For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.
Aristotle
Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina, opens with the famous line, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s point is that a happy marriage depends on a long lists of variables: mutual attraction, agreement about finances, parenting, religion, in-laws and many other crucial respects. You might have everything else in your favour, but if any one of these vital ingredients is missing, or out of kilter, happiness is doomed.
This is the Anna Karenina Principle: A deficiency in any one of a number of factors will doom an enterprise to fail, meaning that success is dependent on every possible deficiency being avoided.* As it is with marriage, so it is with schools. All successful schools are alike; each unsuccessful school is unsuccessful in its own way.
To be successful, a school must fulfil a various essential criteria:
- Great exam results
- Good behaviour
- A broad, rich curriculum
- A wide range of extra curricular provision
- A culture where it’s ‘cool to be clever’
- Well run pastoral systems
- A sense of its position in the community
- A focus on developing and supporting staff
- Intelligent accountability systems
- A belief in the potential of all students
There are, I’m sure, others I haven’t considered.
If you get one of these wrong, the school will not be successful. If results are good, but the curriculum is narrow, children will be deprived something essential. If behaviour is good, but no sees the point in trying hard, then something won’t work. If the academic curriculum is good, but there’s not much on offer besides that, children’s experiences will be limited. If staff feel overworked and unsupported, something, somewhere will give. You could, I think, make the case that if schools get any of the items on the list wrong, success suffers.
All successful schools are similar in that pay attention to everything. Schools may well be brilliant at a few of these things, but if anything’s missing, they won’t be successful. That’s not to say that school leaders should just ‘do’ everything on the list. I suspect somethings need to be in place to allow others to occur. Systems probably have to come first. Behaviour has be right before you can tackle culture. Staff need to feel supported before you can start holding them to account on being their best. And so on.
This may seem like a dauntingly high bar. Take comfort from the obvious fact that no schools is perfect. To be successful a school doesn’t have to be excellent (or ‘outstanding’) at everything. I go so far as to say it doesn’t have to be excellent at anything, it just has to be good enough at everything.
The takeaway: don’t try to be special, unique or distinctive, try to be like every other successful school.
* The principle comes from Jared Diamond’s excellent book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.
Hi David, I definitely agree with you in terms of good schools paying attention to everything. I work with a number of schools who would just see that at SOP and not think it extraordinary that they do that. With other schools they dont recognise that they are not paying attention to everything, or worse believe they are but are patently not.
I hear what you say regarding you list being non exclusive, but, from an international schools perspective I think the term ‘good behaviour’ is rather UK centric and backward looking. It implies compliance with set rules in a very one way relationship, rather than perhaps for example a school’s systematic development of the 5 aspects of emotional intelligence, or restorative practices, or a focus on the 5 ways to wellbeing.
The best schools, I believe don’t have to work around ‘good behaviour’, because they are already engaging with route causes in a proactive and systematic way. In addition although I think that there is commonality of process to become a successful school, if they are successful they the outcome is likely to be unique and distinctive to their own community, catchment teaching staff, leadership style etc. Commonality of process with unique outcomes if you like.
My takeaway for your article: Good schools pay attention to everything. I’ll share that one widely if thats ok!
You should have actually started with the last bullet. In my opinion, the only way to make a school successful is to have a holistic approach to education and it.s fundamental source of inspiration. The student. As a whole. No “rich curricula” or whatever will bring schools to success. It might bring them “good reputation” but this is not the issue.
I deliberately didn’t 🙂
Belief in the potential of students is affected by the expectations staff have of them as well and their worldview. Hence “he can’t read but he’s happy” is good enough.
Very true,It may seem like a dauntingly high bar but the way you put it says it all..great article
The problem is that most school systems are built in a way that makes this highly unlikely.
What do you mean? That the systems in which schools exist make this unlikely or that schools create systems which undermine themselves?
‘Intelligent accountability systems’ : the accountability systems imposed on schools from the outside are rarely intelligent; I have not yet worked in a school where the ones on the inside are sensible either. (The former offers some excuse for the latter…) Is this what you mean, John B?
[…] I’ve argued before that the Anna Karenina principle applied to successful schools too. To be extremely successful you have to get everything right. The list of everything you have to get right includes (but is not limited to) the following items: […]
I have thought so many times of entering the blogging world as I love reading them. I think I finally have the courage to give it a try. Thank you so much for all of the ideas!