Without question, debate across our sector has become unhelpfully polarised, with phrases that have little shared meaning being deployed as grenades.
We need to move away from this.
All highly functioning, coherent schools (“progressive” or “trad”, “restorative” or “zero tolerance”) are underpinned by a remarkably similar set of characteristics: strong social norms, an abundance of joy and rigour, high expectations, aspirations that are kept on track and motivation that is secure.
The importance of school choice
These characteristics are invariably amplified by coherent, simple and enduring communication.
This is true irrespective of the metric by which high performance is measured: for those for whom the most profound measure is student progress, this list holds true; for those for whom the most profound measure is student experience, this list holds true.
What is important here is that our system is built upon the premise of parental choice: schools should be different in so many ways to ensure that families have access to an education for their children that fits their view of which measure - of many possible measures - is of the utmost importance.
For us at Dixons Academies Trust, we are clear about this to enable our families to choose us meaningfully: our mission is to challenge social and educational disadvantage in the North, and we do this through explicitly accelerating student outcomes.
Different measures of success
However, this does not mean that we look in disdain upon a school whose identity is based upon a different target measure and for whom student outcomes are simply not a burning platform.
Across our sector there are repeated references to polarised positions on suspension and exclusion (even grouping these together is often an oversimplification). This has created unhelpful misunderstandings about our own trust.
At Dixons we have established schools that have never permanently excluded. We have schools at an early stage of transformation for whom suspension has been a necessary but not sufficient tool in school improvement.
Resetting expectations is complex: schools are, and should be, different, and they will feel very different depending where they are on their own transformational journey. And data, raw numbers, should only ever be used to start a conversation, never to win a cheap point.
Embracing variety
A risk of a dogmatic approach is that actions become grey: children move through practices that sit outside of existing or formal mechanisms. Perhaps it is about protecting the dogma more than the child.
As a sector, we have to move past the point of different philosophical approaches being seen as morally repugnant - this will only increase polarisation and risk pushing the discussion, unhealthily, further into the arena of personal attacks (especially when this refers to a trust or school, rather than a specific individual - although, all too often, the two are conflated).
Variety and school difference are essential to our sector. We need to encourage variety, difference and innovation, not diminish it.
Rather than adopting the position of ideologues, we need to celebrate our differences and build policy that respects and encourages variety. Only this will meet the complex, various and enduring needs of all children.
Luke Sparkes and Jenny Thompson are trust leaders at Dixons Academies Trust
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