A kid plays up.
You’ve got about four seconds to choose your next move.
And in those four seconds – and in thousands of tiny moments just like it, played out across your entire staff every single day – your school’s culture is being built or dismantled. One justifiable decision at a time.
I ended up making this chart while thinking about what this phenomenon means. You might have seen it on my LinkedIn recently.
Down the left side: The things a school is really for. Ambitions like better behaviour, belonging, harm repair, deep learning and care for that struggling kid.
Across the top: Three ways that each one gets handled.
Slow and restorative. Fast and performative. Pure, dopamine-led compliance.
I wouldn’t mind poking your conscience a little more firmly before you find something wrong with it or file it under ‘interesting,’ and move on.
No school lives in one column. That’s not the point of the chart. ‘’ve never met a teacher who woke up one morning and decided to stop caring about development and start caring about expedience. That’s not how culture dies. Culture dies one speedy, defensible decision at a time. And that’s the problem – every single step to the right on that chart is defensible on its own.
Logging a behaviour incident is faster than understanding it. Sending a dysregulated kid to the calm-down room elsewhere is tidier than co-regulating them in context. Referring a struggling student up the line takes less out of us than riding out the limbic lapse.
Every one of those choices makes sense in the moment. It’s only when you stack a thousand of them, across a whole staff, across a whole term, that you look up and find you’ve accidentally built a school that’s brilliant at proving things and rather hopeless at the things that can’t be proven.
In Restoring Teaching, I write that, “It’s time to stop beavering away in our schools on tasks, compliances, standards, strategic plans, mission statements, and desired outcomes.” That was a provocation when I wrote it – and I mean it even more now.
The machinery that drives compliance cultures isn’t as much evil as it is seductive. It looks like evidence and feels like accountability. It generates reports that reassure everyone that rigour is happening.
But I reckon the tell is always the same. The fast stuff is usually to soothe the adult, because the quick win is almost always for us.
The slow column isn’t the soft one, by the way. There is nothing soft about co-regulating a dysregulated kid when every nerve in your body says send them out. That’s the harder, braver, more skilful path. It also happens to be the actual job.
Hmm, what do I really want you to take from my funky little chart? You don’t need a new program to move left across that chart. You need to catch yourself in those four seconds. You’ll feel the violent tug toward the tidy, provable reaction – and I still want you to choose the more human one instead. Then do it again tomorrow. And again the day after.
Your school’s identity is the sum of a few thousand of those tiny choices, made daily by tired people – like you – who really care.
We can spend those choices proving we’re busy, or we can spend them on the kids standing right in front of us.
I know which one I got into this caper for.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. My Teacher Retention Solution online workshop is coming up next week and I’d love you to join me. We’ll work through what makes great teachers stay in schools – and what you can do to keep more of them.
The Teacher Retention Solution
Tuesday 8 September 2026
Also, a quick update on my Home Truth last week about Who Gets To Decide What A Teacher Is. I gave the impression in this one that the full consultative period was over and my mates at AITSL want you to know that your input is still definitely required.
Soon, the Stage 1 report will be released as a Discussion Paper that we’ll all get the chance to comment on. That “more of this” and “less of that” opportunity is on the way.
My strong encouragement is to keep an eye out for these opportunities (because the next project will be about the Principal standards too) and to engage fully. Tell your story!
Want to subscribe to Adam’s Home Truths? Simply subscribe here.