🏫What 120 Schools Taught Me About Scale

When people ask what I do, I usually say I oversee academics across 120+ schools. Curriculum, academic operations, quality standards, the development of our educators. That sentence takes about four seconds to say. Living inside it has taught me more about how organisations actually work than anything else I've done.

I came to this role having built things from scratch. A reading programme that went into schools, a small children's publishing house, apps, a learning platform for IT companies. I thought I understood growth. What I hadn't understood was the specific way things behave once you have a lot of them running at the same time, in different cities, with different people, all supposed to be doing roughly the same thing.

Here is some of what I've learned.

Everything that works in one school is a favour

In a single school, a great deal runs on goodwill and proximity. A principal notices that a Grade 4 teacher is struggling with fractions and pairs her with a colleague down the corridor. A coordinator remembers that the science lab needs restocking before the practical exams. Nobody wrote any of this down. It just happens, because the people are close enough to see it.

Multiply that school by 120 and almost none of it travels. The things that worked because someone noticed now depend on whether, in each building, someone happens to notice. Some schools have that person. Some don't. Some had that person last year.

So the first lesson of scale, for me, was this: anything that matters has to stop being a favour and become a habit, and a habit across 120 schools is really a system. That sounds bureaucratic. It doesn't have to be. A good system is just good practice written down clearly enough that it survives a change of staff.

Standardise the floor, not the ceiling

The most frequent argument I have, with others and with myself, is about how much to standardise.

Standardise too little and quality becomes a lottery. A parent in one city gets a very different school from a parent in another, under the same name. Standardise too much and you flatten the very things that make a good school good: a principal's judgement, a teacher's instinct for a particular class, the local texture of a community.

Where I've landed is that you standardise the floor. The minimum expectations for curriculum coverage, assessment, safety, how a lesson is planned and reviewed. Those should be the same everywhere, and non-negotiable. Above that floor, you leave room. A school that wants to do more with theatre, or reading, or sport, should be able to, and the system should make it easy to see and borrow what they've done.

The mistake I see most often in large networks is trying to standardise the ceiling. Dictating not just what must happen but exactly how good it must look, everywhere, in the same way. That produces compliance. It rarely produces excellence.

A system teachers don't use doesn't exist

I have seen beautifully designed processes die quietly because they asked a tired teacher to fill in one more form at 4 p.m. on a Friday.

At scale, adoption is the whole game. The question I've learned to ask about any new tool, template or report is not "is this good?" but "will a teacher with thirty-five children and three periods back-to-back actually use it, and does it give them something back?" If the answer to the second half is no, it becomes paperwork. Paperwork gets filled in badly, late, or by someone copying last week's entry.

This is one reason I've started building some internal tools myself, with an AI coding assistant doing much of the heavy lifting. I'm a pseudo-techie at best. But being able to sit with a problem, sketch something, try it, and throw it away if it's clumsy has made me far more honest about friction. When you build the thing yourself, you can't blame the vendor for the extra click.

Comparable data is worth more than rich data

When you have one school, you can understand it through stories. When you have 120+, stories stop scaling. You need data, and specifically you need data that means the same thing in every school.

That turns out to be surprisingly hard. If one school's "satisfactory" is another school's "good", the numbers look comparable but aren't. If one coordinator records observations in detail and another writes "fine", you can't put them side by side.

I've come to value boring, consistent data over rich, inconsistent data. A simple scale applied the same way everywhere tells you more across a network than detailed notes written in a hundred different styles. The richness still matters, but it belongs inside the school, in conversations. What travels upward needs to be structured enough to compare.

The other thing about comparable data is that it changes the conversation. Instead of arguing about whether a school is doing well, you can look at where it sits, what's moving, and which school nearby has solved the problem it's stuck on.

The principal is the lever

If I could invest in only one role across the network, it would be the principal.

A strong principal can make an average system work. A weak one can make an excellent system fail. They decide what gets attention in staff meetings, which initiatives teachers take seriously, and whether a new expectation from the central team is treated as support or as interference.

So much of my work, in the end, is principal work. Helping them read their own data. Making sure they understand not just what we're asking for but why. Giving them room to adapt things to their school without breaking the floor. When I think about where a central academic team adds the most value, it's in making 120 principals better at their jobs, not in trying to reach past them to every classroom.

Messages decay with every hop

The last lesson is the one I relearn most often.

Any message from the centre passes through several hands before it reaches a classroom. Head office to regional teams, regional teams to principals, principals to coordinators, coordinators to teachers. At every step, a little is lost. Nuance goes first. Then the reasoning. By the time it arrives, "here is a new approach to assessment and here is why" can become "there is a new format, use it from Monday".

I've stopped assuming that because I said something clearly, it was heard clearly. Now I try to do a few things differently:

• ▸Say the why before the what, every time, because the why is what gets dropped first.
• ▸Keep important messages short enough to survive being forwarded.
• ▸Go and check, in a handful of schools, what actually arrived.
• ▸Treat confusion at the edges as a design problem at the centre.

None of this is glamorous. But I've come to believe that most failures at scale aren't failures of intent. They're failures of transmission.

What I'd tell my earlier self

When I was running a small reading programme, I thought scale meant doing the same good thing in more places. It doesn't, quite. It means building the conditions in which good things can keep happening without you in the room.

That requires humility about how far your voice carries, discipline about what you insist on, and generosity about what you leave to the people closest to the children. I'm still learning the balance. But I've stopped thinking of 120 schools as one big school. They're 120 small ones, and the job is to help each of them be good on its own terms while sharing a spine strong enough to hold them together.