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We have become remarkably good at specifying what we want from education.

We set targets, measure performance, compare organisations, inspect, benchmark and hold people to account. All of these things have their place.

But I sometimes wonder whether we have become less sophisticated at asking a more fundamental question: what have we built that makes the performance we are demanding possible?

It is tempting to reduce educational performance to people. Recruit great teachers, great operational professionals and great leaders. Then set ambitious targets, measure relentlessly and hold people to account.

But performance is not simply a property of people. It is a property of people and the system in which they work.

You can’t force a better outcome

For example, imagine that the combination of your structures, processes, technology, data, decision rights, skills and capacity can reliably deliver seven out of 10.

Setting a target of nine doesn’t magically turn the system into a nine-out-of-10 system. It simply changes what you are asking of the people operating within it.

We would recognise the absurdity of this elsewhere. If a machine has a known capacity, we don’t improve its output by standing next to it shouting “faster”. Yet, organisationally, we sometimes do precisely that.

And when we do, eventually something gives. People create workarounds. Bureaucracy grows. Measures get gamed. Problems get hidden. Blame moves around the organisation. And, eventually, good people burn out.

That isn’t a failure of ambition. It is a failure to build capability.

Systems determine what is achievable, not ambition

Look across high-performing education systems internationally and, despite significant differences in structure, culture and approach, some broad themes recur.

They invest in people. They take professional development seriously. They create professional pathways. They think about workload and capacity. They give professionals meaningful agency. And they recognise teaching and educational leadership as skilled professional work.

The lesson isn’t that there is one perfect model to copy. It is that high expectations and investment in capability are not alternatives. They have to exist together.

James Clear makes a similar observation in his book Atomic Habits: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

The principle applies well beyond individual habits. An ambitious target provides direction, but the system determines what is achievable.

This also brings up the role of accountability. An aspiration says this is where we want to get to. Accountability says this is what we expect you to deliver.

Those are not the same thing.

Improvement requires honest baselines

There is nothing wrong with ambitious aspirations. The danger comes when we turn aspiration into hard accountability before the underlying capability exists.

Targets don’t simply measure behaviour. They change behaviour.

If the consequence of telling the truth is punishment, we shouldn’t be surprised when the system becomes very good at hiding the truth.

Real improvement requires an honest baseline: this is where we genuinely are today.

Not where we would like to be, or where we think policymakers, boards or inspectors want us to be. But being fully open and transparent requires a degree of psychological safety that so many leaders don’t feel.

You cannot improve what you cannot see or what you don’t understand.

And this becomes even more important as education enters a new digital and AI era. The capabilities required of schools and trusts are changing.

This isn’t simply a classroom issue. Finance, HR, estates, procurement, data, governance, administration and operations will all be transformed.

How do we prepare for the future?

The question, therefore, isn’t simply: how do we make today’s education system perform better?

It is also: what capabilities will our education system need in five or 10 years, and are we building them now?

That changes the role of leadership. It means we cannot simply demand more performance from the existing system. We have to continually build the system’s capacity to perform.

So perhaps when something isn’t performing, our first question shouldn’t be who is responsible? Perhaps it should be: what is the system asking people to do, and have we given them the capability to do it?

None of this is an argument for lowering standards. It is an argument for taking high standards seriously because high performance isn’t something you demand into existence - it is something you build.

Perhaps, as a sector, we can do this together. And perhaps regulators will give us the space to make this possible.

Stephen Morales is group CEO of the Centre for Education Operational Excellence

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