In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb argues that the opposite of fragile is not, as is commonly supposed, robust or resilient. These are merely neutral conditions. The antonym of fragile doesn’t seem to exist in English, hence the neologism, antifragile. If something fragile is damaged by chaos, stress and challenge and something resilient or robust is immune, then something possessing antifragility is enhanced. The best, perhaps only, way to thrive in an uncertain world is to learn from the antifragile and shun the merely robust. Evolution is a good example of an antifragile system: chaos, stress and challenge provoke the flourishing of random mutations which benefit entire species.

When it comes to artificial, man-made systems, some are much more fragile than others. Unsurprisingly, the ability to learn from the mistakes of others is a classic hallmark of an antifragile system. Taleb contrasts aviation with economic systems: as discussed here, the aviation industry is excellent at learning from its mistakes. When a plane crashes, the system is set up to ensure that the particular combination of mistakes which led to disaster never recur. The key here is that each flight is isolated and a mistake in one flight doesn’t lead to system failure. When it comes to highly interconnected systems like global economics, mistakes are spread and compounded very quickly. There is no opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.

Good systems such as airlines are set up to have small errors, independent from each other – or, in effect, negatively correlated to each other, since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes… If every plane crash makes the next one less likely, every bank crash makes the next one more likely. (p 72-3)

So, how does all this relate to education? Despite the rhetoric in favour of autonomy and independence, in England we have a highly centralised system where top down directives force individual schools to comply with and adapt to ever more onerous demands. The threat of inspections and the pressure of league tables are a sword of Damocles; sooner or later the thread will snap and the school is doomed. We work hard to make our schools as robust and resilient as possible but they are essentially fragile institutions which are perilously easy to destroy. To compound this, schools within the maintained sector are subject to repeating each others’ mistakes, often without realising a mistake has even been made.

When an Ofsted inspection moves a school down a category, a report will be issued stating what the school needs to do to improve. While these reports are, no doubt, well intentioned they force schools into distracting, meaningless activity. If a report demands more differentiation, more or different feedback, greater consistency or whatever, school leaders understandably obsess about these instructions. Instead of focusing on improving outcomes by following the best evidence and allowing individuals to develop their own expertise, we ensure all teachers are following top down policies. If things don’t improve we sack the school leaders, punish the teachers with ever greater workload or lash out in some other equally damaging way. If things get better, then it was down to the identified solutions laid out in the inspection report. Obviously.

The thing is, the advice contained in these reports is nothing more than the opinion of the lead inspector. No piece of advice will work in every context and often inspectors see practices they like working in successful schools and make the mistake of thinking that the schools are successful because of, rather than despite these practices. As we know, schools’ success is disproportionately due to the background of its students. Of course there are schools which buck this trend but that is almost always down to the culture of the school. When one school suffers a poor inspection, every other school pores over the ensuing report to find out how to avoid making the same errors but end up spreading and compounding often very poor advice instead of working hard to improve the culture of their school.

Maybe the best advice is to set our face against the spread of bad ideas by severing our reliance on systems. Instead of uncritically adopting the advice of ‘experts’ maybe we should seek to do what airlines do and forensically sift through debris to find out what really happened and avoid making the mistakes of others.