Every few years, education gets a new dawn. A fresh Secretary of State, a review with a capital R, a white paper with a hopeful cover. And right now, if we squint, there's genuine reason for optimism in the UK. Curriculum and assessment have been reviewed (even if we don't think it goes far enough). Inspection is being rethought (again, so twice this year it seems). Ministers are using words like breadth and belonging without wincing. We'll take it. We've been banging this drum long enough to welcome anyone in power who finally picks up a stick.
But we've also been around long enough to know how this film tends to end. Reviews become consultations. Consultations become frameworks. Frameworks become guidance, and the guidance lands in our inboxes about three years after the learners it was written for have left the building. Policy moves at the speed of Parliament. Childhood, adolescence and that one shot at a college course do not.
So we're not waiting.
The System Has a Face
Sir Ken Robinson gave his book Creative Schools the subtitle The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education in some editions, and he meant every word. His argument was disarmingly simple. If you're a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you're a headteacher, for your community you are the system. If you're a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system.
The learner in Room 14 doesn't experience the Department for Education. They experience us. The apprentice at an FE college doesn't feel the funding formula; they feel whether their tutor believes in them. The first-generation undergraduate never reads the access and participation plan; they notice whether a lecturer learns their name by week three.
For every learner, the system is whoever turns up in front of them. That's a heavy responsibility. It's also an extraordinary amount of power, and most of us have been told for so long that we don't have any that we've stopped looking for it.
Genius Is a Team Sport
Linda Hill spent years at Harvard Business School studying organisations that innovate again and again, Pixar among them, and her work in Collective Genius dismantles the myth of the lone visionary. Breakthroughs, she found, rarely come from one brilliant person handing down the answer. They come from groups who are both willing and able to create together, and from leaders whose real job is building the conditions for that to happen rather than having every idea themselves.
The teams that pull it off share three habits. They argue well, testing ideas through honest and respectful friction. They learn fast, experimenting, reflecting and adjusting as they go. And they decide well, combining the best of competing ideas instead of simply crowning a winner.
None of that needs a ministerial signature. A department that disagrees productively. A staffroom that pilots something small and reviews it honestly. A curriculum team that designs with learners instead of for them. That's collective genius, and it's available on Monday morning.
The industrial-era model trained us to look upwards for permission. Hill's research tells us to look sideways for possibility.
Do What We Can, Where We Are
There's a line, usually credited to Theodore Roosevelt, that we keep returning to. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
It isn't a counsel of despair. It's a strategy. National structures built for an industrial age won't stop being irrelevant just because a report says they should. They shift when thousands of classrooms, colleges, lecture theatres and training rooms have already shifted, and policy finally catches up with what practice has proved. Grassroots isn't the warm-up act for system change. It is system change, just distributed.
That looks like the Year 9 teacher who swaps one test for a public exhibition of learning. The FE curriculum manager who brings employers and families into the room before enrolment, not after the first missed week. The university lecturer who replaces a 3,000-word essay with a live brief from a real organisation. The head who ring-fences one afternoon a fortnight for staff to experiment, and fail, without consequence. Small, local, repeatable and shared.
Five Ways We Start Where We Stand
- Own our bit of the system. For the learners in front of us, we are the system. Every decision we make in our room, our department or our faculty is policy as far as they're concerned. Let's make it policy worth living under.
- Stop waiting for permission. Most of what we want to try doesn't need sign-off from Westminster. It needs a willing team, a clear purpose and the nerve to start before the framework arrives.
- Build collective genius, not hero leaders. The best ideas rarely live in one head. Leaders at every level should be building teams that argue well, learn fast and decide together.
- Start small, share loudly. Grassroots only becomes a movement when it's visible. Pilot it, capture what happened honestly, and pass it on to the next classroom, college or campus.
- Welcome reform, never depend on it. We'll cheer every step forward from government. We just won't put our learners' futures on hold while we wait for the next one.
Westminster (or No.10 North!) may well get some of this right, and when it does we'll be first in line to say so. But the learners in front of us this term can't wait for the next spending review, the next framework or the next reshuffle. They get one go at this, and for them the system is already here. It's us. So let's stop asking when change is coming and start noticing that we're the ones holding the door. One classroom, one college, one lecture theatre at a time, until the policy has no choice but to catch up with the practice.
You Are the System
Every few years, education gets a new dawn. A fresh Secretary of State, a review with a capital R, a white paper with a hopeful cover. And right now, if we squint, there's genuine reason for optimism in the UK. Curriculum and assessment have been reviewed (even if we don't think it goes far enough). Inspection is being rethought (again, so twice this year it seems). Ministers are using words like breadth and belonging without wincing. We'll take it. We've been banging this drum long enough to welcome anyone in power who finally picks up a stick.
But we've also been around long enough to know how this film tends to end. Reviews become consultations. Consultations become frameworks. Frameworks become guidance, and the guidance lands in our inboxes about three years after the learners it was written for have left the building. Policy moves at the speed of Parliament. Childhood, adolescence and that one shot at a college course do not.
So we're not waiting.
The System Has a Face
Sir Ken Robinson gave his book Creative Schools the subtitle The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education in some editions, and he meant every word. His argument was disarmingly simple. If you're a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you're a headteacher, for your community you are the system. If you're a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system.
The learner in Room 14 doesn't experience the Department for Education. They experience us. The apprentice at an FE college doesn't feel the funding formula; they feel whether their tutor believes in them. The first-generation undergraduate never reads the access and participation plan; they notice whether a lecturer learns their name by week three.
For every learner, the system is whoever turns up in front of them. That's a heavy responsibility. It's also an extraordinary amount of power, and most of us have been told for so long that we don't have any that we've stopped looking for it.
Genius Is a Team Sport
Linda Hill spent years at Harvard Business School studying organisations that innovate again and again, Pixar among them, and her work in Collective Genius dismantles the myth of the lone visionary. Breakthroughs, she found, rarely come from one brilliant person handing down the answer. They come from groups who are both willing and able to create together, and from leaders whose real job is building the conditions for that to happen rather than having every idea themselves.
The teams that pull it off share three habits. They argue well, testing ideas through honest and respectful friction. They learn fast, experimenting, reflecting and adjusting as they go. And they decide well, combining the best of competing ideas instead of simply crowning a winner.
None of that needs a ministerial signature. A department that disagrees productively. A staffroom that pilots something small and reviews it honestly. A curriculum team that designs with learners instead of for them. That's collective genius, and it's available on Monday morning.
The industrial-era model trained us to look upwards for permission. Hill's research tells us to look sideways for possibility.
Do What We Can, Where We Are
There's a line, usually credited to Theodore Roosevelt, that we keep returning to. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
It isn't a counsel of despair. It's a strategy. National structures built for an industrial age won't stop being irrelevant just because a report says they should. They shift when thousands of classrooms, colleges, lecture theatres and training rooms have already shifted, and policy finally catches up with what practice has proved. Grassroots isn't the warm-up act for system change. It is system change, just distributed.
That looks like the Year 9 teacher who swaps one test for a public exhibition of learning. The FE curriculum manager who brings employers and families into the room before enrolment, not after the first missed week. The university lecturer who replaces a 3,000-word essay with a live brief from a real organisation. The head who ring-fences one afternoon a fortnight for staff to experiment, and fail, without consequence. Small, local, repeatable and shared.
Five Ways We Start Where We Stand
- Own our bit of the system. For the learners in front of us, we are the system. Every decision we make in our room, our department or our faculty is policy as far as they're concerned. Let's make it policy worth living under.
- Stop waiting for permission. Most of what we want to try doesn't need sign-off from Westminster. It needs a willing team, a clear purpose and the nerve to start before the framework arrives.
- Build collective genius, not hero leaders. The best ideas rarely live in one head. Leaders at every level should be building teams that argue well, learn fast and decide together.
- Start small, share loudly. Grassroots only becomes a movement when it's visible. Pilot it, capture what happened honestly, and pass it on to the next classroom, college or campus.
- Welcome reform, never depend on it. We'll cheer every step forward from government. We just won't put our learners' futures on hold while we wait for the next one.
Westminster (or No.10 North!) may well get some of this right, and when it does we'll be first in line to say so. But the learners in front of us this term can't wait for the next spending review, the next framework or the next reshuffle. They get one go at this, and for them the system is already here. It's us. So let's stop asking when change is coming and start noticing that we're the ones holding the door. One classroom, one college, one lecture theatre at a time, until the policy has no choice but to catch up with the practice.