Author: Aby Moore

  • “I wasn’t entirely sold.” A teacher on the 40 seconds that changed his classroom

    “I wasn’t entirely sold.” A teacher on the 40 seconds that changed his classroom

    Forty Seconds at Primrose Hill: Part 3 of 4. The teacher’s view. 

    Jake Parsons has taught at Primrose Hill for the whole of his career, six years, starting in Reception and now working in Year 5, where he says he has found his niche. He’s exactly the kind of teacher a new initiative must win over, because he’s honest about the first thing every teacher thinks when a new initiative arrives.  

    “When I first heard about compassionomics,” he told us, “I wasn’t entirely sold by the concept.” 

    It’s worth sitting with that admission, because the doubt he names is the one most teachers feel and rarely say out loud. Compassionomics, the body of medical research that found a 40-second compassionate conversation could measurably improve a patient’s outcomes, can sound to a stretched teacher like one more thing. Jake’s worry was the obvious one. “I’ve not got much time as it is, and now I need to try and fit these 40-second conversations in throughout the whole day. How am I going to fit them in?”

    Anyone who has stood in front of a class will recognise that thought. What matters is what moved him past it.

    Making the science usable

    Two things changed Jake’s mind, and the first was practical. He didn’t have to wade through the original research. “You didn’t have to go and read the whole scientific literature,” he said, “probably things that were above my pay grade anyway. PiXL condensed it, made it so we can understand it as teachers and teaching assistants, and it’s easy for us to implement.” The framework told him he didn’t have to reach every child at once. He could start with a few, stage it, and build. 

    The second thing was the realisation that he was half doing it already, just without the intent. “As teachers we do it in the first place, but it doesn’t have that intention behind it of ‘I want to find out more, I want to care and nurture just a little bit more.’” The shift was from asking children about their weekend in general, to choosing a child, listening properly, holding the detail, and following it up days later. “How was that all-inclusive Chinese you went for?” The child feels valued, he said, because the question proves you were really listening the first time. 

    His own definition, offered for any teacher who has never heard the term, is worth keeping. Compassionomics, he said, is “a direct approach to caring for the children, through conversation, through warmth and nurturing, through ensuring that all the children feel heard and listened to.” Then the line that identifies the real problem it solves: “So often as a teacher we talk and we don’t listen.” 

    There’s a nice tension in doing this well. Done right, the children shouldn’t notice it’s a strategy at all. Jake says it becomes “just what happens,” and then, every so often, he watches one of them almost catch him at it. “You can see the light-bulb moment, where they go, oh, he’s doing something here, he’s asking how my grandmother is after her hip operation.” Part 1 of this series rests on the fact that the children can’t name what the school is doing. This is the same fact, seen from the front of the room.

    The tally chart 

    Jake’s first focus child had struggled with attendance. Late every day, falling behind before he sat down, walking in already braced for the feeling of catching up. Jake started a daily conversation and, with the child, kept a tally of the mornings he arrived on time. They marked it off together, day after day. “He went from turning up late every single day for a whole term to being on time and there every single day.” The arithmetic of that is striking. A child who was losing the start of every lesson, brought back into the room by a conversation that cost under a minute. And once he was in the room, Jake watched the rest follow. The boy stopped carrying the stress of being behind, and his learning lifted with him. 

    The harder story was a boy who joined mid-year, having been excluded more than once elsewhere. Jake is candid about the red flag he felt reading the paperwork, with a settled, hard-working classroom he didn’t want disturbed. So, the team did the opposite of brace for trouble. “We made a really conscientious effort of going out of our way to really understand him as a person, to find out what makes him tick.” It turned out he had a good sense of humour, and that a light touch in a tense moment could defuse it before it escalated. “Since he joined, we’ve had no behaviour problems, and his work has improved significantly,” Jake said, from at-risk on attainment to working at age-related or better across the board. He’s careful to share the credit, naming the teaching assistants who bought into it. The point he keeps making is that the conversation only works if the caring is real before the question is asked. 

    The same team 

    Asked for the parent relationship that had changed most, Jake didn’t reach for a quick win. He described a mum whose son’s attendance was poor, and who, rather than bring him in late, would often keep him off without telling the school why. There was no chasing her with policy. Instead, the school had what Jake calls “candid conversations” and “compassionate conversations,” until something gave. “We made sure she realised that we’re on the same team here,” he said, “that behind that compassion is that we both want the best for her child.” Now she tells them straight away if there’s a problem, and she knows the door is always open. His way of putting it holds the whole strategy in a line: “What she wants and what we want is exactly the same.” 

    The mechanism is what should interest a leader. A short, repeated, genuine conversation changed how a hard-to-reach adult behaved, and the child’s attendance moved with it. The parents in Part 2 of this series describe what that warmth feels like from their side of the gate. Here’s the teacher describing how it gets built.

    Bravery, and the why 

    There’s a quieter strand in Jake’s account, and it’s about courage, one of the school’s values. He shows what that word means in practice, which hits harder than any poster on a wall. He teaches a class of ten-year-old boys reaching the age where feelings go underground. One told him, in a lesson on emotions, that his dad had said sadness should be pushed down. Jake saw the moment for what it was and gently turned it over. “We want people who know it’s brave to show empathy, to be nurturing and caring. That takes bravery.” Getting boys who would rather not talk to talk is now, he says, one of the things he watches for most. 

    The care turned out to travel in both directions. Jake noticed behaviour settle right across the classroom, “because they care for you as you care for them, it’s reciprocated in both ways.” And it didn’t stay between him and the children. The staff have started doing it with each other, and a session held without the head and deputy in the room, simply so people could talk openly, is the kind of thing Jake says wouldn’t have happened as easily before. He even admits, with a grin, that it has improved things at home. 

    His message to a teacher elsewhere who feels they have no time for this isn’t a slogan. It’s an instruction. “Make time. You can do it in those small moments throughout the day,” the walk to the lunch hall, the few minutes before the bell, the playground duty where you talk to a child who isn’t even in your class. Weave it in so it’s flexible rather than rigid, he says, and be honest about which children most need it. The rest happens as a by-product. 

    He ended on the line that, more than the data, explains why it works. “Between the times of nine and three, you are their parent. It’s your sole job to make sure they feel looked after, cared for, listened to and nurtured. The learning is a by-product of that.” 

    Final part: Emma Mignaud, the head teacher, on hearing about compassionomics at a PiXL trust heads day and turning “that sounds like a good idea” into how a whole school runs. Primrose Hill is a PiXL member school in the Forest of Dean. 

    Missed part 1 and part two? Check them out here: Part 1 (The student’s view), Part 2 (The parent’s view).

    Further reading 

    Trzeciak, S. and Mazzarelli, A. (2019) Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. Studer Group Publishing.

  • The 40 seconds lands on the parents too 

    The 40 seconds lands on the parents too 

    Forty Seconds at Primrose Hill: Part 2 of 4. The parents’ view.

    There’s a version of this story that stops at the child. A teacher holds a short, warm, deliberate conversation with a pupil, the pupil feels seen, the pupil settles, the outcomes improve. That version is true, and Parts 3 and 4 of this series tell it from the inside. But the picture is bigger than that. The parents at Primrose Hill told us the rest. The 40 seconds doesn’t stop at the child. It catches the adult dropping them off, and it follows them into the rest of their day.  

    We spoke to a group of parents, and separately to a parent who’s also a school governor. We started with the morning, because the morning is often where the strain is and nobody pretended otherwise. As the governor put it, the school run “isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.” You have battled your child into a coat, battled the other cars for a space, and arrived carrying whatever the week has already done to you. 

    A reset at the gate 

    Every parent there could name the feeling of handing their child over and walking away lighter. “Happy in, happy out,” one mother called it. Another reached for “stress free”: “I know she’ll be okay.” A third described the tell that does it for her: “The first thing my kids say is ‘Bye, Mummy,’ and I know instantly they’ve happily gone in there.” 

    But the welcome isn’t only for the children. The governor described arriving frayed and finding the head teacher at the gate. “She’s really personable. She’s human.” A short chat, sometimes about nothing to do with school at all, sometimes about football, sometimes just an honest “I’ve had a rough morning, you can tell.” He called it “an opportunity to reset,” and then, with feeling, “the best social drug.” He goes back to the car, takes a breath, and starts the day on a different footing. One mother, who had worked late the night before, said the calm she picks up at drop-off is the calm she carries back to her desk: “It’ll affect my mood and make me start off on the right foot, because you know everybody’s happy here. And they care about you as well as the children.” 

    Another mother put the mechanism plainly. On a hard morning, she walks her son in rather than leaving him at the gate and quietly tells his teacher she has had a tricky start. They keep an extra eye on him, and she gets her day back. “I can be Claire,” she said, “as opposed to mum.” A teacher’s 40 seconds, spent on a child, handed a parent back her own name for the rest of the day. 

    They ask because they’re interested 

    What the parents kept circling was the difference between warmth that’s performed and warmth that’s real. “They’re not asking the question because they have to,” one said. “They’re asking because they’re interested.” Several mentioned bumping into staff in town and being stopped for a proper catch-up, including about children who left the school years ago. One described every door having an adult on it each morning, greeting children by name, “and that’s normal, that’s every day, that’s not ‘oh, the cameras are in.’” 

    The detail that came up in nearly every conversation was names. The head, they said, knows every child’s name, and a good deal more. “They also know what’s going on with the children at home or in school.” For these parents, that knowledge is what makes the trust possible. As the governor said, you’re handing over “my most prized possession” to people you didn’t know from Adam, and the school earns the right to that trust one short, genuine conversation at a time.

    What the governor sees 

    The parent who’s also a governor is worth coming back to, because the role hands him a second lens on the same school. Part of that job is to scrutinise it and ask the hard questions a parent never has to. So, it‘s worth noting the word he reaches for with the governor hat on was ambition. “There is a collective drive to be as ambitious as possible,” he said, “to achieve success, whatever that success looks like for the individual.” He pointed to the displays on the walls, the “we are artists, we are mathematicians” framing, and to the way the end goal is spelled out to the children from the start. Asked to describe the school in a few words, he chose “ambitious, driven, friendly and pragmatic.” 

    The obvious worry about any school built on compassion, that warmth comes at the cost of rigour. The parents kept closing that gap themselves. The behaviour policy is clear enough that families reinforce it at home, as one put it, “so there’s consistency.” At Primrose Hill the care and the high expectations pull in the same direction. 

    The same governor noticed where it all ends up. His daughter teaches him when she gets home. “No daddy, you wouldn’t remember how this worked, this is how we do it now,” and then she walks him through the method rather than the answer. What struck him was that she had taken on the reasoning, not the result alone. “It’s the why, and I’m a real believer that the why matters more than anything.” A short conversation at the gate is part of how a child comes to care enough to bring the lesson home and explain it to a parent who never asked. 

    The day it truly mattered 

    The clearest evidence came from a father remembering his son’s early days at the school, before the boy moved up to secondary. “We had tears at the gate. He’d lost a bit of confidence.” He described himself by the fence, trying to cajole a frightened child through the door, when a teacher came over. Not with a policy, but with a question: “Would you like me to help?” They sat, they talked, the boy heard there was nothing to worry about. “Within a few weeks he was back to normal and blossoming again.” His verdict on the staff who did it was simple. “They did a really good job there.” 

    That’s what 40 seconds buys, repeated daily and meant every time. A frightened child settled. A parent unclenched. A family that, years later, still talks about the school the way one mother did when we asked how she’d describe it to a newcomer: “My kids go to Primrose Hill. Which school are you looking at?”

    One parent took the longest view of all. She came to Primrose Hill herself, forty years ago, and now walks back through the same gates as an adult dropping off her own child. “Everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed,” she said. “The same ethos runs through the school as when I was here. It was always a happy school then. A well performing school. And to feel the same forty years later, that’s quite incredible.” In Part 1, a child imagined the school as somewhere safe enough to one day send children of her own. This is a parent who has done exactly that, forty years on. 

    The compassion was designed for the children. The parents are telling us it reached them too. 

    Next in the series: Jake Parsons, the Year 5 teacher who admits he “wasn’t entirely sold” when he first heard the idea, and what changed his mind. Then the head, Emma Mignot, on building a whole school around it. Primrose Hill is a PiXL member school in the Forest of Dean.

    Further reading 

    Trzeciak, S. and Mazzarelli, A. (2019) Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. Studer Group Publishing. 

  • The children can’t name it. They can feel it. 

    The children can’t name it. They can feel it. 

    Forty Seconds at Primrose Hill: Part 1 of 4. The pupils’ view. 

    Ask a child at Primrose Hill C of E Primary Academy what “compassionomics” means and you’ll get a blank look. None of them have heard the word. None of them know that the adults around them have built a deliberate strategy out of a piece of medical research, or that a 40-second conversation is being held with intent, or that anyone, anywhere, is measuring whether it works. 

    What they can do is describe their school. And when you listen to how they describe it, you’re hearing proof that the strategy works. 

    We sat down with two groups of pupils and asked them simple things. What do you look forward to? How do you feel walking through the gates? Who do you tell when something exciting happens? What would you say to a child who doesn’t go here? Not one question mentioned compassion, or care, or relationships. We wanted to hear what they reached for on their own, without prompting. 

    They reached for trust. 

    A place you can trust 

    The word came up again and again, unprompted. One child explained why she always says hello to a teacher in the corridor: “I just want to make a bigger connection, to know I can trust them.” Another, asked what colour the school would be, chose a bright one, “because it shows that there’s somewhere that you can trust, somewhere you could send your children to when they grow up a little bit.” That’s a primary-age child describing the school as a place safe enough to one day hand over their own children. They’re not performing for a camera. They simply think this is what schools are. 

    Compassionomics

    When we asked what happens on a sad or quiet day, the answers were practical and certain. “I would share my problems with friends or teachers.” “I would tell my friends, then later I’d also tell my teachers.” One child described going in a little early so there was private time: “I take that personal time to tell stuff.” A child has worked out that the adults at the door have a few unhurried seconds for them before the day begins and has decided to spend those seconds on the things that matter most to them. That’s the 40 seconds, seen from the other side of it. 

    They didn’t pretend bad days never happen here. They were matter of fact that they do. What they were sure of was where a bad day goes when it arrives: to a friend first, then to a teacher. Knowing exactly where to take it isn’t something a child works out alone. They learn it from adults who have made themselves available before. 

    They have the words for how they feel 

    We also asked how they feel walking through the gates in the morning, and the answers stood out less for their warmth than for their range. Not just “happy.” One child said “curious,” because she and her friends would be wondering what the day’s lessons might bring. Another said “comfortable,” and explained it: “I feel happy because I know the friends that are going to be there, I feel comfortable.” A third said “excited, because I’m ready to know what we’re going to do today.” These are children who can name a feeling and tell you where it comes from. That fluency isn’t a given at this age. The teacher whose interview comes later in this series talks about the work involved in getting ten-year-old boys to talk about feelings at all. Here, the youngest children already have the words, because the adults around them use them every day.  

    They notice who notices them 

    The pupils were clear that the warmth isn’t rationed. When asked which grown-up always makes them laugh or smile, one child widened the question out before answering it: “all the teachers, because they never say mean things to you, but they always just make you smile.” Another described the school to an outsider as “warm and friendly, because it’s hard to run into someone who doesn’t say hello, especially the teachers.” 

    Mr Parsons, the Year 5 teacher, came up by name more than once. The children rated him not for his lessons but for something quieter. He has “a very good sense of humour,” one said, “and I think he can just understand you as well.” The children had noticed exactly that: a busy adult who, in the middle of a normal school day, takes the time to understand them. 

    Second family 

    The phrase that stayed with us came when we asked them to describe the school to someone who doesn’t go there. “I would describe our school as a second family,” one child said, “because everyone here is like friends with each other.” Another landed on “a trustful place where you could laugh and have a nice time.” A third went broad and happy: “a happy school, because all the people here are really happy and they’re really nice.” 

    There’s a temptation, reading these back, to find them sweet and leave it there. We would push the other way. These are children with no vocabulary for the thing being done to them, describing its exact effect with total accuracy. The adults set out to build a school where every child feels heard, valued and safe enough to bring their worries through the door. Ask the children, who have never seen the plan, and that’s the school they describe. 

    One last thread is worth pulling, because it’s the one that shows up in results. The very first answer we got, when we asked what the children look forward to, was this: “I look forward to learning new things because I want to know more about the world.” That’s a line about curiosity, not about feeling safe, though the two travel together. A child who isn’t spending the morning bracing has attention left over for the world beyond the classroom door. The security is what buys the curiosity. For a leader weighing whether 40 seconds is worth the bother, that is the entire argument, from belonging through to outcomes, made by a seven-year-old who had no idea they were making it. 

    The strategy is invisible to them. That’s how you know it has worked.

    Next in the series: the parents, who feel the same 40 seconds land on them at the gate. Then the teacher who started out unconvinced, and the head whose whole philosophy fits inside it. Primrose Hill is a PiXL member school in the Forest of Dean. They first heard about compassionomics through PiXL.  

    Further reading 

    Trzeciak, S. and Mazzarelli, A. (2019) Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. Studer Group Publishing. 

  • What does it mean to give young people a voice?

    What does it mean to give young people a voice?

    The UK ranks last out of 27 European countries for how happy 15-year-olds are with their life. Almost half of young people in England feel their voice doesn’t matter in decisions across the country.

    Those two facts, sitting next to each other, are worth spending time on. These facts might not be surprising to anyone who works with young people, but they point at something specific. It’s not that young people are disengaged, many of them have just stopped expecting to matter.

    That’s a different problem and it needs a different kind of response.

    Agency isn’t the same as choice

    It’s easy to conflate the two. Choice is about options, but Agency is about whether a young person believes those options are genuinely available to them.

    Consider the student who knows, in theory, that there are different paths open after school.

    Who has heard the assemblies, seen the posters, sat through the careers session. And who still makes decisions based primarily on what feels safest, or most familiar, or least likely to result in failure. It’s not that the options weren’t presented, just that nothing in their experience has taught them that their preferences carry weight. That what they want is a legitimate input into what happens next.

    Agency is what changes that. It’s the difference between a young person who sees the future as something that will happen to them, and one who understands it as something they’re already shaping. And it’s built, or not built, in the smallest and most ordinary moments of school life: whether a student’s unconventional answer gets taken seriously or smoothed over. Whether the adults around them are genuinely curious about their thinking.

    Whether anything they care about shows up anywhere in the rooms they’re in.

    This matters across every phase. In primary, it shows up in whether children feel their opinions count for anything. In secondary and post-16, the decisions carry more visible consequences: subjects, pathways and identity. Young people who feel genuine agency in those moments tend to make choices that reflect who they actually are. Those who don’t make choices for very different reasons.

    What schools are already doing

    It would be a mistake to read any of this as a suggestion that schools are falling short. The work of building environments where young people feel they belong and that their presence in the room counts is happening in classrooms and corridors and tutor groups every single day. It’s in the way a teacher responds when a student gets something wrong. It’s in the conversations that happen at the edges of the school day, the ones that never make it into any data set.

    What the research reflects is a broader picture that schools sit inside but didn’t create. Low life satisfaction among teenagers isn’t a school problem, it’s a social one. Schools are doing difficult and important work within it.

    The more useful question isn’t whether schools are doing enough. It’s whether the things that are already working can be made more deliberate, and shared widely enough that more young people benefit from them.

    The end of term matters more than it seems

    There’s a particular window at the end of the summer term that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.

    For many young people, school is the most stable and connected part of their week. When

    that disappears for six weeks, the students who were already uncertain about their place in the world can feel it acutely. The summer break is long. It’s largely unstructured. And it arrives at the point in the year when young people have the least adult scaffolding around them.

    The final weeks of term are a genuine opportunity. This isn’t the time to fix things, but to equip. To help young people leave with a clearer sense of their options, a stronger belief that their voice matters, and something to hold onto when school isn’t there.

    In September, PiXL’s Let’s Talk programme gives schools a structured way to pick these conversations back up from the start of the new year. For secondary members, Choices with Omar Sharif and Our Power to Change the World with Onjali Rauf give young people the chance to explore agency and decision-making through the lens of people who have navigated real complexity in their own lives. If the end of this term has surfaced things worth returning to, these are worth having on your radar for autumn.

    In the final stretch of term, they are one way of making sure the summer break begins with young people feeling equipped rather than simply released.

    The quieter students in every room

    The schools that do this best tend to share one thing. They treat the question of student voice not as a programme or an initiative, but as an ongoing test of their own practice. They notice when the same students are quiet in every room. They pay attention to who’s not putting their hand up, not just who is. They understand that a young person’s belief in their own agency is built across thousands of small interactions, and that it can be undermined by the same.

    The data on teenage life satisfaction in this country is a prompt to keep paying attention to that. The young people in front of us every day are navigating a world that gives them a lot of noise and very little signal about what they are actually worth.

    Schools are often the clearest signal they get. For some young people, it’s the most reliable source of evidence they have about whether they matter. Schools carry that whether they intend to or not. The question is just how deliberately they use it.

  • What we assume about disadvantaged learners might be the biggest barrier of all

    What we assume about disadvantaged learners might be the biggest barrier of all

    Think of a pupil. A girl, say, who’s not making the progress you know she’s capable of. She has moved twice in the past eighteen months. Her attendance at her previous school was inconsistent, and her prior attainment data is thin. Before you’ve even spoken to her or her family, before you’ve looked closely at what she actually knows and can do, assumptions are forming. Low engagement risk, limited parental support and unlikely to access enrichment.

    Marc Rowland, one of the UK’s most respected Pupil Premium specialists, has spent years making the case against exactly this pattern. The most effective approach to narrowing the disadvantage gap, he argues, is learning-led: grounded in what students know and can do, informed by accurate ongoing assessment of the individual.

    For learners from a disadvantaged backgrounds, the gap between that approach and an assumption-led one has real consequences.

    The problem with assumptions

    Assumptions about students from disadvantaged backgrounds are rarely callous. They’re usually the product of incomplete information combined with real care for the student. But they produce real consequences regardless of the care behind them.

    When assumptions drive provision, interventions become poorly targeted. Research points consistently to this: when provision is driven by assumption, it tends to land in the low to moderate impact range. Schools invest significant time and resource working against the wrong diagnosis.

    What assumptions do to expectations matters just as much. When a school assumes low engagement, poor attendance, or limited readiness to access enrichment, it begins to misattribute gaps in knowledge to gaps in ability. The student in the example above, the one with patchy attendance and thin data, might have strong analytical thinking, a sophisticated understanding of cause and effect, and a real appetite for challenge. The assumptions forming around her would keep all of that hidden.

    What careful, ongoing assessment does

    Precise, ongoing assessment changes the starting point. It asks what this student knows and where specifically the gaps are, giving school leaders something specific to act on.

    This requires the discipline to resist quick categorisation and the processes that draw out detailed information about individual learners. It also demands something from school leaders: a readiness to examine the assumptions they bring to every conversation about their most disadvantaged pupils.

    Assessment takes time and discipline, and it asks more of school leaders. But schools that commit to it are working from an accurate picture of what each learner knows and where they need to go next.

    Assessment, relationships, and belonging

    When assessment drives the conversation, something changes in the relationship between school and family too.

    Research from the Belonging in Education Research Network at Oxford’s Rees Centre

    confirms that 1 in 4 students in the UK don’t feel they belong in school. Among those from more disadvantaged communities, that number is increasing. For many of those pupils, what they experience is an institution that has formed views about them before it has understood them.

    This points to Bent Flyvbjerg’s maxim: think slow, act fast. The school leaders doing the most effective work with students from disadvantaged backgrounds and their families tend to prioritise understanding before they commit to action. They ask questions of students, families, and community members, resisting the urge to offer solutions before they’ve listened.

    Evidence from assessment makes those conversations more grounded. It gives school leaders something specific to bring to a family: accurate information about what this student knows and what the school is planning to do about it. For many disadvantaged students, that kind of specific, evidence-led conversation is what shifts the relationship between school and family.

    A starting point

    If you’re working with disadvantaged learners who aren’t making the progress you know they’re capable of, look closely at what’s driving the provision around them. Has it been built on accurate assessment, or on assumption?

    The student who’s moved twice in eighteen months, whose data is thin and whose attendance has been inconsistent, has missed learning. She may also have strengths, attributes, and capabilities that have had no opportunity to show up in her data. Ongoing assessment is what surfaces those things and gives the school something specific to build on.

    PiXL Waves, powered by Pupil Progress, supports schools with laser-sharp diagnostic insights on student progress, giving school leaders the evidence they need to respond to each learner with accuracy.

    PiXL supports school leaders in developing the tools, insight, and professional confidence to narrow the disadvantage gap. Find out more about PiXL Wave and Pupil Progress at pixl.org.uk.

  • Introducing the Education Leadership Awards: celebrating the leaders who shape our schools

    Introducing the Education Leadership Awards: celebrating the leaders who shape our schools

    Leadership in schools rarely looks like the job title suggests.

    It looks like a head of department staying late to support a colleague through a difficult term. It looks like a headteacher who remembers every student’s name and notices the one having a hard day before anyone says a word. It looks like decisions made quietly, away from any spotlight, that go on to shape what a school becomes.

    This year, we wanted to find those people and give them the recognition they rarely ask for. That’s why we’ve launched the Education Leadership Awards.

    Six ways to lead. One thing in common

    There are six award categories, each one designed to capture a different dimension of what great leadership looks like in education.

    The Cultural Leader Award asks: do you know a leader who has made their school feel different, safer, prouder, more alive? The Strategic Leader Award looks for the person who sees further than the immediate and builds what others only imagine. The Curriculum Leader Award celebrates the leader whose students leave knowing more, understanding more, and believing they are capable of more.

    The Community Leader Award recognises leaders who understand that a school’s influence does not stop at the gate. The Wellbeing Leader Award is for the person who sees the whole person and makes sure no one is invisible. And the Inclusion Leader Award honours those who refuse to let any young person be written off.

    Each category is open across primary, secondary, post-16, and trust settings, so leadership at every level of the sector has its own place here. That means six categories, four sectors, and 24 routes to recognition for the leaders doing this work every day.

    Who can nominate?

    Anyone who has worked alongside a leader they believe deserves this recognition. You don’t need a formal title or a specific relationship. You need a story.

    The nomination platform guides you through three short video questions. You’ll see each one on screen before you record, so there are no surprises. The first asks you to describe your nominee in three words. The second asks why they deserve this award, and the most compelling nominations here tend to focus on a specific moment rather than a general statement. The third asks about impact: what’s different today because this person showed up?

    That’s it. Three questions, around eight minutes, completed in a single sitting. The process is completely free, at every stage.

    Every nominee receives a personalised video to share, regardless of the outcome. Every winner receives a stunning glass award at the ceremony in February 2027, with the nominations being judged by education leaders themselves.

    How to nominate

    Before you start, it helps to have a few things ready: your nominee’s full name as they’d want it to appear on a national award, their job title and school or organisation, and their email address so they can be notified and receive their personalised video.

    Then head to the nomination page and let the platform do the rest.

    Nominate now

    Someone in your world deserves to be seen. Eight minutes is all it takes.

  • The questions leaders ask most often aren’t always the most useful ones

    The questions leaders ask most often aren’t always the most useful ones

    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.

  • Growing science capital, starting with a bus seat

    Growing science capital, starting with a bus seat

    Look closely at a bus seat. The pattern, the fabric, the foam underneath. There’s more science in it than you might think.

    The fabric is woven moquette, designed with a dense pile that springs back after thousands of journeys. The pattern does a job too. Busy, high-contrast designs hide wear and stains, which is materials science meeting practical economics. Underneath sits foam engineered to compress and recover, fire-tested to standards most passengers never hear about.

    None of this looks like science to most children. And that gap, between the science they meet in lessons and the science woven through their everyday lives, is exactly what the idea of science capital helps us understand.

    What is science capital?

    Science capital describes the sum of all the science-related knowledge, attitudes, experiences and resources a person builds up through their life. It covers what they know about science, how they feel about it, who they know with an understanding of it, and how often they encounter it day to day.

    The research, from the ASPIRES project led by Professor Louise Archer and colleagues at UCL, found something that matters enormously for schools: a child with higher science capital is more likely to believe that science is for them. They’re more likely to see it as something that belongs to people like them, and a world they could belong in.

    The harder part of the research is that science capital isn’t evenly spread. Some children grow up surrounded by it and many don’t, and left alone, that gap tends to reproduce itself. Which is exactly why what schools do here matters so much.

    What schools are already doing

    The encouraging part is that schools can grow science capital, and many already are. Trips to science centres and museums. Field work. Science and environment clubs. CREST Awards through the British Science Association, which give pupils ownership of real investigations.

    But some of the most powerful work costs nothing. It starts with showing children that science is all around them, well beyond the obviously scientific objects like a phone or a laptop.

    Pick any object. The curry sauce from the local takeaway. A cup of coffee. A piece of gym equipment. That bus seat. Then ask one question: what’s the science behind this?

    The local angle matters too. When the object comes from a business pupils walk past every day, the question quietly becomes a careers conversation. A textile technologist chose that seat fabric. The foam was specified by a materials engineer and signed off by a safety tester before it carried a single passenger. Jobs like these exist here, in this town.

    A challenge for this week

    Choose one everyday object with your class, ideally something from your local area, and spend ten minutes unpicking the science behind it. If you want questions you can lift straight into the lesson:

    What’s it made of? Why that material and not something else? How would you test whether it does its job? Who decided it was safe, and how would they know? What would you change about it?

    Then ask pupils to bring in their own.

    And when your class has picked its object, share it with us. Tag PiXL and use the Science Week hashtag, because half the fun is seeing what other schools choose, and we will be resharing our favourites all week.

    If you want to go deeper, the Science Centres introduction to science capital is an excellent starting point, and PiXL members can find disciplinary literacy and numeracy activities for international days in the members’ area.

    Start with one object on Monday morning and see where your pupils take it.

  • The test of a true partnership

    The test of a true partnership

    The language of partnership is everywhere in schools. What’s harder to find is the evidence that it changed anything.

    The test of a true partnership isn’t whether families were invited to a meeting or children were asked what they thought. It’s whether anything was different because they were.

    In schools, this work happens across two distinct relationships, and it matters that we hold them as distinct. The partnership with parents and carers isn’t the same practice as the partnership with the young people themselves. They share the same moral foundation, that the people most affected by a child’s education should be authentically involved in it, but they aren’t the same practice. The pressures in each are different. What the evidence asks of each is different. And the consequences when either breaks down aren’t the same. Blurring them weakens both.

    What genuine parent partnership requires isn’t an open door. It’s whether families have a real opportunity to form their views, a genuine means to express them, someone with the power to act on them, and evidence afterwards that their involvement made a difference. It’s important to have a genuine partnership with parents, not just communicate well with them. Most families know whether they have been genuinely heard or whether the outcome was already decided.

    For that partnership to work, schools need to think about what forming a view actually requires. A parent who perhaps has never felt confident in an education setting, or who doesn’t share the school’s first language, or who works two jobs and can’t make a 4pm meeting, isn’t failing to engage. The opportunity to participate has been designed for someone else. Genuine partnership means shaping access around the family, not the system.

    It also asks schools to take seriously who in the room has the power to act. A parent who shares something important with a teaching assistant, whose notes are never passed on, hasn’t been heard. An audience means someone who can change what happens next. Without that, consultation is a performance. The families who engage least with school are often the ones whose children most need the partnership to work. Lowering expectations of what partnership means isn’t the answer, building it differently is.

    There’s a useful way of thinking about this from PiXL CEO Rachel Johnson: her mattering matrix asks whether an individual feels both valued and that they add value. Both are necessary. A parent who’s welcomed warmly but whose knowledge never changes anything has been made to feel acknowledged, not essential. It’s the second part, the sense that what you bring actually matters, that’s most often missing. And without it, the partnership doesn’t hold.

    The same is true for the young people themselves. Children are inside the institution, subject to it every day, and their right to be heard isn’t conditional on how engaged their parents are. A child whose parent doesn’t engage with school still has a right to a voice within it. That voice isn’t a school council or a survey at the end of term. It’s expressed when children are genuinely supported to form and share their views, in ways that work for them. For some children, particularly those with complex needs, voice doesn’t always mean verbal. The means of expression matters as much as the opportunity to use it.

    Children are also astute. A child who has shared something before and seen nothing change won’t share it again. Trust builds through evidence that it works. Knowing their views changed something is what keeps children sharing. Without that, participation becomes something they learn to perform rather than something they believe in.

    What these two partnerships share, beyond their moral foundation, is that they are cultural before they are procedural. You can’t write a policy that creates genuine partnership. You can build structures that support it, but the structures only work if the culture is already there. What we see consistently across our network isn’t a better SEND review process or a more welcoming parents’ evening. It’s a different assumption from the start: that families and children hold knowledge the school needs, and that finding ways to reach it’s part of the job. It shows when a family contacts the school and feels genuinely known. When a child’s view is sought before a decision is made, not explained afterwards. When what a parent said at the last meeting is still being held.

    Think about your own school. When did a young person’s view last change something? And does that young person know it did?

    A parent who disengages from school is a challenge. But a child whose voice is never heard is a different kind of failure, and it belongs to the institution, not to the child. A parent who feels unheard has somewhere to go: a complaint, a governor, a decision to withdraw. A child who feels invisible often has nowhere, and that isn’t the same thing. These two partnerships are connected but they are not dependent on each other. A school cannot use the absence of one to excuse the neglect of the other.

    New funding is now tied to whole-school inclusion approaches, and the schools white paper positions partnership as central to a high-standards system. Our work with Parentkind, and what we hear consistently from leaders across our SEND and Inclusion networks, says the same thing: the schools doing this well have made a cultural decision, not a strategic one. They’re not building partnerships in response to a framework. They’re doing it because they have seen what changes when a child knows their school genuinely hears them. And what changes for the families of those children.

    The test of a true partnership isn’t whether it happened. It’s whether anything changed because it did.

  • Serious About Subtraction: The Quieter Discipline of Precision Leadership

    Serious About Subtraction: The Quieter Discipline of Precision Leadership

    There’s a passage in PiXL’s Serious About Subtraction Leadership Thinking Guide that tends to hit harder in leadership teams than its writers probably expected:

    “Sometimes, we are addicted to adding things to our list, our plans and our approach. Of course, adding things can be a very good thing, it is how we can improve and how we can change things. Doing more can really help but sometimes it can disguise the real problem and sometimes, it can even get in the way of our leadership and our effectiveness.”

    Most heads, if asked privately, would recognise some version of this in their own school. The harder question is what to do about it, particularly at this point in the year, when leadership teams are starting to look at next year’s improvement plan and the natural pressure is to make it bigger rather than tighter. The behaviour intervention from October. The literacy strand that began in January after the data analysis came in. The wellbeing piece that launched alongside the staff survey. The data review cycle that runs every six weeks because it always has. The new attendance protocol that came in after Easter. Each was introduced for a good reason and survived the review that followed. Each is still officially live.

    The pressure most leadership teams feel at this point is to add more on top of all this: a better MIS system, a new marking policy, another attendance initiative, training on Adaptive teaching, an oracy audit. The other available response, the one that tends to take more time and produce fewer visible deliverables, is subtraction

    Why subtraction takes longer to do well

    There are practical reasons subtraction is harder than addition. Adding produces something visible. It comes with a meeting, a launch event, a slide in a strategy document, a line in the autumn newsletter to parents. Subtraction has none of those affordances. There is no launch event for stopping a thing.

    It’s also harder because the work coming off the plan was usually introduced by someone still on the team, championed in a previous SLT meeting, defended in a Trust review. Letting it go can feel internally like a quiet admission that the original decision was wrong, which it usually wasn’t. Most things on a plan worked when they were introduced; the honest question is whether they’re still doing the work they were brought in to do.

    Most leadership teams underestimate the cost of never asking that question. Schools that only ever add eventually run out of operational room. Staff who came up through the adding years often keep pace, because the layers went on one at a time. New colleagues joining a school whose plan has been accreting for a decade frequently can’t see where to stand. Over time, the harder cost shows up as a loss of clarity. When every initiative is still officially live, the leadership team loses the ability to point at the small number of things that genuinely matter most this year.

    What subtraction actually requires

    Subtraction, properly done, is leadership work rather than housekeeping. Tidying the school improvement plan is the version anyone with a highlighter can do in an afternoon. The version that matters asks, honestly, which of the things we still do are genuinely moving us towards the outcomes we care about, and which are still here because the conversation about stopping never happened.

    Done well, the work needs a few things:

    The first is rigour about the criteria, made explicit rather than left to whoever happens to hold the most influence on the day. What earns its place against the outcomes we want for the children and young people in our schools, and what doesn’t.

    The second is care for the people involved. Some of what comes off the plan will be attached to colleagues who introduced it, defended it, or built their professional identity around it. Subtraction done carelessly creates damage that takes years to repair, and the work deserves to be done with that in mind.

    The third is the willingness to actually have the conversation in the room. Subtraction in theory is easy. In practice it means saying out loud what has been quietly understood for a while: that the literacy strand isn’t working in its current form, that the data review cycle is producing reports nobody acts on, that the line management structure introduced two years ago is creating more friction than clarity. The leaders who do this well tend not to outsource the conversation to a consultant or a survey.

    Questions worth taking into the summer term

    A handful of questions that tend to surface the most useful subtraction conversations in leadership teams:

    What did we add this year that hasn’t done what we hoped it would, and what are we waiting for before we say so?

    Which things on our plan are still there because they work, and which are there because they are what we did last year?

    If a new colleague joined our leadership team tomorrow, which parts of the plan would we explain apologetically?

    What would our most experienced staff say is getting in the way of their best work this term?

    If we removed one thing from the plan before September, what would it be, and who needs to be in the room when we decide?

    The questions are designed to make a leadership team look honestly at what its plan has become, including the parts that have become difficult to defend.

    Precision over volume

    The wider framing here connects to the theme of this year’s PiXL June Conference: precision leadership, which the conference materials describe as not doing more, but doing the right things with greater clarity and intent.

    Subtraction is one of the most practical forms that idea takes between now and September. Are you brave enough to stop the high-effort, low-impact initiatives and go into next year with a slightly shorter plan, held with more conviction? Schools that do tend to make more genuine progress than those carrying everything forward by default.