Tag Archives: inclusion

Be More Pirate | time for good trouble

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Amidst the turbulent waves of change we must re-imagine what education and our system can be; it is the opportunity of now, because next matters. It is at this point in our maturing sector that we should venture for greater coherence, collaboration and connection. By embarking on shared quests, we can better navigate toward a new North Star for all places and plunder our shared capability for all children. We need to be more pirate.

“Pirates trouble the edges of society and make enough shock waves to influence the middle ground. Trouble is their tool, although it’s more accurate to call it good trouble.” Sam Conniff Allende

Next needs to be more collective, more adjoined, more than the sum of the present parts, because too often, we are in parts. The view from the crow’s nest reveals inequity and that our pieces rarely fit well to serve our places and the children that need us most. It is the incongruousness of our pieces, the dominance of ‘I’ over ‘we’ and conditions that drive isolationism and competition that is constraining our collective potential. As system altruists, and sector architects we should rise and act on and not just in our system; seeking good trouble.

“…acting on the system gives us an opportunity to think differently. We should think of leadership as the ability to shape the system.” Leora Cruddas

Charting new waters | shared mutinies of good trouble

There are times in history when a group of like-minded individuals chart new waters and from the fringes find new ways to live and be; creating a movement based on new rules, a new code. Pirates challenged the world-order and flipped the accepted shared truths about how things could be, they created a movement so successful and agile that their approach and thinking might just influence and provoke us into our next-phase; toward better. This is our time to be a little more Pirate to strengthen and connect Trusts, to rebel, rewrite, reorganise, redistribute and retell the hell out of what could be.

“Whilst pirates get a bad press, there is significant evidence that these merry men (and women) actually transformed the world and challenged the oppressive status quo. The golden age for pirating 1710-1740 was progressive and counter-establishment – it provided the basis and conditions for significant change. Now as it was then the need for change and a shift of ownership is required.” Sam Conniff Allende

We are the System | Charting new waters, re-finding old maps

There is a significant opportunity to re-imagine the future. There are waters, territories and opportunities, for plundering that could create an education system more aligned with the needs of all children and the places we serve. Whilst our educational landscape is fragmented, the forces that have pushed and pulled academies together have also created the conditions for leaders to better shape our system, to act on it, not just in it. And we must, because we are the system and these are our shared waters.

We exist in a period of uncommon opportunity, where there is now enough maturity in our system, beyond the stormy waters of early academisation, and within calmer waters, for greater horizontal collaboration and shared responsibility for all children and every place. There is no Armada coming over the horizon, so it is time to be more pirate and engage in good rebellion, small arrrrgh.

“I’d rather be a pirate than join the navy” Steve Jobs

The next phase requires greater alignment of the soft and hard power within our system. And more crucially secure a shift in our intrinsic motivation to collectively do better for all, attaching greater currency for collaborative place-based leadership. Stronger extrinsic motivators as part of the new code, held by us, alongside regulators will galvanise the change we seek.

Treasure worth seeking | next-phase thinking

Our sector needs to do more to address the inequity in our society and seek greater social justice. We must better balance the haphazard opportunities that are not evenly distributed in our communities or between peers even in the same neighbourhood. We need to be braver and bolder to build our system to liberate and empower those who find themselves adrift and stranded in life. A band of educators collectively motivated to apply equity and build provision for those that most need an anchor.

The next-phase must build ‘great Trusts’ driven by a Trust Improvement Model that places Trust and place-based improvement at the heart of our mutiny. As we seek to connect and collaborate for the good of all children and to ‘educate a place’ the increased openness and connection will concurrently build stronger Trusts within a more capable system. This is the real treasure worth seeking: Trusts, in partnership, unearthing and aligning much greater capacity for securing social justice and inclusion.

“A major benefit of effective ‘place-based’ reform is seen as the provision of essential “glue” or coordination, by mobilising a collective sense of responsibility to reduce competition which drives local hierarchies and decreases the effects of disadvantage.” Cousin and Crossley-Holland

A new look crew required | Pirating, banding and plundering more capacity

We need a new look crew, educators banding together, collectively questing, compelled by a stronger yearning for the endless immensity and possibility of the sea ahead of us.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Captains and crews must invest beyond the present boundaries, giving time and resource, committing to plunder and better directing the existing capacity towards those most adrift. New crews know that the real treasure is in levelling-up, in greater social justice for all, that is not constrained by our present boundaries. Re-finding geographic territories, places and communities across the land can offer greater opportunity and choice.

“There is one idea that whenever it has been applied has had the power to change the world. Cultures that shift from ‘I’ to ‘We’.” …restore the Common Good in divided times.” Jonathan Sacks

A new Pirate Code | seeking good trouble, a sector-led mutiny for our next phase

  1. “We, not I, Captain.” The next phase is one that must preference ‘We’ over ‘I’. To take shared responsibility for the education of all children across communities, not just those closest to us. A fundamental adoption of a ‘we’ mindset as the basis of our next phase.
  2. Build a values system that directs energy to that which is worth having. A sector that rewards those that connect and collaborate to achieve value beyond themselves and their time. A new values system that rewards those who close gaps for children and the gaps in our places, those who create coherence and partnerships to plunder resources and expertise for the greater good.
  3. Banding crews together. As system architects we must prioritise meaningful partnerships and collaboration between Trusts, Local Authorities and community partners. This is place-based collaborative leadership that connects crews who invest, across boundaries, in informal and formal alliances, releasing expertise. Place-based, because children grow-up in communities not in Trusts and their success and security is bound to that of their peers and their community.
  4. Unearthing old maps, seeking lost territories. We need to re-consider our boundaries, around the importance of ‘place’ to collectively “educate a city, a town, a county… a coherent locality.” By seeking to educate a locality we adjoin partners in shared endeavour to direct, release and use our collective resources and intelligence, to add more capacity and serve the whole. Kintsugi, repairing broken pottery by joining parts with gold, treating the repair as part of the history of a place, strengthening the whole; seeking gold.
  5. Captains and new crews needed. Into the next phase we need braver educators willing to navigate, beyond their waters, and venture into partnerships for the greater good of all children, in all communities. This requires stronger system leadership and collaborative structures that extend beyond settings and to depth, to educate a place.
  6. Connecting and strengthening Trusts. As Trusts work more in neighbouring waters, engaged in place-based improvement, with other crews, we have the basis for a Trust Improvement Model, a form of co-opetition. The next phase requires the development of great Trusts, improving in partnership, to secure greater social justice. Just as Roman concrete is strengthened by exposure to sea water, Trusts will improve through deeper connection beyond their waters: symbiotically.
  7. The treasure we seek, championing those unmoored and cast adrift. We should seek to win for all children. The success of our pirating and joint questing will be measured by how far we close gaps, particularly, the attainment and attendance of those under-resourced, lost at sea and those with needs that we are not yet meeting.  Our children and communities need a system and a collective quest for inclusive excellence. We should deliberately apply equity to close gaps across communities and not just seek the escape of a few.
  8. The laws of the sea. We care about what we measure and reward. Our accountability structures and regulators must align to reward the new code. Only if we align soft and hard power toward this quest and re-orientate the laws of the sea to articulate a new North Star, will we create the conditions where educators who boldly navigate by these stars are encouraged.

Setting Sail | being bolder and braver

“The moment we turn outward and concern ourselves with the welfare of others no less than with our own, we begin to change the world in the only way we can, one act at a time, one day at a time, one life at a time.”Jonathan Sacks

So, we should set sail, hold ourselves and each other to the new pirate code, seek good trouble and venture for greater coherence, collaboration and connection, so that we better serve those children stranded in our system and under-served by our places.

Of course, we don’t need everyone, we just need enough. Movements and mutinies tend to require surprisingly few pirates, engaged in counterintuitively small actions to transform our territories and secure greater social justice.

Time to be more pirate and seek good trouble, it is our time at the edge…

“It’s St. Elmo’s Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it … they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough. … We’re all going through this. It’s our time at the edge.” Billy

Dan Nicholls | March 2025

Fiercely educate…

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… children who are presently disadvantaged.

If we are to overcome the forces in our society and schools that insidiously widen gaps, between those that have and those that have not, we need to be more ferocious, more tenacious in creating the conditions that enable our disadvantaged learners to flourish. This requires educators to be more honest, to ask uncomfortable questions and make braver decisions to fiercely educate those that need us the most.

Photo by Efe Yagiz Soysal on Unsplash

To fiercely educate is to replicate the stage-managed, high expectation and sharpened elbows of an advantaged childhood. Being fierce means guarding a child’s education, expecting much, staying alongside, pushing from behind, consistently and persistently championing individual children.

An advantaged childhood holds, expects and elevates children, who are fiercely loved and as a result feel more secure.

“Okay, well, Eleanor has this mother. She intimidated me at first actually because she just – she’s fierce. Fiercely loving. … but I could tell she felt safe in that house. She grew up feeling safe and fiercely loved.”

“And you and I didn’t get that, not because we didn’t deserve it, we just got dealt something else. But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure.”

Coco Mellors | Cleopatra and Frankenstein

To be fiercely loved* is to be challenged, extended, stretched, to reach and risk, and at the same time, to be held tightly, more secure. “You will be brave, I have got you.”

*the emphasis is on fiercely rather than loved. Families who are socio-economically deprived do not love their children less, often quite the opposite, but the time, money, space to create opportunity and supported experiences to translate that love, ferociously, is compromised at every turn.

Advantaged families interpret the world for their children, translating experiences and interactions to maintain their sense of security and renew their agency. Setting and re-setting a desired narrative of what it is to be and feel successful, to step forward once more, even when the randomness of life and experiences intrude beyond the home. There is always an ongoing invitation to dance. Sitting out is not an option.

To grow up advantaged is to step forward through a life punctuated by opportunities, reaching, risking and stepping forward, it is a secure pursuit. These are childhoods, with guide ropes and safety harnesses, that see failure as an obstacle on the path to eventual success.

“If you are lucky enough to be born in a world made in your image, you probably think of a failure as an obstacle on the path to eventual success. If you are a marginalised person in any way you internalise that failure more closely.”

Elizabeth Day

Without a deep sense of security, a disadvantaged child is far more likely to internalise failure more closely. It is precisely this self-reflection, the connection of failure with self that perpetuates over time and maintains an inhibiting mindset that convinces that it would be safer not to try. Without the ferocity of expectation, the unwavering (taught) belief in their own agency, a child’s hand goes up fewer times, they step back rather than stride forward and live with a constraining belief that the world is not built in their image or for their circumstance.

If we step forward less we tend to surround ourselves with others who are also less likely to step forward in life. It is the five closest individuals with whom you measure your status, the ones that set the bar, the ones we compare against. And where we create schools within schools we set expectations of what is possible (and not possible). We must work harder to cross-connect social circles, orchestrating and intervening to be more inclusive.

“Each starling is only ever aware of five other birds,” she said. “One above, one below, one in front and either side, like a star. They move with those five, and that’s how they stay in formation.”

“Who are your five then?” asked Cleo. “The ones you watch?”

Coco Mellors

It is an inconvenient truth that schools create these self-fulfilling groups, reinforce the conditions for advantage and disadvantage to accumulate. We are the problem more often than we admit, more often than we see, more often than we realise. To see the conditions we create, those that we have come to accept, we must apply the disadvantage lens on ourselves and our schools, be more honest and evaluate what we are willing to accept, what we hold up and measure as success. This is about confronting and tackling the perpetuating inequity, seeking to halt social fractures at a time when society is fracturing.

Hope: to want something to happen or to be true, and usually have a good reason to think that it might.

A childhood of advantage is one of agency and hope; a life on an exciting journey of opportunity, where what is wanted, sought after, is within reach and based on previous experiences, have a good reason to think it might be achieved. And if it does not, any failure slides off, it does not define. After all, the failure is not about me reaching out, because I act on the world. And yet for our disadvantaged children each failure is another hit on self-belief, self-image, another example of the world acting on them. “This world is not for me.”

An advantaged childhood also has purpose (one insisted on, and then internalised by the child), a beacon that directs effort and demands persistence. We must work harder to create, expect and articulate purpose so that it fuels the persistence required to close gaps.

“When we have a purpose, we are able not only to endure and persist but also to provide a beacon that reminds us of what’s important and to make the right decision at the right moment.”

Steve Magnus

Too many journeys through school are riddled with children being let off, in conditions of low expectation where interactions are compromised by collusion. We are prone to making poor assumptions about background, present levels of attainment, context, aspiration, resilience; missing the fact that we are both the problem and the solution.

We need to be more honest and braver as educationalists, guarding each child’s education and building great schools that deliberately step in to create pathways for disadvantaged learners to thrive and flourish. It takes the whole team to maintain provision that privileges disadvantage everywhere, only shared endeavour has any chance of systematically closing gaps; culture over lists of good intentions/interventions.

So:

  • There is little in this world more powerful than someone who deeply believes in you; educators have that power. An unconditional acceptance from a trusted adult gives a child the warm sense of belonging; a psychological safety that says we believe in you. Unpicking disadvantage is a team sport, focused on individuals to apply equity.
  • We are disproportionately influenced by those that we spend time with (sometimes chosen, sometimes destined, sometimes orchestrated); schools need to remove the school within school phenomenon – our choices around setting, staffing, curriculum either perpetuates disadvantage or removes it.
  • To fiercely educate is to have educational provision that reaches those that need us most. We need to measure what matters: the attendance and attainment of disadvantaged learners. Attendance first… we cannot fiercely educate any child we cannot see.
  • Our journey through education is disproportionately shaped by small acts; these are rare, often serendipitous experiences that shape us the most. How far do we purposefully engineer and create these moments of ignition within a child’s education so that they see themselves differently?

The disproportionate influence of five sentences within the novel of our lives.

  • Our interactions, language and the attention we give to others defines our attitude towards them and influences the way children see themselves. It is easy to understate the importance of culture and collective attitude in schools.
  • A child’s self-belief, self-confidence and self-image can be so fragile that inconsequential comments, experiences and actions can erode any belief that exists. As educators we can choose to fill or not fill these lockers. Removing deficit and neutral discourse in our shared language really matters; our words make a difference, both ways.
  • Simply adding “I am giving you this feedback because I believe in you,” changed students’ learning trajectories significantly (Cohen & Garcia, 2014).

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

Carl Buehner

  • We need great teaching in great schools to understand where children are in their learning and teach the next bit. Seeking to hunt not fish and to apply the equity that disadvantaged learners need. Weaving nets to catch the curriculum.
  • We are hard-wired to see success as talent and gift and not the expression of supported opportunity and accumulated hard work over time; it is the latter that disadvantage learners need, it is the former that perpetuate poor attitudes to individual potential and widens gaps.
  • We may well be witnessing a significant shift in the social contract. The contract held between families and school is eroding, relationships and attitudes are shifting. Whilst we wrestle with a whole range of challenges we must not forget, rather increase our investment in the individual children that walk into our schools everyday.
  • … you have the power to change lives, to weave a future for children, just as the threads of society are unravelling for too many children. You are the hope, for many the only second chance.

“History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children.”

Nelson Mandela

Dan Nicholls | May 2023