The unscripted turnaround: plans, pitfalls and the nuance behind the headlines

Inside the 'messy middle' of transformation

In my first article, I talked about why we do what we do (and why we decide what we decide). How our mission pre-destined the weighty decision to take on a school like Croxteth. Now, let's talk about the how. What does it actually take to climb that super steep gradient? And the first truth is this: school improvement is brutally non-linear. It's a long-distance run measured by a sprinter's stopwatch. A breakthrough week can be undone by one Friday afternoon. (If that last sentence raised a wry smile from your lips, know this: you are in the real business of school improvement).

This is about what happens after the bold 'yes'; the tailored execution; the human judgements and painful lessons learnt. And all in the absence of any critical nuance consistently and compellingly missing in public debate and headline data.

Our model: a compass, not a railway track

We have a highly codified transformation model from our attendance framework and instructional toolkit to hundreds of 'what-to-dos' and over twenty core artefacts, all hosted on our Dixons Digital platform. A wealth of shared resources and tried-and-tested strategies authored by the collective wisdom of a team who have spent professional lifetimes turning why into how (and sometimes even how on earth!). But anyone who thinks this is a rigid or off-the-shelf solution is wrong. It’s a tired assumption only possible if made from afar. We fundamentally believe in professional autonomy and agency. But (critically!) that agency must demonstrably benefit students, not just adults.

The model is a compass. We always start by stabilising: establishing safety, culture, and what we call our ‘learning habits’. This is not a zero-tolerance environment (they are children!). Our model is weighted (vastly) toward support and scaffolding. All given to help students get it right long before any sanction is even considered. And the learning habits are just the foundational, door-opening behaviours for future success (always narrated best by our families in those moments where we ask them to stand alongside us to support their child into better routines). But which habit we tackle first, how long each phase takes (or how many times it must be repeated to land), and how we adapt to local context (like uniform flexibility or community engagement structures) is entirely tailored. One Inadequate school can be turned around in months; another, like Croxteth, takes years. The difference isn't the plan; it's the depth of the challenge we inherited and our commitment to building something sustainable.

The human reality: weight, nuance and positive intent

Let's be blunt: this work is heavy. It's a weight that lands squarely on our school leaders. They're operating on positive intent, assuming the best and leading with kindness in a reality that feels Sisyphean. You make a tough call to keep kids safe or to open a door for them, and from the outside, it gets simplified into a soundbite or a statistic. That disconnect – that’s the hardest part. You're being held to account, rigorously, for decisions that the accountability framework itself often misreads. This is where we need to be slow to judge and quick to seek to understand. Leading with curiosity is the antidote to the fundamental attribution error. The instinct to blame a person’s character for a problem that is, in truth, situational and systemic. Our trust capacity alongside our leaders' character creates their commitment; the situation we inherit is the real variable.

This is what that variable looks like on the ground. It is the predecessor principal securing a different job the night before TUPE, leaving you with a first term without a headteacher. It is walking the corridors and not being able to tell the difference between break and lesson because internal truancy is so pervasive. Every systemic issue (like the national SEND crisis) manifests here at a greater magnitude (squirmingly, insidiously lost in a sea of problems). You start with a 300-point action plan just to reach a stable baseline. Buy-in takes years, not months. You are attempting a complete structural and cultural rebuild while simultaneously operating a school and dealing with that day's crisis (or more often crises). And after twenty-five years in this work, I am still surprised at least once a week by something that happens in our schools. It is genuinely unrelenting: two steps forward, one step back. You make mistakes and have to re-route. You expend colossal energy just to get to stability, only to see that some staff don’t have the reserves (often reasonably) for the next, higher summit – which can mean yet another team rebuild. This is relentless. It’s the messy middle.

This is what I mean by the gradient. After twenty-five years in schools facing immense challenge, the last few have opened my eyes to a different category of work. It’s the difference between tough and the most complex. Many leaders know their schools are challenging; far fewer have walked the corridors of schools at this specific precipice. And until you have, it’s difficult to truly understand the weight of it.

When we talk about this gradient, we are describing a professional environment that can overwhelm even the most prepared. It demands a form of resilience that is built through shared experience, not imported from elsewhere. This is why the ivory-tower judgement so often misses the mark.

Take the data. Just take it. At Croxteth, our suspensions have halved. The culture has completely transformed. But the published figures? They're a year behind. So the story you see isn't the story that's true.

And even when you catch up, the figures can mislead. Suspension rates will be high at the start of a journey as you raise the bar from a very low base; the proof of progress is that they come down. More important than the total number is the rate of repeat suspensions. The first is sometimes a necessary sanction (accepting support can require relationships to be secure); if you are raising standards, you must have a final, clear boundary. A pattern of repeats – the second, third, or fourth – is more problematic and should trigger deeper, more tailored intervention. All our data is honest; the narrative around it is often not.

Solving real problems under the microscope: This chasm between reality and perception is constant. In one school, we inherited a system where almost a quarter of students had a pass to leave lessons at any time (such a clear safeguarding crisis!). Of course, anyone should be able to go when they need to; students can leave lessons by simply saying when they need to go. But managing that in a dysfunctional environment would mean a few hundred students roaming unsupervised. Our positive intent to rebuild a safe, structured environment was met with press criticism based on incomplete facts. We couldn't rebut it without fuelling the fire. This is the daily tension: doing the necessary, right thing for children's safety, while being scrutinised through a simplified lens. There is a world of difference between having attended a school and walking its most challenging corridors day after day to rebuild it.

The outsider perception, and landing better

Our urgent, necessary focus on internal stabilisation in Liverpool sometimes meant we were perceived from the outside as a ‘Bradford trust’ imposing a template. I was born and raised on Merseyside; Liverpool is my home city. But if that was the perception, we own our role in it. We are learning to land better and engage upstream with communities from day one. We are now loud about the local adaptations to show an early deeper respect for context.

The new frontline: deepfakes and digital abuse

The weight of leadership now extends into a terrifying digital space. We have had to take down all photographs of our principals and senior leaders from our public websites and materials. Why? Because their images have been stolen, manipulated into deepfakes, and grotesquely misused on social media. The perpetrators are tiny in number but the consequences enormous. This isn't criticism; it's a targeted campaign of harassment designed to break individuals. It is a stark, modern example of the fundamental attribution error weaponised: reducing a leader's complex, mission-driven choices to a malevolent caricature. They carry this, too.

The true measure: belief inside the building

The most lagged indicator is also the most vital: the belief of the people who live it. When we started at Croxteth, buy-in was fragile. Now, the students speak with a pride that no inspection grade can capture. The staff who've weathered the storm talk about safety, purpose, and a future they finally believe in. That’s the transformation that matters: slower, messier, and the only foundation that lasts.

This belief is what our heads carry. They are navigating the most profound human complexities of supporting families, making care-filled judgement calls, and absorbing relentless scrutiny in both the physical and digital world. They do this because they believe in our mission. We are happy to be challenged on our methods; a debate on pedagogy is healthy. What we cannot accept is a challenge to our fundamental intent and values.

When we took on our most complex schools, staff were leaving in tears because it was that bad. Yet, a vocal minority sometimes claims the school was 'better' when it was Inadequate (this happens almost every time we work in turnaround). For a few, it might have been easier; perhaps less was expected in the old set up. But the silent majority of families, who now see a school where their child is safe, happy, and learning, know the truth. That knowledge is the leader's greatest reward but sometimes it can feel like little protection from the grind.

The point here is not to catalogue grievances, but to ask for understanding. The work is messy, the choices are hard, and the people doing it are driven by a commitment to children. We own our mistakes.

But we cannot solve these deep challenges unless we start from a place of shared respect for the difficulty of the task and the positive intent behind it.

This human, gritty work is what changes schools. But it exists within a system whose accountability mechanisms often fail to capture its complexity, and whose incentives are misaligned with the mission. In my final article, I'll explore what we (and the sector) need to do next: how to evaluate success intelligently, how to incentivise the right work, and why effective collaboration is our greatest hope.