Professional development, coaching, and consultancy

Category: School improvement

  • Clarity, Culture, and Complexity: Making Sense of the DfE’s Research Agenda

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo


    In April 2025, the Department for Education published an updated Areas of Research Interest paper — a significant document not just for researchers, but for school and system leaders. It offers a clear signal of the government’s longer-term ambitions, framed through the lens of the national Opportunity Mission: to “break down barriers to opportunity at every stage.”

    This paper reflects a shift in emphasis: from short-term initiatives to long-term outcomes, from isolated interventions to system-level thinking, and from research as insight to research as actionable strategy. Schools will feel the effects — and school leaders should of course take note.

    Below is a summary of the seven key themes, alongside my reflections on how leaders might respond with clarity, purpose, and care.

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  • Can we teach courage?

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    The recent Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast miniseries offers a rich seam of insight for educators. Though ostensibly about spontaneous speaking in high-stakes professions—negotiation, broadcasting, refereeing—it invites us to reconsider the nature of talk in the classroom—not as a peripheral skill or passing distraction, but as a central pillar of how learning happens.

    What emerges from the series is a truth both obvious and counterintuitive: spontaneous speaking is not the antithesis of preparation, but its culmination. The ability to respond thoughtfully in the moment—to speak before one is entirely certain, to listen deeply, to adjust mid-flight—is a skill that grows out of deep rehearsal, structured thinking, and intentional practice.

    It is also, I would argue, at the heart of great teaching.

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  • From Purpose to Practice: Leading Technology Adoption in Schools

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    From Purpose to Practice is the latest in a growing set of free resources designed to support school leaders and educators in making thoughtful, purposeful decisions about how technology is used in teaching and learning.

    Rather than offering a checklist or endorsing the latest tools, the guide sets out a framework for strategic reflection.

    It begins by reasserting a central principle: technology should serve pedagogy—not the other way around.

    From there, it explores what meaningful adoption looks like in practice, offering:

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  • What your one-to-ones might be telling you

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    In my recent post, From Oversight to Insight, I made the case that line-management conversations, when thoughtfully led, can be quietly transformative. They’re not just accountability checkpoints — they’re opportunities to build clarity, capacity, and trust.

    But what happens when those conversations don’t feel that way?

    Sometimes, it’s not what’s said in a one-to-one that matters most — but how it’s said, how often, and what it reveals about the line-manager’s priorities.

    To explore this, I’ve adapted the Thomas-Kilmann conflict model to frame line-management interactions not as conflicts, but as signals of how much a leader values a given issue, and how much they value the relationship.

    Here’s what it looks like:

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  • Planning with Purpose: A Reflective Resource for High-Impact Classroom Practice

    Supporting schools, educators, and organisations to lead with clarity, teach with impact, and grow with purpose

    José Picardo

    There is always a risk in attempting to distil the richness of great teaching into a checklist. The work of the classroom is too complex and too contingent on context to be captured in such simple terms. We all know that what succeeds in one lesson may fall flat in another.

    In the face of this complexity, many of us find it helpful to return to a set of guiding principles — not as prescriptions, but as prompts for reflection. This resource aims to bring together a small number of such principles in a form designed to support deliberate, thoughtful planning.

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