On Both Sides of the Table: What a Year of Listening Taught Me About Great Schools

This year I have come to know schools from two directions at once, and the longer it has gone on, the more each view has reshaped the other. By day, my work at Edurio is about how trusts and schools listen to the people they serve, and what they choose to do with what they hear. But this year I also stepped into my first year as a Trustee, which has sat me firmly on the other side of the table, the side that has to receive all of that listening and decide what to do about it. Holding both perspectives at the same time has been humbling in a way I had not expected.

I have spent this year listening to a remarkable range of people, not only chief executives and the trust leaders, but the classroom teachers, the office staff who hold a school together behind the scenes, and the pupils themselves, who tend to be far more honest about their experience than the rest of us dare to be. The more of those conversations I had, the more I kept arriving at the same, slightly unfashionable thought: that so much of what makes a school a good place comes down to some very old, very ordinary ideas about how you treat people, the kind we used to call good customer service.

I know how that sounds. Education is not a transaction, and I would never pretend a child or colleague is a customer in the way a shopper is. But strip the idea back to what it really means, taking people seriously, listening to them properly, and showing them that it mattered, and those instincts travel a great deal further into a staffroom or a classroom than we tend to admit.

What half a million voices will tell you

You see it first in the sheer scale of what people will tell you, if only you ask. This year the Edurio community gathered close to 20 million responses, from more than half a million staff, pupils and parents. It is tempting to read a number that size as just a number, but I find I can’t, because behind every one of those responses is a person who took a few minutes out of a hard day to say how things really are for them. What comes through every time is how much of the clearest insight sits with the people we ask the least.

When the answer has to be no

What matters every bit as much, though, is what happens after the asking. It would be comforting to imagine that listening well means acting on everything you are told, but no trust or school, with their stretched budgets and impossible competing demands, can ever promise that, and nor should they. What I have come to believe is that being heard was never really about getting your way. It is about knowing your view was taken seriously, that someone weighed it honestly, and that when a decision goes the other way you understand why, rather than being left to assume you were simply ignored.

Sometimes, of course, listening does lead to change, and when it does the difference can be striking. Kings Leadership Academy in Liverpool listened closely to its staff, acted on what was wearing them down, and believe they saved somewhere in the region of £240,000 in a single year through lower absence and fewer people leaving. Far more often, though, the honest answer is “not this, not now”, and in those moments it is the explanation that keeps trust alive, not the outcome. People will keep telling you the truth for as long as they believe you are dealing with them straight, and they tend to fall quiet the moment they suspect their words have disappeared into a void.

Meeting people where they are

If there is a single idea I try to carry into all of this, it is to meet people where they are, rather than where I assume them to be. I was reminded of it again on a recent visit to a primary school, watching teachers give everything to meet the exact need of the child in front of them in that moment, and it struck me that the same patience is owed to the adults in a school too, whether that is the office manager juggling a hundred small fires or the early career teacher still finding their feet. Sitting on the Trustee side this year has only sharpened it for me, because governance can collapse so easily into a conversation about numbers and ratings, when the thing that actually moves an organisation is whether the people inside it feel heard and understood.

Some of the conversations that shaped my thinking happened well away from the day job, particularly on a residential with a group of trust leaders where the talk kept returning, almost without our noticing, back to the same handful of ideas. One was presence, and the truth that belonging in a school is built far less through any programme than through the small, daily signals that tell people they matter here. The harder questions surfaced too, the ones the sector has been wrestling with all year (and much longer): how trusts grow without losing what made them work, how we meet the rising need around SEND, and whether, in our rush to systematise, we risk de-skilling the next generation of headteachers. Underneath all of it was the thread that runs through everything else here: listening. Not as a survey to send or a box to tick, but as a stance, a way of working that trusts people enough to share the load with them and to leave real room for their judgement.

The part that can’t be automated

None of this works, of course, if the listening itself feels like a chore, for the people doing it or the people being asked. So a good deal of our year at Edurio went into taking the friction out of it: a rebuilt survey builder, clearer results, new benchmarks so you can see how you compare, and guides to help turn feedback into action. You can see the full run of what we shipped if you’re curious, but I won’t dwell on the features here, because they matter only insofar as they give people more time for the part that can’t be automated.

Which brings me to the two letters I had hoped to get through an entire reflection without using. I tried rather hard to keep AI out of this post, almost entirely as a small act of rebellion, because you can scarcely move in our sector this year without tripping over it. But a piece written at this moment in history would feel a little dishonest without at least a nod, so here it is.

At Edurio, we use AI across our own platform and heavily in our ways of working, and are glad of it, because it finds patterns and shoulders the heavy lifting that used to swallow people’s time. What it cannot do is sense what has shifted in the mood of a staffroom, or gently challenge an assumption a leadership team has carried unexamined for years, or carry the weight of really knowing a community. For us, this applies to our day-to-day work serving the sector, but equally to the sector and the organisations within it. Those practices sit firmly, still, with human intelligence, and it is what we are most determined to protect and to build around in the years ahead. Faster answers have their place, but the wiser ones are still human, and that is the thread we mean to keep pulling on, with plenty more to share when it is ready.

Before the summer

For now, as you head towards the break, thank you, for listening to your people this year, and for trusting us to help you do it well. If you know another trust that leads by listening, our new Trust Credit Scheme is a warm way to introduce them, and there’s a little something in it for you too. 

Now, enjoy the more than deserved rest. Thank you. 

Molly