A short essay on why the most important work schools do may not appear in any inspection framework, and the three questions that sit at the heart of every school community.
The conversations young people most need to have are increasingly happening without another human present. Young people can now talk about loneliness, anxiety and identity without ever having to look someone in the eye.
The system often values standards, outcomes and results, because these are the measures it recognises most easily. But a different pattern is emerging in the lives of young people. Conversations about friendship, about feeling lost and about who they are are increasingly happening through prompts typed into machines rather than through relationships with other people.
When young people find it easier to type how they feel than to say it to someone who knows them, something has shifted. Not outwards, inwards, the question is not what we offer them, but who we are to one another.
Who am I?
Who are you?
Who are we together?
These are not questions technology can answer. They grow through presence, through time spent alongside others and through the slow and sometimes difficult work of being in community together. Through the relational culture of a place and the density of togetherness that exists within a community.
That phrase – the density of togetherness – is not abstract. You can feel it when you walk into a school that has it. There is a quality to how people speak to one another in corridors, how a staffroom holds its silences, how a child who is struggling gets noticed before they fall. It is not an initiative. It is not on a development plan. It is the accumulated weight of thousands of small, daily decisions about who matters and how we show it.
In schools where that density is thin, people are polite but disconnected. Staff meetings run to the agenda but miss the room. Leaders carry things alone that were never meant to be carried alone. And young people learn, quickly and accurately, that the adults around them are performing community rather than living it.
Schools remain one of the few places where young people spend sustained time within a real community. There they learn how to notice others, how to sit with disagreement, and how to carry responsibility for the people around them. None of that appears in an inspection framework. It may be among the most important work education does.
But the culture young people experience does not arrive from nowhere. It is shaped by the adults. By how a senior team talks to one another when the door is closed. By whether a headteacher has space to reflect, or is running on instinct and adrenaline. By whether the relationships at the top of a trust are honest enough to hold the weight of what the work demands.
That is why the relational culture work I do with MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams always comes back to this: the togetherness at the top shapes the togetherness throughout. A trust cannot build belonging for its children if the adults leading it do not experience it themselves.
The work of rebuilding doesn’t start with a programme or a platform. It starts with how people show up for one another, every day, in a place they share.
What young people carry out of school is not just knowledge. It is the experience of having been part of something, of having learned alongside other people, not just from a curriculum. And the cultures that schools build every day shape whether that experience has room to take hold.
The question is not a new one: what do young people most need to learn in our schools about living well together?
The Single Collective works with MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams on the relational culture that shapes how adults, and young people experience school. If you’re thinking about what togetherness looks like in your trust, start a conversation.
About the author
Ali Durban MBE is the founder of The Single Collective and co-founder of Gesher School (three times Ofsted Outstanding, and a national model for SEND education). She works with MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams across England on the relational culture work in the space between CPD and wellbeing.