How to improve a school—Part 1

A blueprint of sorts

Image via AI

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I am currently thinking that my next book, or perhaps the one after that, will be about school improvement and so I am starting to collect my thoughts. That is something of a departure for me. It feels weird because it feels presumptuous. How could I possibly know what is needed to improve a school I have never set foot in? Yes, I am part of a team who runs, by most measures, a pretty successful independent school in Australia. However, those measures are flawed, NAPLAN is not the greatest assessment of literacy and numeracy and the Victorian Certificate of Education is in dire need of reform.

And how can we know that an approach I have followed translates to other settings?

It’s worth pointing out that I have worked in four schools. The three schools I worked in prior to moving to Australia were government schools in London. The first school was successful. That’s where I initially learned how to teach. The second was a failing school ‘facing challenging circumstances’ that became a success and I was part of that story. The third was a complacent school in an affluent area that was resistant to shaking off that complacency.

There is no science to what I am going to suggest. All I can say is we tried x with the intention of causing y and sometimes y then happened. I cannot prove it wouldn’t have happened anyway. And yet I know people are interested in my thoughts on this because they ask me about it.

There are some useful heuristics that I believe in and science has a role to play in evaluating what not to do. Nevertheless, please take everything that follows with however much salt you feel is necessary.