“Great teachers have high expectations for their students, but higher expectations for themselves.”
Todd Whitaker

As we begin our ninth year as an English Hub, I have found myself reflecting on expectations. The expectations we hold for children, for schools and, perhaps just as importantly, for ourselves as educators. After eight years of working alongside schools, one thing I have become increasingly convinced of is that what we believe is possible really does matter. Of course, simply setting an ambitious target does not make it happen. If only school improvement were that straightforward. High expectations without excellent teaching, strong leadership, careful implementation and the right support are just high expectations. But what we expect does influence what we do. It influences the level of challenge we provide, how quickly we respond when a child is struggling, the opportunities we create and whether we accept an outcome as inevitable or stop and ask, “What could we do differently?”

Over the last eight years, we have worked alongside schools in very different circumstances and at very different points in their improvement journeys. Sometimes, in those first conversations, when we begin to talk about what might be possible, we are met with understandable doubt. “Our children couldn’t do that.” “We’ve always struggled with reading.” “That just isn’t realistic for our school.” And yet, so often, things change. Not overnight, and certainly not because somebody simply tells a school to be more aspirational. Sustainable improvement is much more complex than that. Things change because leaders establish clarity about what needs to improve and why. Teachers develop their knowledge and expertise. Practice becomes more consistent. Assessment is used intelligently to inform teaching rather than simply describe attainment. Children who are at risk of falling behind are identified quickly and receive the support they need. Leaders keep asking difficult questions and, crucially, people begin to see that improvement is possible.

This is why I particularly like Todd Whitaker’s observation that great teachers have high expectations for their pupils, but even higher expectations for themselves. There is an important challenge within that. Raising aspirations cannot simply mean expecting more from children. We have to expect more from ourselves too. If we believe that every child can succeed, then we have a professional responsibility to consider what we need to know, do or change to give them the best possible chance of doing so. It means being curious about our impact. What are children actually learning? Who is making progress? Who isn’t? Which aspects of our practice are working well? Where are the barriers? What needs to change? High expectations are most powerful when they are matched by the knowledge, expertise and determination needed to make them achievable.

There is something else I think we need to guard against. Sometimes, without ever intending to, we can put ceilings on children’s achievement. We know their starting points. We know the challenges they face. We know what previous cohorts have achieved. We know the context of the school and its community. All of that information matters, and good educators understand context. But understanding context is very different from allowing it to determine what we believe a child can achieve. Knowing a child well should help us identify what they need from us. It should never become a reason to expect less of them. The same is true of schools. Context should inform our response, not limit our ambition.

One of the great privileges of working across so many schools is that we get to see what is possible. We have seen schools make remarkable improvements in reading. We have watched teachers grow in confidence, knowledge and expertise. We have seen children who found learning to read incredibly difficult become successful readers. And we have seen schools achieve things that, at the beginning of their journey, they genuinely did not believe were possible. Those experiences inevitably shape our expectations too. Once you have seen what can be achieved, it becomes much harder to accept that something cannot be done simply because it has not been done before.

So, as we begin our ninth year, perhaps there are some useful questions for all of us to consider. Are our expectations genuinely high for every child, including when children face disadvantage, SEND or other barriers to learning? Are we providing the quality of teaching, curriculum and support needed to make those expectations achievable? And when children are not succeeding, are we prepared to look closely at our own practice and ask what we might need to know, improve or do differently? These are not always comfortable questions, but I think they are important ones. High expectations should never be about ignoring the complexity of children’s lives or the challenges schools face. They are about acknowledging those challenges fully while continuing to believe that they do not have to define the eventual outcome.

At Roade English Hub, our aspirations remain as high as ever. We believe every child should have the opportunity to become a successful reader and writer. We believe schools can improve, whatever their starting point. And we believe that when knowledgeable, determined professionals work together, draw intelligently on evidence and refuse to accept that difficulty means impossibility, remarkable things can happen. Nine years in, we have plenty of evidence of that, and I still think there is much more to come.