Outstanding schools are places where children feel safe, happy, and successful. With an acute sense of purpose and an assured style, they have a Swiss-watch precision to their plans, policies, and processes.
They are nevertheless warm and welcoming places, where children feel valued and able to flourish.
Outstanding schools have a clear picture of the skills and attributes they wish their students to have, and a honed understanding of how to develop them.
Parents invest their trust in teachers and let them get on with things, whilst independent inspectors vouch for school quality as amazing educators shape their students' success.
Understanding outstanding
Outstanding schools have strong pillars supporting a safe culture: Clear and comprehensive standards; policies and procedures that make contexts work; supportive environments in which children feel safe and with people they feel they can trust.
They are happy places where “the principles of compassion, communication, and community building are priorities” (UNESCO, 2022). Such principles shape the values, attributes, and attitudes that students learn to live their lives by.
Happy schools attract and keep great people through an active and enduring commitment to personal well-being and professional development.
Well-being shines out in an inclusive and diverse way through quality relationships, via concern for people's welfare and through investment in high quality learning spaces.
Outstanding schools are institutions that thrive through their successful people. They do so by connecting the elements making up the atoms of the molecule.
There is a focus on the whole student, a commitment to access, diversity, and equity, a wider engagement with family and community, and a focus on investing in people.
Outstanding schools are safe and welcoming, they have strong and share core values, set within a positive climate of healthy relationships.
Outstanding schools have clarity of purpose when it comes to their students; the attributes and attitudes they wish them to have, the values and vision they want them to assume, and the skills and qualities they wish them to hold.
Outstanding schools have a profile of student success and a means of delivering it year-in, year-out. Key amongst these is teaching their students how to become independent learners by teaching them how to think.
Agents of their own success
The OECD Leaning Compass 2030 sets out a vision for the future of education. At its heart is the concept of student agency -- the idea that students can influence their own lives and shape the world beyond them.
In doing so, it outlines the competencies students will need to thrive in 2030 and beyond. Students can set their own goals, reflect responsibly, and use experience to make their own changes.
By acting ahead rather than being acted upon, students become agents in their own learning: Able to define learning and to direct its course.
In setting objectives and building targets, students have more control and greater motivation to succeed.
“Learning how to learn” enables students to be regulators of learning. Self-regulation has a greater influence on performance than academic ability or prior achievement.
It helps students appraise their strengths and weaknesses and link these to effective learning strategies.
It embraces a mix of motivation, cognition, and metacognition -- the ways students think about learning and intentionally direct their learning.
Recent research reviews of metacognition and self-regulation make explicit recommendations for helping students become agents of their own success.
Beyond first rate subject knowledge, teachers need to understand how to develop their student metacognitive strategies: Specifically, how to plan, monitor, and evaluate learning.
As teachers model examples and encourage students to talk about their thinking, however, explicit teaching of thinking can only happen effectively if schools make this a strategic objective.
Simon O'Grady is the Founding Headmaster of Haileybury Bhaluka, the first premier boarding school in Bangladesh, for boys aged 11-18 years. Having led outstanding schools on three continents, he draws on his experience of building such schools for the success of all children.
