Education offers us a constant stream of ideas about how schools might improve, many of them useful and some arriving with enough enthusiasm to make us reconsider the entire improvement plan before Monday morning. Remaining curious is part of good leadership, but our attention is finite, as is that of the people we lead. Amongst the research, frameworks, initiatives and entirely reasonable demands, every school needs to decide which work it cannot afford to lose sight of.
After years of leading schools and later holding accountability across a group of them, I have come to believe that one of a principal’s most important responsibilities is to bring the school to a clear and shared understanding of what every child will know and be able to do. This does not require us to reduce education to a checklist or pretend that everything worth learning can be neatly measured. It asks us to identify the foundations on which children’s wider education depends and make a collective commitment not to leave them to chance.
Accountability systems can reveal patterns, expose inequity and sharpen priorities, but their value lies in leading us back to individual children. Meaningful change happens when somebody notices what has not yet been secured and makes sure something useful happens next.
Being clear about the foundations
Agreeing the essential foundations deserves careful thought because this is not an invitation to write down everything we happen to value. We are identifying the knowledge, vocabulary, facts and processes that children will repeatedly need if they are to read, write, calculate, reason and participate confidently in the wider curriculum. The list should be sufficiently focused to guide teaching and practice, while remaining ambitious enough to protect every child’s entitlement.
A principal should be able to explain what the school has agreed children will know and be able to do, when this learning should be secure, what security looks like and how it will be maintained. That clarity should then run through the school at an appropriate level of detail, so governors understand the entitlement being protected, teachers know the learning that requires particular attention, parents know what their children are working towards and children understand what they are practising and why.
This is where collective responsibility becomes important. Leading small schools showed me the value of knowing children across year groups and phases, particularly when staff wore several hats and responsibility was naturally shared. A child did not become somebody else’s concern when the new school year arrived. Larger organisations need to work deliberately to preserve that closeness, so gaps do not disappear between classrooms, teams or spreadsheets. No individual teacher is expected to solve every problem alone, but responsibility for deciding and delivering the next response remains with the school.
Turning information into action
Once the foundations have been agreed, the work becomes a continuing cycle of teaching, noticing, responding, practising and revisiting. A correct answer during today’s lesson is encouraging, although it does not tell us whether the learning will remain available next week. Children need clear teaching, carefully chosen practice and repeated opportunities to retrieve important knowledge after time has passed.
As knowledge becomes secure, children need enough fluency to use it without exhausting their attention. A child labouring through basic number facts has less working-memory capacity available for a multi-step problem, just as a reader concentrating heavily on decoding or basic vocabulary has less available for inference and interpretation. Planned revisiting then helps important knowledge remain accessible, instead of allowing secure learning to fade.
Assessment is useful when it helps us decide what to do next. A response may point towards further explanation, adapted practice, a carefully chosen group or a conversation between colleagues who know the child. Sometimes more practice is exactly what is needed; at other times, the child needs the underlying idea to be taught again. The purpose of identifying a gap is to close it, which means moving from information to action without burdening teachers with systems that document the problem more thoroughly than they help to solve it.
Protecting the attention of adults
The adults responsible for this work also have finite attention, and a school cannot name dozens of priorities and then wonder why implementation is shaky. When everything appears equally important, staff must keep deciding what deserves their attention today, leaving the essential work vulnerable to drift and giving the newest idea more influence than it may deserve.
Good leadership makes the central expectations easy to understand and manageable to enact. This involves explaining the thinking, providing useful models, allowing time to practise and checking implementation closely enough to offer help. Shared planning, routines and pedagogical guidance can all support this, provided they are built around a curriculum entitlement that everybody understands. Continually communicating that entitlement helps everyone remain focused on the learning the school has agreed every child should secure.
Keeping the richness
Protecting the foundations should give every child greater access to a rich education filled with literature, art, scientific discovery, history, music, sport, creativity and experiences that enlarge their understanding of the world. Children can participate more fully in that richness when they read fluently, draw on a growing vocabulary, recall the knowledge a problem requires and express their ideas with increasing control.
There will always be more we want to offer, including the gloriously unnecessary experiences that children remember long after they leave us. Schools should keep the richness, the surprise and, occasionally, the fluffy thing with a cherry on top. Beneath it all, however, should sit an entitlement that is widely understood and carefully protected: these are the foundations we will teach every child, we will find out whether they have learnt them and, when they have not, we will work together to decide what needs to happen next.
Amongst the new ideas and the many worthwhile demands on a school, this is the work I would hold on to. Principals need to know what matters, make it clear to others and protect enough collective attention to see it through. Schools can continue to learn, adapt and enrich what they offer, while remaining persistent about the foundations that allow every child to participate fully. Much of excellent school leadership involves doing important everyday work with enough care, clarity and consistency to make it dependable for every child.
References
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). ‘Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology’. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
Education Endowment Foundation (2024). A School’s Guide to Implementation. London: Education Endowment Foundation. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/implementation
Rosenshine, B. (2012). ‘Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know’. American Educator, 36(1), 12–19, 39.
Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G. and Paas, F. (2019). ‘Cognitive architecture and instructional design: 20 years later’. Educational Psychology Review, 31, 261–292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09465-5