There is an understandable appeal to consistency. Leaders want pupils to receive the same quality of education whichever classroom they enter, trusts want to reduce unnecessary variation between schools, and teachers want clarity about what matters. Pupils undoubtedly benefit from routines that are calm, familiar and purposeful. None of this is unreasonable; in fact, some things should be consistent. Every young person should experience a rich and ambitious curriculum, be expected to think hard, and have access to beautiful texts, careful explanations and worthwhile conversations. Expectations should remain high for pupils who find learning difficult, and adaptations should help them into the curriculum rather than quietly replace it.
This is consistency of entitlement, and it matters enormously. But it is quite different from requiring every teacher to deliver that entitlement through the same lesson format, the same sequence of activities or the same routine at the same point in every lesson. The two are sometimes treated as though they are interchangeable, but they are not.
Form without function
A few months ago, in a conversation with Jon Hutchinson, the term isomorphic mimicry came up in relation to school practice. It is a concept from organisational theory that describes what happens when an organisation adopts the visible features associated with successful practice without necessarily developing the capability or understanding that made the original practice effective. The organisation comes to look like a successful one, but the resemblance is largely on the surface: form without function. The idea has stayed with me, and it firmed up during several conversations recently about how easily well-intentioned initiatives drift into proxy measures.
We can see how this happens across the sector. Leaders visit a successful school where retrieval practice is used well, so retrieval questions are introduced at the start of every lesson. Knowledge organisers seem to be helping pupils in another trust, so every subject is required to produce one using a common template. Effective teachers give clear explanations and check for understanding, so a standard lesson structure is created to ensure that these things are visible everywhere. The reasoning is understandable: if a practice is associated with strong outcomes, replicating it appears to offer a reliable route to improvement.
Yet the visible practice is not necessarily the source of the success.
Retrieval practice works when teachers have selected questions carefully, understand what pupils need to retrieve, and use their responses to make decisions about subsequent teaching. A knowledge organiser is useful only when it represents a carefully considered curriculum and helps pupils see connections between important ideas. Once these practices are lifted out of their context and mandated as universal routines, their purpose can become obscured.
Teachers comply with the form while the function gradually disappears: retrieval questions are completed because it is the first five minutes, knowledge organisers are produced because they are expected, and lesson phases appear on slides because leaders look for them.
What began as an attempt to improve learning becomes a means of demonstrating compliance. The practice is present, but whether it is doing useful educational work is another matter.
Consistency of what?
This raises a question that is not asked often enough: when leaders say they want greater consistency, what exactly do they want to be consistent? If the answer is the quality of pupils’ entitlement, there is a strong case for it. If the answer is the appearance of lessons, we need to be far more cautious.
A rich curriculum might be a consistent expectation across every school in a trust, but it does not follow that curriculum materials must be identical in every respect. All pupils are entitled to clear explanations, but a clear explanation in mathematics will not look like one in history, art or physical education. All pupils should revisit important knowledge, but this does not mean every lesson in every subject needs to begin with five retrieval questions. The principle can be consistent while the enactment varies.
This is not an argument for teachers doing whatever they like, nor is it a defence of weak practice under the banner of professional autonomy. Shared principles, coherent curricula and sensible routines matter, and where variation diminishes pupils’ entitlement, leaders have a responsibility to address it. But variation is not in itself evidence of weakness, just as uniformity is not evidence of quality.
In a strong organisation, teachers understand principles well enough to make thoughtful decisions about how they are enacted, explaining why a particular approach is appropriate for this content, these pupils and this point in the learning. That requires more professional knowledge, not less.
The attraction of what can be seen
One difficulty is that surface consistency is easy to observe. Leaders can see whether retrieval questions are on the board, check whether every teacher is using the agreed lesson template, and count how many knowledge organisers have been produced to RAG-rate their completion. These things create the immediate impression that improvement is being managed. It is much harder to determine whether pupils are encountering worthwhile content, whether questions are revealing anything useful, whether explanations are illuminating difficult ideas, or whether a knowledge organiser reflects the structure of the subject.
The things that are easiest to check can therefore become proxies for the things that matter most.
This can also distort professional development. Instead of helping colleagues understand why a principle matters and how it might be translated into their subject, implementation becomes the distribution of templates, and consistency becomes a question of whether everyone is using them.
Yet strong practice cannot be secured through templates alone. If we want pupils to think hard, teachers need to understand what makes the material intellectually demanding. If we want retrieval to strengthen learning, colleagues need to know what is worth retrieving, when retrieval is useful, and what to do with the information it produces. If we want knowledge organisers to support the curriculum, subject teams need time to consider the knowledge, concepts and connections they contain. This is slower and more demanding work, but it is also what genuinely improves what pupils experience.
Principles and practices
It is helpful to distinguish between principles and practices. A principle describes what we value and the educational function we are trying to secure. A practice is one possible way of bringing that principle to life.
For example, the principle might be that pupils regularly revisit significant knowledge so that it becomes increasingly secure and connected. Retrieval practice is one way of supporting this, but it is not the principle itself, and a retrieval starter at the beginning of every lesson is only one possible enactment.
Similarly, the principle might be that pupils understand the most important knowledge and ideas within a unit. A knowledge organiser might help, but its existence does not tell us whether the curriculum is coherent, the knowledge has been taught well, or pupils understand how its different elements connect. When practices are mistaken for principles, they become fixed. The question shifts from “Is this helping pupils learn what matters?” to “Is everyone doing it?” That is the point at which consistency starts to become conformity.
Some questions for leaders
Before introducing a trust-wide or school-wide expectation, it is worth asking:
What is the underlying principle we want to make consistent?
What is the educational purpose of this practice?
What is the evidence that the practice will achieve that purpose in this context?
Is it essential, or is it one possible way of enacting the principle?
What variation might be justified by the subject, content, phase or pupils?
How will we know whether the practice is improving learning rather than simply becoming visible?
Are we developing teachers’ understanding, or mainly monitoring their compliance?
These questions do not remove the need for leadership decisions; they make those decisions more disciplined.
Perhaps the single most important diagnostic test is this: if the visible routine disappeared, what other evidence would tell us that the underlying principle was secure?
If we cannot answer that, we have placed too much confidence in the surface feature. Consistency should describe the quality of the entitlement we offer every young person. It should not require every lesson to look the same.
The aim is not identical practice. It is a shared commitment to strong principles, enacted intelligently.
Until next time
Mary
PS If this has prompted some thinking about what ambitious curriculum entitlement looks like in practice, particularly across Key Stage 3, there is more in KS3: The Ambitious Years.
Amen to all of that… it’s harder work for Senior Leaders but it recognises subject distinctiveness and professional autonomy. To ensure deep engagement with the curriculum (students and staff) and real adaptation to learners. It’s also retains the idea of real teacher professionalism and avoids us teaching students not to uncritically follow new orthodoxies whilst doing the opposite methodologically in our own classrooms. By all means it may be necessary in a critical situation to create a type of uniformity but only ever as a means to arrest as mess and to establish a more nuanced approach once order has been restored.
This is so insightful, Mary. I agree you in with this so much. When training primary teachers, I have often used the metaphor of practice being like a toolkit that a teacher uses. A great and useful tool will not do the job well (or at all) if the teacher has not discerned the clear purpose (principle) for its use. Thank you always for these important messages.