For a few years now, we have questioned the process as these end of year exams approach. But then the busyness of school life carries everyone forward and nothing gets done. This year was different. Ainslie Dann, who had recently stepped up to lead our internal examinations took the time to properly review what we were doing and, crucially, acted on it before the window closed. Her review asked a simple but difficult to answer question. What is this window of testing actually for?

The Year 10 examination window is not primarily about generating grades. Its value is in producing information that improves learning. It should function as a diagnostic mid-course checkpoint: generating valid, reliable and actionable data that helps departments identify strengths and gaps, enables targeted feedback and reteaching, and supports students in recognising their own misconceptions and areas requiring further retrieval and revision. Once you’re clear on the purpose, the design of the assessment needs to follow from it. When we looked honestly at what we had been doing, the design and the purpose did not quite match up.

The evidence on testing is clear and well-established. The testing effect is one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Retrieval strengthens memory, and when students are required to pull knowledge from long-term memory, learning improves. Frequent, low-stakes retrieval helps information stick, strengthens recall pathways and makes forgetting less likely.

But running a compressed mock season halfway through a two-year course is a different proposition entirely. The research base is strongest for short, focused, regular retrieval, not high-stakes replication of the final exam experience. When we move from low-stakes retrieval to full formal papers under timed conditions, we are no longer primarily strengthening memory. We are assessing performance under pressure, stamina, stress tolerance, sleep management and emotional regulation. The construct shifts and under those conditions, what students display is not necessarily their learning, but more their capacity to cope.

Daisy Christodoulou draws on a memorable analogy in Making Good Progress: you don’t train for a marathon by running a marathon every training session. The full distance is the test of preparation, not the method of building it. The same logic applies in classrooms. You do not prepare students for high-stakes exams by placing them under high-stakes exam conditions simply because it appears to be good preparation. The conditions of the race need to be introduced gradually, once the knowledge base and the conditioning that would allow genuine performance are secure enough to be meaningfully tested. What we had in Year 10 was, in effect, a training programme that opened with the full race half-way through training.

If a Year 10 student sits multiple two-hour papers across many subjects within a two-week window, the data does not purely reflect curriculum mastery. It reflects coping under artificial compression. For many students, this window is actually harsher than the real examination series, which runs concurrently for our Year 11, 12 and 13s, and where papers tend to be better spaced, study leave is extended and sequencing is far clearer. Some Year 10s have genuine IGCSE exams sitting inside their mock window, adding a further layer of pressure that has nothing to do with what any teacher is trying to measure.

Which returns us to the validity question: are we measuring what we intend to measure?

Domain coverage extends that concern. A full past paper generally looks to sample a huge chunk of the specification. But midway through Year 10, not all content has been taught or secured. When a student underperforms on an unseen or lightly covered unit, the signal gets blurred. Is that a knowledge gap? A sequencing issue? Poor instruction? Premature exposure to material that simply hasn’t been retrieved enough yet? The resulting grade can look authoritative while masking a much more complicated diagnostic picture.

This is exactly where the design principle from our review focused. If the purpose is a valid, reliable and actionable mid-course checkpoint, then the volume and length of assessments should match that purpose, not exceed it. The change was straightforward: fewer papers, capped timing. There was some resistance, but definitely progress. Adapted papers can still preserve exam-style structure, command words and mark weighting. They can still include extended analytical responses and evaluative questions. But by reducing the overall load, they produce cleaner data, protect student wellbeing and give departments something they can genuinely act on, rather than a dataset distorted by fatigue and artificial compression.

Wellbeing is not a second order consideration here. Performance science shows that acute stress can sharpen attention in short bursts. Sustained stress across multiple high-demand tasks doesn’t: it degrades working memory, disrupts sleep and erodes emotional control. When students are revising simultaneously for ten or more formal papers, cognitive load does not just accumulate, it compounds. And they will cram the night before each paper, producing a performance shaped by short-term retention rather than secure knowledge. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve tells us exactly how quickly that fades. We may have believed we were building resilience. We were more likely generating noise in our data and unnecessary stress for our students.

There is also a sequencing argument that underpins all of this. Year 10 is about knowledge security and skill development. Year 11 is more about exam replication and stamina. Conflating the two too early is a misalignment. Students need to learn how to think within a discipline before they are asked to endure the full performance environment of the final series. The conditions of the exam are something to be introduced gradually, not dropped on students at full weight before the knowledge base that would allow them to perform is anywhere near secure.

The strategic question, then, is worth thinking about. What are we actually trying to answer at this point in the course? Forecasting predicted grades? Identifying intervention needs? Checking knowledge security? Building exam literacy? Testing to strengthen memory? These are different purposes, and they require different assessment designs. A full past paper at full length is not the only marker of seriousness, and treating it as though it were conflates performance with learning in exactly the way the research warns us against.

What our review gave us was not just a reduced exam load, though it did produce that. It gave us a clearer answer to the strategic question, and an assessment model designed intentionally around that answer. Getting there required someone to ask an uncomfortable question early and see it through, and we are genuinely grateful she did. The Year 10 window now has a defined purpose: a diagnostic mid-course checkpoint designed to produce information departments can genuinely use, feed a strong reteaching and retrieval cycle, and give students a meaningful picture of where they actually are, not a bruising preview of what it feels like to attempt the race before the training is done. We will find out next week whether it delivers on that. But at least now we are asking the right questions before the papers go out, not after.

Assessment should strengthen memory, clarify gaps and guide teaching. A tighter, more deliberate model produces better data, stronger learning and calmer students.

Midway through the course, you really don’t want to be running a rehearsal for survival. If you want maximum effectiveness from an end of year assessment, you have to use it as an opportunity for precision.

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Hattie draws on Clark, Kirschner and Sweller’s description of the ‘pedagogy delusion’ from How Teaching Happens. They define it as a “set of beliefs and assumptions about what should happen in a classroom that is characterised by a rejection of evidence.” It is, in their words, “an acceptance of the romantic and philosophical”…“a celebration of the superficial in the form of fads and myths”…and “an assertion that pedagogy is an end in itself.” In practice, this reduces teaching to generic methods, detached from both content and the evidence on how learning actually occurs.

Discovery learning has a seductive internal logic. Children learn by doing, so give them a problem and let them find their way through it. Step back, facilitate, be the guide on the side. The teacher’s job is to create the conditions for understanding, not to transmit knowledge directly. In 2005, this was simply teaching. There was a self-evident truth and was pretty much all we were shown on my course.

The intellectual genealogy runs deep. Rousseau argued that children should learn through experience, not instruction and John Dewey built an educational philosophy on it. Jerome Bruner formalised it in the 1960s under the label “discovery learning,” and by the time it reached teacher training programmes in Britain, it had moved from a theory to an orthodoxy. Interestly, in researching for this article, I learned that Dewey himself had rejected hands-off child-centred learning, and what teacher training inherited was a flattened version of his ideas, shorn of that qualification. Robert Peal’s observation in Progressively Worse - that progressive ideology became so embedded it ceased to be recognised as ideology at all - describes precisely the environment I trained and taught in for the first few years of my career. David Didau, reviewing the book in 2014, noted that his own training had presented the same orthodoxies as unquestionable, like mine - that he had never even heard the term ‘progressive’ applied to education.

What was less commonly known to us in the profession at the time was that the research disagreement had been running for decades. By 1969, review articles were already reporting that experimental results on discovery learning were “conflicting and often insignificant.” The data had been accumulating for thirty years before I set foot in a classroom. Nobody had told me, or most teachers I knew.

The clearest statement of the problem came in 2006, when Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark published Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work. Their argument was structural, not ideological. Discovery learning ignores the architecture of human cognition. Working memory is severely limited. A novice learner, confronted with an open-ended problem and no explicit instruction, is not engaged in productive inquiry - they are managing cognitive overload. The absence of guidance does not free students to think. It floods the very system through which thinking happens.

The mechanism is critical. Cognitive load theory distinguishes between the mental effort required to understand new material and the mental effort spent managing the learning task itself. When novices are asked to discover concepts they have not yet encountered, most of their cognitive resource goes to navigating the task rather than processing the content. The appearance of engagement - the visible activity, the discussion, the movement around the room - can be entirely genuine while the learning remains shallow and fragile.

John Hattie’s synthesis of meta-analyses, now spanning over 400 million students, gives this statistical weight. Direct and explicit instruction sits at an effect size of around 0.59. Problem-based learning lands at 0.26. Inquiry-based teaching, depending on how it is implemented, comes in between 0.31 and 0.46, which is often below the 0.40 threshold Hattie uses as the hinge point for meaningful impact. These are not marginal differences. They represent consistent, large-scale patterns across decades of research.

Hattie is careful on one point that often gets lost in summary: discovery and inquiry are not always ineffective. The issue is sequencing. Once students have explicit surface-level knowledge - the “grammar” of the subject, the facts, the vocabulary, the foundational concepts - more open-ended tasks can build the deeper understanding that sits on top of that foundation. The problem is not inquiry learning in principle. It is sequencing: inquiry deployed first, before the knowledge exists to make it productive. That is what the evidence consistently shows, and that is also what my training consistently modelled - in the wrong order. Actually, scratch that. There was no knowledge taught at all. Just enquiry.

Why had the evidence had so little traction and been almost ignored in my PGCE? The honest answer is probably that visible engagement is a powerful signal, and it points in the wrong direction. A classroom where students are moving, talking, building, choosing is a classroom that looks healthy. A classroom where the teacher is explaining and students are listening can look, by comparison, passive. The judgment is immediate and intuitive, but also wrong. In Seven Myths about Education, Daisy Christodoulou writes about how England’s Ofsted, around the mid-2000s, praised engagement and activity while giving low grades to lessons where a teacher taught explicitly. Fluency during a lesson - students participating smoothly, discussions running easily - can create what cognitive scientists call the illusion of knowing: a feeling of understanding that evaporates when the test arrives.

There is also an ideological dimension that has made the evidence harder to hear. Discovery learning is not a neutral pedagogical preference. It carries a philosophical weight. To value student agency, self-direction and experiential learning is to position yourself on the side of autonomy and child-centred dignity. To prefer direct instruction is to risk sounding like you trust teachers more than students, or that you value compliance over curiosity. Those are not accurate characterisations of what the research actually supports, but they had shaped how the debate was perceived inside staffrooms and teacher training programmes for a long time…even now, there are many in education posting online about discovery learning, student choice and that knowledge is no longer important.

The practical upshot for school leaders is pretty clear. If professional development, lesson observation frameworks or coaching conversations default to rewarding visible engagement, they are likely pointing in the wrong direction. The question to ask is not whether students appear active but whether new knowledge is being acquired and retained. Those are not the same question, and schools that treat them as equivalent will keep getting the same results. None of this means lessons should be joyless or that teacher-led explanation requires passive students. Hattie’s own data identifies classroom discussion at an effect size of 0.82 - well above the hinge point - and collective teacher efficacy at 1.57. The strongest classrooms are not those where teachers lecture and students sit silently, nor those where students are released into open inquiry without the knowledge to make use of it. They are places where teachers know precisely what students need to understand, build that knowledge explicitly, and then extend it through targeted discussion, deliberate retrieval and structured elaboration - once the knowledge exists to make those techniques worth using.

The bigger challenge is institutional. A school that has built its teaching philosophy, observation culture, CPD and planning expectations around the busy, student-led classroom will not shift simply by presenting John Hattie’s effect sizes. That assumes the problem is a lack of information, which I doubt very much it ever is.

Underneath sits a set of beliefs about what learning looks like…reinforced over years through observations, praise, positive student voice, active promotion and professional identity. If engagement has been consistently rewarded and treated as learning, then any challenge to that idea doesn’t land as neutral evidence, but as a threat to competence. That is where the backfire effect takes hold. People will protect the model that has served them.

The institution strengthens this. If observation rubrics privilege visible activity…if CPD showcases collaborative, student-led tasks…or if planning templates demand pace and variety…then the system continues to validate those assumptions. In that context, new evidence has little leverage as it runs into a way stronger, lived curriculum of experience.

I guess that is why arguments are still playing out so intensely on LinkedIn and Substack. This is not a debate about methods. It is a defence of frameworks and ideas that have shaped careers. Most of these ideas were absorbed early, before there was enough knowledge to interrogate them, which is what makes them feel so obvious.

The first job is not persuasion through data but to surface assumptions. Making them visible and then creating the conditions for people to examine the gap between what looks like learning and what leads to durable, long term change in memory. Without that, any attempt at change will be absorbed, distorted or resisted by the existing system.

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A few 121s with students before the mock exam season a few Januaries ago confirmed this. When I asked what revision looked like, the answers were pretty much the same: reading through notes, revisiting old feedback, highlighting classwork, rereading the textbook, completing past papers and waiting for a teacher to respond or going through papers with a tutor. Some of this has value. Much of it does not.

That gap, between effort and effectiveness, is no small detail. It is the same exam-prep experience for most students. We expect them to perform in high-stakes conditions having never really shown them how to prepare for those conditions properly.

This piece draws on what we know about how memory works and combines it with what we understand about habits and planning, translating both into strategies students can use immediately. These are not guarantees, but they are grounded in decades of replicated research and provide a far more dependable approach than instinct or preference. And they’ve worked for many of our students.

Why most revision doesn’t work: the cramming problem

Most students, when asked honestly, will admit to cramming before a test. The pattern is generally the same: focus hard the night before, memorise key terms and definitions, perform reasonably well the next day, and then move on. The reason this persists is that it can appear effective…in the short run.

Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that forgetting is rapid and front-loaded. Without revisiting material, retention drops sharply within the first day and continues to decline thereafter. What he also demonstrated is that each return to that material slows the rate of forgetting, gradually strengthening it over time. The issue with cramming is not that it produces no learning, but that it produces learning that does not last.

What makes this harder for students to recognise is the sense of familiarity that comes from rereading. When content looks recognisable on the page, it creates the impression of knowing. Robert Bjork’s distinction between storage strength and retrieval strength explains this. Information can exist in memory without being accessible when needed. Under exam conditions, it is retrievability that counts, not recognition.

This is why performance in the moment can be misleading. A completed task with notes nearby or a piece of work produced in comfortable conditions tells us very little about whether knowledge can be recalled independently, applied flexibly or sustained over time. The goal is not short-term success but knowledge that remains available when it is needed.

What actually works: the science of learning

A consistent body of research points towards a small number of approaches that improve long-term retention, and although these ideas are now widely referenced and used by (many?) teachers, they are still not widely used with any discipline by students.

Retrieval practice is one of the most useful processes. Testing yourself on material strengthens memory far more effectively than rereading it because it requires information to be brought to mind rather than recognised. If students are serious about revision, they have to move beyond looking at information and start trying to pull it back out.

Spacing builds on this. Returning to material after some time has passed, rather than revisiting it immediately, produces more durable learning because it requires effort to retrieve after sufficient time for a bit of forgetting. That effort is part of the strengthening process. Revision that feels harder because some forgetting has taken place is revision that is doing its job.

Interleaving adds a further layer by mixing topics and question types rather than working through one area in isolation. Students are required to discriminate between concepts and select the right knowledge for the task in front of them. It is more demanding, but it reflects the conditions of the exam far more closely.

Self-explanation takes this further. When revising in economics, for example, we often ask students to treat each multiple choice option as a true or false proposition and explain fully why in either case. That process exposes whether they actually understand the concept or have simply learned to spot the right answer. It slows them down, but it also sharpens their thinking in a way that simple recall cannot.

Worked examples and scaffolds play an equally important role. Strong revision, whilst ultimately aiming for independence, needs to begin with some guidance. Model essays, clear structures/frameworks and worked solutions provide a reference point for what strong thinking looks like. Removing that support gradually, rather than all at once, allows students to build towards independence rather than struggle blindly towards it.

Another of Bjork’s ideas, desirable difficulties captures much of this. Learning that requires effort tends to last longer than learning that feels straightforward. Students are often drawn towards what feels smooth and fluent, when what they need is something with enough resistance to strengthen recall.

Two further points are worth stating directly. Attention is a prerequisite for learning. If a student is distracted, little is encoded in the first place. And as Daniel Willingham has argued, memory is the residue of thought. What we remember is closely tied to what we have had to think about.

If you did only two things

If a student wanted the greatest return for the least complexity, there are two habits that would carry most of the benefit.

First, retrieval practice. Stop rereading and start testing. Try to bring information to mind without support, then check and correct.

Second, spacing. Return to the same material multiple times across days and weeks rather than in one concentrated block.

Those two, done consistently, outperform almost everything else. Everything that follows refines and strengthens them, but without them, revision rarely holds.

Time blocking and scheduling: building the system

Knowing what works is only useful if it translates into consistent action across weeks and months.

Tasks left on a to-do list rely on motivation in the moment, whereas tasks placed in a calendar become commitments. A scheduled block removes the need to decide what to do and when to do it. It allows the student to begin without negotiating with themselves first.

In practice, this means being precise. “Revise econs” is too vague to act on. “Macroeconomics: International Trade, past MCQ questions, 60 minutes” is not. If something disrupts the plan, the block is moved rather than abandoned.

I found it annoying how so many students resist this level of structure, preferring to retain flexibility. In reality, that flexibility often turns into drift. Without clarity on what is being studied and when, coverage becomes uneven and gaps remain. Students I mentor will often push back here, and it isn’t until they fully commit and see how it works when they live by their schedule that they recognise how powerful it can be.

This is also where interleaving operates across time, not just within a session. A student might schedule one topic on Monday, another on Tuesday, then return to the first later in the week in a different form. That pattern spaces the learning, mixes it with other material and prevents the false confidence that comes from over-familiarity.

We have started to teach much of this more explicitly over the last few years. Earlier in Year 11, during tutor time, we now run short carousel sessions where students are shown what effective revision looks like. Retrieval, spacing, self-explanation, planning, all in small, practical blocks. Without making time, far fewer students would be effective in their revision. You have to remove the assumption that students will work this out for themselves.

To support this, Heads of Fac have contributed to central schedule that breaks all subjects into topics and tracks each return to them over time. The aim is to revisit each topic multiple times across the revision period, using a range of approaches. The value lies not in repetition alone but in strengthening access to the knowledge so that it can be used under pressure.

Getting the level of difficulty right

One issue students run into quickly is getting the level of challenge wrong.

If everything feels easy and most answers are correct, the work is not stretching memory enough. If everything is wrong, the approach is not working and needs adjusting. Strong revision tends to sit between those two points, with a high success rate early on and increasing difficulty over time.

That might mean starting with structured questions or supported tasks, then moving towards more demanding retrieval and finally timed exam conditions. The key is not to sit in one place for too long. Revision should evolve as knowledge strengthens.

Techniques that work in practice

The Pomodoro Technique provides a simple structure for focused work. A 25-minute block followed by a short break creates a contained period of attention that makes starting easier without lowering expectations.

Mind-maps can be effective when used as a recall task. Review the material, put it away, reconstruct it from memory, then check for gaps. What is missing becomes the focus for the next session.

Flashcards allow for repeated self-testing, with attention directed towards what is not yet secure. Mixing topics within a set introduces variation and forces the brain to switch between ideas. I wrote more about flashcards before, here.

Worked examples can be used actively by studying structure, removing parts of the scaffold and attempting parallel responses independently. That gradual withdrawal of support builds competence far more reliably than jumping straight into full answers.

The image I come back to with students is the jungle. When they first encounter a topic, the knowledge is in there somewhere, but there is no clear path to it. The first attempt to retrieve it cuts only a rough trail. A second return clears a little more. Leave it too long and the growth starts to reclaim it. Return again and again, at spaced intervals and in different forms, and eventually the path becomes one you can rely on. That is what revision is for. Building a route back to knowledge that will still hold when the pressure is on.

Past papers: track, mix and mark

Past papers become increasingly valuable as exams approach, but their impact depends on how they are used.

For multiple choice papers, tracking scores over time allows patterns to emerge, but the real value comes from interrogating each option and understanding why it is right or wrong. That process reveals misconceptions and directs future revision.

For extended responses, self-marking against the mark scheme encourages closer attention to what is actually being rewarded. Examiner reports add another layer, showing the patterns that repeatedly cost students marks.

Mixing topics within practice sessions ensures that revision reflects the demands of the exam rather than the comfort of single-topic study.

How parents can help

Parents cannot revise for their children, but they can influence whether revision happens in a structured way.

Asking to see the plan, checking what has been covered or testing a small number of flashcards provides accountability without taking over the process. Even sitting with a student for the first few minutes of a session can help overcome the barrier to starting.

Equally, parents can also control device use/access, monitor sleep and support with nutrition, all of which can have a major impact on retention at any time, but especially when revising.

The aim is to provide presence and structure rather than pressure.

Once students have a clear system, the change is often immediate. Work becomes more focused, progress is easier to see and the sense of control increases.

Most students do not need to care more. They need to know how to revise in a way that justifies the time they are putting in. Once that becomes clear, revision stops being something they endure and starts becoming something that returns on their investment.

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The contrast with England is useful. There, attendance carries legal weight - fines, court orders and statutory follow-up exist. Problems remain, but the expectation is clear and enforced externally. International schools operate without any of that. No fines, no courts, no external enforcement. Attendance becomes a test of what a school is prepared to insist upon, and who is willing to back that when it is tested.

At our school, the causes are familiar. Term-time holidays taken with minimal friction. Families flying mid-term for graduations or relocations, turning what could have been a short absence into two weeks out. Younger siblings watching older ones disengage and drawing their own conclusions. Affluence reinforcing the belief that outcomes are insulated from habits - a belief that does not hold, but often appears to, especially when the eldest got into a decent university despite a patchy Year 11 record. Many parents see school as a service they pay for that they can opt in and out of as suits.

Sport adds its own complexity. Swimmers missing extended periods for meets, golfers chasing ranking points, tennis players labelled elite long before results justify it. Sport has genuine value and schools should support it seriously. The issue arises when school becomes the flexible element rather than the fixed one, and when aspiration quietly hardens into assumption. For a small number of genuinely committed student athletes, we have devised an elite sports programme that operates as a formal contract - monitoring missed school, building in time for catch-up work, and keeping lines of communication open. It reflects an attempt to work with students and families rather than against them, while making clear that the academic commitment is not optional.

These patterns point to an important question. Are families clients purchasing flexibility, or partners in a shared educational contract? Where that is not defined, expectations easily drift and decisions lose consistency. Once absence becomes negotiable for some, it spreads. It is usually led by the families most confident the rules will bend for them, and once that line is crossed, it is hard to re-establish.

Most schools also carry a group of students whose absence is already entrenched. Early intervention still has value, but the window is narrower. Once patterns settle they are harder to shift, and the gap between the student and the curriculum widens in ways that are difficult to close.

Timing compounds this. Missing school early in the year disrupts access to core knowledge, routines and expectations as they are being established. Later recovery rarely closes that gap fully. Learning accumulates. Time lost early carries a cost that follows students further than they or their families tend to anticipate.

This becomes clear at secondary. Entry remains relatively inclusive up to Year 11, but our Sixth Form is not. Places are limited, standards are high and outcomes are exceptional, so competition is tight. Low attendance rarely sits alongside the IGCSE grades needed to keep options open and enable progression. Absence narrows pathways, and once decisions are made, reversal is rare.

Students who are academically able are no longer guaranteed a place where attendance falls below a set threshold. In marginal cases, offers become conditional.

Some students struggle to attend because of genuine wellbeing concerns - anxiety, mental health pressures and family strain are real and require proper support. But support that consistently removes the expectation to attend teaches avoidance, and students who learn to opt out when things feel hard are not developing the tolerance for difficulty that school is partly there to build. Schools have a role in that, not by dismissing need, but by refusing to treat absence as a reasonable response to it.

For years, our policy set 93% attendance as acceptable - roughly 13 days missed across a year. Writing that number into a policy document legitimised absence and signalled to families that missing nearly a tenth of school was within the rules. The data reflected it faithfully.

We have far from solved attendance; I am not sure it can be fully solved. What we have done is stop treating it as a problem that minor adjustments might fix. Expectations were rewritten, thresholds tightened, language clarified, and tutor practice and parent communication rebuilt rather than patched. One shift changed conversations before it changed behaviour: 100% attendance on reports was moved from “Excellent” to the baseline “Meeting expectation”. Anything below it required explanation, and that reset what needed to be justified - placing the burden back with families rather than with the school.

We also removed “authorised absence” from our language. The position is now straightforward: absence is absence. A school can understand a reason without endorsing it, and the language used to describe behaviour shapes what families consider normal. We also rewrote registration codes to distinguish between learning missed and learning relocated through school-led activity, because that distinction is key for accuracy.

Attendance is now tracked more precisely, reviewed more frequently, and tutors are expected to act earlier. Our receptionist now calls home for all absent students where no reason has been provided, prioritising any CP students and sending updates to the relevant Head of Year and Assistant Head. Calls from tutors and Heads of Year also happen sooner, and we try to get meetings with parents set-up before patterns have time to embed.

For more complex cases, we have begun to explore and use Emotionally Based School Avoidance planning, because social anxiety requires a fundamentally different response from family-led absence. The work is slow and rarely linear, but the outcomes for the individuals involved have been encouraging.

We have always moved quickly with emails and calls home. What has changed is the next step. We now contact students directly where we can, rather than relying only on parents. In one recent case, I called twice in the same morning. On the second call I set a clear deadline and said I would come and collect them if they were not in school by that time. They arrived before it, but I was ready to make the short walk if needed.

I have not had to follow through on a home visit, but the credible prospect of one has been enough to shift behaviour. We have used home visits in recent years. This more direct approach, with clear expectations and a defined consequence, carries more leverage and makes it clear that we want them in, and that we are prepared to act on that.

This aligns with the Education Endowment Foundation’s rapid evidence review of attendance interventions. The evidence base is limited, but targeted approaches that address individual barriers directly show small positive effects. One study that included home visits saw attendance rise from 82% to over 91% across three months, with no change in the control group.

The review also found that personalised contact with parents is more effective than standard letters, and that reporting days missed rather than percentages produces sharper responses. A parent can accept 92% attendance without much resistance. Fifteen missed days, set alongside grades and post-16 options, is harder to ignore. Framed that way, the implications are clearer.

The data over time is consistent. Students above 95% attendance outperform those below 90% at IGCSE, AS and A Level. Exceptions exist, usually among high attainers, but they tend to encounter the consequences of their habits later rather than escaping them altogether. Attendance now sits alongside attainment and destination data in the same conversation, because separating them has never made much sense. You see some parents shuffling in their seats at Options evenings when the correlation is up there on the screen for all to see.

The research points to mentoring as having weak to moderate positive effects for persistently absent students, particularly where relationships are sustained long enough to carry weight. That is likely the next stage for us, alongside clearer formal agreements around sport and competition, and tighter alignment between wellbeing support and attendance expectations.

We have trialled older students working with younger students to support behaviour, attendance and punctuality. The numbers are small, but the impact for those involved was clear.

There is a limit, though. If students are not in school, the scope for any intervention is reduced.

None of this works, however, without clear and visible leadership from the top. Heads of year, form tutors and the staff members who genuinely care - the hero teachers who will make the extra call, stay late for the difficult conversation and chase the same family for the third time in a month - can shift individual cases. But they tire when they are working without consistent backing from above, and they should not have to sustain that effort alone. Without senior leadership reinforcing the same message in meetings with parents, in how exceptions are handled and in what is communicated at whole-school level, individual effort becomes isolated and eventually unsustainable. Staff read those signals accurately. So do families.

Strong attendance culture has to be owned at the top and felt throughout the school. Where that is absent, policy documents and data dashboards make little practical difference. The expectation has to be credible, and credibility comes from who is seen to be driving it and what happens when it is tested.

The EEF is candid that no single approach works across all contexts and that the overall evidence base is not strong. Schools should not over-claim. What that means in practice is less about finding the right programme and more about tracking your own data carefully, acting early and maintaining position when the pressure to yield builds - which it always does. Attendance holds only when the same expectation is applied repeatedly and visibly, by everyone, with every family. When alignment weakens, the numbers follow, and gains do not sustain themselves without continued attention.

That is where most schools find the work hardest. Writing the policy is the easy part, but holding position week after week without ceding ground through fatigue or the accumulated weight of cases that each seem, in isolation, to deserve an exception. Someone has to keep returning to the same standard. In an international school without external enforcement, that someone is always internal - and it has to start at the top.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In practice, that means:

• define the contract early - attendance is expected, not optional

• remove ambiguity - absence is absence, language is precise

• track patterns, not events - act on early signals

• act on day one - same-day contact, no delay

• speak to the student - not only home

• set clear deadlines - and follow through when needed

• use proximity - home visits where possible / appropriate

• link attendance to outcomes - progression decisions reflect it

• align support with expectation - support does not replace attendance

• hold consistency at senior level - no drift, no exceptions

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The stats are not particularly encouraging for many. This Fortune article is pretty sobering - 1.2 million UK graduate applications for 17,000 graduate-level jobs. While the dystopian narrative of AI replacing human work is often sensationalised, these figures suggest that AI is already acting as a disrupter in entry-level recruitment and the Center for Global Development suggests global inequality may widen. If employers can access higher output from fewer, more capable individuals using AI, the demand for entry-level labour plummets further. The signal then becomes not just qualifications, but the ability to use these tools better than everyone else. That has clear implications for graduate markets already under pressure, and therefore schools.

AI isn’t new any more and has blended almost seamlessly into normal life for many. Since the mainstream arrival of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, people have had access to tools like this for nearly four years. It is now more surprising to hear that someone isn’t using it in some capacity.

We know it is disruptive and, with that in mind, a more convincing take is that AI is not the flattening or equalising force some had hoped it would be. I see it better understood as an amplifier, particularly of leverage. And leverage, in economic terms, rarely benefits everyone equitably.

In economics, human capital is the accumulated knowledge, habits and skills that make people productive, which in turn determines their value to employers through their marginal revenue product. Human capital builds slowly but compounds over time. Education and training raise it, and governments invest in it to improve productivity and, in theory, benefit the wider economy. Governments therefore look to schools to deliver a curriculum that builds that capital for the future. The knowledge, habits and expectations they establish determine whether students can make effective use of tools like AI, or whether they remain dependent on them.

It is unlikely that AI will fully replace that human capital any time soon. What is becoming clear, however, is that people interact with it unevenly, significantly enhancing productivity for some far more than others.

Rather than democratisation, what we are seeing is a rise in the returns to prior knowledge and investment, with social mobility coming under further pressure.

AI and learning: the great amplifier

I see clear parallels between AI and how memory and schemas work. The science of learning tells us that the more prior knowledge you hold, the easier and faster it becomes to learn more, because new information has something to attach to. This is already starting to play out very clearly with students where AI is concerned.

A student with a strong internal mental model of a subject can use AI to probe their thinking more deeply. They can ask it to critique their reasoning, generate counterarguments, surface blind spots and understand what comes back. When they return to their own work, they can use it to dismantle an essay and expose weak logic. Crucially, they can sense when it is wrong, because they have something to compare it against, and their thinking is strengthened by the speed and depth that AI gives them.

Another student can use the same AI tool, even starting from the same prompt, to generate something that reads well. It may even sound coherent. But without the underlying schema, they cannot properly interrogate what is produced. Sloppy definitions are accepted, thin examples pass and they cannot iterate or refine the output because, to them, it already appears to do the job. The work gets done. A good grade might even follow, particularly if it is handwritten and submitted cleanly the next day, reinforcing the behaviour. But the thinking has barely moved on. Same tool, very different experience.

In the short term, the outcomes may even look similar. One student could produce an essay independently. The other arrives at something comparable through AI. On paper, they may sit at the same grade, but the knowledge gap widens, as only one of them can replicate this independently.

This begins to look a lot like increasing returns to knowledge. The more you know, the more effectively you can use the tool, and the more you get back from it. Those starting further behind do not just gain less; they struggle to convert access into understanding at all.

Prior knowledge and agency are the dividing line here.

The learning misconception - knowledge is still essential

People, teachers included, still talk about the importance of skills and how, in a world shaped by AI, students need creativity, communication and critical thinking more than ever. With information instantly accessible, the argument goes that knowing things matters less than being able to use them well. That is right, to an extent. But what is often missed is that all of these are underpinned by knowledge. You cannot just learn to “think critically” in the abstract.

We now know that generic skills are not transferable in the way we once assumed. You do not learn to think critically in general; critical thinking is rooted in domain-specific knowledge. A student may be able to think critically about a text they understand well, but that does not mean they can do the same in a different subject or context where their knowledge is weaker. Knowledge is the raw material of thought. It is not possible to think critically about something you know nothing about.

Analysis and evaluation, two of the most valued higher-order skills, rest on knowledge. You cannot evaluate a scientific claim without understanding the rules of scientific evidence. To analyse, you need the components. Imagine trying to analyse a historical event without an understanding of context, causes, consequences or chronology. Scientists and historians think differently, and that thinking is shaped by the knowledge and methods of their disciplines. Critical thinking in one domain does not easily transfer to another.

Daniel Willingham’s line that “memory is the residue of thought” makes this point more directly. If students do not have knowledge stored in long-term memory, there is very little for them to think with in the first place.

In that sense, knowledge is not in opposition to skills; it is what makes them possible. In the context of AI, the same principle applies. Like most IT systems, it is GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. The idea that “you can just look it up” and therefore do not need to know anything has not aged well in light of what we now understand about how learning works, particularly the evidence that novices struggle without sufficient prior knowledge.

Agency and judgement

A similar pattern is emerging with adults. It is now very easy to outsource the difficult first draft of a message, to ask AI to frame a decision or soften tone. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. I do it regularly.

But there is a difference between using AI as a thinking partner and using it as a substitute for judgement. If the habit becomes letting the machine produce what you think, cognitive ability begins to weaken. Over time, the muscle of judgement diminishes.

Used differently, it can do the opposite. You can use AI to tear apart an argument, to surface objections not yet considered, or to highlight where you might sound self-righteous or unnecessarily combative. In that sense, it introduces friction, and that friction tends to improve the quality of thinking.

This looks very much like skill-biased technological change, potentially leading to structural unemployment and job displacement. Technology that disproportionately rewards those who already possess certain forms of capital, or the understanding and access needed to use new technologies well. We are seeing AI increase the returns to being well educated, rather than reducing the gap as many had hoped.

There is increasing recognition that education systems will need to adapt to an AI-driven economy. Demand for technical skills will not translate neatly into more jobs, particularly as many of those tasks are being automated by the same technology. The advantage will sit with those who can think with these tools, not just use them. Those who cannot risk displacement and continual retraining.

That has to be taken seriously. Does it mean that those same students with libraries in their homes are going to see even more relative success? We know students with disciplined home environments, strong vocabularies and established habits of reading benefit most from our current education system. Are they now about to move even further ahead through AI?

Will those who already have the habits and knowledge to engage deeply extract disproportionate value? Will AI widen the agency gap rather than narrow it?

The upstream problem

In schools, the initial response seemed to default to the plagiarism conversation when AI first emerged. Detection, containment and handwritten essays were the main focus. There is still an important place for all of that, but these are starting to feel like surface issues. The real issues sit further upstream.

As discussed, knowledge matters, and probably more than ever. Without a strong mental framework within the subject domains, you cannot properly critique what you are given or judge whether something is accurate. You will not spot hallucinations if you do not understand the terrain.

Information asymmetry grows as a result. The person who understands the domain can see where AI overreaches. The person who does not may experience it as authority and stop there. The gap is already visible. If we are not seeing it, it may be because we are inside it.

Deepfakes and distortion

There is another layer to this which schools cannot ignore, and it connects directly to student agency.

Deepfakes are no longer theoretical. Convincing audio and video can be fabricated with relative ease. You do not need particularly high levels of technical expertise. A teacher’s voice can be cloned or a student’s face mapped onto something explicit. Fabricated material can circulate long before anyone has time to verify it. The safeguarding implications are obvious, and most schools are far from equipped to deal with them.

Guidance is beginning to respond, with awareness of digital harm no longer limited to social media, screen time or cyberbullying. AI-generated content is now firmly within that conversation. But the pace of change remains the issue. By the time guidance is updated, the tools have already moved on.

Jonathan Haidt has accelerated a broader shift in how we think about phones, attention and childhood. Schools and parents are increasingly questioning constant connectivity and the effects of distraction. Going device free is no longer radical for a school, and as a parent, choosing not to give my kids a phone has been met with increasing support over the last year or two. A few years ago, they were often the only ones without one, which made us feel like we were in an outlier position.

AI arrives into that already fragile space. It is no longer just about distraction, but distortion.

Agency, in that context, is not simply the ability to act. It is the ability to discern, to verify, to pause and to consider the consequences before deciding whether to believe, engage with or pass something on. This is where laws and government guidance can have the greatest impact, in much the same way they have with smoking, alcohol and other demerit goods, reducing the need for individual judgement in the most obvious cases while learning has time to take place.

Understanding the system

The arrival of AI has brought into question the need to learn to code. Not long ago, every child was being told they need to learn it. Coding was framed as the new literacy. That position shifted quickly. With no-code tools and increasingly abstracted interfaces, many began to argue that coding would become unnecessary.

Balance has returned to this debate. Not everyone needs to code fluently. But understanding how systems are structured, how models generate outputs and where they fail is increasingly important. Not just to produce software, but to avoid becoming passive in relation to these tools.

What matters is less syntax and more how you think. The ability to break complex problems into smaller steps, to diagnose where something has gone wrong and to iterate towards a solution. Those habits extend well beyond programming. They shape how people approach work, decisions and uncertainty more broadly.

There is also a shift towards what might be described as a hybrid approach. The advantage will sit with those who can combine human judgement with the speed of AI, using it to accelerate output while retaining control over logic, structure and purpose.

Underlying all of this is a more basic requirement. Technology will continue to change, and quickly. The people who benefit will be those who can adapt, learn new tools and operate without complete certainty. In other words, those who can learn well and exercise agency.

It is the difference between using a tool and being shaped by it. I see it as servant versus master.

Four years on, AI is already everywhere, or at least it feels that way, particularly in writing. The frictionless tone, the consistent cadence and the polished structure that bear little resemblance to how that person has ever written before. Occasionally, the accidental inclusion of “here’s another draft…” is left at the bottom of an email by mistake. Either people do not realise how visible it is, or they no longer care. That, in itself, says something about authorship, whether the goal is thinking or simply producing.

I had a passing thought that AI is a bit like alcohol. It does not change who you are so much as expose it. For some, curiosity sharpens. For others, laziness becomes easier. Those with discipline find it compounds, while others settle quickly into dependence. What was already there is simply amplified.

AI is not levelling the field. It is widening the gap between those who can think with it and those who cannot.

What happens next will determine how far that gap grows.

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Progressive education had long elevated experience and student activity as the primary drivers of learning, privileging inquiry over instruction, skills over content and self-expression over transmission. It was not introduced as one tradition among many, open to scrutiny or comparison. It was presented to me as professional maturity. The implication was subtle but powerful: to question it was to reveal yourself as out of step.

It was only later, through CPD, through reading and conversations online, that I encountered dissenting voices. What I had accepted as settled truth actually turned out to be well-contested ground. In Progressively Worse, Robert Peal argues that progressive ideology became so embedded in British education that it ceased to be recognised as ideology at all. It was simply how teaching was done. That observation closely matches my own experience. My training made little reference to disagreement and I honestly do not remember any positive reference to direct instruction. Child-centred orthodoxy was framed as moral progress. Direct instruction was portrayed as harmful. Knowledge was described as inert and authority treated with suspicion. The alternative was barely articulated, let alone defended.

Whether one agrees with Peal’s conclusions or not, the historical sweep invites reflection. Many of us inherited a position before we realised there was one. What I had taken to be professional consensus may simply have been (un)professional inheritance. Looking back, the recognition is not especially comfortable. It is easier to inherit than to interrogate and easier to repeat than to examine. Once routines settle and classrooms run smoothly, questioning your own rhythm can feel unnecessary.

Younger teachers entering the profession today may find some of this difficult to imagine. The idea that teachers were actively encouraged to minimise explanation, avoid direct instruction and build lessons primarily around activity can sound almost absurd when described plainly. Yet for many of us it was simply the professional climate we entered. It was the norm.

Even thoughtful educators were working within that framework. David Didau once wrote a blog post titled The Ultimate Teaching Technique advocating approaches that now sit firmly within that progressive tradition. Back in 2016, he revisited the post adding an update at the top that reads:

“I no longer agree with any of the following. It remains on my blog as a warning against hubris.”

This is admirable; rather than removing it, he left it visible as a record of how professional certainty can age badly. It is a reminder that teaching, like any profession, evolves, and that many of us held positions with great confidence before we fully understood the mechanisms of learning.

I cannot remember whether it was Dylan Wiliam who first phrased it this way, but the warning will be familiar. Many teachers improve rapidly in their first few years and then plateau for much of the rest of their career. Practice stabilises and confidence grows. Without deliberate reflection the questioning slows. The danger is rarely incompetence. It is comfort.

Professional growth begins when assumptions are surfaced, orthodoxies examined and we distinguish between what works and what merely looks as though it does. None of this requires ideological warfare. It requires intellectual humility. The question is less about whether progressive education was right or wrong in absolute terms and more about whether we are willing to scrutinise the inheritance we have received.

I like to think that nowadays I am a more discerning and reflective practitioner, someone more willing to question practices and look for evidence that supports or challenges the claims behind them.

Teaching has moved on in the years since I entered the profession. Cognitive science and the science of learning have helped clarify some of the processes involved in learning and have brought greater coherence to discussions about effective practice. The profession does not possess complete certainty, but our understanding of how learning happens has become clearer.

For example, we now understand reasonably well that:

• Memory is what remains after thinking, and what we think about strongly influences what we later remember.

• Working memory is extremely limited and can only attend to a small number of ideas at once.

• Long-term memory stores the knowledge accumulated over time and forms the foundation for understanding new ideas.

• New learning depends heavily on prior knowledge because new information attaches to what is already understood.

• Forgetting is natural and inevitable, which means knowledge must be revisited and retrieved if it is to remain accessible.

• Retrieval strengthens memory more effectively than simply re-exposing pupils to information.

• Fluency during a lesson can create an illusion of understanding even when learning remains fragile.

History provides many examples of professional confidence preceding understanding. Doctors once appeared in cigarette advertisements recommending particular brands with the authority of medical expertise. A century earlier, surgeons moved between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies without washing their hands, puzzled by the deaths of new mothers in maternity wards. In both cases the practices of the time seemed entirely normal to those living within them. Only later did they come to look not merely mistaken but extraordinary.

We may be living through similar turning points elsewhere. The role of smartphones in children’s lives is only now beginning to be questioned after years of largely uncritical acceptance. Future generations may look back at some of our dietary habits, or the strange reality that parts of New York can be classified as food deserts, despite the abundance of food surrounding them. They may look at our technology use and other everyday assumptions and wonder how we failed to see what to them may appear obvious.

Education is not immune to that pattern. Ideas that once carried the authority of professional consensus can later come to look more like inherited habits than carefully tested principles. Some of the teaching approaches many of us were trained into may eventually be viewed in that way: not as malicious decisions, but as confident mistakes made before the evidence was fully understood.

Professional maturity may therefore have less to do with choosing a camp and more to do with remaining unsettled. Once you recognise that what feels like consensus might simply be inheritance, it becomes difficult to stop asking harder questions. In a profession built on learning, it would be strange if teachers themselves ever stopped doing it.

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The contemporary framing comes from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge, building on the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman’s distinction between two modes of thought provides the mechanism that makes nudges intelligible. System 1 is fast, intuitive and automatic. It runs on pattern recognition and shortcuts. System 2 is slower, effortful and deliberate. It relies on working memory. It feels like strain because it is cognitively expensive. Where possible, our brains prefer to avoid it.

Faced with options, our brains tend to default to the path of least resistance. The easy choice wins disproportionately often, not necessarily because it is superior, but because it demands less effort.

Nudge theory takes that cognitive reality seriously. If behaviour follows ease, then altering what is easy alters behaviour.

Governments have operationalised this insight. The UK established the Behavioural Insights Team within the Cabinet Office. Its work has included increasing tax compliance through social norm messaging, improving organ donation registrations and shaping public health behaviour. The mechanism is rarely coercion. It is the redesign of choice environments so that the desired action requires less friction than the alternative.

The corporate world has done the same. Repositioning healthier options at eye level changes consumption. Moving from opt in to opt out transforms participation rates, but the available choices still remain. It is the default that shifts.

If our cognitive architecture predisposes us to choose what is easiest, then schools are also in the business of designing for ease, whether consciously or not.

In an effective classroom, the room is set before students enter. The first activity is already on the screen or on desks. Mini whiteboards sit in place, with pens and rubbers ready. The environment communicates what is about to happen without narration. That frees attention for deliberate greetings, quick uniform checks and relational presence rather than procedural instruction.

For me, where teaching takes place across multiple rooms, and where safeguarding or pastoral matters occasionally delay my arrival and set up, the contrast is clear. When students enter an undefined space, uncertainty creeps in and energy disperses. The cost is initially small but cumulative. When the retrieval task is visible and materials are ready, the easiest action is to sit and begin. The architecture does much of the behavioural work.

The routines around mini whiteboards are similarly intentional. Students write an answer every time. If they genuinely do not know, they write a question. A blank board is not neutral. It represents cognitive withdrawal. Boards are not wiped until instructed. When told to show, they are held up immediately. In larger classes, those at the back hold them higher to ensure visibility. The teacher scans responses and makes mental notes or intervenes in real time.

None of this happens by accident; the routine must be established deliberately. The aim is to reduce decision points and remove ambiguity to protect working memory. Students are not repeatedly deciding whether to participate. Participation is the default. Over time, the routine becomes habitual and the cognitive effort required to comply diminishes (Caiti Wade has an excellent post on teaching the routines for MWBs).

I was fortunate to be involved in the redesign of my faculty’s subject classrooms, where similar principles were applied at scale. Removing display boards and replacing them with wraparound whiteboards reduced visual clutter and expanded cognitive workspace. The walls became surfaces for thinking rather than decoration. Students diagram processes, map arguments and plan essays collaboratively. The intention was to lower extraneous load and increase space for structured thought, with clear walls at the start of each lesson ensuring attention is directed precisely where it needs to be.

In each case, the design choice is small whereas the effect, when repeated daily, is cumulative.

Cognitive Load Theory clarifies why this matters. Working memory is limited. If we clutter the environment with unnecessary stimuli or inconsistent routines, we consume bandwidth that could otherwise be used for learning. A clear start, visible task, consistent routine and minimal visual distraction do not merely create order. They create cognitive capacity.

At whole school level, similar principles apply.

In our Year 11 and Year 13 leavers arrangements, we moved from an opt in model to an opt out one. In previous years, we sent Google Forms asking who wanted the traditional “Class of (insert year!)” hoodie and who intended to attend the prom. We then chased responses and payment. Participation was framed as optional and staff time was absorbed in administration.

This year, the cost of the hoodie and prom is included in the Term 3 fees. Families may opt out, but participation is assumed. Administrative load has reduced significantly simply by shifting the default. Behaviourally, this is straightforward. From a cognitive load perspective, it removed dozens of small decision points for staff. From a cultural perspective, it normalised participation.

Attendance offers another example. Previously, 100% attendance was described as Excellent in reports. We reframed 100% as Meeting Expectation. Being present every day is the expectation, unless there is legitimate reason otherwise. We also removed routine references to ‘authorised absence’. From the school’s perspective, absence is absence. The message is simpler and clearer.

When communicating with parents, sending home the number of days missed rather than a percentage is said to be more impactful. Five days missed in a term is concrete. Whereas a high percentage for attendance might sound respectable. The data may be identical, but interpretation shifts. Behavioural economics has long demonstrated that framing influences judgement.

A similar logic informed our approach to devices. We reframed the norm so that no device is visible unless explicitly invited by the teacher. The default shifted from students entering a room and immediately opening laptops to lessons beginning with thinking, usually through a starter or a structured “do now”. The change was small in policy terms but significant in practice. It aligned with our implementation strategy, reduced transition ambiguity and removed the need for repeated instructions about screens. By resetting the starting point, friction decreases and attention at the beginning of lessons improves.

Many common teaching strategies can be understood through this lens. Cold calling and think pair share as defaults reduce the opt out space and make thinking participation the norm. Strong starts reduce transition ambiguity. Clear instructions followed by immediate practice lower extraneous load. Choral response ensures rehearsal without individual negotiation. Continuous circulation and Pastore’s Perch increase accountability without escalating tone. Each nudges behaviour while protecting working memory.

At this point, the ethical question arises. Nudge theory is frequently criticised as paternalistic. It assumes that the architect of the environment knows which outcome is preferable. It implies that individuals, left entirely to their own devices, may not always choose well.

That critique cannot be dismissed. Any deliberate shaping of choice architecture involves judgement about what constitutes the better outcome. In education, however, such judgement is unavoidable. Curricula are sequenced, timetables structured and assessments designed on the assumption that some pathways are more desirable than others. Teachers are perhaps best placed to make that call.

The distinction, therefore, is not between influence and neutrality. It is between intentional design and inherited drift. Nudges alter the default while preserving alternatives. Even if families can choose to opt out or students could resist routines, their agency remains intact. What does change is the starting point.

The real alternative to deliberate design is not freedom, but unexamined defaults shaped by habit, history or administrative convenience.

Behavioural economics, habit formation and Cognitive Load Theory converge on a simple insight: People default to what is easiest and working memory is limited. If these are facts then environment design is critical.

The aim is not to remove struggle, but to locate it precisely. Cognitive effort should be directed towards thinking, recalling, analysing and problem solving, not towards working out what to do, where to sit, which book to open or whether to begin at all. The desirable difficulty belongs in the learning itself, not in the prelude to it.

Schools are always shaping behaviour. The question is whether that shaping is deliberate and aligned to educational purpose.

In your classroom, what currently makes distraction easier than thinking?

Which routines remove unnecessary decisions?

Where are students spending cognitive energy that has nothing to do with the content?

If the academically productive choice is not the path of least resistance, something in the architecture probably needs redesigning.

Teaching is the deliberate act of transferring knowledge from one mind to another, whereas learning is a durable change in long-term memory. The two are connected, but one does not guarantee the other. Learning is not engagement or compliance, nor is it the ability to get something right at the end of a lesson. It is what endures: a lasting change in memory that shapes what a student can later recall, do or understand.

For a long time, I mistook activity for learning. If a lesson was busy, if students were discussing, moving and producing something visible, it felt successful. It looked successful and was often praised as such. Yet visibility and momentum are not reliable indicators of what will remain once the moment has passed. Busy does not mean remembered.

Cognitive science explains what is happening in young learners’ minds, not just what is happening in the room. Working memory is narrow and fleeting, easily overloaded and quick to discard what it cannot process. Long-term memory, by contrast, is expansive and structured. Learning depends on the gradual construction of schema within it, interconnected networks of knowledge that allow new ideas to be understood rather than merely encountered. New information does not settle simply because it has been presented. It has to attach to something already there and secure. Where there is no stable structure for it to connect to, it slips away.

Seen through that lens, the case for explicit instruction becomes less ideological and more practical. When students are novices, clarity is not control; it is efficiency. Careful explanation limits unnecessary cognitive load and increases the likelihood that core knowledge is encoded accurately from the outset. Modelling exposes the thinking that would otherwise remain hidden, while guided practice allows misconceptions to surface while they are still pliable rather than after they have hardened into habit. Independence should not be the starting point. It is the consequence of knowledge sufficiently organised to bear it.

Discovery in the absence of secure knowledge does not produce autonomy. More often, it produces confusion. The limits of working memory do not disappear because an activity is engaging.

Rosenshine’s “Principles of Instruction”, particularly its emphasis on high success rates during practice, makes the point clearly. Learning requires effort, but repeated failure erodes it. Students need success as they are stretched. The teacher’s craft lies in holding that balance so that challenge strengthens learning rather than weakens it.

Bjork’s work adds to our understanding of how we learn. Spacing, interleaving and variation can make learning feel less smooth in the moment, yet strengthen retention over time. What feels fluent is not always secure, with ease during a lesson potentially masking fragility days later.

The same principle extends beyond the individual lesson into curriculum design. Knowledge presented in fragments does not assemble itself. Without deliberate sequencing and revisiting, information remains disconnected. Pace can be mistaken for progress, coverage for understanding. Unless ideas are organised into a coherent structure and returned to repeatedly, they remain brittle.

Educational debates are not settled, nor should they be. Education cannot be reduced to memory alone. Yet across cognitive psychology and classroom research one point is clear: durable learning depends on the accumulation, organisation and retrieval of knowledge in long-term memory. Without that foundation, higher-order thinking has nothing stable to operate on.

If we take that seriously, some classroom practices are simply safer bets than others:

• Sequence content deliberately so new ideas build on secure knowledge rather than sit in isolation

• Make core knowledge explicit and revisit it systematically

• Embed retrieval into everyday classroom routines rather than reserving it for revision

• Introduce new material with clarity, especially for novices, and model the thinking, not just the answer

• Maintain high success rates during guided practice while correcting misconceptions early

• Withdraw scaffolds deliberately as understanding strengthens

• Teach vocabulary explicitly and foreground disciplinary language

• Calibrate challenge so effort strengthens memory rather than overwhelms it

• Space practice over time rather than relying on massed exposure

If we accept what cognitive science tells us about memory, then some teaching methods are simply more likely to work than others.

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Teaching can look animated and impressive. Learning is slower and less visible, constructed in the mind and revealed only over time. A lesson may run smoothly, students may answer fluently and pages may fill, yet none of this guarantees that anything has taken root. A classroom can appear industrious while memory remains unchanged.

What counts is what endures once the lesson has faded. The measure is not whether students seemed engaged in the moment, but whether the knowledge is still there weeks later, connected to other ideas and available for use. The difference between performance and learning is rarely obvious in the hour itself. It becomes clear later.

If that is the standard, then planning changes. Sequencing becomes deliberate, explanations precise and practice judged by what it secures rather than how it looks. The work may feel slower and more exacting, but it is how learning compounds over time.

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I left England to teach abroad not long after that orthodoxy peaked, so I largely missed the moment the profession began to rethink it. I was reading a chapter in “The Curriculum” by Mary Myatt that prompted this reflection and gave clarity to why the shift occurred.

The change did not occur overnight, but there is a noticeable inflection point around 2021–22. The language of differentiation began to recede from official guidance and “adaptive teaching” moved in, particularly through the Early Career Framework and subsequent advice from the Education Endowment Foundation. This was not simply cosmetic but reflected a growing recognition that, in practice, differentiation had developed what Dylan Wiliam describes as “lethal mutations”.

It is worth saying that new terminology does not lead to improved practice. Like many blanket terms in education, “adaptive teaching” risks becoming elastic, stretched to cover almost anything. If it simply replaces one vague label with another, little changes. The meaningful shift is not linguistic but structural: keeping the intellectual demand constant while varying the support that secures access.

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Despite being well intentioned, differentiation often translated into easier work for some pupils. Fewer concepts. Simpler language. Reduced demand. The very pupils who most needed access to powerful knowledge were sometimes those least likely to encounter it in its full form.

Myatt’s critique sharpens this further: Pre-differentiation can cap thinking. When we decide in advance who can cope with challenge, we risk rationing access to the most demanding ideas. That weakens the principle of curriculum entitlement.

Differentiated tasks tend to become closed. Prepared materials can steer pupils towards completion rather than understanding. The intellectual work is constrained before the lesson even begins.

Separating pupils by task can also limit the opportunity to surface and address misconceptions in real time. When everyone grapples with the same core ideas, teachers gain sharper diagnostic insight.

And too often, the work becomes the worksheet and with completion being visible, the understanding is harder to see. Guessing, copying or following prompts can create activity without necessarily securing any learning.

There is also the issue of workload. Creating multiple versions of a lesson is time-consuming. That investment would be defensible if outcomes were consistently stronger. The evidence for that has always been mixed. The Early Career Framework addressed this directly in standard 5:

Adaptive teaching is less likely to be valuable if it causes the teacher to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils.

The concern isn’t adaptation itself, but the artificial construction of different tasks and lowered demand.

When I first heard the term “adaptive teaching”, I assumed it was simply “responsive teaching” repackaged. A new label for something strong teachers were already doing. That was partly true, but not entirely.

Responsive teaching is, at its core, about setting clear goals, planning learning carefully, identifying what pupils have understood and where they are struggling, and then responding in ways that move them forward. It rests on structured planning, careful modelling, hinge questions, exit tickets, feedback decisions and deliberate checks for understanding. It is systematic, not improvisational.

Adaptive teaching overlaps with this, but it carries a broader framing. It includes those responsive moves while placing greater emphasis on deliberate curriculum and lesson design that anticipates variability without lowering intellectual demand. The learning goal remains common but it is the support that flexes.

What has replaced differentiation, then, is not indifference to individual need, but a clearer distinction between task and support.

The intellectual demand is shared. What adapts is the teaching. Explanation. Questioning. Modelling. Scaffolding. Feedback. Flexible grouping. Support is provided in response to what pupils show, rather than pre-loaded into tasks that predetermine what they can do. The learning intention remains common, but the route towards mastery can vary.

This is not an argument against meeting specific additional needs. Pupils with SEND or EAL may require carefully considered adjustments. But lowering conceptual demand as a default mechanism is neither equitable nor effective.

This links directly to Myatt’s argument about challenge.

We are, in many ways, a challenge-seeking species. We willingly struggle with puzzles and problems when the conditions are right. The effort is purposeful. Mistakes are part of the process with the reward often being understanding. In classrooms, challenge functions in a similar way. When pupils are trusted with demanding material and supported well, struggle is more likely to be experienced as growth rather than as failure.

The mistake was treating challenge as enrichment or extension and making it something additional, reserved and special for the more able or fastest few. Myatt argues that this is backwards and that challenge is not an add-on but an entitlement.

If we are serious about narrowing gaps, we cannot offer fundamentally different curricular diets as a routine solution. Apart from pupils with significant and very specific additional needs, the material should be demanding for all. What differs is how we secure access to it.

So differentiation receded as the profession became more precise about curriculum entitlement, coherence and challenge. It was not so much discarded as outgrown.

• Where are our Heads of Year going to be next year?

• Who follows their cohort?

• Who is rotating back down, and how far?

It’s worth saying this up front, the Head of Year is one of the best, and often the hardest, jobs in a school. It is right at the intersection of behaviour, attendance, safeguarding, parent communication and student wellbeing, while also leading large numbers of adults who signed up to teach maths, chemistry or economics, not PSHE. It is emotionally demanding, operationally messy and, when it is done well, the graft is largely invisible. When systems wobble, Heads of Year are the ones holding things together, and they are often the first person teachers look to for help. Which is why how we design the role, and where we position it within the school’s structure, matters so much.

Our annual debate usually starts as logistics and quickly becomes something else. Preferences. Relationships. What people enjoy. What they feel confident doing. Expertise. What they would rather not give up.

What rarely features properly is a clear sense of what we are trying to optimise for.

This debate isn’t new. In 1987, Lesley Bulman was asking the same question in “Heads of Year - Rotating or Static?” Even then, the tension was clear: relational continuity versus phase expertise. Nearly forty years later, we are still circling the same trade-off.

What has changed is our understanding of how schools improve.

There is no modern empirical study comparing static and rotating Heads of Year (that I can find). But when you step back and look at the broader evidence on school effectiveness and implementation, the themes are consistent, even if they don’t give us a neat structural answer.

What is shown to drive impact

There is no substantial body of peer-reviewed research that directly compares static and rotating Heads of Year and measures their impact on attainment, attendance or wellbeing. The structure itself is rarely the independent variable in formal studies.

What does exist is adjacent research in three areas.

1, school connectedness. Studies consistently show that students who feel known, supported and understood by adults in school are more likely to engage and achieve. That work speaks to the value of continuity and relational trust. Whilst it does not prescribe a specific pastoral structure, it does suggest that stable adult relationships, particularly for vulnerable students, are protective.

This could support arguments for continuity in key transition years, although it does not determine how that continuity should be structured.

2, Leadership and system quality. Research on school leadership repeatedly finds that impact is mediated through staff consistency, clarity of expectations and the quality of teaching. Leadership influences outcomes indirectly, by shaping adult behaviour and strengthening systems rather than through structural configuration alone.

If rotating Heads of Year disrupts consistency, resets expertise and weakens system coherence, then it is likely to dilute leadership impact.

If static or phase-based models strengthen consistency, embed expertise and stabilise expectations, then they are more aligned with what leadership research says drives improvement.

3, Implementation and organisational coherence. Guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation, James Mannion and wider implementation research emphasises that sustained improvement depends on clarity, consistency and embedding practice in systems rather than relying on individual champions.

What it does not show is that one structural configuration of Heads of Year reliably outperforms another.

The debate, then, is not empirically settled. It is contextual and strategic. In the absence of clear comparative evidence, schools are forced to make deliberate decisions about what they are trying to optimise for.

In the wider literature, structural configuration is rarely treated as a primary driver of improvement. Consistency of adult practice and organisational coherence are far more frequently associated with improved outcomes.

Guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation, particularly around behaviour and implementation, consistently stresses that impact comes from clear whole-school approaches and embedding practice in systems rather than relying on individual champions. OECD system reviews point in a similar direction: coherence and consistency matter.

From that perspective, whether a Head of Year follows a cohort is secondary to whether the pastoral system itself is stable and coherent.

Continuity strengthens relationships. It does not automatically strengthen systems.

Following a cohort can strengthen trust, reduce friction and make support feel more personal. That has value. But on its own, it does not move outcomes at scale.

The role confusion that underpins the debate

A few years ago, during a development day, a group of Heads of Year were asked what they loved most about the role. Several talked about working directly with students. The relationships. Supporting young people through difficult moments.

All of that matters. But it was also revealing.

Because those things describe the role of a tutor.

For most students, the tutor is the most important adult in school. Tutors see students daily. They know families. They notice changes early. They are the constant that follows the student.

That is where relational continuity is most powerful.

A Head of Year role is different. It is a leadership post. Its priority is not to be the closest adult to the student, but to lead and develop the adults who deliver the pastoral programme. To create consistency. To ensure standards are held. To make sure systems work when pressure rises.

That shows up most clearly in behaviour and safeguarding.

Effective Heads of Year trust and empower their team. They advise and support, but only step in directly as behaviours escalate, rather than intervening too early and undermining the tutor. Issues confined to one subject or one faculty should be pushed back for those teams to own. Patterns that cut across multiple areas are coordinated and addressed. Parents are handled calmly and consistently. Child protection concerns are identified early, logged properly and passed on through the correct channels.

When that leadership function is clear, tutors feel supported rather than bypassed. Subject teams retain responsibility rather than offloading, and behaviour systems remain intact.

When it isn’t, Heads of Year drift towards being super-tutors. Everything flows upwards. Casework expands. Leadership time disappears into firefighting. Systems start to depend on individuals rather than structure.

And that brings us back to movement.

Why cohort-following can weaken systems over time

Cohort-following concentrates knowledge in individuals rather than embedding it in the system.

Expertise, judgement and context travel with the person. When they rotate off, much of that resets. The next leader is learning the year group again from scratch. Over time, this slows cumulative improvement.

Static or phase-based elements allow expertise to build within a stage. Leaders see the same developmental patterns repeatedly. Thresholds sharpen. Processes tighten. Decisions become more consistent because they are informed by experience rather than novelty.

This is not about commitment. It is about organisational learning.

There is also a structural cost we rarely name.

Heads of Year often want to stay with their cohort. That is understandable. But when individual preference drives design, the system absorbs the consequence. Leaders arrive into high-stakes years as novices and institutional knowledge thins.

Pastoral structures exist to serve students first.

Where the tension sharpens: Years 11 and 12

The Year 11 to Year 12 transition makes the trade-off visible.

Year 11 is technically complex. Exams. Post-16 pathways. Leavers’ processes. High parental anxiety. Tight timelines. Heads of Year who remain in Year 11 build deep expertise. Systems improve year on year.

Year 12 brings a different challenge. Students adjust to new academic expectations and greater independence. There is a genuine case for familiarity here, particularly for vulnerable students.

But Sixth Form is not simply Year 11 with older students. It has distinct processes: UCAS timelines, work experience, subject combinations, retention risk and a very different level of autonomy. Phase knowledge matters.

Students also grow and change. A fresh start with a new leader can sometimes be beneficial. It allows expectations to reset and reduces the risk of assumptions forming too early. A Head of Year who has worked with a cohort for several years may, however unintentionally, anticipate certain patterns of behaviour. That can shape responses before the student has had the chance to redefine themselves.

Many schools acknowledge this by maintaining a static Head of Sixth Form, even if Heads of Year rotate within it. That is a structural recognition that expertise at key stages has value.

You cannot fully optimise both relational reassurance and phase mastery with the same design.

Why this isn’t a dichotomy

The binary feels increasingly unhelpful.

A more deliberate model would treat Heads of Year as phase leaders rather than cohort owners.

A stable group across KS3, alongside stable groups across KS4 and KS5.

Not tied rigidly to a single year group, but deeply familiar with the phase. Over time, specialism develops: attendance, behaviour, transitions, curriculum alignment.

This provides stability without rigidity.

Expertise stays within the key stage. Relationships remain stable because tutors are the consistent presence. Knowledge does not walk up and down the school each year.

It also reframes the debate.

The question becomes less about “who wants to follow their cohort?” and more about “what does this phase need most?”

Where I’m at

This cannot be allowed to become sentimental. It has to remain strategic.

If your school’s priority is:

• consistency

• equity

• cumulative system improvement

• leadership expertise that compounds

Then static or phase-based elements probably make the most sense.

If your context includes:

• high levels of vulnerability

• unstable tutor or staffing systems

• inconsistent behaviour routines

Then greater continuity at cohort level may be justified.

Most schools will need elements of both. The mistake is treating annual rotation as neutral.

The better question becomes: where does expertise matter most to us, and where do the gains from continuity genuinely outweigh the strength of our systems?

Get an honest answer to that question and the right structure for your school becomes much clearer.

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Sources

Bulman, L. (1987). Heads of Year – Rotating or Static?

Education Endowment Foundation (2019). Implementation Guidance Report. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/implementation

Education Endowment Foundation (2019). Improving Behaviour in Schools. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/behaviour

Leithwood, K. et al. (2004). How Leadership Influences Student Learning. Wallace Foundation. https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/pages/how-leadership-influences-student-learning.aspx

Blum, R. & Libbey, H. (2004). School connectedness – Strengthening health and education outcomes for teenagers. Journal of School Health.

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When something is not working, the diagnosis is often relational. Are the relationships weak? Is connection missing? Do students feel known? And the solution offered is usually the same. Build rapport. Invest time. Show you care. I’ve even heard it said that you need to build relationships and get buy-in from students SO that you can teach them.

It sounds right, and humane. But it is also the wrong way round. Excellent teaching is not, and should never be the reward of good relationships. Great teaching is the cause of them. I wrote recently about warm demanders - high care paired with high expectations, with care underneath insistence. The idea and research around it supports this. Warm demanding is not about being nice first and rigorous later. It is about rigour with care.

When I think back to my own school days, everyone’s favourite teachers were never the ones who prioritised being popular or having a laugh with the students. Those teachers might be great in the moment, but they were not respected. The teachers who were respected, and the most trusted and valued were often also described as the ‘strictest’. You knew where you stood; boundaries were clear. Their room felt safe, something pretty rare at the all boys school I went to in the early 90s. Those teachers were warm demanders, not that they would have ever used that language back then.

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Doug Lemov is practical on this in Teach Like a Champion 3.0. He sets out five guiding principles, mental models, for how learning works to help teachers apply the techniques in his book. The fifth is what I’m talking about here. “Teaching well is relationship building”. Relationships are built through what happens in the classroom, not as a prerequisite to it.

Lemov challenges that familiar, well intentioned line: Students will not care what you say until they know that you care. He never argues against care but does challenge the sequence in which care is shown, and the priorities in the classroom in how relationships are built.

His position: Students trust you because learning reliably happens for them in your room.

This aligns with what we know about the science of learning. Learning requires attention, clarity, retrieval, feedback and a sense of safety. None of those are produced by performative warmth or by actively trying to build the relationship in a classroom. They are produced by structure, clarity and competence. When students experience success through their own effort, trust follows. When effort leads nowhere, no amount of friendliness or warmth compensates.

Teach Like a Champion is practical and clear. Relationships are built by applying the techniques within the book, which make you a better teacher. Lemov notes that earlier editions were criticised for lacking a chapter on relationships, as if that absence implied he did not think they mattered. He responds by suggesting the whole book is about relationships. I agree. None of the techniques are labelled explicitly as being for relationship building, but many create the conditions in which trust forms quickly to allow relationships to form, grow and strengthen.

Here are a few TLAC techniques and how I see them do the job of building relationships:

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When classrooms are orderly, predictable and academically purposeful, students feel safe. Not just socially safe, but intellectually safe. They can attempt answers. They can be wrong. They can improve. That safety is the foundation of trust, and it is where relationships begin and develop.

Success is critical too. When students experience progress, when they can see themselves getting better, they infer something important: this teacher can help me learn. My effort is worth something here. This builds credibility and trust.

Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction suggest that during guided practice, students should be successful around 80% of the time before a teacher moves on. The logic here is intended as instructional rather than motivational. If success is much lower, the material is likely too complex or insufficiently modelled, increasing the risk that errors become embedded. If success is much higher, the work may not be demanding enough to extend understanding. Around 80% therefore signals an appropriate level of challenge… demanding enough to require thinking, but successful enough to consolidate learning and build confidence before independent practice.

When students experience this level of structured success over time, they are more willing to participate, attempt answers and take academic risks. This contributes to a classroom climate in which challenge feels predictable rather than threatening. Gradually, instructional credibility develops. Students are more likely to accept difficulty when prior experience suggests that modelling, scaffolding and checking for understanding will be in place. In this sense, strong classroom relationships are supported by high expectations paired with reliable instructional support.

This is not an argument for indifference, distance or emotional flatness. Students arrive with histories, pressures and vulnerabilities that do not disappear when the lesson starts. In our setting, 121s play an important role. They create time and space to notice patterns, listen carefully and help students make sense of what is happening in and around their learning.

However, these moments are most effective when they sit alongside instructional credibility rather than in place of it. High care without high-quality teaching risks becoming pastoral containment. It may offer reassurance, but it does not reliably build confidence. When learning consistently happens in the classroom, 121s tend to deepen trust rather than compensate for its absence. They circle back to learning rather than substituting for it.

This is also why we ensure our pastoral systems are explicit and deliberate. We use CPOMS to record safeguarding and child protection concerns carefully. We are tightening how we log 121s, general information and behaviour concerns so patterns are visible and support is coordinated rather than anecdotal. We talk deliberately about every student having five trusted adults, so responsibility is distributed rather than concentrated in a single relationship. These systems function as enabling conditions. Their effectiveness still depends on the quality of day-to-day instruction.

Alongside this sits an expectation of academic care. Knowing students, noticing patterns, following up and holding the line on learning signal care through instruction rather than around it. A previous strategic focus on belonging moved us forward. The next phase is to ensure that belonging is secured through successful learning itself.

So, the effort towards developing relationships and ensuring students are known is not a separate programme. It emerges from teaching that is clear, structured and responsive. Not primarily through corridor conversations or personal disclosure, but through remembered answers, referenced mistakes and noticed improvement.

Belonging alone does not reliably produce learning. Successful learning experiences often precede and strengthen a sense of belonging. When relationship building is prioritised ahead of secure routines, clear explanation, modelling, practice and feedback, students may feel comfortable but not competent. That comfort is fragile when work becomes demanding. Anxiety increases when there is no experience of success to anchor confidence.

Teaching well, therefore, has to be the starting point. The most relational act a teacher can perform is to run a classroom where learning happens deliberately, every day. Everything else follows.

I recently read the flashcards ebook by Kate Jones, and it is well worth attention. It has prompted me to think about bringing flashcards back more formally. What stands out is the insistence on precision, effort and discipline, and the way flashcards are grounded in what we know about memory, retrieval and learning, rather than being framed as a last-minute revision technique to wheel out before a test or exam.

The guide is here and is worth your time:

Familiarity does not equal learning

One of the most damaging illusions in learning is mistaking familiarity for understanding and assuming that recognition equals knowledge that can be reliably recalled.

When students reread notes, flick through a textbook or look back over worksheets, they often experience a sense of recognition. That recognition brings confidence, and that confidence is easily misinterpreted as learning. The problem is that familiarity tells us very little about whether information can be retrieved when it actually matters, without support, under pressure.

Daniel Willingham’s line that “memory is the residue of thought” is a useful starting point. The claim is not that thinking guarantees remembering, but that what we attend to and mentally process is far more likely to be remembered than what we simply encounter or reread.

Questioning matters because it directs attention and forces mental activity. When students are asked to retrieve information, they have to think about it in a particular way. Over time, there is a clear relationship between how often something is retrieved and how accessible it becomes later.

This is what the testing effect captures. Actively recalling information through questions or low-stakes testing tends to produce better long-term retention than rereading or restudying the same material. The benefit comes from the act of retrieval itself, not from feedback alone, although feedback clearly plays an important supporting role.

Whilst I only came across this body of work during the evidence-based shift of the mid-2010s, the idea itself is not new. Early experimental work by Edwina Abbott in 1906 identified what we would now recognise as the testing effect. More recently, a substantial body of research, including the work of Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, has demonstrated that retrieval practice improves later recall across a wide range of contexts.

This aligns closely with Robert Bjork’s work on desirable difficulties. Retrieval is often harder than rereading, and that difficulty is part of why it works. When retrieval requires effort, learning tends to be more durable. The struggle matters because effortful retrieval changes how knowledge is organised and accessed in memory. Pulling information out, rather than seeing it again, makes it more likely to be retrievable in the future.

Getting it wrong can help too

We also know that making errors can support learning, largely because the friction they create makes later recall more robust. There is emerging evidence suggesting that deliberately generating errors and then correcting them can have a similar impact on learning to retrieval practice itself.

This only works under specific conditions. Paul Kirschner is clear that deliberate erring comes after instruction, not before. Students need to already know the correct answer for an error to be meaningful. Used carefully, this might involve asking students to generate a believable but incorrect answer and then correct it, or working with errors provided for discussion.

Crucially, students need to understand why this kind of effort matters. Without that framing, many will avoid strategies that feel harder, even when those strategies lead to better long-term learning. Once again, it comes back to struggle. The very thing we are inclined to avoid is often the thing that helps learning stick.

Back to flashcards

I see flashcards as a practical, low-cost way of harnessing these cognitive mechanisms. Used properly, they allow teachers and students to move beyond revision and use retrieval proactively throughout the learning process. Once the ‘how’ is understood, students can work with them independently and with far greater effect.

Used badly, flashcards reinforce the familiarity trap. Flip, glance, nod, move on. Students feel productive, but learning barely shifts.

Used properly, flashcards remove the safety net. The term or question is visible. The answer is hidden. The student has to commit before checking. That moment of effort is where deeper learning takes place. This works particularly well with a partner who insists on an answer rather than a shrug, or when students commit an answer to paper before checking it later.

As frustrating as it can be, students need to understand that learning should feel like a struggle. Not confusion or chaos, but genuine, deliberate effort. If retrieval feels smooth and comfortable, it is probably doing less than we hope. When it feels slow, exposes gaps and forces thinking, it is far more likely to be available later.

Flashcards as a curriculum tool, not just revision

One of the strengths of Kate Jones’ ebook is that flashcards are treated as a retrieval tool embedded in teaching, not simply something students do when exams are looming.

How they are built is important. The guide is clear that effective flashcards require:

• one idea per card

• precise, unambiguous language

• clear prompts

• answers that can be judged as right or wrong

• answers shouldn’t be too hard or to easy

• they shouldn’t be used to just read!

• making your own can lead to better recall than pre-made cards

Vague or overloaded cards invite misconceptions and false confidence. This aligns closely with the evidence base. Retrieval is not an optional extra and should be part of effective teaching.

Flashcards can be used to support spacing. Flashcards that appear once and then disappear are of limited value. Forgetting, counterintuitive as it sounds, is a condition for learning. When cards return over time, retrieval becomes harder, and that difficulty strengthens memory while slowing the next phase of forgetting. Flashcards can also be used for interleaving, but only when this is done deliberately. Random shuffling is not interleaving. Interleaving works when students must discriminate between similar ideas or procedures. That depends on curriculum sequencing and teacher guidance, not just on the cards themselves.

Implementation is the hard part

This is where James Mannion’s work on implementation is useful. The curriculum is crowded as a standard, with lesson time always tight, and teaching content can already feel like a race. Adding flashcards without removing or reducing something else simply increases workload (for teachers and students) and is unlikely to be very helpful.

In recent years, I have shared guidance on how to use flashcards in whole-year group revision sessions, but have given relatively little class time to building them properly in my own lessons. It is encouraging when students says they have tried the approach and found it useful, but that is not the same as systematic implementation. But since reading more about them, I have been thinking about how.

If flashcards are to be implemented well, it is worth asking a few key questions first, to see if there’s much utility in bringing them in deliberately:

• what currently takes time but has less impact than well-designed retrieval?

• where could flashcards replace an existing activity rather than sit alongside it?

• how will retrieval be revisited over time, not just bolted on at the end?

• how will students be taught this process early so cramming becomes unnecessary,

• can the process be sustainable and fully independent?

Teaching the process early in necessary. When students learn how to retrieve properly from the start, revision becomes cumulative rather than frantic. That does require time in class, and that is not easy when content pressure is high. The alternative is hoping learning will somehow stick on its own.

Flashcards demand discipline, modelling and clarity. What they offer in return is the potential for far more reliable, independent learning.

Are flashcards worth the effort?

Flashcards are nothing new. They are not clever or innovative. They can be demanding in quiet, unglamorous ways that work in making learning stick

Used with precision, they expose weak curriculum knowledge, lazy revision habits and the false comfort of familiarity. They also give students a way to practise learning independently that research suggests does actually work.

Kate’s ebook is a timely reminder of an underused tool underpinned by solid evidence. I am now thinking about seeing if flashcards are being used across my school and teams. The question, as always, is not whether something works, but if we think it is worth implementing, what do we stop doing to make space?

Flashcards only earn their place when they make learning harder in the right ways. When they do, they can be one of the most honest tools we have.

When learning stalls or behaviour slips, it often starts at the door. Students arrive slowly. Expectations are not explicit. The first task is late, or treated as optional. Sometimes the lesson might even wait for those who have not yet arrived.

The start becomes reactive rather than intentional. Instructions are repeated. Time is lost. Learning does not begin cleanly, setting the rest of the lesson up for drift.

When we looked across the school at raising standards and improving teaching and learning, lesson starts kept resurfacing. Through drop-ins, staff conversations, and the same issues raised repeatedly, the pattern was consistent. Late arrivals disrupted learning. Teachers were resetting rooms before teaching had begun. There was no explicit approach to handling issues and little consistency within teams, let alone across departments. It became clear that the most sensible place to begin was the start.

We had already been working to tighten our lates procedures, but it was obvious the issue was bigger than just a bit of tardiness. It was more about teaching and learning, and culture.

So we chose to focus on lesson starts, armed with Doug Lemov’s Technique 46: Strong Starts and the impact was better than expected. We kept it simple:

• Teacher at the door, early. Greeting students and controlling the threshold, so checking uniform and equipment as part of entry, not as a mid-lesson interruption.

• Students to know exactly what to do on arrival. Seating plans followed. Silence where required. Instructions short and consistent.

• Work waiting. A tight Do Now linked to prior learning (usual retrieval practise), doable without support, with answers ready for self-checking within five or six minutes.

• Teachers circulating immediately and checking learning during those first few minutes.

We backed this with CPD, shared examples, and made the standard and steps explicit in the playbook I was curating, so very little was left to interpretation.

The improvement was quick with lessons starting sooner and corridors felt calmer. Teachers were spending less time resetting and reported more time teaching.

Feedback from teachers and leaders was consistently positive. What stood out was that the impact went beyond lesson starts. Many staff commented that once the opening of the lesson was tight and predictable, they began thinking more carefully about what came next. This meant that explanations improved, transitions tightened and the rest of the lesson generally benefited. After a tight, deliberate start, it made sense to keep that standard up for the rest of the lesson.

I see this as a genuinely successful piece of work and one I am proud of. More importantly, it shaped much of what followed. It reinforced for me what effective implementation actually looks like in practice, not as theory.

We started with a real problem and resisted the urge to jump to solutions. The issue had already surfaced clearly through drop-ins, staff conversations and emerging patterns across the previous academic year. Behaviour at lesson starts was inconsistent. Expectations were unclear. Practice varied within teams and even more so across departments.

Timing mattered. Beginning at the start of the academic year gave us the necessary space to work deliberately. Leaders first. Then the full staff body through INSET. Expectations were explicit, shared and reinforced. There was also a simple logic to the focus. If we want to improve teaching, the most obvious place to begin is where learning begins.

By committing to one priority and pursuing it relentlessly across all departments, we avoided dilution. The message was communicated clearly before implementation, reinforced during rollout and sustained afterwards. That consistency created a genuine sense of collective effort rather than another initiative to endure. Even now, long after the initial rollout, lesson drop-ins by SLT and middle leaders remain tightly focused on this specific phase of the lesson. The practice has stuck, which is the real test.

It also helped re-centre the conversation on teaching and learning through behaviour. We have excellent students, which can create the false assumption that behaviour does not require active management. Even highly capable students benefit from precise instruction, explicit expectations and dependable routines that remove uncertainty from learning.

Strong starts are now planned, practised and protected. With that embedded, we moved on to Focused Finishes as the logical next step, tightening learning further and clearly bookending lessons.

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It is worth defining what we usually mean by strict. It is generally taken to mean harsh, inflexible, punitive and joyless. Rules for their own sake. Compliance over understanding. Authority that is enforced through fear, volume or positional power. That is not what I recognise in strong teaching and learning cultures, and it is not what I recognised in the conversation in this podcast.

What I see instead is what we call the warm demander.

The term itself comes from the work of educational psychologist Judith Kleinfeld in the 1970s, studying teachers who were most effective with Indigenous students in Alaska. Her insight was pretty simple yet powerful. The teachers who made the biggest difference were neither permissive nor authoritarian. They were warm and demanding at the same time. High expectations, held within strong relationships.

That idea surfaced in our school when we explored and implemented Social Emotional Learning a few years ago. I came across it again more recently whilst researching behaviour. The conclusion is consistent. Students do best when adults care enough to insist.

A warm demander holds high standards and does not apologise for them. They care deeply about students and therefore insist on behaviours that make learning possible. They are calm, predictable, and consistent. They explain the why, but they do not negotiate the whether. Warmth without demand drifts. Demand without warmth fractures trust. The balance is deliberate.

As well as theory, it has to live in routines, systems and in the agency we give teachers to apply them.

Take punctuality. It is not an admin issue. It is a learning habit. When students arrive late, learning is disrupted. So we have become explicit now:

• Two lates trigger a catch-up

• Three or more lates lead to an after-school detention

An ‘If this, then that…’ approach, like speed cameras - you speed, you get a ticket. You’re late twice (or more), there is a consequence.

We have applied the same approach to wearing ID tags, a safeguarding issue we needed to fix. We are clear that they matter because they signal belonging, safety and respect. Forgetting or losing one has a consequence:

• First forgotten ID tag is a 10-minute, same-day detention

• Each subsequent incident escalates by 10 minutes

• The fourth in a term results in parents being brought in

Clear systems matter. But who holds them matters more.

For a period, we had leaned heavily on faceless processes and automated emails. They were the first step in moving the needle on undesirable behaviours and they did work. Efficient, yes. Human, less so. So, we have deliberately moved more of this work back into the hands of tutors and teachers. The system provides the structure. The adults provide the relationship.

A simple question like, “What happened to make you late?” can open a dialogue. It gives the student space to explain and the adult a chance to listen. The interaction builds trust and is far more likely to lead to behaviour change, or the necessary understanding. The expectation remains firm, but it is delivered by someone who knows the student and has the ability to respond with both judgement and care.

This is teacher agency in practice. Teachers are not bypassed by systems. They are supported by them. The system removes ambiguity and protects consistency, allowing teachers to focus on care, coaching and follow-through and follow-up.

Routines need to be taught, rehearsed and protected. Attendance and punctuality are core conditions for teaching and learning. Corrections need to be calm and consistent. Certainty matters more than severity. Follow-through does need to be relentless (but always human) if it is to work. And it does appear to be working for us.

Care, in this model, is not indulgence. Care is insisting on the standard because you believe the student can meet it. Care is holding the line, every time, so no one is guessing where it sits. There will always be exceptions, and this is where teacher judgement, agency, professionalism and care are paramount. Expectations remain high, and students are supported to meet them. And, in my experience, they do want to.

Behaviour, teaching and learning, and care are not separate domains. Behaviour systems exist to protect learning. Attendance is a curriculum issue because knowledge builds over time and absence creates gaps that compound. Punctuality is culture made visible. Consistency is a form of kindness. Poor habits need to be broken, and we have to care enough to help students become better for themselves and for their futures.

So I don’t think enforcing rules is necessarily strict, it is just being a warm demander.

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Walking into a meeting hoping to convince leaders, or your team, of a course of action is usually too late.

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Even with a solid slide deck or a tight agenda shared in advance, people often arrive cold. They probably haven’t read it. They feel ambushed. They probably dig in because they have not had any real time to think. The room might turn to debate rather than making a decision. Or worse, you end up mandating, begging, bribing, or leaning on authority - “the board wants this, it needs to happen”.

I have been there. Years ago, a Deputy Head tried to convince me and a group of Middle Leaders to take on the responsibility for leading the House system. There was enthusiasm and even the House cup filled with sweets as an incentive. It still went nowhere.

Pre-wiring fixes that.

It means doing the thinking work before the meeting, not inside it.

Done well, pre-wiring can help in three ways:

1. You build early support

2. You identify who might block progress and why

3. You realise an idea is a non-starter and avoid the meeting/item altogether - Pre-wiring helped me realise it was important to delay the launch of a new tool until Term 2

I first came across pre-wiring through the Manager Tools podcast. I see it less as a tactic and more as disciplined leadership - the work you do with people beforehand so nothing important is a surprise in the room.

For me, the aim is simple. I want to know how people are likely to react before the meeting starts. Not so I can win, but so the meeting can move forward rather than sideways, or not happen at all.

What pre-wiring does:

• Removes surprises. I already have a sense of where people stand

• Builds buy-in. Early conversations turn critics into contributors

• Surfaces roadblocks. People are far more honest one-to-one

• Shortens meetings. The thinking happens beforehand so the meeting is about deciding, not debating

How I do it

• I identify who really matters. Not everyone in the room, but those whose support or resistance will shape the outcome

• I have short, informal conversations. I frame them as sense-checking rather than selling

• I tailor the message. Different people care about different things and pretending otherwise is naive

• I listen properly. If someone raises a valid objection, I adjust the plan or address it openly. I have even asked people to raise concerns in the meeting so they are dealt with head-on. Knowing they were coming meant not being blindsided

I usually follow up briefly so people can see their input landed.

There are different versions I use regularly:

• A boss pre-wire so nothing goes upstairs cold and there is clarity about what will be discussed and what is likely to be decided has already got approval

• A peer pre-wire to build alignment and avoid being isolated in the room

• A team pre-wire so public messages are aligned. This is critical in protecting those I line-manage. I often do a quick run-through of their meetings to ensure what they present will land with their teams. I’ll even send them to check in with one or two potential blockers.

• Testing ideas with participants before training sessions or meetings I am leading

Done badly, it looks like politics. Machiavellian manipulation, which is not the intent.

Done well, it respects people’s thinking and time. It makes meetings tighter, calmer, and more productive.

As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a moulder of consensus.”

By the time we meet, the decision should not be new. Only the confirmation should be.

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I remember hearing Sam Harris argue that if you had the exact same genes and environment as Adolf Hitler, you would have acted exactly as he did. It is an uncomfortable thought, but a useful one. It suggests that beliefs and behaviour are shaped far more by prior conditions than by independent choice. I suppose no one goes out with a decision to actually believe something they currently don’t.

Therefore, changing your mind is more of an identity shift than a deliberate intellectual act.

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I have always liked John Maynard Keynes’ line, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”. I know I’ve changed my mind on a few things over the last year or two. I have definitely had some clear shifts in how I think about life, my work and about leadership in particular. Some of these changes were forced by the experiences of doing my job. Others arrived more quietly through studying, reading and watching what actually works.

Here are ten things I have relatively recently changed my mind on, in a professional capacity:

1. Leadership is about restraint

2. Meetings are not where thinking should happen

3. Authority does not come from position

4. Being busy is not evidence of impact

5. Pushing harder does not raise standards

6. Coaching scales better than telling

7. Not everything needs fixing

8. Consistency beats charisma

9. Career progression is not meritocratic

10. Changing your mind is not weakness
    
    

1. Leadership is about restraint

I used to believe leaders were the ones who came up with the ideas. Or at least that leadership meant seeing things clearly and articulating them well. If the idea was strong and the logic sound, alignment would follow. When it did not, I assumed others needed more convincing. I remember feeling frustrated when something did not land.

I am reminded of Mandela’s description of his father, the chief. He listened to everyone first and always spoke last. Others talked themselves into clarity while he absorbed the full picture. When he finally spoke, it carried weight because it was informed, measured and decisive.

Leadership, I have learned, is not about intellectual dominance. It is about restraint. The clearest leader in the room is often the one who says the least, or speaks last.

2. Meetings are not where thinking should happen

I used to believe meetings were the place where good leadership would be on display. Live debate, sharp thinking, decisions made in the room. If something stalled, it meant the discussion had not gone far enough, and maybe needed to be returned to another day.

I have changed my mind. Most meetings fail before they begin. People arrive cold, defensive or underprepared. Positions harden in public. What looks like thinking is often just performance. The louder voices dominate, not the best judgement.

I now believe the real work happens before the meeting. Pre-wiring matters. Quiet conversations, drafts shared early, pressure-tested thinking done one-to-one. By the time people enter the room, the decision should already be clear. The meeting is the final click, not the workshop.

3. Authority does not come from position

It is probably normal to assume authority comes with the job. If you have the title, are fair, and generally know what you are doing, people will follow.

That has not been my experience. Authority is not something you are given. It is something people allow you to have. It builds slowly through patterns. Do you show up? Do you follow through? Are you predictable in the right ways?

The leaders I see with the most trust now are rarely the loudest or most senior. They are the ones whose word carries weight because it usually turns out to be true.

4. Being busy is not evidence of impact

Like most, our school is busy. I am often too busy. For a long time, I took that as a sign I was making progress. A full calendar, constant movement, endless emails, always being needed. It felt like contribution.

I do not see it that way anymore. Busyness is a poor proxy for value. Activity can be a form of avoidance. Noise often hides the fact that priorities are not clear.

Impact comes from leverage. Fewer actions, chosen deliberately and followed through properly. Knowing what to stop before you start matters. Clear systems, solid implementation and restraint matter. Real leadership often looks quieter than I once expected it to.

5. Pushing harder does not raise standards

I used to believe standards rose through pressure. Tight deadlines, firmer messages, more follow-up. If something mattered, it needed more attention.

I see now that pressure without clarity creates compliance, not excellence. It narrows thinking and drains energy. More importantly, it assumes poor intent, which is rarely the case.

Standards rise when expectations are clear, routines are shared and relationships are strong. Calm insistence, held consistently, does more than pressure ever could.

6. Coaching scales better than telling

I still default to advice more often than I would like. It is quicker and it feels helpful. I know the answer, I solve the problem and move on.

I have changed my mind about what that creates. Telling builds dependence. Coaching, through questions and pause, builds judgement. One creates speed in the moment. The other scales.

Asking better questions takes longer upfront but pays back later. Fewer bottlenecks. Stronger leadership around you. Less coming back to your desk. I believe this, even though I am still some distance from fully living it and often kick myself for having solved an issue for someone.

7. Not everything needs fixing

Earlier in my senior career, I intervened everywhere. Gaps, missing or broken systems, inconsistencies, rough edges. I felt responsible for all of it, often because it was pointed out to me by others (see point 6!).

I am more selective now. Some things resolve themselves with time. Some things belong to others. Some things are not worth the cost of intervention.

Attention is finite. Leadership is as much about what you leave alone as what you step into. This has been a hard lesson, but an important part of my growth.

8. Consistency beats charisma

I used to admire charismatic leaders and if I am honest, tried to be one. Big presence, strong delivery, rooms that lifted when they spoke.

Over time, I have come to value something else more. Consistency. The leader who shows up in the same way on a quiet Tuesday as they do on a big day or in a crisis.

Presence and performance still matter. They are part of the job. But they are only respected when they sit on top of consistency. Without that, they do not last.

9. Career progression is not meritocratic

Many of us believe good work will be noticed. That performance alone will be enough to progress.

That is still partly true, but I no longer fully believe it. Progression also depends on timing, narrative, fit, sponsorship and context. Sometimes you are excellent at the wrong moment.

This is not cynical. It is realistic. Understanding the system is part of leadership, not a betrayal of it.

10. Changing your mind is not weakness

I used to defend past decisions. Admitting a shift felt like inconsistency or a loss of credibility. My wife would say I still do this outside of work.

I see it differently now. Changing your mind in response to better information is a leadership skill. Stubbornness dressed up as conviction helps no one.

I am less certain than I used to be, and that feels like progress.

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That’s why Principals, Headteachers, managers and CEOs get paid more. Not because they are working harder minute by minute, but because schools and organisations need people prepared to cut through ambiguity and choose a direction. When things are unclear, people look up the hierarchy for someone to make the call.

The word decision comes from the Latin decidere, meaning to cut off. To decide is therefore to remove alternatives. To close paths and commit. That is why decisions feel heavy. You are not just choosing one option, you are actively rejecting others, and that can be uncomfortable.

Whilst often used interchangeably, there is a useful distinction between choosing and deciding. Choosing is the act of selecting one option from those available, while deciding involves reaching a final conclusion after consideration and evaluation. Decisions tend to be less reversible than choices. You might choose salted caramel ice cream, but you decide to change jobs.

As heavy as decisions can be, there is something freeing in deciding too. Endless options create noise, but decisions create focus. Progress can really happen once options are cut away and a direction is chosen.

For a long time, I assumed that the more decisions you make, the better you become at deciding. Like building a decision muscle. To a point, that is true. Judgement improves with experience. Patterns emerge. Day-to-day decisions become quicker and easier as you recognise what situations tend to lead where. I have reflected before on how often, in my first year as a senior leader, I would pop in to ask my headteacher a question and be met with, “What do you think?”. Being pushed to answer repeatedly forced me to decide, and my confidence in decision-making did grow quickly. It developed me and reduced the number of decisions my boss had to carry.

But that only holds up to a certain point.

As schools move towards the end of term, workload increases as time runs out and extras mount. Safeguarding work also tends to stack up as fatigue, pressure, disrupted routines and looming holidays expose vulnerabilities and prompt more disclosures or behaviours that signal distress. Pressure rises. Sleep drops. You spend those final weeks making more high-stakes calls than usual. This applies across a school, from classroom teachers through to the Head.

By the evening, the simplest decisions become strangely hard.

After a heavy week like that, I found myself staring at a menu with no idea what to order. No preference. No instinct. Completely blank. Tired, hungry and being asked to hurry up, I eventually ordered the same thing I always order.

Decision fatigue is not about weakness or poor organisation. It is about finite cognitive bandwidth. The same cognitive load we readily consider when thinking about student learning applies here too. When that bandwidth is depleted, decisions slow, judgement deteriorates and, sometimes, the ability to choose stops altogether.

Research on decision-making under cognitive load points to two common failure patterns: fatigue and paralysis.

Fatigue is when energy is low and decisions still happen, but quality drops. People default, rush and choose what is easiest, quickest or most familiar rather than what is optimal.

Paralysis is when decisions are delayed or avoided altogether. This often shows up as over-analysis, excessive information-seeking or waiting for one more piece of data that never materially changes the decision.

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They can look different, but they often come from the same place: depleted capacity. In leadership, both are risky because neither is deliberate and both undermine effectiveness. Reducing avoidable cognitive load is why leaders such as Obama, Jobs and Zuckerberg simplified routine decisions like what to wear each day.

Fatigue does not explain everything, though.

Emotional load plays a significant role. Safeguarding, conflict and responsibility draw heavily on emotional regulation, not just cognition. Two leaders can make the same number of decisions, but emotionally weighted ones drain capacity far faster.

Tolerance for uncertainty matters too. Some paralysis is driven less by tiredness and more by discomfort with ambiguity. When clarity is low and stakes are high, hesitation can reflect low tolerance for uncertainty rather than depleted energy.

Accountability pressure also shapes behaviour. When consequences are personal, visible or reputational, leaders may delay or avoid decisions even when cognitively fresh. This is not indecision so much as risk management.

The behaviours can look the same. The causes are not.

Recognising which state you are in - fatigue, emotional overload, uncertainty aversion or accountability pressure - is critical. Without that awareness, leaders risk treating the wrong problem or defaulting to inaction when deliberate choice is required.

This is where decision frameworks and mental models become useful.

This idea of judgement under pressure is echoed in a recent Forbes piece on discernment by Vibhas Ratanjee, drawing on the work of decision scientist Gary Klein. The argument is that modern leaders are not short of decisions, they are short of discernment. We reward speed, polish and confidence, often mistaking decisiveness for clarity, while skipping the harder discipline of actually seeing what matters.

Klein’s work on naturalistic decision-making shows that experienced leaders rarely compare options neatly. Instead, they recognise patterns, mentally simulate likely outcomes and move. It can look like intuition, but it is judgement shaped by experience, reflection and consequence. Crucially, not all experience qualifies. Repetition without reflection does not build discernment. It reinforces habit.

That matters, because many leadership environments test performance more than judgement. In-tray exercises, interviews and real-world crises are not about finding the right answer, but about whether you can notice what is relevant, question surface certainty and commit when clarity is partial.

Discernment, in that sense, is not about knowing more. It is about seeing better. And that is what separates fast decisions from wise ones when pressure is high and the cost of being wrong is real.

Many leadership decisions are made under uncertainty. Waiting for clarity is tempting, but clarity rarely arrives. Research on decision paralysis shows that uncertainty elsewhere can create inaction here. Leaders stall not because they lack judgement, but because they want certainty that does not exist.

Strong leaders decide anyway.

Steven Bartlett recently referenced this on Diary of a CEO while interviewing Desmond O’Neill, noting that Obama authorised the Bin Laden raid with roughly 50 percent confidence that Bin Laden was in the building. It reflects how senior decisions are made under uncertainty, where waiting carries its own risk.

O’Neill notes that there is rarely a provably right decision in advance. There is only a decision made with the information available at the time.

That distinction matters. Being right is confirmation whereas being wrong is feedback. Neither defines the quality of the leader. What matters is making the decision and then owning it.

Once you decide, you have to own it. Fully. No hedging. No hiding behind the process. No rewriting the story after the fact. Ownership builds trust even when outcomes disappoint.

Daniel Kahneman’s work on judgement and decision-making shows how stress, cognitive load and noise distort thinking, pushing people towards reactive, surface-level responses rather than considered judgement. Calm matters because it enables pattern recognition rather than panic. It helps separate signal from noise and recognise what a situation is most like, rather than reacting to the loudest detail.

Calm also makes Charlie Munger’s inversion thinking possible. Instead of asking what would make this perfect, ask what would clearly make it worse and rule those paths out first. When capacity is low, that alone can materially improve decision quality.

Desmond O’Neill makes a similar point when speaking with Steven Bartlett. In medicine, decisions are rarely made with certainty. They are made by weighing probabilities, risks and consequences, knowing that delay is itself a decision. Leadership operates in the same way.

Trump is a useful counter-example. Performative certainty without ownership is the opposite of responsible decision-making under uncertainty.

The standard, then, is not about being right in advance but about being responsible in the moment and then owning your decisions after the fact, regardless of them being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

• Make the call.

• Be clear about why.

• Own what follows.

• Review it honestly.

• Adjust without self-protection as the motive.

Two elements often overlooked are timing and narrative. When to decide matters as much as what you decide. Some decisions benefit from pause, consultation and data gathering. Others deteriorate if they wait. Part of leadership judgement is knowing the difference.

Decisions also do not land in a vacuum. I have seen sound decisions in schools fail to gain traction not because they were wrong, but because the rationale was unclear, the framing was weak or the story was left for others to write. Leaders do not just make decisions. They decide when to act and how those decisions are understood. That work often determines whether a decision strengthens trust or quietly undermines it.

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Fast forward a few years, and I’ve done a full 180. Between my MBA, the reality of senior leadership, and now the NPQH, I’ve become a bit of a strategy convert. I used to be operationally focused. In early (and unsuccessful) interviews for senior roles, the feedback was usually: learn to move between the micro and the macro. I see now how central strategy is - not just for businesses, but in leading schools. Understanding strategy and having a strategic toolkit is the difference between living in the weeds and constantly reacting and actually driving your school forward.

A colleague and I will be running a Leadership Pathway soon, taking a deep dive into strategy - change, project management, implementation. The older I get, the more I see that all those frameworks I once thought were pointless are just different ways of thinking things through. Strategy is simply shaping outcomes on purpose rather than by chance. A good one gives you direction and focus. Without it, you drift.

No one really teaches you this stuff in schools (unless you study business or economics). Most leaders have to pick it up later - during a Masters, on NPQs or from a mentor and everyone needs to go through a bit of trial and error.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes running projects. Looking back, I can see where the right approach could have made the work smoother, stickier, more sustainable. I’ve lost count of how many good ideas have faded once the person leading them moved on. This piece pulls together what I’ve learned - the tools, the mindset and the discipline that help turn ideas into something that lasts.

What is strategy?

Strategy is the how. It’s the way you move from where you are to where you want to be. In schools, that means knowing what matters most and keeping that focus alive over time.

At its core, strategy should come back to two things in schools - improving learning and supporting wellbeing. Research (Day et al., 2020; Bennett, 2017; EEF, 2021) points to three levers that make the biggest difference: teacher effectiveness, behaviour and culture, and social and emotional learning. Anything else as a focus means they are all already exceptional, or you might be wasting time, resources and effort looking at developing the wrong things!

But strategy isn’t just about identifying priorities. It’s about communicating them clearly and embedding them so deeply that people feel them in the culture. Every message, meeting and decision either sharpens that focus or blurs it.

I guess a good test of a school’s strategy is how well people stick with it. Does it change every year? It needs steady focus, decisions that stay true to the purpose, and routines that keep everyone pulling in the same direction. Which is where the mission, vision and values come in as guiding forces:

• Mission - why we exist, our purpose

• Vision - where we’re heading, our future aspirations

• Values - our beliefs, how we operate, the principles that guide us

Short-term wins come from the day-to-day graft. Strategy is the bit that builds slowly and compounds over time towards the bigger goal. Without clear anchors, projects feel ad-hoc and the strategy drifts. But when your decisions keep lining up with your mission, the work should last – even when the people change.

Role creep

One thing I know for certain: doing less is always better. It’s one of the biggest traps leaders, especially new ones, fall into. I was the worst... always an ever-expanding list of things to do - and with Parkinson’s Law in play, whatever time I had, the work would fill it. It’s easy to say yes, especially early in your career, keen to impress or chasing a promotion. Resources are always tight and by nature those in education want to help and serve. But role creep – taking on more than the job actually demands – can quickly overburden and burn you out.

Dylan Wiliam captures this perfectly in Leadership for Teacher Learning (2016):

“In my experience, it is hardly ever the case that teachers are doing things that are unproductive. This is why leadership in education is so challenging. The essence of effective leadership is stopping people from doing good things to give them time to do even better things.”

You’d be hard pressed to find a teacher that doesn’t agree with that. Taking on too many initiatives at once is standard for the education sector… but it spreads energy thin. Everyone ends up with bloated to-do lists and working late way, way too often. Piles of marking build up (as it is always the first thing to be delayed) and instead of making meaningful progress, you end up only moving the needle a tiny bit on a few different projects, but nothing really gets done properly.

Strategic Minimalism: less but better

Greg McKeown nails it in Essentialism. His diagram (below) says it all – focus your energy and you move somewhere; spread it thin and you just look busy.

This is where solid strategy, both at whole‑school, departmental and at the individual level is critical. Strategic leadership means being disciplined in what you take on and brave enough to stop things that no longer serve the bigger goal…

Good strategy helps with focus knowing what to pursue and, just as importantly, what to ignore. Having that end goal, a clear vision and then working out exactly what needs to happen to get there. Now it is of course hard to sack everything off and do one thing in a school. But I’ve found, as hard as it might be, that I’m most effective as a leader when I operate with a form of strategic minimalism, and this takes discipline. I reckon that I spent most of my career in education as the “I’ll do it” guy. But over the last few years, I have learnt that you cannot do it all. This means:

• Prioritising what will truly move the needle: what projects are critical and what are unnecessary?

• Saying no more often is hard but “no” is a muscle.

• Keeping the work simple and executable…don’t over complicate: what actions are needed to complete?

I love how Thornhill’s Mr Burton, from Channel 4’s Educating Yorkshire, has simplified pretty much everything into the school’s motto “Be Nice, Work Hard”.

Strategic Models, Tools and Techniques

Thinking about those models and tools that bored me at university…they are what actually enable you to get the work done; bridges to get from where you are to the desired state.

Before starting a project, ask three things:

• What’s the real purpose of this work- development, assurance or both?

• Is the problem complicated or complex?

• What’s the level of readiness - urgency, trust, resources, alignment?

If it’s a clear, contained problem, you can probably use a structured approach like Kotter or Lewin. If it’s messy or cultural, start with sense-making frameworks like Cynefin or Stacey and layer structure in later. I won’t go into those methods now, but there are two failure patterns worth avoiding:

1. Measurement becomes the target when metrics replace meaning, practice can narrow and the real learning disappears. We all know the phrase what gets measured gets managed but it is good to keep, weighing the pig won’t make it fat in the back of your mind.

2. Happy talk kills urgency a positive culture can mask underperformance. Without honest conversation, change can be slow to take hold. This is dangerous, and while I won’t be touching on psychological safety here, it’s worth remembering that candour without care can do as much harm as silence. The real skill lies in creating spaces where people can speak the truth, be heard, and still want to stay part of the work – and aren’t punished for it. There’s nothing good about being the Emperor in the story about the Emperor’s new clothes.

Once you’ve diagnosed the challenge and chosen your approach, the next step is turning strategy into movement.

Methods that travel well

These are the tools I keep coming back to when planning or leading projects. They’re easy to apply, but powerful enough to build real momentum.

Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model

This one gets thrown around a lot, but it’s still one of the best starting points for structured projects, or at least that’s what my Master’s lecturer told me. It seems pretty popular, too with most leaders knowing about it. Apart from in my academic assignments, I don’t tend to follow it step-by-step - schools are messy, but I do reckon the first few stages are gold for most projects when there is some form of change involved. Creating urgency, building a guiding coalition and then creating and communicating a clear, believable vision can all determine the success of a project.

I’ve seen plenty of initiatives skip straight to the launch - a quick briefing presentation informing of new systems - without fully investing in the early groundwork. Teachers need to feel the reason for the change.

The coalition piece matters, too. You need the right mix of credibility, influence and drive. When respected teachers are genuinely behind an initiative, it changes everything. They carry weight in the staffroom and help keep the work alive as everyone starts to move on to the next thing.

I also think the short-term wins Kotter talks about are great opportunities to grab some low-hanging fruit - things that show quick, visible progress. They’re worth planning deliberately. When something works fast and people can see it, it builds belief and changes the narrative in the staffroom. Anything that reduces friction, saves time or clearly helps students learn is the best kind of early win to help build momentum.

Whilst there are eight steps for a reason, the danger is in treating Kotter like a straitjacket. It’s not. For me it works best as a loose framework to give direction. Use it as a guide, not a recipe to follow to the letter.

Timelines and planning tools

For every project, I keep one master sheet with a simple timeline and checklist. I work backwards from the delivery date, plotting the key steps and linking the documents, slides and forms I’ll need along the way. Each tab covers one project, with an overview tab that brings everything together in one view. It’s not fancy, but it works – and the more responsibilities I’ve taken on, the more I rely on it.

Speed SWOT analysis (Exactly the same as a SWOT just done faster)

Probably one of the most well-known tools and an incredibly simple way to understand context. Using it surfaces the internal strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats as perceived by those you ask, which then helps spark discussion. A great tactic is to run a Speed SWOT with a cross-section of staff, by sending out a short google form. Keep it short, gather honest views anonymously and share the themes back quickly, using AI to analyse. The learning and progress comes from the fact it is anonymous and so the potential tensions get highlighted rather than the less-than-natural consensus that can sometimes come when people collaborate on a SWOT round a table.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

A clear, simple format to provide focus. I think these are needed for every project you lead on. Set one objective - what do you actually want to achieve - and two to five measurable key results that track progress as you go.

Below is an OKR example from when we introduced the Deliberate Device Use System in November 2023. We didn’t hit every key result, but we got close, and it gave the work structure, direction and a way to measure progress that went beyond good intentions.

Objective: Embed a culture of deliberate, mindful device use across Secondary so that technology enhances learning without disrupting focus, wellbeing, or relationships.

Key Results:

1. 100% of students are briefed on the Responsible Use Policy during the first week after half-term and can articulate key expectations in follow-up tutor discussions.

2. 100% of teachers contribute by collecting devices seen and hand them to the Secondary Office

3. 100% of inappropriate device use incidents are logged and followed up with a restorative conversation (tutor) within 48 hours.

4. Student voice indicates a 20% increase (from baseline) in self-reported ability to manage device use responsibly.

5. Parents receive clear communication outlining the policy, rationale and support channels before implementation and rollout.

Pre-mortem

Probably my favourite tool. I’ve used it for big initiatives like improving punctuality and implementing a new behaviour policy. Before launch, gather the team involved and ask them to imagine the project has failed by a set date. Then ask: What went wrong? What was missed?

Teachers are brilliant at this part. It flips the mindset from optimism to preparation and surfaces risks early. I then like to use the Risk Matrix from AntMurphy.me to map risks and then move the session towards planning how to reduce the most likely and high impact risks.

Inversion

More of a mental model than a tool - basically a lighter version of the premortem. Charlie Munger explains it perfectly here: most people ask “How do I achieve success?” Instead, he says it’s often wiser to flip the question and ask “What would guarantee failure?” - then avoid those things.

Two Munger inspired examples:

• If you want a happy life, don’t ask “How do I become happy?” Ask “What would make me miserable?” and stop doing those things - envy, resentment, poor health, bad relationships.

• In business or education, instead of “How can we make this succeed?”, ask “What could ruin this?” and design around the answer.

Inversion thinking works by starting from failure to make better decisions. It forces realism and helps you see blind spots. Take your OKRs and ask: What should we avoid at all costs? or If this failed, why would that be? Sometimes it’s easier to spot what to stop than what to start.

Stakeholder analysis

Use this right at the start of a project - before decisions are made or messages go out. It helps you see who’s affected, who influences, who might block it, and who needs to own it. Decide early how to involve or inform each group so nothing catches anyone off-guard later.

It’s also a useful tool for deciding who to include in a premortem or who needs to be consulted or looped in at different stages of the work. I’ve found it especially valuable for projects that cut across teams or roles, like behaviour or attendance systems. When people see how a change connects to others, it can help reduce resistance and increase ownership.

Eisenhower matrix

I first came across this years ago through Covey’s 7 Habits and now have the matrix drawn on my whiteboard in front of my desk. I use it to sort next actions for live projects into urgent/non-urgent and important/unimportant. As a mental hack, I only keep the top row - the Important stuff - and split that into urgent and non-urgent tasks. It keeps things simple. The aim is to stay on top of the non-urgent important work so that, technically, nothing ever becomes truly urgent.

I’ve built in a couple of recurring time-boxed Strategic Time sessions each week, where I try to only work on the important/non-urgent tasks, which helps me try and keep all the important things out of the urgent category.

Time-boxed sprints

These are short bursts of focused work with a clear outcome. I use them mainly for strategic projects - the kind that are important but not urgent, like the upcoming IGCSE options process. I’ll usually book a private room in the library, set a timer and work in Pomodoro-style blocks.

These sprints sit in my scheduled Strategic Time slots each week. Having a defined window to concentrate reduces interruptions and stops the big, long-term projects from slipping down the list, and the timer keeps me honest.

Once a week, I have a focused sprint while I do a GTD-style weekly review - a quick Mind Sweep, update project timelines and plan the following week’s operational and strategic work. Any time left goes on clearing my Next Actions list, which usually means lesson planning or marking.

Implementation matters (probably most)

Most school projects fail not because the idea’s bad, but because the implementation is weak. We talk about what to do far more than how to do it well.

The NPQ Headship Framework nails this. Implementation is slow, deliberate work - testing, adjusting, learning. It’s about pacing change, removing friction and staying close to the people doing the work. When I dug into this as part of a recent NPQH assignment, five themes stood out that sum up what effective implementation really involves:

1. Diagnose before you decide

Start with the problem, not the solution. Talk to people, look at the data, find the friction. Don’t start fixing before you know what’s broken. Use a clear, robust process to identify what actually needs changing.

2. Focus on fewer, better priorities

Depth beats coverage. Evaluate honestly and be brave enough to stop what’s not working. Back one or two things and stay on them until they stick.

3. Plan deliberately, then adapt

Implementation is a process, not a moment - and certainly not just a launch. Use timelines and stakeholder maps to plan in stages, set review points, and adapt as things change.

4. Match the approach to the context

Context decides whether a good idea works. Check readiness, capability, trust and timing - then adjust the pace and scale of change to fit reality on the ground.

5. Build climate and capacity

Change depends on the environment people work in. It lasts when people feel safe, trusted and supported. Distribute leadership and keep attention on the work long after the initial buzz fades.

Bridging the gap between ideas and execution

The hard bit of strategy isn’t having ideas. Every staffroom is full of them. It’s choosing which to back-and getting them to actually happen.

That takes clear, consistent communication. I used to believe you couldn’t over-communicate. Turns out, you probably can-but you just have to make it worth hearing. Keep the message tight, consistent and anchored to purpose.

These questions can help at any stage of a project:

• Do staff know what we’re trying to do and why it matters?

• Is their role in it clear?

• Are we reinforcing the message in briefings, meetings, feedback, 121s, and in our day-to-day actions and expectations?

It’s pretty old now, but I still love the Netflix Culture slideshow. Early in the deck it says a company’s values have nothing to do with the nice-sounding statements on the wall. It goes on: “Values are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” That line stands out. It’s a reminder that culture and strategy aren’t what we say they are – they’re what we tolerate, reward and repeat, and basically what we do.

If you want to see a school’s real strategy, don’t read the plan. Watch what people do on a Tuesday morning when no one’s watching.

In closing…

…strategy’s just about doing things on purpose - knowing what matters, doing it well and seeing it through. To summarise this massive think-piece:

• Do less, but do it properly.

• Use the tools that help you think clearly.

• Plan it out, get people on board, and keep the message steady.

• Keep it anchored to purpose, not trends.

Mostly though, strategy is about improvement and that comes through turning up, doing the work, building relationships and learning as you go. That’s how things actually change.

AI is now mainstream and accessible by anyone. Its utility is wide and limited only by the user’s creativity. There are few jobs out there that have not benefited from AI in some capacity. For many, AI simply saves huge amounts of time and does much of the graft and admin a PA might do. Our office staff are used less than before for those admin-related tasks that were solely their domain. Recently, a principal shared how they’re reshaping the support team at his school with it being close to a certainty that some of the existing support staff will become surplus to requirement due to what AI is doing already.

World-wide, job losses are substantial, with this report stating 1000s of US jobs being lost every month, and Elijah Clark, a (heartless?) CEO has bragged about the cost savings of removing people from businesses… (he basically gets hired by other CEOs to help them use AI better to reduce their costs through headcount!). The same article doesn’t confirm whether mass replacement is likely- well, anytime soon, that is.

The trouble for humans is that as much as AI is helping us as individuals now, it is quickly getting good at doing things we thought could only be done by humans. Scarily, the Microsoft research suggests that jobs with higher educational requirements were more likely to be affected by AI. Looking at the list, some are obvious: writers, authors, proof readers, copy makers and web developers. However, there are a few surprises, such as models! I guess AI robots and on-screen AI’s can model better for cheaper and longer without fatiguing, whilst looking exactly as desired. I was hoping economics teachers wouldn’t feature, but they do 😢, along with historians, geographers and mathematicians. Those least likely to be affected are all very physical jobs, and I guess until the cost falls to develop and produce machines that can change tyres, fix roofs, give massages and do house-work without human involvement, those jobs will remain. Those massage chairs in airports are ok, but they aren’t yet good enough to replace a skilled person.

The WEF predicts a net gain of 78 million jobs, but warns that 40% of employers expect to cut white-collar, entry-level roles where AI can automate tasks. Combine that with globalisation - companies expanding into lower-cost talent markets like India - and you have the future that PEW Research foresaw: fiercer competition and fewer entry points for graduates.

This is happening fast with significantly fewer jobs opening up than usual. Recent graduates are finding it harder than ever to find work- 65% of US graduates, a 25% increase year on year, have been unable to secure work. It was only recently, we were telling students that a job in tech was a safe bet, but tech seems to be amongst the hardest hit. There have been huge layoffs for coders with a quarter of programming jobs vanishing in the last two years. This week I have had requests from parents of students starting their IGCSEs to switch from Computer Science to other subjects, citing recent technological developments. It is so hard to know what to do as a student, right now…I am kind of glad my kids are too young that much of this will play out before they need to make big choices. We will hopefully have a better idea in a few years (or sooner, things are moving fast) about what to study…I am not sure if kids the same age as mine (12 and 9) will even ‘need’ to go to university given the current trajectory, which is sad (albeit better for the wallet!)

The Future of work - Is it all bad?

No one can predict the future, but you can follow trends and listen to the range of views. While much of the discourse is negative, not all of it is. This Forbes article suggests a post-work world where AI renders human work unnecessary and Universal Basic Income (UBI) ensures everyone is able to meet their basic needs of food and shelter, thus eliminating many of society’s issues such as crime, homelessness and access to services. UBI is a set financial payment to everyone in an economy regardless of their wealth, employment status or income. It has gained more support in recent years, but critics cite UBI as a disincentive to work. Given the speed that AI is moving, that may not be a problem by then.

There have been plenty of UBI experiments, but rolling it out on a mass scale will be no small job. Covid attempted this with mostly positive outcomes for income inequality, aside from high costs (see chart below) that added to the amount they won’t be paying back. There will be major political, social and economic considerations and impacts. Should UBI be implemented, some see us living in a form of utopia whereby we exist as a leisure class without the burden of work, unless you want it. Problems then become where will humans find meaning, how will we contribute to society and how much control is given over to the government when everyone is reliant on them for income? It might be amazing: kids might go to school for the sole purpose of learning, not to be shaped for work.

AI is certain to bring many benefits: curing diseases and cancer, offering better ways to solve global problems of climate change and finding effective economic solutions to issues like unemployment and wealth inequality (UBI?), and no doubt many other benefits that I can’t think of now. But are we ready?

100x the impact of the Industrial Revolution

Humanity has been through a number of upheavals due to technological disruption, but some believe AI will be the most disruptive we have ever seen. Demis Hassabis, CEO and founder of Google’s DeepMind and a leader in AI and AGI development recently said that the AI revolution will have 100x the impact of the Industrial Revolution. By this he means 10 times bigger in terms of changes and 10 times faster, and remember the Industrial Revolution lasted 100 years. Haassbis shares a more positive outlook, with what he calls radical abundance being a (hoped for) possibility. Much of his work is about using AI to advance science and medicine and to better understand the world around us. He sees issues like climate change, the water shortage and other major problems being solved through AI. He is surprised that economists and governments aren’t paying enough attention to what will inevitably happen. He urges philosophers, social scientists and those in power to start thinking now, collaborating and working together to shift society’s mindset from it being a zero-sum game. He says we will need a new form of economics in the post-AGI world, which is itself a race with significant first mover advantage. This is especially true as the population continues to grow and jobs disappear through the ongoing, inevitable technological disruption.

Listening to Hassabis, I am not sure we are ready for what is coming. Especially when you hear what the US government’s DOGE was set up to deal with, although moving beyond fax machines was a small win! Whether you think AI as good or bad, you can’t help thinking that we aren’t anywhere near prepared for the inevitable disruption to come…I know most schools aren’t prepared. Teachers everywhere, according to 404 Media, say AI has upended the classroom. Hybrid essays - part student, part robot - are now routine. Students trust ChatGPT over books, can’t always tell fact from fiction, and many struggle with basic vocabulary, with Covid gaps making it worse. Teachers are rewriting assessments, forcing in-class writing, and combing through Google Doc histories to catch cheats. Rules are inconsistent, tech firms bake AI into school systems, and the ethics remain unclear. The result: more policing, less teaching, and a growing sense the job is losing its meaning. Behind it all is a bigger cultural shift towards passive consumption over active thought. If that wins, education as we know it doesn’t stand a chance.

With my students in mind, Hassabis argues that the most effective AI users might be ten times more productive than those who don’t use it. So students do need to immerse themselves in these systems. He still advises studying STEM and that everyone should try to become exceptional at prompting and fine-tuning the models, given that those who use the tools effectively will gain a serious advantage over those who don’t.

The case against mass unemployment

Marc Andreessen argues that fears of AI-driven mass unemployment are overblown - not because AI can’t replace jobs, but because regulation, licensing and entrenched systems slow or block adoption in much of the economy. That may buy time, but it won’t stop AI from changing how work is done, eroding entry-level roles, and widening the gap between those who can use it well and those who can’t.

Cruiseliners in a Speedboat World

Schools feel the need to stay on top of developments, adapt quickly, and keep a finger on the pulse as new tools emerge - but that’s easier said than done. I’ve always seen schools as cruiseliners: huge, slow to turn, needing miles of ocean to change course. By the time the helm has shifted, the world - and the technology - has already moved on. The pace of AI is measured in days, weeks and months; the pace of education is often measured in years. Our job is to prepare young people for that mismatch - to help them thrive in a world where the ground is constantly shifting beneath their feet. As AI flattens many once-academic advantages, traits like character, resilience, adaptability, literacy and ‘learning how to learn’ will matter more than ever. As schools, we should be teaching these - and how to use AI wisely, critically, and creatively.

If AI really does create a world without work but with the means to live well, maybe it will feel like being a teacher on a never-ending summer holiday - something most people, including me, could probably live with.

On-boarding checklist

I have built two types of these over the years. One I would send to the new hire and one for my team’s use, which has since been updated and adopted school-wide for all new starters. Both lists are just simple spreadsheets and contain important elements of the job that need to be covered before a team member starts…they can be RAG’d or numbered to show where early development needs to focus.

The one shared with the new recruit is designed to get them up to speed, so they can see where they might need to spend time before starting…this includes simple things like MacBook usage and software to more pedagogy-focused readings that would be of great benefit to know prior to starting.

The first meeting

A great leader I had a few years back sent me a couple of questions that he wanted to discuss in our first meeting. Getting them early gave me a chance to think about them so when I met with him I had my answers and was better prepared for our first conversation. One in particular stood out and I now use it all the time:

"How do you like to be led?"

It’s simple but I had never been asked it before and it got me thinking. I shared my preferences and it set a positive tone for our relationship. It gives an insight into how you will be working together…It lets you hear how they function and allows you to shape how they can expect you to show up, which enhances how you’ll work together, sooner. It also shows you care and want to get the best out of them.

The first meeting is always going to be key. Setting aside a good hour for this allows you to introduce, explain and lock in things like 121s, dig deeper into what they want from you as a leader and will also enable you to share your expectations early for them.

Another question I now send prior to the first meeting is:

“How do you prefer to receive feedback?"

This also helps set the tone for your working relationship, allowing you to gauge how they’ve previously experienced getting feedback, as well as enabling you preface how important feedback (giving and receiving) is to you. I always qualify this by explaining I am continuously looking to develop my own leadership skills and recognise feedback as an essential part of this process. I share my process and qualify how it is used to help them develop to ensure the school gets the best out of them. I’ve written before about feedback, and it is still something I’m working on myself to be better at.

What happens in the first meeting?

Prior to the meetings, it is always good to send an invite with a time (1 hour), the purpose and location for them to accept. The first meeting is to establish the relationship, get to know the newbie better and set the tone for the future… unlike normal 121s, I go first in this meeting and lead the agenda.

As a side note: I think that whenever a leader makes a request for someone’s time, they should always give the reason/purpose. We have all had the request from a boss to go and see them later and then worried all day that you’ve done something wrong, only to find a it was a simple request or question of no consequence that has derailed your focus and put you off your best for the day’s lessons! No matter the intent, or even if it is obvious why (like the first intro meeting), a leader should say why they want to meet…it ensures there’s no unnecessary anxiety.

A rough agenda for the first meeting might look like this:

1 Intros - establish relationship

After the usual basic intros…

• Ask about family and motivations for being where they are now…Ask about hobbies etc

• What is something you'd like to do more of in your spare time?

• What would you like to know about me/the team/the school?

2 Onboarding - checking in on how they have been onboarded

Much of this will be out of your hands as induction is the responsibility of lots of different parts of the school…but as a leader it is good to get a grip on where they’re at…

Here, you bring out and review the onboarding checklists shared and explore what they know, areas of development they need in short term, who they still need to be meeting (and why) and what they need to be doing themselves to get up to speed.

Qs might include:

• How has induction been so far?

• How has your first week been?

• Anything surprised or confused you?

• Is there anything you'd like more info or resources on?

• What can I do to make the next two weeks successful for you?

• How connected to the school/team/other newbies do you feel? In what way? Ask about anything that might help with this.

3 Expectations - share the team expectations, school-wide expectations and yours

This is key to getting the tone right. Sharing a bit about culture, how things currently work and your expectations of them. Without sounding corporate, it’s good to run through or at least touch on and link with the team’s and school’s vision and values.

This is where the “How do you like to be led?” question can be discussed in detail. As mentioned, this Q is generally shared prior to this meeting, and if it’s an external starter, I will have asked it at interview, but it is still great to talk about here in this first meeting.

In this part of the meeting, I find it useful to explain my process for 121s and feedback. I would also ask here: “How do you prefer to receive feedback?” Again, this is often shared beforehand so they should have considered it. I like to hear what they say but then share my approach of giving feedback (bit.ly/4fkH7TV).

Other questions to consider include:

• What is your ideal working environment? Independent or collaborative? They might prefer to take work home, work quietly in the office or be part of a team…all good to know. (Culture/climate)

• What makes you feel valued at work? Undervalued? (Belonging)

• Do you have any pet peeves?

• What do you expect from me? It’s good to know the expectations held about you as the leader. These can be discussed and may help you develop and be better for your team.

• What do you expect from your team? How have/can you communicate this? This Q might be more for a leader but still helps you to understand their expectations within a teamwork environment and can help you shape what you expect, and share the culture of how things currently get done.

4 Goals and PD

A bit like in 121s, this tends to be the last thing to discuss as it is future focused. It might not feature in the first meeting as there is always a lot of job/team specific matters that need to be covered beyond the basics written in this structure. But, if time allows it, or in a follow up meeting, it is good to understand their aspirations, goals and direction.

Questions worth using include:

• What accomplishments are you most proud of so far in your career?

• How are you tracking your progress? Google Doc, voice recordings...enables a chat about Bluesky at our place, but this is covered more thoroughly at induction.

• What goals are you thinking about for this year, personally, for your team, T&L and leadership?

• Where do you see yourself in two years, five years, ten years?

• What barriers do you see in your way of these goals?

• What support do you need? How can I help you achieve these?

It might be you need to have a few meetings to get through everything. If there’s time before teaching starts, it’s good to try and squeeze them in then, teachers really do just want to focus on teaching so the sooner the better. It may be you bring some of the remaining questions into your first few 121s.

Very early on, I will encourage them to ask questions - as many as possible - for the first few weeks to get to know how things work. You have to prep the teams they’ll work with to expect this so no one gets annoyed! Lots of questions mean lots of learning, and as they get settled they will slow down but it is important they know they are expected to be asking so they don’t feel stupid, or that they can’t ask!

5 Email template

Below is a template of a basic email I have used in the past to lock in this first meeting.

Subject: Welcome – our first check-in

Hi [Name],

I hope your first few days have gone well and that induction has given you a helpful overview of how things work here. It’s a lot to take in, but I hope you’re starting to feel settled and connected.

I’d like to set up our first one-to-one so we can get to know each other a bit, talk through how we’ll work together, and make sure you’ve got everything you need to make a strong start.

As part of that, I’ll also share a bit about how our team works, what you can expect from me, our team’s focus and how we’ll approach feedback and development over the year.

Before we meet, have a quick think about these two questions - we’ll start the conversation from here:

• How do you like to be led?

• How do you prefer to receive feedback?

They’re simple but helpful in shaping how we work together from day one.

Which of the following times work for you?

[Insert 2 suited options, e.g.

Thursday 11:00–12:00 or Friday 2:30–3:30]

I’ll send a calendar invite once you confirm what works best.

Looking forward to the chat.

Best,

Your name