Some reflections on educational excellence, reputation, leadership and the hard work of getting teaching and learning right.
One of the things I’ve found amusing since moving into international education is how some rather prestigious schools proudly present approaches as groundbreaking when they were things we were being taught to do as trainee teachers in the UK twenty years ago. It’s fascinating, and I often wonder… do they know?
The approaches aren’t bad, quite the opposite, it’s lots of stuff that’s fundamental to good teaching. It’s just funny how something can be repackaged, given a new name (and sometimes not even) and celebrated as a major educational development when it’s been part of good practice elsewhere for decades?! And as a “little woman”, my experience has been ignored when I’ve mentioned it; embarrassing for them, really. Although I suppose it becomes rather less amusing when you start wondering what that tells us about a school’s understanding of excellent education in the first place.
I’ve been having some interesting conversations with educators working across different international contexts recently, particularly about the different educational models and practices that we’ve encountered and the gap that sometimes exists between what schools say they’re doing, what actually happens in classrooms, and whether there is any substance to it. The whole idea of the marketisation of education I understand, I just get a little twitchy about it.
These aren’t reflections on any one person or school, but rather a collection of thoughts that have developed from conversations with educators and leaders about our shared experiences across different educational settings.
I’ve worked in schools with very different philosophies, and I don’t think there’s any particular type of school that has a monopoly on excellent education. I’ve seen some wonderful teaching in relatively ordinary settings and some surprisingly questionable practice in institutions with extraordinary reputations. Some of the best practice you’ll ever see is in UK academies and state schools, and far outshines most (not all) of what I’ve seen internationally, which is a surprise when you consider how time-poor UK teachers are.
I think it’s something we need to talk about more openly; a school’s reputation isn’t necessarily a reflection of the quality of its teaching and learning. In fact, I’m really not convinced educational quality is always the main reason some schools become prestigious in the first place, and I know I’m far from alone.
There’s a whole conversation to be had about social and cultural capital here, and I could quite easily go down a Bourdieu rabbit hole. Families may choose a school for its networks, university connections, social environment, opportunities and the advantages that come with belonging to a particular community. Many parents probably understand this perfectly well and already know where they want to send their children before the positive result even shows up on the pregnancy test. They’re not buying the world’s best pedagogy or thinking about teaching and learning in that moment; they’re buying access to things that might be rather difficult to obtain elsewhere. Those things can be really valuable, but let’s not confuse them with educational excellence.
Some schools talk about their examination results, and these are one of their biggest marketing tools. But if a school admits students who are already academically strong, often with considerable support and advantages outside school, then excellent examination results aren’t necessarily evidence of exceptional teaching. They might be, but how would we know?
It’s why we should consider value added. Not because I think every aspect of a child’s education can be measured (it can’t and shouldn’t be), or because spreadsheets transform teaching, but because surely we should be interested in the difference we’re actually making? Where did students start? How much have they progressed? Are they doing better than we might reasonably have expected? And at what cost? Student wellbeing? Oh, it had better not have been!
We’ve had approaches to measuring value added and external baselining for years. They have limitations, certainly, and we need to remember that measuring progress isn’t the same as proving how much of that progress was caused by the school. There are plenty of other factors influencing a child’s achievement, and different models can produce different conclusions depending on what they take into account. But these approaches can still tell us things that headline results alone can’t. Used well, they can also help students see their own progress and feel good about what they’ve achieved. We do need to be mindful of the Pygmalion effect, though. Expectations can influence outcomes, and a predicted grade should never become a ceiling on what we think a student can achieve.
Schools can also examine progress through well-designed internal assessment, provided they’re actually collecting and using meaningful evidence. But are they? Who’s quality assuring the assessments and checking their validity? Has anyone had any training in assessment design? This is arguably more straightforward in GCSE settings, where there’s an externally assessed qualification to work towards, than in MYP settings where much of the assessment is designed and marked internally.
Without that, we know what students achieve, but far less about what the school actually contributes. Do we know what we’re adding? And if a school already has an excellent reputation, full enrolment and impressive university destinations, how much pressure is there to find out?
Which raises another question about leadership: how do you recognise excellent education if you’ve never actually seen it? And who gets to define what excellence looks like in the first place?
We place a great deal of value on experience in education, but twenty years working in schools doesn’t necessarily mean twenty years experiencing excellent practice. You might have spent your career in institutions with wonderful reputations, achieved considerable professional success and held increasingly senior positions without necessarily having encountered genuinely excellent approaches to curriculum, assessment or instruction. And sometimes you’ll only recognise excellence when you’ve experienced the opposite. If the schools you’ve worked in have always been considered excellent, why would you automatically question what you’ve experienced? And when someone who’s never really had the opportunity to see excellent practice becomes responsible for leading it, at any level of a school, what are they using as their benchmark?
This isn’t about having worked in the right schools or collecting the right qualifications. Some of the best educators I’ve encountered have spent much of their careers in one place, but they’ve continued to read, question, observe, collaborate and develop their understanding. Others have worked in prestigious institutions around the world without necessarily developing the same depth of expertise. Experience and expertise aren’t interchangeable, and I’m not sure we’re always particularly good at recognising that.
I’ve also been bowled over by just how much influence some very confident people can have, even when they’re discussing educational concepts they barely understand. I’ve seen it so often that I’m barely surprised anymore. We’re here to educate kids, yet somehow we’re still listening to experienced educators confidently promote things like learning styles?! I’ve seen school websites that make me cringe as an educational researcher, and I’ve sat through meetings where educational myths are presented as facts. Surely, if you’re going to stand up in front of colleagues and make claims about how children learn, you have a responsibility to know what you’re talking about? Run it past someone you trust to give you honest feedback first.
I’m all for professional learning, I genuinely love it, and nobody should be expected to know everything, but there’s a difference between recognising what you don’t know and confidently advising others on things you haven’t properly understood. The same goes for promotions; getting the job doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly acquired all the expertise the role requires. If anything, it means your responsibility to keep learning has increased. Keep reading, questioning and developing your understanding because the aim should be to become genuinely good at what you’ve been entrusted to do, rather than assuming the title itself is evidence that you already are. It’s always good to surround yourself with people who know things you don’t, who are comfortable telling you when you’ve got something wrong, and whose expertise you’re prepared to listen to.
There’s also a responsibility on the people giving these individuals a platform; you can’t always trust those that raise their hands (sadly). If those making educational decisions haven’t developed a strong understanding of excellent practice themselves, how are they supposed to recognise when an idea is poorly conceived? It’s an interesting variation on the Peter Principle. Perhaps people aren’t always just promoted beyond their competence; perhaps some organisations aren’t particularly good at recognising competence in the first place. We ought to be spending more time looking beyond our own institutions, talking to educators working in different settings and questioning whether what we’ve come to accept as excellent practice really is. When confident people are repeatedly given influence without their ideas being properly scrutinised, and their confidence is mistaken for competence, the problems can become embedded in the organisation.
I’m not particularly inclined to challenge people publicly in meetings. I’m much more likely to go away, think about what’s been said and do a bit more reading, and if I’m still concerned, raise it privately directly or with someone who has the ability to address it. I’ve never particularly wanted to put anyone on the spot or embarrass them, and I certainly don’t see the value in allowing frustrations to spread amongst colleagues and affect the culture of a school. Surely we should be able to question educational decisions professionally without it becoming personal? Apparently, though, even that can be considered rude. So who suffers when poorly understood ideas are given influence without proper scrutiny? Ultimately, the kids.
This brings me back to the question of substance. We can talk endlessly about different things and buzzwords that we think people want to hear, or those with a superficial understanding might be impressed by, but what actually sits underneath those promises? Do the people designing these approaches understand the educational principles involved, and can they explain what they’re doing differently and why? Is there any evidence that it’s making a difference to learning? Because there’s a gulf between adopting the language of good education and knowing how to deliver it.
Even when people are familiar with the evidence, that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to put it into practice. Understanding that an approach might be effective is one thing; knowing when to use it, how to adapt it to a particular subject or group of students, how it fits within a coherent curriculum and whether it’s actually working is quite another. You can know all the terminology, repeat the research and give a thoroughly convincing presentation without necessarily being particularly good at any of those things. That’s why developing professional expertise is rather more complicated than simply introducing staff to the latest educational idea.
Now we’re adding AI into the mix, and whilst I’m genuinely interested in what it might offer education, I do wonder whether we’re sometimes getting a little ahead of ourselves. Before deciding what technology to introduce, shouldn’t we understand the educational problem we’re trying to solve? If students are struggling to learn something, we need to understand why. Perhaps the curriculum hasn’t built the necessary prior knowledge, the instruction hasn’t been sufficiently clear or students haven’t had enough opportunities to practise. An AI platform might help address some of those things, but it won’t automatically compensate for an educational approach that wasn’t particularly well thought through in the first place. It can’t replace good first teaching, and we can’t out-teach a terrible curriculum. We also need to understand teaching and learning well enough to quality-assure whatever we’re producing with AI. That’s where I’m concerned, because what others and I are seeing isn’t always reassuring. We’re seeing AI being used by people who don’t have the knowledge or expertise to properly evaluate what’s being generated, recognise inaccuracies or spot what’s missing. If you don’t understand what good looks like yourself, how are you supposed to judge whether the AI has produced it? If you’re unsure whether something is educationally sound, ask somebody with the relevant subject or pedagogical expertise to look at it with you. There’s no shame in not knowing something, but there is a responsibility to check.
We’ve seen some extraordinarily ambitious promises about education before, and I think there’s a big difference between having a great-sounding idea and having the expertise to put it into practice with any real rigour. Sometimes these visions come from people who aren’t educators, which isn’t necessarily a problem in itself, but it can become one when the complexity of delivering genuinely good education is underestimated. Avenues and Whittle attracted considerable attention for their visions of doing schooling differently, yet their original organisational models subsequently changed in significant ways. This raises questions about how readily we’re impressed by an educational vision before we’ve established whether the expertise, curriculum and structures needed to deliver it are actually there. Providing an extraordinary education is incredibly hard, but apparently a few smooth words and a fancy presentation can make the idea of one remarkably easy to sell?! Is someone being dishonest if they genuinely believe they’re delivering excellence, but don’t have sufficient educational expertise to recognise that they aren’t?
I think it’s entirely possible for an institution to develop a rather distorted understanding of its own excellence, especially when so much of what it encounters appears to confirm what it already believes. Families want places, students achieve impressive results, graduates enter prestigious universities and the school continues to enjoy a wonderful reputation. That must be rather reassuring, but none of it necessarily tells us whether the curriculum is coherent, whether assessment is telling us what we think it is, or whether the teaching is as good as the people responsible believe it to be. But if their understanding of excellence has largely been shaped by other institutions with similarly impressive reputations, there’s a danger that the same assumptions just keep being passed around, each one lending the others a bit more credibility.
Are we actually inviting people to tell us when something isn’t working, particularly those who might see things rather differently from us? If impressive examination results, university destinations and a wonderful reputation are taken as confirmation of educational excellence, what evidence would make us reconsider? Would we recognise weaknesses in curriculum, assessment or instruction if we encountered them, and would we have the professional expertise to distinguish between something that sounds educationally impressive and something that genuinely is? Because if we can’t answer those questions, I’m not sure we’re really evaluating the quality of the education we’re providing. We might simply be finding more reasons to believe what we’ve always believed.
I suppose that’s what has been irritating me throughout these conversations. Not that schools shouldn’t be proud of their achievements, or that prestigious institutions can’t provide an extraordinary education, but that we might become so convinced of our own excellence that we stop recognising the difference between what we’re promising and what we’re actually delivering. The really uncomfortable possibility is that everyone involved might be perfectly sincere, thoroughly convinced they’re doing a wonderful job, and still be getting some fairly fundamental things wrong.
Which brings me back to the question I’ve been thinking about throughout all of this: what if we’re not as good as we think we are?
Would we even know?
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