The Tyranny of Merit: Rethinking success in our schools

The last non-fiction book I finished in 2022 keeps rolling around in my head, niggling and nagging, and is The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel. In this post I’m trying to work out why it’s had such an impact on me. I’m not sure I have the …

The Eternal Now of modern existence – or, Why I don’t like threads

Go on, hear me out. Bear with me. Sprinkle some of that Christmas cheer my way. Tear yourself away from the latest oh-so-sage travelator edu-thread and indulge me in a blog post I’ve had simmering for a while. In 2017 Twitter increased its character count from 140 to 280. Things began to change on my …

What happens to a dream deferred?

“What happens,” the poet Langston Hughes asks us, “to a dream deferred?” What are we thinking and dreaming about, school leaders? And how are we harnessing that combined expertise, that rangy, expansive knowledge arcing across the system? Or are we pushing back, tripping over structural incoherence, railing against the importance of our collective togetherness? Are …

Dark spots and bright lights

I’ve been challenged today to think, and that is a good thing. I blog and talk a lot about thinking and about what we're attending to as school leaders, but finding time to think in the whirring school day, especially in a grey, gnawing November, is hard. Today it was my Trust’s Principals’ Conference, and …