What makes a good school? Introducing the ingredients…
By Suzanne Owens - former Acting Headteacher and school leader, Merseyside, Director of Schools in Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Morocco, Headteacher of Rushen Primary School, Isle of Man, and education leader with over 30 years of UK and international school leadership experience
The best starting point for any school improvement journey is a question, not an answer. When I asked that question it shaped everything that followed, and it has shaped my thinking about leadership ever since.
A training day, some Post-it notes and an honest conversation
On one of my first days as Headteacher, I gathered the whole staff team together. Teachers, teaching assistants, lunchtime supervisors, the school administrator, the caretaker - everyone who was part of the school community. I gave them two questions and asked them to write down their honest answers.
What is going well here? And - even better if?
I did the same in assemblies with the pupils, asking them what they loved about school and what they wished was different. I spoke with parents individually as I met them in the first weeks, asking the same two questions in different ways. Then I looked for the patterns.
What came back was honest, sometimes uncomfortable, and enormously useful. There were genuine strengths: staff who cared deeply, a school building full of potential, a community that wanted the school to succeed. But there were also clear challenges that almost everyone identified. The most prominent of these was behaviour. Pupil behaviour, particularly in Key Stage 2, was affecting relationships, confidence and learning. It was the thing that kept coming up, the thing that sat behind almost every other concern.
I made a decision then that has stayed with me: I would start where people were, not where I thought they should be. If the community had identified behaviour as the priority, that was where we would begin. Leadership is not about imposing a predetermined agenda. It is about listening carefully, finding the shared truth, and then working together to change it.
The best schools I have worked in and visited share one quality: they know what they are trying to build, and everyone in the building can describe it.
The improvement cycle
Out of those early conversations grew a way of working that I have applied in every leadership context since - in primary schools in Merseyside, in large all-through international schools in Kuwait, and in school improvement consultancy across multiple contexts. It is the improvement cycle, and it is built on four questions:
What does good look like? Research it. Visit other schools. Read the evidence. Talk to people who have solved the same problem. Do not guess.
Where are we now? Assess the starting point honestly and specifically. Vague starting points lead to vague improvement.
How do we close the gap? Plan deliberately, involve people, and evaluate impact as you go. Adjust when the evidence tells you to.
What do we need to improve? Start with honest evidence, not assumption. Ask the people closest to the work.
This cycle sounds straightforward. In practice it requires courage, because it means being honest about what is not working, and it means involving people in a process they might find uncomfortable. In my experience, it is the only approach that produces improvement that lasts. When people help to identify the problem, they own the solution. When the research is shared openly, the direction feels legitimate rather than imposed. When the starting point is named clearly, progress becomes visible.
We began by focusing on behaviour, because that is what the evidence told us to do. But we did not simply introduce a new behaviour policy. We asked the second question: what does good look like? We read the research. We looked at what schools with genuinely positive cultures had in common. We found that the schools where behaviour was strongest were not the ones with the most elaborate reward systems or the most severe consequences. They were the ones where relationships were at the centre of everything - where pupils felt known, where adults were consistent, and where mistakes were treated as opportunities to learn rather than offences to be punished.
The ingredients begin to take shape
What we discovered through that research was that good behaviour was not a standalone ingredient. It was the product of other things being in place: a clear sense of purpose, a culture built on trust, high expectations applied consistently, and teaching that engaged and challenged every learner. Pull one thread and you find it is connected to everything else.
I think of it like a garden. Every plant needs the right combination of conditions to thrive - soil, light, water, temperature, space. Change one element and you change everything. A school is the same. The ingredients do not work in isolation. They work together, and the absence of one weakens all the others.
That insight - that a good school is made up of interdependent ingredients, each one reinforcing the others - is what this series is about. Over the next eleven articles, I want to explore those ingredients in depth, drawing on more than three decades of experience across UK and international schools, including eight years as Headteacher in the Isle of Man, four years leading and founding schools in Kuwait, and consultancy work supporting schools across a range of international contexts.
The ingredients I will explore include purpose, culture, trust, distributed leadership, inclusion, behaviour and relationships, staff development, assessment, middle leadership and sustainable improvement. Each one matters on its own. But it is the combination - the way they work together - that creates a school where children genuinely thrive and where adults are proud to work.
Behaviour is not a standalone ingredient. It is the product of other things being in place.
Why this matters now
I am writing this series at a particular moment in education. Schools are navigating significant pressures - on funding, on workload, on recruitment and retention, on pupil wellbeing and on the expectations of inspection frameworks. In that context, it can be tempting to reach for quick fixes: a new programme, a rebranded policy, an external consultant with a ready-made solution.
My experience tells me that quick fixes rarely produce lasting change. What produces lasting change is a clear and honest understanding of where you are, a well-researched picture of where you want to be, and a sustained commitment to closing the gap - together, with the people in your building, for the pupils in your care.
That is what the improvement cycle is about. And that is what the ingredients of a good school are about.
The question I asked on that INSET day was not a particularly original question. But the answers it generated, and the journey those answers set in motion, shaped everything that followed. A school that had real challenges became, by 2024, a school where attainment was highly effective across every phase, where behaviour had been transformed through a relational culture built on restorative practice, and where the whole community - staff, pupils, parents, lunchtime supervisors and all - understood and lived the school's vision.
That transformation did not happen because of one person or one programme. It happened because a community asked an honest question, researched the answer together, and kept going - through a pandemic, through industrial challenges, through staffing challenges, through all of it.
That is what a good school does. Next time, I will explore the first ingredient: purpose.
Suzanne Owens is an education leader and consultant with over 30 years of UK and international school leadership experience, including headship in the Isle of Man, former Headetacher of Rushen Primary School in the Isle of Man, international school leadership in Kuwait, and educational consultancy across British, Cambridge and IB school contexts. This article is the first in a 12-part series: The Ingredients of a Good School.