This article is a powerful articulation of a warm demander in practice at your school.
From a leadership perspective, two questions feel especially pivotal:
How do we sustain warmth as a non-negotiable when staff capacity, confidence, and emotional load inevitably vary across a school?
And how do we design systems that create certainty and consistency without quietly displacing professional judgement, so clarity doesn’t drift back into compliance?
Both feel foundational. If warmth erodes under pressure, or systems begin to do the relational work for us, the model risks becoming something it never intended to be.
Thanks for this. Yes, they feel like the right questions to be asking, and they are hard ones.
I do not think you can mandate warmth in the same way you can standards. Capacity, confidence and emotional load are finite. When we pretend they are not, people tend to ‘perform’ warmth rather than practise it - saying the right things, following the script, but without it being sustainable or authentic.
For us, warmth is about visible behaviours rather than personality. Prioritising 121s. Noticing issues early. Using CPOMS properly. Being clear about when and how we intervene and what follow-up looks like. That gives people something concrete to return to on harder days.
On systems, I tend to see them as guardrails rather than replacements. They create certainty around the non-negotiables so professional judgement has somewhere to operate, rather than being displaced. When systems start doing the relational work for us, something has probably gone wrong. @ David Didau wrote a strong two-parter on systems recently - I think I restacked it but will dig it out and share again.
I’m also drafting a piece at the moment on how excellent teaching leads to strong relationships, and how those two ideas can get blurred or misused, and that you shouldn’t actually focus on the relationship as it’s excellent teaching that builds the trust that leads to it.
Thank you for this, Mark.
This article is a powerful articulation of a warm demander in practice at your school.
From a leadership perspective, two questions feel especially pivotal:
How do we sustain warmth as a non-negotiable when staff capacity, confidence, and emotional load inevitably vary across a school?
And how do we design systems that create certainty and consistency without quietly displacing professional judgement, so clarity doesn’t drift back into compliance?
Both feel foundational. If warmth erodes under pressure, or systems begin to do the relational work for us, the model risks becoming something it never intended to be.
Thanks for this. Yes, they feel like the right questions to be asking, and they are hard ones.
I do not think you can mandate warmth in the same way you can standards. Capacity, confidence and emotional load are finite. When we pretend they are not, people tend to ‘perform’ warmth rather than practise it - saying the right things, following the script, but without it being sustainable or authentic.
For us, warmth is about visible behaviours rather than personality. Prioritising 121s. Noticing issues early. Using CPOMS properly. Being clear about when and how we intervene and what follow-up looks like. That gives people something concrete to return to on harder days.
On systems, I tend to see them as guardrails rather than replacements. They create certainty around the non-negotiables so professional judgement has somewhere to operate, rather than being displaced. When systems start doing the relational work for us, something has probably gone wrong. @ David Didau wrote a strong two-parter on systems recently - I think I restacked it but will dig it out and share again.
I’m also drafting a piece at the moment on how excellent teaching leads to strong relationships, and how those two ideas can get blurred or misused, and that you shouldn’t actually focus on the relationship as it’s excellent teaching that builds the trust that leads to it.
Very much still work in progress.
Here’s that post from David Didau on systems
https://open.substack.com/pub/daviddidau/p/applying-systems-thinking-to-school?r=2nj6f&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay