Please hold, your future is important to us
A fresh look at schools through the lens of queueing theory—exploring how visible and invisible waits shape young people’s experience, and what we might redesign with care and intent.
I’ve been playing a lot of Mini Metro recently. It’s an oddly meditative, minimalist game about designing underground transport systems. Your job is to connect stations, manage congestion, and stop the city from grinding to a halt. It’s essentially a game about queueing theory: flow, demand, and what happens when too many people want the same thing at once.
It’s more enjoyable than I’ve made it sound, I promise.
Somewhat embarrassingly, as with many things, it didn’t take long before I found myself wondering what it had to do with schools… When the game ramps up, it reminds me of those times in school when the demand for our attention far exceeds its supply—and, with the best will in the world, you simply can’t do everything or see everyone.
And so stuff queues up. There are queues for attention. There are queues for feedback. There’s always a queue for lunch. There are queues for help. Queues, queues, queues. Some are visible. Most aren’t.
A strange but useful lens
Queueing theory is a branch of mathematics and behavioural science that focuses on waiting lines: how they form, how long people wait, and how systems can be designed to manage flow. It’s used in places like airports, hospitals and call centres—anywhere demand exceeds capacity.
Once you start seeing school this way, it’s hard to stop.
When more people want something than we can serve at once, how do we manage the experience of waiting? That’s the big question.
And here's the part that's rarely discussed in education (or elsewhere, for that matter): waiting is never neutral. It’s affective. Queueing shapes how we feel about ourselves, our needs, and the systems we're in. How long we wait, whether it feels fair, whether we’re seen while we wait—all of that matters.
So, what could we learn by seeing school through this lens?
The queues we can see…
Some queues are obvious: the line for the loo, queueing for lunch, hands up in class, a stack of books on your desk waiting for feedback.
These queues are easy to spot. They’re visible, physical, and often structured to maintain order.
… and the queues we can’t
More interesting—and more important—are the queues we don’t notice:
A quiet child waiting for someone to ask how they’re doing.
A student waiting for an opportunity to shine—on stage, in sport, or in leadership.
A parent waiting for a return call from school.
A young person waiting for help that keeps getting delayed: for reading support, counselling, for the EHCP that’s “in process.”
A teaching assistant waiting to be seen as a professional, not a helper.
These are deeply emotional waits—the ones that reveal who gets noticed and who gets missed. We know that, without intervention, the students at the back of these queues are the ones with the fewest resources to advocate for themselves.
Skipping the queue
In any queueing system, some people learn to skip ahead. In schools, these are often the confident, the articulate, the familiar.
It’s the child who knows how to self-advocate without appearing rude. It’s the parent who sends that perfectly-pitched email. It’s the student whose excellence buys them attention, praise, and opportunity.
Meanwhile, others learn to wait. Or worse, to stop expecting. They internalise that help is for others. That they don’t belong at the front. And if we’re not careful, our systems will quietly reinforce those beliefs.
How much behaviour in schools—the best and the worst—is simply an attempt to jump a queue?
What makes a good queue?
Queueing theory—and behavioural science more broadly—offers some insights:
Uncertainty makes waiting feel longer than it is.
People are more patient when they can see visible progress.
Perceived fairness matters more than actual speed.
Distracting people with something meaningful can change the emotional experience of waiting.
This is why Disney designs its queues as immersive experiences. This is why some post offices announce your position in the queue. Uber’s map doesn’t make the wait for a taxi any shorter but it can make it feel shorter. By showing a little car moving toward you in real-time, it removes uncertainty and provides visible progress, significantly improving the user experience. It's a psychological intervention, not a logistical one.
And I’m wondering what, if anything, we could do in schools to intervene in these queues…
What might this look like in practice?
A few provocations. I’m trying not to think too hard here and just shooting from the hip!
Live pastoral ‘wait time’ dashboards? Imagine a digital screen in the school reception showing real-time updates on response times for pastoral or SEND support—like Uber, but for care. Students and staff see: You’re next in line. Someone will speak to you within 15 minutes.
Queue Committees? Each term, task a group of students to audit a waiting experience in school that bugs them (e.g. lunch queue, speaking to a teacher, etc.). Their task? Redesign the system for dignity, fairness, and emotional safety—with the power to pilot any recommendations.
Queue Concierge? A dedicated staff member—not for behaviour or admin—walks the school each morning identifying who’s 'hovering' socially or emotionally. Their role? To intervene before the queues even form.
I don’t know…
That’s all I’ve got right now.
None of these are radical changes but they start from a different question: What’s it like to wait in our school? And who is always waiting?
We can’t eliminate waiting
Most of our school systems are optimised for throughput: how many lessons we deliver, how many interventions we run, how much data we can process.
But young people aren’t cargo to be moved through efficiently. They’re humans, with emotions, needs, and hopes—often waiting for someone to notice them.
We can’t eliminate waiting. But we can choose to design it—with dignity, fairness, and care. And we could probably learn a lot about a school not by who speaks the most but by who is always waiting to be heard.