A couple of years ago I finally made a pilgrimage to Brisbane’s famed Breakfast Creek Hotel. As a tragic Midnight Oil fan, the Brekkie Creek had occupied mythical status in my imagination for years thanks to its mention in Dreamworld. And because the Real Schools team is spread all over Australia, it was also a rare treat to have seven or eight of us all together in Brisbane at the same time.
We were sitting around the table solving education’s problems and talking general nonsense when a very young waiter, maybe 18 years old at a guess, approached carrying a tray loaded with five or six pints of beer. And he tripped.
Well … I only discovered later that he’d tripped because, from my perspective, all that happened was six full pints launching directly onto my head, shoulders and back. A couple of glasses smashed against me and then shattered again onto the floor beneath the table. I was utterly drenched in booze.
The poor young bloke just stood there horrified, repeatedly mumbling, “I’m so sorry,” over and over again while staring at me like his life had just ended publicly in front of a packed Queensland pub. And honestly, what struck me immediately wasn’t my inconvenience or even the shock of suddenly smelling like a brewery. It was the fear in his face. This kid was absolutely convinced he was about to lose his job.
So, I looked at him and said, “Mate, go grab me a towel.”
He sprinted off through the pub, returned almost instantly and helped me dry myself off while continuing to apologise every few seconds. Eventually I tried to break the tension a bit and asked him, “Did you do that on purpose?” His eyes widened immediately. “No! No, no, no.” And I said, “Well then we’re sweet. These things happen.”
A little later, while he anxiously swept up every tiny shard of glass from beneath our table, the manager came over apologising profusely and explained that it was only the young bloke’s second shift. I remember saying something to the manager that I still think about now.
“Whatever you do, don’t sack him. That’s a young man who desperately wants to take responsibility. I reckon you’ve got a ripper there.”
At the end of the night we went to settle the bill and the staff at the Brekkie Creek refused to let us pay for our drinks. I thought it was a lovely gesture, but more importantly I thought it revealed something deeper about the culture of the place. The young waiter took responsibility, and the organisation took responsibility too. Nobody hid. Nobody deflected. Nobody tried to reposition the problem as somebody else’s inconvenience to manage.
Which brings me to Jetstar.
Now listen, I understand airlines are enormously complicated operations and things inevitably go wrong. But I also think you only earn a colloquial phrase like “Getting Jetstarred” when enough people repeatedly experience an organisation refusing to meaningfully solve the problems they cause.
A while ago Jetstar lost our luggage during an international trip and then seemed almost professionally committed to avoiding responsibility for it. It was a hell of endless phone queues, non-communication, deflection and unexplained delays. Nobody empowered to help and, worse still, nobody particularly interested in helping either. The entire experience felt engineered around exhausting customers into surrender rather than solving the problem itself.
And I think there’s a really important lesson in this for schools.
Communities do not expect schools to be perfect. Parents understand that schools are full of human beings managing enormous complexity every single day. Kids, leaders and staff will all make mistakes. Comms will occasionally fail and decisions will miss the mark too.
Perfection is not the standard communities are searching for. Responsibility is.
What destroys trust in schools is rarely the mistake itself. It’s the instinct to protect image above reality. It’s defensiveness, mealy-mouthed bureaucratic jargon, avoidance. Or the subtle implication that the family, the child or the complexity itself is somehow more responsible for the problem than the institution responding to it.
Communities can forgive schools that screw up. What they struggle to forgive are schools that refuse to genuinely own the screw up.
That’s why restorative cultures work so well. A genuinely restorative organisation understands that mistakes are inevitable, but responsibility is cultural. Healthy cultures build adults and young people who instinctively lean toward ownership, repair and reconnection rather than avoidance, blame or punishment theatre.
And honestly, I think every school leader should occasionally stop and ask themselves one confronting question: “When things go wrong, does our community experience us more like the Breakfast Creek Hotel or Jetstar?”
Because even though one’s a pub and the other’s an airline, I reckon the answer is telling.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. If my ramblings here aren’t quite enough for you, I’ve also been posting more regularly over on LinkedIn lately. Some of it’s about schools, some leadership, some culture and occasionally just me trying to make sense of things in real time. You’re very welcome to come and join the conversation over there.
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