what I believe
Assessment, at its best, is what I call Relational Epistemics. It is a process of getting to know your school, and every single human within it, as individuals and collectives. And data are all the fragments of those stories. Not summaries. Not verdicts. Fragments. Cold until we warm them over the coals of context.
The most important things about a student are often the ones that cannot be counted or we don’t choose to see, and the silence around those things is itself a signal worth reading. Belonging is not an outcome to pursue after achievement – it is the soil from which achievement grows. And everyone has the right, without condition, exception or compromise, to be seen, heard, known and to belong.
Most schools feel this. They also feel, somewhere beneath the surface, the gap between who they say they are and how they actually seek to know their students and staff. That gap is where this work begins.
what we will challenge
The ways schools have been taught to know – to measure, rank, sort and audit – are neither neutral nor inevitable. They carry the residue of intellectual traditions that crowded out other ways of knowing, and of colonial histories that subjugated them. The result is a double hierarchy: of knowers, and of knowing itself. And it is quietly exclusionary.
There are other ways. Ecosystems know, as do all the species within them. Communities carry knowledge across generations. Humans know things before we can explain why, and even when we never will. When schools begin to listen for these signals – slowly, relationally, with genuine curiosity – something shifts. It is unsettling. It is also, for most people in the room, the most alive they have felt in a long time.
how the work moves
I arrive through whichever (wheelchair accessible) door a school opens – data, wellbeing, belonging, inclusion, leadership. But neither I nor the school is ever, as Gregory Bateson said, “just that and nothing more”. The work moves through a whole community, listening for what is said and what isn’t.
It takes many forms: a couple of days that crack something open; a hybrid partnership – sustained over months and years – that chases questions as they form; a keynote that plants something uncomfortable and workshops that tend whatever grows. There is no fixed script for who challenges and who listens. That mutuality is the point.
an invitation
I do not arrive with answers. I arrive with questions, with attention, and with the belief that what feels inevitable rarely is, and that the bogeymen in our way, once named, become insubstantial. And what we do next is shaped by both of us – there is no script for who leads and who follows, who steadies and who reaches further, or when those roles are passed, one way or another.
This work is a forge. It requires the willingness to hold something in the fire long enough for it to change shape, and to bear the heat and resistance that transformation demands. What emerges cannot be predicted. But something is clarified in the remaking – and with it comes the permission, and the courage, to begin.