Schools carry real accountability and the stakes for students are high. Identifying what isn’t working and responding to it is part of the job. But for many leaders it has become the dominant mode, so dominant that a different kind of conversation barely gets a look in.
Most leadership meetings follow a recognisable pattern. Data is shared, a concern is raised, a problem is highlighted. The conversation that follows is shaped by what needs fixing, where the gaps are, what the plan is to address them. That’s not wrong, it’s just not the whole picture.
A different kind of question
Appreciative inquiry starts from a different place. Rather than asking what’s wrong and how to fix it, it asks what’s working, why it’s working, and how conditions can be created for more of it. It’s a strengths-based approach to organisational development, one that takes seriously the idea that where a conversation begins shapes where it ends up. A meeting shaped by deficit thinking tends to produce deficit answers. One that opens with genuine curiosity about what’s working tends to surface something more useful.
The Open University describes appreciative inquiry as a way of working that focuses on an organisation’s strengths and successes rather than its problems and failures, a deliberate shift in how leaders examine their own practice. Difficulty still gets examined. The shift is in whether it’s always the first thing on the table.
The honest barrier is time and habit. When accountability pressure is high and agendas are full, starting from strengths can feel like a luxury. It isn’t, but it does require a deliberate decision to resist the pull toward problem-first thinking, and that’s harder than it sounds when the culture around you rewards identifying and fixing things quickly.
What this looks like in practice
For school leaders, the practical application is closer than it might sound.
Think about your last team meeting. How much of it was spent identifying problems, and how much was spent asking what had gone well and why? Not as a warm-up before the real agenda. As a genuine line of inquiry that the team stayed with long enough to learn something from it.
One headteacher, reflecting on a staff development session, described the moment a simple question changed the direction of the meeting. Instead of opening with that term’s assessment data, she asked her team: what’s the best lesson you’ve taught recently, and what made it work? The conversation that followed surfaced more about the school’s actual strengths, in subject knowledge, in relationships with students, in the way feedback was being used in certain classrooms, than the previous term’s review cycle had. The school hadn’t changed, the starting point had.
Or think about your self-evaluation process. Most are structured around evidence of impact, areas for development, actions to address them. That framework has value. But it tends to produce a document that describes a school primarily through its gaps. An appreciative inquiry approach would ask instead: what does this school do consistently well, and what does that tell us about our capacity to improve in the areas that need attention? The same logic applies to peer review, to CPD conversations, to the exchange between a headteacher and a middle leader after an observation.
These aren’t soft questions. They’re harder to answer than a RAG-rated action plan, because they require leaders to think carefully about what’s actually driving success rather than defaulting to what’s most visible or most measurable.
This way of thinking runs through how PiXL approaches school improvement. The belief that schools have the capacity to solve their own problems, that the knowledge and expertise needed is usually already in the room, sits underneath network conversations, open days, and the way peer learning works across the partnership. Appreciative inquiry gives that belief a more intentional structure. It also connects directly to the diagnosis stage of PiXL’s Diagnosis, Therapy, Treatment, Re-teaching model, the point at which leaders are examining what’s actually happening in their school before deciding what needs to change. Strengths-based questions belong in that stage. They surface evidence that deficit-first thinking tends to miss.
A starting point
If you’re looking for a starting point, the kinds of questions appreciative inquiry brings into a meeting or review process aren’t complicated. What’s working really well right now, and why? When have students made the progress you hoped for, what was in place that made that possible? What does your school do that you’d want every school to do, and what would it take to do more of it? They don’t need a new framework or a restructured meeting agenda. They need a decision, at the start of a conversation, to ask something different.
The Open University’s free OpenLearn course on appreciative inquiry is a useful starting point for any leader who wants to understand the approach before bringing it into their own context. The course covers the theoretical foundations and practical application of strengths-based inquiry in organisational settings.
The question to start with is straightforward. When did you last sit down with your team, ask what’s going really well, and stay with that question long enough to find out?
For leaders working within PiXL’s Diagnosis Therapy Testing Re-Teaching model, appreciative inquiry sits most naturally in the diagnosis stage, the questions it surfaces about what’s working, and why, are exactly the kind of evidence that should shape what comes next.
