Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

 What’s so great about consistency? How has the consensus that everybody ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ is always the best idea arisen? Superficially it makes sense – a choir singing from different hymn sheets would create a cacophony – but if we stretch the metaphor a little we can see that while a choir may be singing the same hymn, different choristers will be singing different parts and in different keys. Their hymn sheets will be different.

As Harari says in, Sapiens, “Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think reevaluate and criticise.” Inconsistency is the engine room of creativity and innovation. The ability to grapple with competing, contradictory ideas is the hallmark of maturity and sophistication; accepting cognitive dissonance is the only way to avoid bias and prejudice.

In a secondary school, who knows best how to teach the Year 9 history curriculum to 9X3? Who’s the expert at teaching GCSE PE to 10J1? Who would you want to make decisions about what texts to choose for an A level literature class composed of a mix of plodders and brainiacs? If, as a school leader your answer is ‘me,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ then shame on you. The (often unacknowledged) experts are experienced subject teachers.

I spent a day with a very successful English department recently talking about some of my thoughts and ideas about how to teach English. To most of the younger members of the department much of what I as saying was new, unfamiliar and, dare I say it, exciting. One older teacher spent a good deal of the time staring at me quizzically. When I’d finished my exposition she came over for a chat. She told me that she already did pretty much all the things I was suggesting but hadn’t known she was doing them – she was ‘just teaching’.

It became clear that she was considered a maverick by her head of department, a liability by some members of the leadership team and a legend by her students. I haven’t enjoyed talking to another teacher about English teaching so much for ages! But what I found most fascinating was that whereas a lot of what I know is filtered through education theory and psychology, most of what she knew was tacit. She hadn’t realised how much of an expert she was.

My advice to the school was to get all the younger teachers in the team to spend as much time as possible watching their more experienced colleague to try and pass on as much of her wisdom and practical knowledge as possible.

It would appear from some recent conversations that Ofsted’s current direction of travel when evaluating the effectiveness of leadership and management is to check to what extent teachers are following school policies. If teachers are found to be following policies then apparently the school is considered well led. (Obviously, there also has to at least a superficial correlation between said policies and increasing results and good behaviour.) Not unreasonably, this might lead some to conclude that the most effective way to run a school is to mandate what teacher should be doing and then enforce compliance through lesson observations and book audits. This would be a mistake.

Much better to have a policy of trusting teachers to be experts. And better still to leave the evaluation of this expertise to subject leaders. If your policy for, say, marking, is to allow each subject leader to determine, in consultation with their team, the best way to approach marking in their subject area, compliance is unlikely to be an issue. And neither is consistency.

Teachers will have signed up to do what’s best for their students in their subject areas. Instead of a school full of glassy-eyed automatons all singing the same notes at the same time, the corridors will fill with joyful and divergent harmonies, clashing at times but building to a triumphant crescendo.

I realise I’ve stretched this particular metaphor to breaking point, but the point is to encourage school leaders to embrace the potential of discord, dissonance and uncertainty. Maybe harmony, or at least euphony, relies on discord?