Kids Don’t Need Innovative Schools. They Need Good Ones.

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I’m starting to twitch every time I hear the word innovation in education. Innovation strategy, innovation hubs, innovative pedagogy, it’s everywhere, on every staffroom wall and every glossy school brochure. I’ll pop this here because I’m sure some people are already wondering: I’m not anti-innovation. I’m a scientist, and I love innovation in science and technology. I teach for it. I want students to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, solve problems, apply ideas in unfamiliar situations and imagine things that don’t exist yet. That’s part of what a good education should do, especially in my subject.

But there’s a difference between teaching students to become innovative and using their core education as the place where adults perform innovation. The OECD takes some of the sparkle off the word because, in its measurement work, innovation in education is treated as significant change in educational practice. Students are experiencing something different, and that doesn’t mean the difference is better. So if a school says it’s innovating in teaching and learning, fine, but it should be ready for some awkward questions. What exactly has changed in the way students are being taught? Why is this better than what came before? How do we know? What might be lost along the way?

Because kids are going to spend real learning time inside whatever adults decide to call “innovative”, and Johnny can’t get Year 8 back. He gets one shot at being thirteen. If we spend that time inside a teaching and learning idea that sounded wonderful in a keynote but didn’t actually help him learn, we can’t give it back.

In science, we understand that innovation carries risk. Drug development is a good example. Candidates go through ethics committees, informed consent processes, mountains of red tape and regulated, rigorous systems. Roughly 90% of drug candidates still fail once they enter clinical trials. That doesn’t mean scientists are reckless. It means innovation is difficult, uncertain and full of failure, even when people are taking it seriously. A failed drug candidate can be withdrawn, a failed product can be redesigned (oh look, iteration), and a failed app can be put in the bin. Johnny can’t be.

That’s the problem with treating a child’s education as the place where we find out whether an idea works. Most of what schools need isn’t a grand experiment at all. It’s iteration. It’s the job. Look at what students are actually experiencing, check whether the learning has substance, adjust what isn’t working, keep what helps, and stop what doesn’t.

Iteration isn’t second-best. It requires professional judgement, not just enthusiasm. As Dylan Wiliam puts it, everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere. The skill is knowing what to use, when to use it, and when to stop because it isn’t working here. Good teachers know this. They read the room, they read the student, and they adapt. That’s not innovation; that’s expertise.

Some practice should change, of course. Some practice should probably be put in a lead-lined box, sealed shut and buried (to be honest), but ordinary improvement doesn’t need to be inflated into innovation just because innovation sounds bolder and gives everyone something shiny to put on the website. Innovation is different. If students are being asked to learn in a new or significantly different way, that carries risk. It might be brilliant. It might be needed. But it isn’t automatically better, and it shouldn’t be treated like a branding opportunity. It needs evidence, guardrails, proper trialling, and the humility to stop if it isn’t helping. Iteration should be normal. Innovation should be careful.

Education is always in beta because schools are full of children, teachers, relationships, constraints and context. What worked before might not work well enough now, and what looked beautiful in a strategy document might fall apart in students’ actual experience. We understand this in science: you can’t go all in without evidence, and you can’t do it without guardrails and ethics. So if we’re going to borrow the language of pilots, trials, evidence and experimentation, we need to accept the responsibilities that come with it.

In schools, though, we rarely call it what it is. We call it innovation, not an experiment, so teachers implement it because they’ve been told to, not because anyone has explained that this is genuinely untested. Nobody’s watching for whether students are learning less, because nobody was told that was even a question worth asking. There’s no clear sense of who would raise the alarm, or to whom, or what would happen if they did.

If the results aren’t good, you stop. You don’t begin “embedding phase two”, roll it out across the whole school because the logo has already been designed, or keep going because someone senior has attached their professional identity to it. You stop, or you change course, or you admit that the idea sounded better in a meeting than it looked in the education of actual children.

And yet the pressure to do none of that is enormous, because then there’s the marketing and the need to be first or ahead of the game. Seen as the school doing the thing before everyone else has even named the thing. I understand the temptation; schools are competitive places. Parents are looking, boards are looking, other schools are looking, and it’s easy to start thinking the shiny thing is the brave thing.

But good educators can usually see a dog-and-pony show for what it is. The people you actually want in your school (the thoughtful ones, the ones who understand learning, the ones parents would want teaching their kids) can tell when something has substance and when it’s performative. They might not say it in the meeting. They might smile, nod, add the required wording to the planning document and make the display board if they really have to, but they’ll know when a child’s learning is being used as a backdrop for adult ambition. I find that tough to swallow.

If we’re using a child’s education to make ourselves look brave, modern or visionary, we’re not serving them. We’re using them. We’re using our position, our authority, teachers’ energy and students’ time to make ourselves look good.

The best marketing a school can have is students who are properly educated (and I’m not just talking about attainment scores and exam results). Students who can read well, write clearly, explain their thinking, ask better questions and use what they know. Students who feel known, stretched and supported, and who leave with more doors open because the adults around them took the foundations seriously. That’s what a school should be known for.

If we take care of the education, the reputation will look after itself. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not in a way that photographs particularly well, but over time people notice when the learning has substance, when teachers know what they’re doing and why, and when students are actually learning rather than being placed inside something that looks impressive from the outside. They also notice when their child doesn’t need as much tutoring as the kids in the competitor school.

So yes, let’s improve education. Let’s challenge poor practice, use technology where it genuinely helps, build students’ independence carefully, and use inquiry where it deepens learning rather than where it leaves students guessing or confused. But let’s stop pretending that new automatically means better, and let’s stop pretending that calling something innovation makes it more thoughtful than it is.

Dig the foundations well. Build something coherent. Make the learning journey one of substance. Don’t chase being first if it comes at the expense of being good.

Kids don’t need schools to be innovative; it isn’t innovation that protects their well-being, they just need them to be good.