Anyone remember a retail chain called NQR? Not Quite Right. I’m actually told there are still some around, but I haven’t spotted one in ages. NQR is essentially a whole shop of discount shelves, odd stock and items that look fine at first glance but are just a bit beaten up on closer inspection.
That’s probably the most honest way to describe how a lot of school leaders and teachers are feeling right now.
They’re not broken in any headline-grabbing way, but not quite right either. Student behaviour feels harder to positively influence than it used to and staff are stretched in ways that aren’t really sustainable. Parents are demanding more – often quicker and more tailored than schools can reasonably deliver. And many students are arriving, especially in Term 4, less ready to cope, less able to regulate and less equipped to function well in the company of others.
Something’s distinctly NQR.
What makes this hard to reconcile sometimes is that it hasn’t happened because schools have stopped caring or trying. If anything, schools have never worked harder. The effort I see in our schools is extraordinary – and it’s largely going unrewarded. Teachers are giving their all, leaders are carrying enormous loads and we’re still told to produce better results… or else.
That’s the thing about an effort problem versus a design problem. They often feel identical from the inside. You’re exhausted either way, but the solution is completely different.
If it’s an effort problem, you push harder. You add more professional learning, more programs and more interventions. You layer initiative on top of initiative and hope the cumulative weight eventually tips something back in your favour. Most schools have been doing this for years and most schools will tell you that it hasn’t worked.
If it’s a design problem, you stop and ask a different question. Not, “What more can we do?” but, “What are we actually configured to produce?”
And that question, for many schools, leads somewhere uncomfortable.
For a long time, that answer has been: results. Measurable, reportable, comparable results. Data has become our north star and improvement has been framed as a measurable gain.
None of that is wrong exactly, but it is incomplete. When performance becomes the purpose, everything else organises itself around what can be counted. Behaviour becomes something to manage rather than develop, and success is too regularly defined in ways that are convenient to reports rather than meaningful.
Over time, the system gets efficient at producing results and less effective at producing people.
The world our students are stepping into has moved on from that trade-off. It needs people who can regulate themselves through social turbulence, work productively with others, take responsibility for the impact they have and contribute to something bigger than themselves.
Those aren’t soft skills any more. They’re the ones that machines can’t replicate, and that communities will increasingly depend on.
The capabilities we’re talking about here aren’t built through more data cycles or more academic intervention. They’re built through human interactions and through the quality of the relationships in a school. Through a culture where students experience – daily and repeatedly – what it feels and sounds like to be treated with dignity and to treat others the same way.
When you contemplate the NQR-ness of your students, it’s these skills of merely getting along that I contend you’ll see as the dents in their can that would have them on the discount shelf of life.
What our schools – and our communities – need is leaders who are explicit about the kind of people their school is trying to develop. That means staff who share a way of working that is consistent enough for students to predict and human enough to actually grow them. It means shifting the focus away from reacting to behaviour in the moment and toward building the conditions where better behaviour is far more likely to occur.
It doesn’t require doing more. It requires doing less with more clarity and more conviction.
Most schools don’t have an effort shortage. They have a design question they just haven’t asked yet.
It’s worth asking.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. Join me for The Bullying Myth online workshop on Tuesday 27 October, where we’ll explore what’s actually working to reduce bullying in schools.
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