Diamonds aren’t forever
Even the best-performing schools can glitter with strength but shatter under pressure. This is a call to embrace the messy art of resilience—to bend, not break.
Diamonds are, famously, the hardest natural material on Earth. The ultimate emblem of strength, brilliance, and unyielding durability. But here’s a lesser-known truth: diamonds are pretty brittle too.
Despite their legendary hardness, diamonds have weak spots—hidden planes where their tightly packed atomic structure is vulnerable. A single sharp blow, at just the right angle, and a diamond will crack or split. It’s this brittleness, this fragility, that reveals something we rarely think about: strength alone is not enough.
Our school systems, including some of the very best, are a lot like diamonds. On the surface, they seem strong—efficient, high-performing, tightly engineered. But when the pressure persists, they crack in ways we didn’t see coming.
The problem isn’t that these systems lack resolve, or tenacity or grit. Most schools have oodles of those things. The problem, I think, is that we’ve fallen into a collective trap—chasing the wrong kind of strength altogether.
The cult of efficiency
We love efficiency. We’re addicted to it. We’re far from alone but schools are packed to the rafters with schedules, targets, data points, and metrics. Every minute accounted for. Every resource squeezed. Every decision scrutinised for maximum productivity.
And in the short term, it works. Things get done. Lessons are taught. Results improve. Until they don’t. Because when you optimise something for efficiency, you also make it fragile. You strip away the breathing room, the slack, the ability to absorb the unexpected.
A couple of staff absences? A sudden shift in policy or funding? An unexpected influx of new students mid-year? Suddenly, the whole system teeters on the edge.
Efficiency is wonderful—right up until the moment it isn’t.
What does resilience cost?
Resilience is the capacity to adapt, to endure, to bend without breaking. But building resilience isn’t easy. And in the absence of ‘more resources’, it requires choices—hard, uncomfortable choices that don’t and won’t always feel like progress.
Here’s what the quest for greater resilience will likely cost us today:
⏳ Time
You can’t pack a timetable to bursting point and expect people to thrive. Building slack into schedules means slowing down—less teaching, less doing. But, in that space, you create room for reflection, collaboration, and creativity.
💷 Money
Resilience isn’t cheap. Contingency funds, professional development, extra staff—these are expensive investments. But they’re also the things that make a school flexible enough to ride out a storm. And I use the word ‘investments’ decidedly: investments build future value; costs are resources spent without long-term returns.
🎚️ Control
Resilient systems are decentralised. That means letting go. Trusting teams. Allowing people to experiment—and sometimes fail.
📈 (Short-term) Success
Resilience rarely aligns with the metrics we use to measure success. It’s slow, messy, and hard to quantify. But it’s also the only way to build something that lasts.
These trade-offs aren’t easy to make. But they are necessary if we want to build effectiveness in the long-run.
Lessons from the world around us
Nature is full of examples of resilience. Trees don’t grow strong by being rigid. They grow strong by being flexible—able to sway with the wind, adapt to the seasons, and bounce back after a storm.
The same is true of many mechanical marvels. Engineers design planes with redundancy because they know every system fails eventually and seldom when you want them too. Tech companies embrace “slack time” because creativity thrives when people and ideas are given space to breathe. Ecosystems with diversity survive shocks better than those that are too uniform.
While I won’t pretend any of this is easy, I believe that schools and trusts can learn from this. We can build systems that are designed to flex and adapt, rather than crack under pressure. But it takes courage to let go of our obsession with efficiency and embrace something messier, slower, and harder to measure. It’s properly counter-cultural.
Whose responsibility is resilience?
Whose job is it anyway?
In schools, we work to a yearly beat—from September to July. School leaders measure performance and improvement on a YoY basis. We make decisions and changes based on how we perform at the business end of the season in June and July—“Our P8 score has fallen by X in 2023/24 which means we’ll do Y in 2024/25.” School leaders are held accountable on the extent to which they can shift metrics up and down on an annual basis.
But who’s responsible for ensuring the organisation can absorb unexpected shocks along the way? Who’s responsible for ensuring annual gains aren’t gotten at the expense of long-term viability, or at the expense of someone or something else? Who’s responsible for securing organisational health in the long-run?
Maybe it isn’t one person—or one function’s—responsibility? Of course school and trust leaders have a responsibility to build resilience into their schools—but perhaps policymakers, parents, and communities also have a role to play too? Accountability systems that consider and reward sustainability, that consider positive and negative externalities, not just short-term gains, would surely help—as would funding models that prioritise slack and support.
But we need to shift the culture too. To stop treating efficiency as a virtue, or any of the words I’ve bolded so far as ‘undesirable’ or ‘luxury items’—and start seeing it for what it is: a trap.
A vision for the future
The visioning exercise for this is a piece of cake. Nobody wants shiny, hard and brittle diamond schools; we want all of our schools to resemble trees—with deep roots, flexible branches, and the capacity to endure and grow stronger with each challenge. Who could disagree with that?
The challenge for us today is to commit to building schools that endure—to prioritise living, breathing institutions with the strength and flexibility to thrive over and above brittle systems that will shatter under stress.
It’s a bit like training for endurance, rather than speed. It’s about developing the kind of fitness that carries you through the long haul, instead of a sprint. And like any good training plan, it requires deliberate effort, consistency, and a willingness to embrace discomfort.
Leaning into that metaphor, here are three things we should think about:
🧘♀️ Building a strong core
Every elite athlete has a strong core, and every resilient school has a stable foundation. This means clarifying purpose and values, investing in people, and embedding flexibility into systems. It’s about ensuring the fundamentals—time for collaboration, budgets with contingencies, policies that adapt—are strong enough to support the whole.
🏋️ Simulating stress
I’m thinking about ‘type II fun.’ Acute stress. Every now and then we need to mimic race-day conditions: run through scenarios, test how systems respond to small shocks, and refine them before bigger disruptions hit. We do this a lot anyway—but it’s all pretty reactive. By proactively embracing and scheduling ‘safe-to-fail’ experiments, we can create environments where innovation can flourish without catastrophic consequences.
💆 Prioritising recovery
Endurance athletes know that recovery isn’t a luxury—it’s part of the work. For schools, this means proactively building in time for reflection and repair. Protect time for teachers to stretch off and recharge. Give teams space to reflect and refine. Acknowledge that rest is a vital, essential part of growth. Easy to say; difficult to do. Ice baths are optional.
None of this will happen overnight. And it won’t be easy. Like any good training programme, building capacity requires persistence, patience, and commitment to the long game.
But the cost of resilience is nothing compared to the cost of brittleness.
When systems fail, it’s not just the structures that break—it’s the people inside them who suffer. The children and young people we serve bear the brunt of systems that are too rigid, too fragile, and too focused on chasing perfection.
We owe it to them to do better. To stop worshipping efficiency at all costs. To trade the illusion of perfection for the messier, more imperfect, more beautiful work of building schools that can bend without breaking.
Endurance doesn’t look like brilliance. It doesn’t shine or sparkle. But it lasts. And for our schools, and the children and young people they serve, that’s the strength that matters most.