What makes a good school? It’s a difficult question with more than one correct answer. Probably what most people would come up with is something along the lines of the ‘culture, ‘ethos’ or ‘atmosphere’ of the school. But who drives this? Upon whom does it depend? *-)

Obviously a strong, driven Head with clear aims and good people management skills helps. But so does friendly, intelligent and informative office staff and inspirational Heads of Department.

I suppose what will interest most is how one goes about transforming a school that is underperforming in some way into a successful institution. In the Education Guardian last week, Professor Tim Brighouse proposed ‘Fifteen Essential Pieces in the Jigsaw of a Successful School’This booklet can be downloaded from www.rm.com for free, but a �5 donation to the Ted Wragg fund is requested. Whilst he quite rightly says that “no reliable formula has ever been published that, if followed, would be guaranteed to produce the results.” A cynical letter in this week’s Education Guardian notes that the “sure-fire Labour scheme” for guaranteeing good results is to “Select Your Pupils! See the London Oratory, grammar schools, academies, faith and trust schools for more details.”

As Brighouse suggests, there can only ever be a heuristic, a way of approaching a situation to improve an institution. Each presents its own unique challenges and situations which must be dealt with by experienced professionals who have dealt with many different types of schools and people. An undue focus on a certain element can distort the picture. Introducing a new uniform, for example, does not necessarily result in an improvement in behaviour. Instead, it can have a more subtle effect which can be more difficult to measure. It could, for instance, lead to higher expectations by the community which, in turn, could be actualised within the school itself.

Brighouse uses a jigsaw metaphor to get a handle on how various elements fit together to lead to a desired outcome. Whilst this metaphor is a useful one, it suggests that the ‘jigsaw pieces’ themselves are fixed and that implementing each will somehow lead to a huge improvement in a given school. Personally, I’ve always found Aristotle’s idea of a ‘golden mean’ interesting and persuasive. Although originally conceived for individuals, it can nevertheless be applied to institutions and groups of people. The idea is that each virtue is somewhere between two vices: courage, for example, being somewhere on the line between recklessness and cowardice.

Applying this to a school situation would mean that the desirable elements of a school (results, good behaviour, citizenship, etc.) would be dependent on the circumstances of the population that the school reflects. To some extent, this is what value added’ scores are aiming at – to show how well a school is doing relative to the raw materials it has. Whilst schools should always aim at producing the most rounded individuals it possibly can who achieve in line with their potential, the ‘golden mean’ (or eudaimonia) for each individual will be different. Expecting the same type of behaviour from a child who has gone from care home to care home as one who has had a stable, middle-class home life is unreasonable.

Thankfully, the educational system is taking this more and more into account. Alternative courses and phrases such as ‘personalised learning’ are in vogue, which will hopefully lead to a decline in attempting to shoehorn individuals into convenient pigeon-holes. Allowing pupils to follow courses more relevant to their talents, abilities and situation (note, not station) in life should, in future, lead to improvements in behaviour and pupil responsibility in schools. So in terms of school improvement, perhaps we need to think ‘outside the box’ and change our definition of what a school should be and look like, rather than trying to force the full spectrum of human life into a few rigid boxes.