remembering, inhibiting, complying, attending. A five-year-old’s score may reflect cognitive capacity, language, familiarity with adult-led tasks, sleep, confidence, socialisation, or willingness to please an unfamiliar adult. The scores are real but their meaning is far from self-evident.

This is not to say there isn’t a gender gap — there clearly is and to deny it would be to fall into the moralistic fallacy — but we should be cautious about what it represents. A measured difference isn’t an explanation. We can say that girls, on average, scored higher on certain measures at age five. We can’t leap from that to confident claims about what boys and girls are naturally like, or what schools should do in response.

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It was a privilege to be asked to serve as lead drafter for the English and Drama curriculum framework for Northern Ireland. It was also a rare pleasure to work with the knowledgeable and passionate teachers, school leaders and experts who made up the English and Drama Subject Working Group. I’m immensely proud of what we’ve created. No document is ever perfect, and few are likely to please everyone affected, but this one captures my beliefs about what the study of English can be.

Curriculum drafting is an act of stewardship. It asks us to think carefully about what young people are entitled to know, experience and be able to do. It asks us to balance inheritance with possibility: the literature, language, stories, arguments, traditions and forms that have shaped us, and the knowledge that will allow the next generation to take up that inheritance with confidence, judgement and joy.

My hope is that the framework will have a powerful and positive impact on the teaching of English across Northern Ireland. I hope it helps teachers think with greater clarity about the structure of the subject. But, most of all, my hope is that it helps more children experience English as an invitation into language, literature, thought and culture.

Here is our vision for English, taken from the TransformED Northern Ireland Curriculum 2028.

Vision Statement for English

English is the study of language both as a means of living and as a tool for human thought. A high-quality English curriculum allows pupils to participate fully in the world and fosters their sense of belonging within it. Through accurate and fluent speaking and writing, pupils can communicate ideas, experiences and emotions. Through confident reading and attentive listening, pupils not only allow others to communicate successfully with them, they enter the wider conversation in which literature records and reshapes human experience. The study of English becomes a gateway to deep wells of thought and experience beyond their own.

A strong English curriculum lays the foundation for a lifelong habit of reading across many forms and genres. The intensely personal pleasure of immersion in the flow of well-crafted prose makes a text a place to live inside and where a pupil makes meaning at their own pace. Whether through the narrative tension and fully imagined world of a novel or through an intricately crafted argument, a literary text captivates the reader’s mind. Literature gives space for beliefs, emotions and relationships to be examined with care. Through the rich range of specific and connected texts that they study in school, through the passion of their teachers from a lifetime of reading and discussing literature, and through the lasting desire to keep reading that these experiences form, pupils are given one of the most important means that humans have ever produced for personal development. As individuals, as members of reading communities and in wider society, they grow culturally, emotionally, socially and spiritually.

English thus extends beyond practical utility. Pupils encounter a rich and varied diet of whole texts that require patience, sustained attention and informed interpretation. With support to build stamina for extended reading, they learn to follow argument, trace narrative and recognise patterns, fostering their own creativity as they learn from and adapt stylistic and structural conventions. Wide reading reveals how writers connect across time, genre and tradition. Through knowledge of context and intertextuality, pupils learn that stories do not stand alone but belong to a shared cultural landscape in which ideas are inherited, contested and refined. Through encounters with literature from different periods, cultures and traditions, pupils gain the knowledge and experience to give them genuine choices and informed judgement.

Vocabulary runs through every aspect of the subject. Words function as conceptual tools that enable pupils to make finer distinctions, perceive pattern and hold more complex ideas in mind. As vocabulary expands, so does the reach of thought. For this reason, vocabulary, background knowledge and context are taught deliberately. This matters as much in early reading as in later study, since without it, pupils cannot make sense of texts or the ideas they contain.

A cumulative approach shapes the teaching of reading, writing and spoken language. Reading fluency and disciplinary knowledge must be built step by step. In Foundation and Key Stage 1, this means that phonological awareness and decoding ability are priorities until automaticity, accuracy and prosody are achieved by all. Success in both spoken and written language requires early and regular participation in rich sound-worlds – poems, rhymes and songs, memorable folktales and stories – with plentiful oral recitation and rehearsal as well as enjoyment of the social and emotional benefits of discussing them. It requires practice in purposeful listening and clear contribution. Writing depends on explicit teaching of handwriting, syntax, spelling, sentence control, vocabulary, structure and argument. Together, these strands enable pupils to communicate with increasing confidence and precision.

The aim of English is to give young people an entitlement to:

• knowledge that helps them understand the world, including knowledge of letter and print that renders the world of text accessible

• language that helps them express ideas with precision

• literature that illuminates human experience

• habits of attention that support thoughtful and creative engagement.

In this way, English prepares pupils not only for academic success but also for participation in the ongoing conversation of humankind, understanding the traditions they inherit and contributing to their future. Reading for pleasure emerges as a long-term outcome of a curriculum that builds the competence, confidence and shared cultural entitlement required for all aspects of English to become genuinely enjoyable.

If this piques your interest to review the substance of the curriculum, you are most welcome to download and review it. The curriculum is currently in its public consultation phase and, should you have any comments to make, you can do so here.

Fire is one of humanity’s oldest and most essential technologies. By warming homes, cooking food, hardening clay, and later sterilising equipment and powering engines fire kickstarted civilisation. But it also burns down buildings.

Long before there were cities, schools, books or wheels, our ancestors were learning how to use flame. Traces of burned bone and ashed plant remains at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa suggest that hominids were using fire around a million years ago. At Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel, burned seeds, wood and flint fragments point to controlled use of fire nearly 790,000 years ago. Later evidence suggests not just burning, but cooking, tool-making, protection and social life organised around the hearth. Fire changed what we could eat, where we could live, how long we could stay awake and what we could make.1

To be useful, fire must be controlled. It requires attention, boundaries, tools, habits, knowledge and rules. A hearth left unattended might burn your house down; a kiln not properly maintained will destroy the pots it was meant to harden; giving a child a box of matches is asking for trouble. Out of control, fire is terrifying: indiscriminate, hungry, impossible to reason with, as wildfires show when they turn forests and towns into ash.

No-one is pro-fire or anti-fire. We’re pro-hearth and anti-arson. In a kiln, a furnace, or a carefully managed campfire, fire is wonderful. But obviously, no one wants it in the curtains, the wastepaper bin or the roof space. The question isn’t whether fire is useful but how it’s power harnessed and how its risks are mangaged.

We need to think about AI in school in the same way by working out how we control it and how we manage its risks. For some, AI is about to democratise expertise, personalise learning, solve workload and make every child’s education infinitely adaptive. For others, it’s a cheating engine, a hallucination machine and an existential threat to thought itself. Both responses contain some truth, but both are too simplistic.

AI will make some things in schools better, some things worse and quite a lot of things merely faster. That last possibility should worry us more than it does. Schools are already full of tasks that can be completed without anyone thinking very much. Just as students can copy notes without understanding them, teachers can produce resources that look attractive but don’t teach anything particularly well. Likewise, leaders can generate policies, reports and improvement plans which look impressive without addressing the reality of classrooms.

AI hasn’t created these problems — they stem from all-too-human desires to save time, avoid effort and look good — but it has accelerated them. And, as with fire, pouring accelerant over a poorly controlled system is never a good bet. It’s pointless to discuss whether AI should be allowed into education — it’s here, baby! The real question is whether we can control it and what we need to guard against

The findings that follow are a sequence of warnings about the consequences of AI on learning.

1. Students know there’s a cost to using AI but use it anyway

2. Students who use AI best need it least

3. The best AI tutors are deliberately obstructive

4. AI can strengthen participation or replace it

5. The better AI gets, the more human judgement matters

Taken together, these findings suggest a simple test. AI is useful when it helps students think more clearly, practise more deliberately and become less dependent over time. It’s dangerous when it makes weak understanding look strong, makes effort feel pointless, or allows adults to outsource decisions they ought to own.

1. Students know there’s a cost but use it anyway

Discovering that use use aof AI is endemic amongst students is about as surprising as discovering that they dress badly or wash infrequently. In 2025, Oxford University Press reported that around 80% of 13- to 18-year-olds said they used AI in their schoolwork, while only 2% said they didn’t use it at all. More interestingly, many of them worried that AI might be damaging their learning and skill development. The survey reports, “Nine in ten students say AI has helped them develop a skill—problem solving, idea generation, and exam prep top the list. At the same time, 62% report negative effects, such as reduced creative thinking and over-reliance.”

• 62% reporting concern that AI reduced creative thinking and over-reliance

• 60% worry AI encourages copying over original thinking.

• 51% fear it may reinforce bias or stereotypes.

• 48% suspect peers are secretly using AI to complete schoolwork.

• 47% worry teachers can’t detect it.

• 47%, worry they can’t identify accurate AI-generated information.

• 32% admit they can’t tell if AI content is true

In other words, students appear to understand the bargain. AI helps with problem solving, idea generation and exam preparation, but they also worry that it encourages copying, weakens creative thinking, fosters over-reliance and makes truth harder to judge. That is a much more interesting picture than the usual story of students either cheating shamelessly or embracing the future with innocent enthusiasm.

Think of the student who starts with a reasonable request: explain this question. Because the explanation is helpful, they ask for a few ideas. Then they ask for a better opening sentence. Then they ask for the whole paragraph to be rewritten. Each step is only a little nudge further from independent thought. By the time the work is submitted, the student hasn’t cheated in the old-fashioned sense, but nor have they done the thinking the task was meant to provoke.

Schools already incentivise this. We tend to reward completion more than we do thinking, polish more reliably than struggle, and compliance more immediately than learning. AI fits beautifully into that system because it manufactures the appearance of effort. It makes students seem productive, capable and conscientious, even when the mental effort has been outsourced.

Of course, we shouldn’t be too smug about this. We use satnav and lose our sense of direction. We use autocorrect and become less certain about spelling. We save phone numbers so we don’t have to remember them. Offloading is a normal human response to convenience. The different with AI is that the offloading reaches into explanation, judgement, expression and thought itself.

A student doesn’t need to be lazy to use AI badly. They only need to be under pressure, short of time, unsure what good looks like, and surrounded by tasks where the submitted product matters more than the thinking that produced it. The cheating panic catches only the most obvious abuse. The deeper problem is dependence disguised as efficiency.

2. AI most helps those who already know most

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The usual explanation is comforting: someone must have failed. Leaders weren’t strong enough, teachers weren’t consistent enough, students weren’t motivated enough, and parents weren’t supportive enough. But what if the more troubling possibility is also more useful? What if schools are systems that can produce poor outcomes even when most of the people inside them are well-intentioned, hardworking and competent?

We know from ordinary life that intentions and outcomes fail to match. Someone tidies your desk and you can’t find a vital document. A friend organises a party in your honour and creates an evening you dread. A policy designed to help people ends up making their lives harder.

History is littered with larger, grimmer examples: the Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, the Partition of India, the War on Drugs and No Child Left Behind. Each was, at least in part, an attempt to solve a serious problem. Each created consequences its architects either didn’t foresee or couldn’t control. Good intentions pave the road to hell. But why are we so surprised that good intentions are so obviously insufficient?

In schools, the gap between intention and outcome is often hidden because the intentions are so virtuous. Who could object to attempts to improve attendance, raise standards, keep children safe, develop reading, reduce workload or close gaps? But virtuous aims can still create vicious incentives. An attendance policy can improve the numbers while making school feel more hostile to the families most in need of trust. A data system can promise clarity while generating hours of low-value labour. A behaviour policy can create calm corridors while pushing the most vulnerable children closer to exclusion. None of these things happen because people want them to happen but because systems convert aims into incentives, routines and consequences.

A common response is to assign blame. If we could just remove the incompetent or malicious, all would be well. This is the logic behind school inspection: if a school is underperforming, its leaders must be the problem. Expose them, replace them, and improvement will follow. But this isn’t just wrong, it’s foolish. Replace the leader and the same pressures remain: recruitment problems, unstable budgets, weak local services, inherited curriculum gaps, hostile accountability, fragmented data, exam incentives and the daily weather of human need. Sometimes new leadership helps enormously, but only when it changes the conditions in which people work.

There may be a few schools led by tyrants or incompetents, but most schools, regardless of outcomes, are led by people doing their best. Leading a struggling school — especially one in a deprived area — is punishingly hard. Success and failure are always influenced by luck. Punishing the unlucky for failing to control every variable deters others from taking on such roles.

Good intentions aren’t enough but they do matter. If we assumed that well-intentioned leaders could be supported, mentored, and developed into effective ones, we might create a system with higher morale, less burnout, and better outcomes, especially for the most disadvantaged students.

To do this, we must move away from a culture of blame and towards one of responsibility. Schools are complex networks, not only of people, some of whom may unintentionally act against their own best interests, but also of policies, specifications, software, and other interrelated elements. This complexity means parts will always misalign. Schools aren’t tidy jigsaw puzzles; they’re often cobbled together with string. Sometimes literally.

Leaders have to juggle all of this while also responding to external pressures: government mandates, media scrutiny, societal crises, emerging technologies. It’s inevitable that schools will sometimes struggle. But while unintended outcomes aren’t always a leader’s fault, they’re still their responsibility.

All of which is a long preamble to Stafford Beer’s famous maxim: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” POSIWID, for short. Beer argued that systems should be evaluated on their observable results. A system’s true purpose is revealed by its consistent outputs, regardless of what its designers claim.

No one intends for a school to produce poor outcomes. But if it consistently does, then intention is functionally irrelevant. Focusing on what the system does, rather than what it should do, helps us address discrepancies between aims and outcomes.

Applying the principles of POSIWID to Ofsted, England’s school inspectorate, reveals something about these discrepancies in the inspection process.

What are Ofsted’s stated aims?

• “To improve lives by raising standards in education and children’s social care”

• To conduct inspections that help services improve

• To apply proportionate regulation focused on risks

• To inform policy and practice through inspection insights

• To adapt to ensure relevant and effective oversight

• To be transparent and engage stakeholders

To what extent are these aims fulfilled in practice?

What does Ofsted do?

• Publishes a rubric for judging school performance

• Conducts two-day inspections assessing leadership, behaviour, curriculum, and safeguarding

• Publishes inspection reports with brief recommendations on how to improve on future inspections

• Releases subject reviews and clarifies inspection practices¹

• Shapes school priorities - schools align teaching and assessment with what they believe Ofsted wants

• Encourages performative compliance - schools prepare evidence to impress inspectors

• Promotes high-stakes accountability - risk aversion, exam focus, and data obsession follow

• Increases workload and stress - inspection anticipation spikes pressure, sometimes with tragic outcomes

• Constrains curriculum innovation - schools avoid novel approaches that might not align with Ofsted frameworks

• Reinforces system hierarchies - inspections influence parental choice and school reputation

• Shapes public perception - inspection grades serve as shorthand, often lacking nuance

• Fuels a consultancy industry advising schools on how to pass inspections. Though diminished, it still exists.²

Each of these can reasonably be argued to be consequences of Ofsted’s activities even though many of them are unintended. The mechanism is depressingly familiar. Once inspection carries high stakes, schools begin to optimise for what can be seen, evidenced and defended. Curriculum intent statements, book looks, data drops, lesson routines and behaviour scripts become safer than the more elusive business of finding out what students actually know and can do. The proxy becomes the target. The target becomes the work. Eventually, schools are not merely preparing for inspection; they are being reorganised by the anticipation of it.

What does Ofsted not do?

• Improve student outcomes directly — this is the work of those who work in schools

• Close performance gaps — despite intentions, these remain stubborn or widen

• Make schools happier, safer places — while safeguarding is important, cliff-edge judgments likely don’t help

These repeated outcomes reveal Ofsted’s true functional purpose. Whether intended or not, inspection arguably distorts the system more than it improves it.

Ofsted presents itself as the gold standard for school evaluation. But through the lens of construct validity, problems emerge. Construct validity asks whether a test genuinely measures what it claims to. Although inspectors believe they measure “quality of education,” a vague, complex construct, instead, they assesses proxies: lesson snapshots, curriculum maps, brief conversations with leaders, teachers and students etc. But can we meaningfully assess the quality of education a school provides in two days?

When inspections are supposed to reveal something as complex and long-term as the effectiveness of a school, we should ask: do Ofsted ratings correlate with other meaningful indicators? The answer is, at best, inconsistently. While high Ofsted grades sometimes align with good academic outcomes, the relationship is far from perfect. Blunt, high-stakes judgments are antithetical to consistent and valid measures of actual learning. Ofsted too often relies on unreliable proxies like short-term outcomes or performance during inspections, which tell us little about what pupils have genuinely learned or retained. This exposes the emperor’s new clothes: what passes for accountability is often little more than data theatre. If we’re serious about improving education, we need to stop mistaking performance for learning and start measuring what really matters.

Instead, too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning. Worse still, inspection outcomes skew against disadvantaged schools. These schools are less likely to receive ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ ratings, even after adjusting for prior attainment. If judgments track pupil intake more closely than teaching quality, we’re evaluating demographics, not education. This is a failure of discriminant validity: inspections measure the wrong things. A school might be good at being inspected but poor at educating. That’s a dangerous confusion.

To compound this, Ofsted’s impact is hardly neutral. High-stakes inspection distorts practice. Jane Perryman paints a bleak but familiar picture: under the watchful eye of inspectors, schools stop being places of learning and become stages for performance. The inspection regime, she argues, doesn’t just evaluate schools, it reshapes them. Teachers begin to teach not for understanding, but for optics. Leaders write policies for show, not for substance. In essence, schools are being judged on how well they simulate the illusion of effectiveness. It’s not about what works, it’s about what looks like it works. Perryman’s work reveals the corrosive impact of high-stakes accountability: it warps priorities, distorts identities, and rewards surface over depth.

None of this is to say that accountability is unimportant. Inspection exists because schools are public institutions entrusted with children’s lives and futures. Parents deserve information, governments need assurance and children should not have to wait years for adults to notice that a school is failing them. The case for accountability isn’t trivial, and those who oppose Ofsted too glibly can sound as if they’re really opposing scrutiny. The problem isn’t that schools should be answerable for what they do but that the current model confuses public judgement with useful feedback, and too often rewards the appearance of quality over the slow, difficult work of improvement.

But if we are to hold schools accountable, we need to be clear about what we’re holding them accountable for, and how we’re measuring it. If our tools can’t validly and reliably do that, then they’re not just ineffective, they’re dangerous. A poorly calibrated system of accountability risks incentivising the wrong behaviours, punishing the wrong schools, and rewarding performativity over substance.

In truth, Ofsted does achieve some of its aims: public visibility, pressure to improve, and a semblance of consistency. But if we’re serious about the quality of education rather than the appearance of it, then we need an accountability system with far stronger construct validity. Otherwise, we risk mistaking noise for signal and performance for learning. For all its good intentions, inspection has become a system that too often rewards the management of appearances.

What might a better system might look like?

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That is the basic idea behind affordances. An affordance is the environment’s invitation to act: the possibilities it opens, the actions it makes available, the behaviours it seems to ask of us. Sometimes this is straightforward: a handle affords pulling, a chair affords sitting, a path affords walking. Sometimes it’s less clear: a low wall might afford sitting to one person, climbing to another and an obstruction to someone else. Affordances are relationships between people and environments, not properties that objects simply possess.

James J. Gibson, the psychologist most associated with the term, defined it like this:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. ... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment

He argued that we don’t perceive a neutral world to which we later attach meaning, but one already organised around possible action. We see objects as climbable, reachable, passable, graspable, avoidable, usable or dangerous. A surface isn’t just flat, brown and extended; it may be something we can walk on. A gap isn’t just empty space; it may be passable for one body but impassable for another. rather than waiting for us to decode it, the world makes some routes inviting and others daunting; it encourages some choices and makes it more difficult to select others.

Gibson was one of the central figures behind ecological psychology, a tradition that tried to put perception back into the world rather than treating it as something sealed inside the head. Much twentieth-century psychology tended to imagine perception as a kind of internal reconstruction. The world sends us fragments of sensory information, the mind processes these fragments, and somehow we build an internal representation of reality. Gibson thought this picture was misleading. Perception, he argued, is more direct, more active and more bound up with the environment than that. We don’t first encounter shapes, colours and textures and then later infer what they mean. We encounter an environment in terms of what it allows us to do.

Affordances, therefore, are always relational. A chair affords sitting for a person of the right size, strength and mobility, but not for a horse or a baby who cannot yet sit upright. A shallow step affords access to the able bodied but obstructs wheelchair users. A tree affords climbing to a child with the strength, confidence and desire to climb, but might afford shade, danger, beauty or nothing much to someone with a different set of motivations and characteristics. The same environment offers different possibilities because we all differ in our bodies, histories, purposes, knowledge, fears and incentives. Gibson’s point was that the world was already structured with invitations and constraints long before we developed the ability to reason abstractly about it.

Environmental psychology is the study of how physical and social environments shape human perception, emotion, behaviour and decision-making. It asks a deceptively simple question: how do the places we inhabit act on us? A room is not just a container for activity — it changes any activity that takes places within it. Light, noise, density, layout, temperature, sightlines, furniture, privacy, crowding, entrances, exits and the availability of tools all alter what we notice, feel and do. While the settings in which we act aren’t the whole story, they’re always instrumental to the development of that story.

This doesn’t mean the environment determines behaviour in any crude sense. We’re not billiard balls, knocked into predictable directions by the objects we encounter but we are affected by our environments. In schools, a poorly lit, unsupervised corridor invites lingering. A cramped, overheated classroom invites friction. Arranging tables in groups where students face each other, not the teacher, invites conversation rather than attention. A staffroom with no usable work space tells teachers something about what’s expected there. The design of a setting leans on tthose who inhabit it.

The design theorist, Donald Norman popularised a related idea by distinguishing between actual affordances and perceived affordances. The actual affordance is what can be done whereas the perceived affordance is what people think can or should be done. That badly designed door may physically be pushable, but the handle suggests pulling. We respond to the invitation we perceive, not to the designer’s intention. This distinction is particularly useful in schools because leaders and teachers are constantly engaged in designing systems meant to guide behaviour. But what we intend a system to do is always trumped by what others perceive the system as being for.

We create policies, design classrooms, produce resources and import technologies to support our intentions, and then wonder why people behave in ways that seem to undermine them. The problem isn’t that people ignore what we meant, it’s that thery don’t see it. People respond to what the environment makes visible, easy, safe or worthwhile. Good intentions are filtered though timetables, staffing, habit, workload, accountability, architecture, professional norms and school culture, so that — by the time they reach the classroom — they’ve become invisible and intangible.

This Twitter exchange reminded me of all this:

PowerPoint offers a revealing example. Although it doesn’t cause sub standard teaching, it does make some teaching decisions feel more natural than others. A slide deck affords sequence, display, delivery and forward motion. It makes the planned route of the lesson visible and reassuring: click, advance, continue. This is great for a trainer giving as presentation but less useful in a lesson. A slide deck can make coverage feel like progress and movement through material feel like movement in understanding. It draws attention towards what the teacher has planned to show and away from what students are actually doing with it. Bad teaching is perfectly possible without a projector but if we’re mindful about the ways a tool can shape action, we have an insight into the limitations of the slide show.

Teaching requires movement backwards — and sometimes sideways — as well as forwards. A teacher explains, checks, notices, adapts, models, questions, corrects, returns and rehearses. Understanding is recursive and moves in loops. Slide decks are essentially linear. Of course, they can be used well. They‘re great for displaying preselected images or chunks of text. If you’re sure about where you want to get to they’re a useful way to frame a hinge question. The question isn’t what PowerPoint can technically do but what it makes users think it is for. For most teachers most of the time, a slide deck affords presentation. It affords telling more readily than checking, sequence more readily than responsiveness, and coverage more readily than diagnosis. The deck says, move on regardless of what’s right for the students in the room.

Schools are full of things designed with one intention that afford another. Leaders introduce systems to improve teaching, reduce uncertainty, support students, create consistency or make the school more humane. Teachers use those systems in ways that help them survive the day, teach their classes, protect their time, avoid unnecessary conflict and do right by the students in front of them. Students read the same environment for its own possibilities: where effort is worthwhile, where it’s possible to cut corners, where rules are flexible, where adults mean what they say and where they don’t.

The danger of becoming attuned to affordances is that we move from blaming individuals for rational behaviour to a kind of fatalistic acceptance which sees people as puppets. This isn’t true. We interpret affordances, resist them, redesign them, work round them. Sometimes we make things worse, somethime better. A school creates pressures which shape rather than replace judgment.

We should think harder about what we’re incentivising, not only in the crude sense of rewards and sanctions, but in the subtler sense of what the environment makes easier to notice, easier to start and easier to justify. If behaviour is shaped by the relationship between people and setting, then improvement means redesigning the setting so that better action becomes more available, more visible and more likely. The point isn’t to manipulate people but to stop pretending that “just telling” will be enough.

Desire paths reveal the psychology of use: we don’t move through environments as designers imagine from above, but as physical beings with purposes, pressures and limited patience. When an official route feels indirect, effortful or misaligned with where we want to go, shortcuts are not just more attractive but more obvious. And, as it becomes increasingly visible with each each new person making the journey, it’s more socially permissible and easier for the next. The new path is a record of repeated situated judgement. In schools, the same principle applies when teachers create workarounds or students discover where effort can be avoided and rules negotiated. The sensible response isn’t to try to block the path, but to find out why people are taking it

Too often, policies are written far away from the circumstances in which they’ll be used. A behaviour policy may be designed in an office, but it’s enacted in a corridor when a teacher’s runing late to their next lesson and a student is having a melt down. Feedback policies may be written with learning in mind, but they’re enacted when a teacher has ninety essays to wade through, limited time and a sense that someone will check for evidence of compliance. Ecological psychology shifts us from thinking about what we ideally want to what’s possible with these people in these situations..

Improvement should be less about adding expectations and more about changing the cues, frictions and feedback loops. If we want teachers to respond to students’ thinking, they need lesson routines that make that thinking visible while there is still time to act on it. Mini-whiteboards, short written responses, live sampling, visualisers and hinge questions all have the capacity to alter the classroom environment by making understanding more visible and misunderstanding harder to miss.

If we want feedback to improve learning rather than decorate books, we need to change what the environment asks teachers to produce. Book scrutiny should look less for the visible trace of teacher work and more for whether students’ work has got better over time. Meeting time is better used to examine samples of work, identify recurring errors, compare explanations and decide what students need next. The unofficial desire path of superficial tick-and-flick marking is a sign that the official path is too concerned with evidence and not concerned enough with practicality.

If we want professional development to change practice, we need to design settings in which practice is the obvious thing to do. A room facing a screen invites listening. A department meeting built around examples, non-examples, rehearsal, student work and subject-specific misconceptions invites professional judgement. This changes what people think the space is for. Teachers only become better at explaining difficult ideas when the environment gives them time, materials and colleagues with whom to refine those explanations.

The same thinking applies to behaviour. The environment has to make the desired action easier than the workaround. If teachers are expected to follow up disruption, the process needs to be quick, visible and — crucially —supported by leadership. If students are expected to move calmly through corridors, routes, timings, thresholds and adult presence need to make calm movement normal. If leaders want consistency, they need to reduce the number of points at which adults are forced to negotiate on the fly.

Inclusion can also be redesigned ecologically. If our aim is that all students have access to a challenging curriculum, then the setting should make access easier than avoidance. Teaching assistant deployment should support participation rather than create dependence. Adaptations should help students meet the intellectual demands of the subject rather than lower those demands. The focus must be on how to arrange people, tools, routines and expectations in order to make successful participation more likely for this student in this lesson.

Pressure shapes judgement, but it doesn’t replace it. This way of thinking acknowledges that we are responsive to our environment, but not trapped by it. We can push against it or adapt to it. We can improve our interactions or sometimes make them worse. But an environment that is specifically designed to acknowledge stresses and encourage optimal behaviour is one in which everyone finds it easier to be their best.

The practical response is to audit the invitations and affordances offered by our schools, study the desire paths by walking through a teacher’s week. Consider what the calendar, marking load, meeting structure and data system make easier. Follow groups of students through their day and notice what each threshold, transition, task and adult response seems to promote. Look at department meetings and ask whether thay are making intellectual work likely or just focussing on administrative compliance. Look at the responses to behaviour incidents and ask whether the system makes swift certainty easier than prolonged negotiation. Look at curriculum documentation and ask whether — and how — it makes teachers think about learning or merely getting through content. Wherever students or staff have worn unofficial paths through the system, try to appreciate what’s in it for them and, wherever possible, make these desire paths official.

Schools don’t need more initiatives. For the most part, they need better alignment between intention and environment. If we want students to work hard, the setting has to reward effort. If we want teachers to think, the timetable has to protect thought. If we want curriculum to matter, meetings have to normalise discussion of subject content. When the environment is aligned with our intentions and values, no one has to struggle to do the right thing.

Our environment teaches us how to behave. Staff learn what’s really valued, students learn what’s actually possible. We’re all fallible, thoughtful, anxious, hopeful, self-protective, generous, ambitious people trying to work out what our school is really asking of us. Working out what you want people to do is simple. But working out how to make it reasonable for people to do what you want them to do is the hall mark of great leadership.

In 1970, psychologists and psychiatrists were invited to a lecture on “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” The lecture, supposedly given by Dr Myron L. Fox, a graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a student of the great John von Neumann, was actually given by an actor who knew nothing about either game theory or physician education. The audience of MDs and PhDs were, in fact, unwitting subjects in a study conducted by Donald Naftulin, John Ware and Frank Donnelly on “educational seduction.”

The audience were divided into two groups; one group was given a lecture by an actual scientist about something relevant and interesting, the other group listened to Dr Fox pedal his nonsense. In the first experiment, Dr Fox was instructed to lecture in as boring a monotone as he could manage. The audience was then tested on how much they’d retained and, surprise surprise, it wasn’t much. In a second experiment, Dr Fox went to town, using the full range of his thespian skills: he had his audience laughing, concentrating and nodding along. Even though the content of the lecture was absolute pap, filled with what Deborah Merritt describes as “double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements,” students rated the lecture as interesting, stimulating and valid.1

This phenomenon, that a charismatic speaker could fool a knowledgeable audience into believing any old rubbish was meaningful and worthwhile, became known as the Dr Fox Effect. Dr Fox bamboozled three separate audiences of professional and graduate students. Merritt, in a critique of student surveys used to evaluate lecturers, put it like this:

Despite the emptiness of his lecture, fifty-five psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, graduate students, and other professionals produced evaluations of Dr. Fox that were overwhelmingly positive. … The disturbing feature of the Dr. Fox study, as the experimenters noted, is that Fox’s nonverbal behaviors so completely masked a meaningless, jargon-filled, and confused presentation.

The problem isn’t that audiences enjoy good speakers. Of course they do. The problem is that we’re surprisingly bad at distinguishing the feeling that we’re learning from the reality of learning. We may enjoy fluency, warmth, pace, confidence, humour and theatricality, and mistake these things for understanding. In schools, we do something similar whenever we use engagement, enjoyment, participation, confidence or lesson polish as proxies for learning. These things aren’t worthless, but they’re not the same as students knowing more, remembering more, or being able to do more later.

This may help explain the wild popularity of the late Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk on schools killing creativity. It’s had something like 76 million views, despite being, in my view, utterly and completely wrong-headed. Robinson was funny, charming, fluent and seductive. He told a story people wanted to believe: that schools crush children’s creativity and that the answer is to liberate them from the dead hand of traditional academic instruction. But creativity is not released by reducing the amount children know; it’s cultivated through knowledge, discipline, imitation, practice and the gradual acquisition of the very traditions Robinson was so breezily willing to caricature.

Now, although other researchers have confirmed the existence of the Dr Fox Effect, it appears that although people in the audience rate a good speaker positively regardless of what they say, little actual learning takes place unless the speaker possesses considerable subject knowledge. Psychologists Eyal Peer and Elisha Babad replicated the original study in 2012 but added an additional item to the questionnaire people who attended the lecture were given. The question asked whether audience members felt they’d actually learned anything. The results were interesting: even those students who had evaluated Dr Fox as a highly effective speaker were aware that they’d learned nothing from the lecture.

The problem with ‘engagement’

So, what does this tell us about effective teaching in schools? There’s still a commonly held belief in education that a good teacher can teach anything well and that subject knowledge, whilst not without value, is clearly less important than the pedagogic skills and personal charisma of the teacher. The argument suggests that it’s much better for teachers to focus on acquiring and practising generic teaching skills than on developing subject knowledge.

Although students may well enjoy engaging lessons and motivating speakers, these things don’t actually seem to make much difference to learning. Rob Coe has referred to engagement was a “poor proxy” for learning. This is one of those claims that manages to be both obviously true and weirdly provocative. Of course students need to attend to what they’re learning. Of course we’d rather they were interested than bored but engagement is, at best, merely a condition that may make learning more likely.

In The Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nutthall discusses his research which found that “students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know.” Students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they’re comfortable with and already know how to do than into the more uncomfortable business of grappling with uncertainty. A classroom can look wonderfully engaged because students are busy rehearsing what’s already secure.

The same problem applies to motivation. Here’s Nuthall again: “Learning requires motivation, but motivation does not necessarily lead to learning.” Motivation and engagement may be vital elements in learning, but their impact depends on what they’re used in conjunction with. Motivated to do what? Engaged by what? If students are being motivated to perform superficial tasks, or to practise things they can already do, then the whole enterprise may be a waste of time.

The illusion of confidence

Tom Loveless made a related point in a report for the Brown Center, where he tanalysed PISA findings on student engagement and maths attainment. He found that the relationship between engagement and attainment was far from straightforward. Several high-performing countries reported lower levels of student engagement than the US, and, at national level, students’ enjoyment of maths and enthusiasm for maths lessons were negatively associated with achievement. Confidence was no more reliable: American students reported being more confident than Singaporean students, but their test performance much worse.2 The point isn’t that engagement causes poor performance, but that motivation, enjoyment and confidence are unreliable proxies for learning.

Of course, none of this proves that engagement and intrinsic motivation are actually bad for attainment, but it does cast serious doubt on policies and practices that try to boost engagement in the belief that results will follow. As Loveless put it:

PISA provides, at best, weak evidence that raising student motivation is associated with achievement gains. Boosting motivation may even produce declines in achievement.”

That isn’t a licence for dull lessons bit it is a warning against confusing the visible signs of student enthusiasm with the less visible business of durable learning. What students enjoy may not involve much learning. Working hard is, well, hard work. Grappling with uncertainty often feels uncomfortable. If learning depends on students having to think hard, then activities designed chiefly to maximise engagement may easily steer them away from the very struggle that produces retention and transfer.

There’s also compelling evidence that we’re pretty terrible at judging when we learn best. Most of us prefer blocked or massed practice: we review the basics, complete a few related exercises, reach a feeling of fluency and move on. It feels efficient because performance improves quickly during the practice itself. Interleaving, by contrast, often feels harder and produces more mistakes during instruction, even though it tends to produce better long-term retention. There are similar problems with retrieval practice. Students tend to prefer strategies that feel productive, such as rereading or restudying, while underestimating the value of effortful retrieval. Strategies that produce quick fluency make students feel as if they’ve learned more than they have whereas strategies that feel effortful, uncertain and less successful in the moment may feel worse, but often produce stronger retention later.3

Part of the problem is that blocked practice gives us the warm, fuzzy feeling of cognitive ease. It creates the illusion of knowing. We prefer the comfort of feeling successful now to the discomfort of learning something well enough to remember and use later. In that sense, engagement can become another version of the Dr Fox Effect: a seductive surface signal that makes us feel we’re making progress when the harder evidence is far less reassuring.

What great teachers know

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It’s easy to see why the idea of moving effective teachers into struggling schools has such appeal. For policymakers, it feels fair, practical and admirably direct: if some children have less access to strong teaching, then paying strong teachers to work where they’re needed most looks like a straightforward act of justice.1 For teachers, the assumption is just as seductive. If we’ve been successful in one school, it’s natural to believe that success belongs to us, that our explanations, routines, standards and judgement will travel with us wherever we go. But as many teachers discover, moving schools can shatter that belief. Success in one setting doesn’t guarantee success in another. Not only are the students different, so too are the routines, the curriculum, the expectations, and — perhaps most crucially — the institutional backing we’ve taken for granted may be weaker or all together absent. Personal effectiveness may be, at least in part, a relationship between our expertise and the conditions in which we work.

Teacher quality is real

Teachers matter enormously. The difference between strong and weak teaching is one of the most robust findings in the value-added literature. A one standard deviation increase in teacher quality is associated with annual gains of at least 0.11 standard deviations in maths and 0.095 in reading, while other studies find that stronger teachers are linked not only to higher test scores but to longer-term outcomes such as college attendance and earnings.2

One of the strongest arguments for focusing on teacher quality is that there is often more variation within schools than between them. Hanushek, Rivkin and Kain’s work on teachers, schools and academic achievement used matched panel data to disentangle the influence of teachers and schools, with particular attention to the problem that students and teachers are not randomly distributed. Their findings helped establish a central point in the value-added literature: school-level averages can hide substantial classroom-level variation.

A student in a weaker school may learn more in the classroom of a highly effective teacher than a student in a stronger school learns in the classroom of a much less effective one. School quality shapes the odds, but it doesn’t determine the quality of every lesson. Students don’t experience school in the abstract; their experience is of particular teachers and lessons. Even though a school can be chaotic, individual classrooms can be oases of calm. Equally, a school’s impressive reputation can allow some teachers to coast.

Because teacher quality can — and often does — exceed school quality, it’s tempting to assume it must be stable, self-contained and portable. We imagine a good teacher as someone who embodies effectiveness, ready to be lifted from one school and slotted into another. But although teacher may be more effective than the school around them, they’re never independent of it.

What happens when strong teachers move?

Matthew Kraft and John Papay’s recent paper on teacher portability tests this assumption directly. It uses the Talent Transfer Initiative, a randomised US programme in which low-achieving schools were allowed to offer high-performing teachers from higher-achieving schools a $20,000 stipend to transfer and stay for two years. The design created a rare natural experiment, allowing the researchers to see what happens when teachers with strong records of effectiveness move into markedly different school contexts.

The headline result suggests the programme was a success: transfer teachers performed better than the teachers these schools would otherwise have been likely to hire. But, compared with their own previous performance, they became less effective, with their value-added impact falling by around 0.12 student standard deviations after transfer, enough to move the typical high-performing transfer teacher from about the 85th percentile of effectiveness to the 66th.

This makes clear that teacher effectiveness depends, at least in part, on the conditions in which teachers work. If effectiveness were simply a stable property of the individual teacher, the decline would be hard to explain. A great teacher would remain just as effective wherever they were placed, rather than having their impact altered by different students, routines, curriculum, leadership and school culture.

In the study, the nature of the work itself changed. The transfer teachers moved into classrooms where prior maths attainment was 0.40 standard deviations lower and prior English language arts attainment was 0.29 standard deviations lower, meaning they were having to teach students with substantially different starting points, gaps in prior knowledge and instructional needs. The proportion of students eligible for free or subsidised school meals rose from 68% to 92%. Teachers in the study also reported much weaker conditions for teaching: positive ratings of student motivation fell from 86% to 39%, student discipline from 81% to 52%, and parental involvement from 60% to 32%.

This confirms what many teachers discover when they move schools: expertise is both general and local. Some things we take with us — subject knowledge, habits of explanation, standards, routines and judgement — but some we learn from the students in front of us: what they know, what they struggle with, how quickly they grasp new ideas, which examples and explanations are likely to work.

We also learn the school’s habits: whether leaders follow through, colleagues share standards, the curriculum is fit for purpose, and assessment tells anyone anything useful. We learn how refusal is handled, whether consequences happen, whether line management clarifies or clutters expectations, and whether meetings solve real problems or merely produce evidence of effort. Some of this knowledge may be transferable, but most of it has to be reaquired around new students, routines and constraints.

Kraft and Papay argue that the decline in teacher effectiveness “appears to be driven by lower match quality, negative indirect school effects, and the loss of student-specific human capital.” In plainer language, teachers are more effective when they’re well matched to their school and students, when the school supports good teaching, and when they have built up knowledge of the students they teach. Change those things, and effectiveness changes too. As they put it, “Schools are critical in supporting or constraining teacher effectiveness.”

The measurement trap

For all their faults, value-added models (VAM) capture something important: whether students taught by a particular teacher make more progress than we’d expect, given their prior attainment and other observable characteristics.3 However, these models can tempt us to treat effectiveness as if it’s located entirely within the teacher. The danger isn’t the measure itself, but that we miss what it abstracts away. VAM is a proxy for teacher effectiveness; a statistical estimate of a teacher’s contribution to student test-score growth, not a direct observation of teaching quality. It depends on the effects of all the other teachers to have taught a student, as well as the personalities, beliefs and home lives of students themselves. And this is before we even begin to think about the school in which estimates are produced.

Approached with caution, this can be useful. Modelling makes it clear that teachers differ in quality and that students learn more in some classrooms than they do in others. As such, it helps separate a teacher’s contribution from the advantages or disadvantages students bring with them. Without it, we risk mistaking high prior attainment for effective teaching, or difficult starting points for weak teaching. The problem begins when an estimate of a teacher’s contribution is treated as the teacher’s essence.

School improvement narratives have long been dominated by a strangely individualistic model of teaching. Because weak teaching is treated as the property — or fault — of weak teachers, improvement becomes the process of correcting, coaching, incentivising, moving or replacing individuals. Of course, sometimes that’s necessary. Like all other human attributes, teaching ability distributes on a bell curve and some teachers need more support than others.

The problem is that this account is hopelessly incomplete. Teaching quality is produced by teachers working within a particular environment. Schools can make it easier or harder for teachers to be effective. In some schools, even the weakest teachers can teach effectively due to how efficiently systems operate. In others, even the most skilled are limited by the chaos or indifference that surrounds them. If we fool ourselves into believing teaching is purely the output of teachers, not only do we miss the most effective levers to pull to improve teaching, we contribute to the misery so many teachers experience as the day-today reality of their professional lives. Any measure is misleading if it encourages us to ignore the extent to which the system produces the thing being measured.

When we behave often behave as though improvement can be installed in individual teachers while everything around them remains unchanged we are likely to pour resources into a ‘solution’ that makes everything harder for teachers and has school leaders operating in the dark. This is the coaching trap: identifying the teacher as the unit of improvement when it’s school culture that’s the source of the problem.

My point isn’t to abandon instructional coaching — it’s still a good bet in schools with strong cultural foundations — but to stop expecting it to create those foundations without addressing the systemic pressures which make it hard for teachers to be their best. As Kraft and Papay’s portability study makes clear, if school conditions shape teacher effectiveness, then trying to improve teaching one teacher at a time is, at best, inefficient and, at worst, irresponsible.

Kraft and Papay’s earlier work on professional environments points in the same direction: teachers improve more, and more quickly, in schools with stronger professional conditions: better order and discipline, purposeful collaboration, effective leadership, useful professional development, coherent culture and fair evaluation. And even the best teachers can be diminished by a change of context.

Systems and forces

In case it seems that I’m just blaming leaders for poor teaching, I need to make it clear that principals are not responsible for the conditions in which their schools have to operate. Schools sit inside wider systems of accountability, inspection, funding, recruitment, safeguarding, SEND provision, curriculum policy and public expectation. Many of the pressures that distort school life arrive from outside the school gates. Heads may create local systems, but they do so inside larger systems that reward some behaviours, punish others and make certain kinds of leadership much harder than they should be.

It’s helpful to think of schools as systems inside larger systems, constantly buffeted by external forces. Systems include those things over which leaders have at least some control: routines, structures, habits, processes, incentives and norms. Forces are those things imposed on schools from outside.

Forces are the weather. Funding settlements, inspection frameworks, teacher supply, local demographics, statutory duties, parental expectations, political priorities, social media storms, safeguarding demands and the changing complexity of children’s needs all press on schools regardless of a headteacher’s decisions. We can’t avoid these forces; they are the background against which we must contend.

Systems, on the other hand, are the responses we engineer in order to operate within those forces we can’t control. They’re the routines, structures, habits, processes and norms we build to make it possible to survive — and, ideally, thrive —despite external pressure. Children’s natural tendency to prefer not to be made to do algebra on a Friday afternoon requires reliable behaviour routines. Overstuffed exam specifications and students’ uneven prior knowledge require an efficient, coherent curriculum. Uncertainty about what students know requires assessment that reveals patterns and suggests workable solutions, rather than merely replicates what we already know as is typical with most internal assessment.4 Organisational complexity requires line management that balances trust and accountability in ways that allow teachers to do more than merely comply with explicitly stated expectations, and our finite capacity for attention requires systems that protect teachers from the illusion that all demands can be treated as equally important.

If we blame heads for the weather, we’ve simply moved crude individualism up a level. Blaming teachers for the effects of poor school systems is wrong, but blaming heads for the effects of poor national systems is no better. Headteachers inherit shortages, incentives, legal duties, inspection anxieties, budget constraints and political noise. They are not sovereigns. They are operating inside a system that often rewards visible compliance over genuine improvement.

Once effectiveness is imagined as something possessed by exceptional individuals, school improvement can look like a matter of importing the right person. This was the logic behind the cult of the ‘superhead’: find a charismatic turnaround leader, drop them into a difficult school, give them licence to act, and wait for improvement to arrive.

There have been heads who took on chaotic schools, created order, raised expectations and improved results. It would be foolish to deny that. But the superhead story has always been more complicated than its admirers wanted to admit. Too often, it treated leadership as a portable personal force rather than a set of conditions, relationships, routines and judgements built over time.

The cleanest caution here is not scandal but sustainability. In 2016, Schools Week reported on research into ‘superheads’ which found that although results rose during their tenure — often due to a combination of exam gaming and off-rolling — scores fell by an average of 6 percentage points after they left, with larger falls when the head had been in place for longer. Worse, the subsequent clean-up costs were also substantial, coming to £11.8 million across 21 schools.5

Effective heads don’t parachute in with a bag of tricks. Instead, they build a school’s capacity to improve without depending on them. They develop middle leaders, strengthen curriculum, make behaviour routines predictable, improve the quality of professional conversations, protect time, clarify accountability and make it easier for teachers to be their best.

The worst version of the heroic headteacher model does the opposite; centralising decision-making, accelerating only high profile change, frightening dissent into silence, chasing short-term indicators and mistaking compliance for strong culture. A school may become more orderly, but not necessarily a functional place for teachers to work.

With teachers, the temptation is to imagine classroom effectiveness can be moved without changing the routines, relationships and curriculum that shaped it. With heads, the temptation is to imagine institutional effectiveness can be imported without developing the people, habits and safeguards that sustain it. A strong head in a weak governance structure, with brittle middle leadership, poor trust and exhausted staff, may be able to impose change but this is not the same as building a culture in which teachers and students can thrive.

Towards a surplus model of school leadership

The influence of headteachers, though profound, is indirect. Leaders shape what’s prioritised, tolerated, measured, ignored and allowed to drift. A headteacher can’t improve teaching through force of will. They can, however, create the conditions in which excellence becomes more likely.

A deficit model of school improvement locates failure in individuals. Because teachers can’t be trusted, students don’t care and middle leaders aren’t holding the line, staff need tighter systems to make them comply. When things go wrong the default assumption is that someone is to blame and the solution is tighter monitoring, greater prescription and less professional trust.

A surplus model begins from a different premise. It assumes, until there is good evidence otherwise, that people are acting in good faith, working hard and trying to do the right thing. When things go wrong, it seeks to identify and remove the barriers to success. This means recognising that weak practice often emerges from unclear expectations, poor feedback loops, conflicting incentives, missing knowledge, unmanageable workload or convoluted routines.

Students arriving late to lessons offer a simple example. Deficit thinking reaches quickly for character: students are lazy, teachers are inconsistent, sanctions aren’t tough enough. A surplus model looks first at the design of the school day. Is movement time realistic? Are corridors congested? Do entry routines vary from classroom to classroom? Is the policy clear enough to be enacted day to day? The solution may still involve sanctions, but it begins with design rather than blame.

Deficit leadership is an attempt to find simple answers to complex problems, whereas a surplus model asks leader to take responsibility for the systems they oversee.

These models obviously contain elements of caricature. No school operates an entirely deficit or surplus model but you make recognise elements of these approaches to leadership in schools you’ve worked in. Importantly, a surplus model is not a call for blind trust. Trust without precision becomes drift; accountability without trust becomes theatre. Teachers are most likely to improve when they feel trusted, but they also need to know they are accountable. The aim is intelligent accountability: clear enough to prevent mutation, humane enough to avoid compliance theatre, and expert enough to distinguish looking good from being good.

Effective school leadership is to build routines in which being good is easier than looking good. That means turning behaviour follow-up into something staff can trust, reducing the number of priorities, protecting departmental time, ensuring assessment meetings to look at students’ work rather than just at spreadsheets, and insisting that policies are either maintained or abandoned rather than endlessly announced and ignored.

Every school trains its staff but does it train them into better habits or teach them how to survive bad ones? A surplus model of leadership is focussed on creating a culture where better teaching is more likely. This still leaves room for teachers to take responsibility for what they can control but acknowledges the limits of what is within their sphere of influence. Teachers still need secure subject knowledge, disciplined habits, clear boundaries, and to focus on the intellectual preparation required to teach effectively but it’s much easier to develop these when not having to act as a warlord in a failed state.

Students in the most disadvantaged schools absolutely need the best possible teaching but this is only possible when they are aligned around the principles that make such teaching possible. Where a well-led school multiplies professional development, a school which is poorly led absorbs it.

The belief that school improvement is only possible when great teachers work with great school leaders is unhelpful. What we need is great teaching and great school leadership. Both are best thought of as the product of systems rather than of individuals.

Moving people who have proved themselves successful in one setting into harder schools may still be worth doing, but this transfer is not what a sustainable improvement strategy.

This is where schools make their entrance. A school is not just buildings where children are kept busy; it is an example of humanity’s most powerful tool for transmitting cultural knowledge quickly, efficiently, and equitably. In a world where the pace of cultural and technological change vastly outstrips the speed of biological evolution, schools are essential for ensuring that each generation inherits, understands, and builds upon the knowledge of the past. Without them, we risk forcing each child to start from scratch in a world that’s far too complex, far too unforgiving, for such inefficiency.1

1. Why our brains are the way they are

In order to comprehend ourselves we need to know that we have been forged in the crucible of natural selection. In our distant past, we naked apes had few advantages beyond our big brains and opposable thumbs. In order to survive we needed to band together with other members of our species and share any useful survival tricks we came up with. These ‘good tricks’ were collected, refined and passed down the generations, forming the basis of human culture.2

It’s tempting to view culture – “the extensive accumulation of shared learned knowledge and its iterative improvements over time”3 – as that which sets human beings apart from all other species. While a few other species make very limited use of tools, we have invented smart phones, 3D printers and the Large Hadron Collider. But our capacity for culture must also have evolutionary roots. And it does. The evolution of culture took place side by side with the evolution of our genes. In fact, who we are and how our brains work is the result of two and a half million years of gene-culture coevolution. The evolution of genes is painfully slow, yet culture can evolve incredibly rapidly and have the effect of galvanising the selection process on genes, resulting in far faster biological innovation. (One of the most well-known examples is the evolutionary relationship between the genetics of lactose tolerance in humans and the cultural habit of dairy farming.4) This time period saw a quadrupling in size of the human brain,5 unprecedented changes in human gene expression,6 and archaeological evidence of hyperexponential increases in the complexity and diversity of our technology and knowledge base.7 Our reliance on each other and the tools we have designed to assist us in our efforts to stay alive have shaped our brains. In the words of evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, “Human minds are not just built for culture; they are built by culture.” But what we’ve ended up with is just good enough to survive and reproduce; in essential ways, our brains are the same as those of our Palaeolithic ancestors.

When we think about how and what to teach, we should consider the role of evolution in shaping the way humans have adapted to think and learn. In our distant past, learning was a costly strategy – time spent learning was time we couldn’t spend surviving and reproducing – so it makes sense that we have evolved to learn as efficiently as possible. Evolutionary biologists think of learning as being either social or aso­cial. Social learning is essentially copying (what’s everyone else doing?), whereas asocial learning is accrued by interacting with the environment through trial and error. Everything we know is either learned socially or asocially, through mimicry or experimentation, emulation or innovation.

Both types of learning have associated advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of asocial learning is that you get accurate, up-to-date, first-hand information about what works and what doesn’t, but the cost is high. You could waste hours on strategies that barely work—or worse, you might end up dead after eating a suspiciously funky mushroom, tumbling off a cliff in pursuit of some gourmet berries, or getting mugged by something with claws and a bad attitude.

The advantage of social learning is that it’s easier, safer and more likely to result in productive survival strategies. Human beings, like many other species, operate in groups, and so copying the behaviour that others – especially those in your kinship group – have adopted seems a sensible strategy. After all, if everyone around you is getting on well, why would you risk trying something different? Copying something badly means you are less likely to survive and reproduce than those who copy things well, and so being good at copying is selected for. The downside to relying on other people’s experiences of what’s most likely to be effective means that we might not understand why we do what we do. When environmental conditions change rapidly or a new predator is introduced, old strategies may prove ineffective and those who can adapt the quickest are those who will survive.

It used to be believed that the numbers of social to asocial learners in a group would be fairly evenly balanced – that environmental change would favour asocial learning, whereas stability would favour social learning – but it turns out that social learning forms the basis for the remarkable growth and success of human culture.8 This might seem counter-intuitive: surely, new innovations gleaned from asocial tinkering must be the most important driving force in human ingenuity? The thing is, although we need a minimal amount of asocial learning, most people get on most of the time purely using socially learned strategies, and that’s because we copy strategically. Only the most successful ideas get passed on and spread throughout the group. Each new generation hones in on optimal solutions, so as long as there’s a little bit of experimentation going on – either through asocial learning or through copying errors – culture accumulates and is continually refined. This is essentially what Richard Dawkins referred to as memetic reproduction.

In the modern world, we support a very small number of people – sci­entists, artists and the like – that they may spend a fraction of their time on asocial learning. The rest of us spend our lives directly copying those around us or accessing the vast accumulation of human culture through word of mouth, books, the internet and now, GenAI. Pretty much every moment of every day is spent engaged in tasks which are directly or indirectly copied. As the Bible tells us, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” If we choose to engage in a brief bout of asocial learning, we do it for fun and because we’re safe enough not to worry about it going too far wrong.

Obviously, when the zombie apocalypse comes, asocial learners will be in much demand; those who work out how to survive in the new paradigm fastest will have an enormous advantage over the rest of us. But then, if humanity is to survive, it will be because we copy the new ‘good tricks’ they come up with and begin the fight back against the undead.

So, what does all of this have to do with education? Simply this: while we might all enjoy a small amount of asocial experimentation, almost everything we learn – and almost certainly everything useful – will be due to our ability to observe and emulate. A school curriculum that favours a trial and error approach to reacquiring what has previously been discovered as the result of several millennia of iterative copying is fighting against biology. We’re just not fitted to learn that way. Even Jerome Bruner, often miscast as a champion of the discovery learning cause, could see that existing knowledge and culture were not generally passed on by dis­covery. He wrote:

You cannot consider education without taking into account how cul­ture gets passed on. It seems to me highly unlikely that given the cen­trality of culture in man’s adaptation to his environment – the fact that culture serves him in the same way as changes in morphology served earlier in the evolutionary scale – that, biologically speaking, one would expect each organism to rediscover the totality of its culture – this would seem most unlikely.

Jerome S. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction

By far the most effective way to pass on the fruits of human culture is to share what has already been discovered and invented as clearly and as explicitly as we can.

This gets to the heart of what we believe schools are for. Should they be safe spaces in which we allow children to tinker about at the margins of human culture, maybe discovering something useful for themselves? Or are they, as education professor Michael Young has said, places that should “enable young people to acquire the knowledge that, for most of them, cannot be acquired at home or in the community.”9 The first choice is a Darwinian jungle in which those fortunate enough to have wealthy, educated parents will thrive and the devil take the hindmost. If you believe in social justice and giving children a fair chance to escape the constraints of this lottery, using schools to promote effective social learn­ing is the only option.

2. Why some things are easy to learn but others are hard

Our ancestors needed to find food, avoid danger, mate and ensure their children survived to adulthood. The need to find food selected for minds which could attend to and remember the characteristics and behaviour of plants and animals, the resourcefulness to provide shelter and defend against predators, and the ingenuity to consider how inanimate objects might be used as tools. The ability to compete and cooperate in groups, whether for food gathering or mating opportunities, selected for minds which were able to anticipate the motives and emotions of others, and better communicate needs and ideas. These are the folk disciplines: folk psychology, folk physics and folk biology.

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