No ifs, no buts - what we can learn from Outliers & outliers

Like many teachers, a frustration I have is the lack of time (and energy) to read as much as I'd like during term time.

Fortunately, my birthday falls at the start of the summer holidays & I am blessed with friends who buy me great books as presents knowing that it's the one time of the year when I am likely to be able to commit to read them properly. Until I set off on the epic adventure that is setting up and running a free school, summer holidays were a festival of reading.

The Good Book

Summer 2009 one of my reads was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I love pretty much everything he has written. (I finally got around to his latest, David & Goliath, this holiday.)

The way he takes complex concepts and brings them to life through anecdotes, examples and evidence always leaves me wanting more. I love the way he gently but firmly forces his readers to confront counter-intuitive ideas. In Outliers he takes the reader on a journey, exploring what we can learn from exceptional individuals and organisations, climaxing with the tale of KIPP, and a brilliant telling of his own family's story.

It blew my mind, and was the single biggest thing that got me seriously working out how we could improve educational standards where I live. When I returned to work that autumn, I didn't know quite what I wanted to do, but I knew that I would be doing something different the following year.

And 5 years on, here I am at BFS, focused every day on how we can achieve our own outlier status next summer.

Why am I writing about this after results day 2014?

There were many fascinating concepts explored in Outliers that have stuck with me: "accumulative advantage", the 10,000 hours rule, and rice Vs wheat & the link with maths ability, to name but three. The one of most interest to me today though is the idea that by looking at persistent outliers we can nearly always learn something about how we can do things better. 

All too often in life, when we come across someone or something exceptional we revert to "yes... but-ery". We look for reasons why the success of others can be explained away and our own relative failures can be justified:

"Yes, it's great that artist has had such success, but he always had the backing of his family"

"I love what they've achieved, but they had a lucky break"

Since entering teaching in 2002, I have been amazed at how often people dismiss strong performances by others with "yes...but-ery". If students haven't done so well over time when compared with others, we have a whole litany of reasons to hand as to why ours underachieved or theirs did better:

"Yes, but that school has improved the intake of the kids it gets..."

"Yes, but in Bedford we lose loads of bright students to the private schools..."

"Yes, but that school doesn't have as many kids on FSM..."

Outliers suggests we should be doing the exact opposite: rather than dismiss outlandishly good results in individual schools, we should be knocking down their doors to see what they're doing & what (if anything) we can learn from them.

Mr Reddy's Secrets to Success

I was lucky enough to meet Bruno Reddy, one of the founders of King Solomon Academy in 2010. It turns out he grew up in Bedford & he heard we were setting up a new school, so he got in touch and insisted we meet so he could share what KSA had learned so far in their journey.

Clearly they continued to learn lots as yesterday they announced one of the most phenomenal set of GCSE results I've ever seen. Look them up. Amazing.

Yet if you go on Twitter right now and search "King Solomon Academy" or "Perry Beeches" or the name of other super-high performing schools, you will find teachers discussing their amazing results, and all too often it's done with a sense of "yes, but..."

Too much discussion is about whether their success is because they have small year groups/more funding/high attrition rates/sneaky selection etc etc etc - not "OMG, that's AMAZING, I want that for my students, tell me more!?"

And whilst these outliers are, by definition, relatively few and far between, they are starting to grow in number, thus making their success even harder to ignore. Maybe when it was just one school it would be forgivable - but just off the top of my head I can think of KSA, Perry Beeches and Mossbourne as three schools who seem to have bucked historical trends and shown that entire cohorts of kids can achieve.

So well done to Liam Nolan & Team PB, Max/Bruno/Natasha & the KSA crew, and everyone else engaged in the mission of bucking trends and becoming outliers. Thanks for showing us the way ahead & what is possible.

It's now for the rest of us to be humble and listen and learn from them.

(I've already blocked out time in my diary to go and visit. Guys - you teach me how you do it and I'll bring cake, that sound like a deal?)