The ecology of schools
Why thinking of schools as ecosystems rather than machines leads to more sustainable improvement
For the past fifteen years or so, the dominant educational narrative has revolved around discovering ‘what works’. In many ways, the turn towards the science of learning has served us well, displacing a good deal of wishful thinking and making the profession more sceptical of confident assertions unsupported by robust research..
However, this has also been a period in which many schools have struggled to improve despite becoming increasingly evidence-informed. Leaders pore over dashboards in an effort to maximise outcomes. Underperformance is identified earlier, interventions become more tightly targeted and progress is measured with ever greater precision. Students are tracked to within an inch of their lives in the belief that improvement should always be measurable and continuous. Any slack, any inconsistency or plateau becomes evidence that someone isn’t working hard enough.
The result is that many schools have come to resemble finely tuned machines whose purpose is to convert effort into outcomes as efficiently as possible. Teachers and students become components to optimise, bottlenecks to remove or sources of variation to eliminate. Yet despite all this tightening, improvement often proves stubbornly elusive, while exhaustion and burnout become increasingly common.
The current path feels increasingly unsustainable. Thinking of schools as machines and people as components to optimise may produce short term gains, but it also risks creating organisations that are efficient without being healthy, productive without being resilient. If that’s true, perhaps we need a different way of thinking about what schools are and how they improve. One that helps explain not only why some changes succeed, but why others fail despite the best of intentions.
Seeing like an ecologist
The metaphors we choose determine the questions we ask, the problems we notice and the solutions that seem most plausible. The most powerful metaphors are the ones we no longer notice; they’re just common sense. if schools are imagined as machinee, it encourages us to talk about pulling levers, fixing problems, implementing interventions, delivering programmes and driving improvement. This language feels natural because its metaphorical underpinning has become invisible. Escaping its influence requires us to adopt another way of seeing.
What might change if we began to see schools as ecosystems instead of machines? Instead of viewing schools as collections of discrete parts assembled into a functioning whole, we might understand them as living systems: dynamic networks of relationships, feedback loops, dependencies and adaptation. Improvement could become less about pulling the right levers and more about cultivating the conditions in which healthy systems can grow and the individual within them can flourish.
Imagine returning each spring to the same patch of woodland. One year birdsong is absent. The obvious response would be to introduce more birds, but that would tell us nothing about why they disappeared. Perhaps the insect population has collapsed. Perhaps the fungi threading through the soil have been damaged. Perhaps deer have gradually browsed away the undergrowth where birds once nested. By the time the birds disappear, something much more fundamental has already changed.
The biologist Eugene Odum believed this was how nature should be understood. In the classic text, Fundamentals of Ecology he argued that “the ecosystem is the basic functional unit in ecology.” A bird’s fate is woven into the woodland that sustains it. Soil, fungi, insects, plants, weather and predators continually shape one another. As Odum observed, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Every disturbance to the soil, every new species and every shift in climate alters the conditions under which everything else lives. Applying this ecological way of seeing to schools encourages us to notice relationships before components. Just as every organism helps shape the ecosystem it inhabits, every member of a school helps shape the organisation they inhabit. Culture grows from the accumulated effects of thousands of interactions between people, routines, incentives and expectations. Every cohort inherits an organisation already shaped by those who came before, and every decision contributes, in however small a way, to the environment experienced by those who follow.
In The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, W. Edwards Deming expressed a similar idea. He defined a system as “a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system.” Understanding a system means understanding the relationships that hold it together. Improvement, therefore, depends on understanding how changes in one part reshape the performance of the whole. For example, a new marking policy affects workload, which changes time available for planning, which has an impact on lessons, which, in turn, affects behaviour. Behaviour reshapes morale, trust and expectations. Every initiative changes the conditions under which the next must succeed. Schools continually recreate the environment in which teaching and learning take place.
Rather than our current obsession with finding and fixing individual components, the language of ecosystems encourage us to look for patterns of interaction, feedback, adaptation and emergence. In choosing a different metaphor, alternative approaches to school improvement can be imagined.
What follows explores some of ecology’s most illuminating ideas and offers suggestions on how they could be applied to school improvement.
Hidden networks: The unseen relationships that hold organisations together.
Carrying capacity: Why attention is the school’s limiting resource.
Keystone and invasive species How fashionable ideas colonise schools and crowd out better ones and developing the people, practices and relationships on which school improvement depends.
Islands: The benefits and dangers of organisational isolation.
Fragmentation and extinction debt: Why decline occurs before its symptoms are visible.
Monoculture and requisite variety: The tension between consistency and adaptability.
Reciprocity: How sustainable school improvement replenishes what it draws upon.
Rewilding: How leadership can be conceived as the cultivation of conditions rather than the exercise of control.
1. Hidden networks
If schools are ecosystems, then their most important features may also be their least visible. Ecologists have generally understood forests as collections of individual trees competing for sunlight, water and nutrients but Suzanne Simard’s research has transformed this understanding. Beneath the forest floor lies an intricate network of mycorrhizal fungi connecting the roots of different trees. Through this subterranean web, trees exchange water, nutrients and chemical signals. Although there’s also competition for resources, the forest flourishes due to the relationships hidden beneath the surface.
An organisational charts shows reporting lines, but doesn’t really tell us much about how a school actually functions. Looking back on schools I’ve worked in, the people who seem to hold everything together are not those we might expect. There’s the site manager whose knowledge meant he could spot problems long before anyone else noticed them; the head’s PA who knew everyone and kept relationships running smoothly; the wise old teaching assistant who understood the most vulnerable children inside out and would know exactly what to do no matter what went wrong.
These relationships are easy to overlook precisely because they aren’t formally designed. If these hidden connectors were to leave, the effects of their absence would ripple outwards, effecting many other elements of the whole. Obviously, formal structures would remain intact, but the organisation will function differently, often less smoothly. Importantly, hidden networks aren’t inherently good; they transmit norms. Collegiality, curiosity and generosity are contagious, but so too are cynicism, complacency and low expectations.
The mechanistic view of school improvement depends on leaders telling everyone else what to do. The levers available to do this are limited: staff briefings, handbooks, INSET days etc. How much more successful might the work of leading a school be if we had a better map of how these connections worked? An ecological perspective suggests that school improvement should begin by making these hidden networks more visible byt asking these questions:
Who do colleagues naturally turn to for advice?
Where does expertise already reside?
Which relationships enable departments to learn from one another?
Who connects otherwise separate parts of the organisation?
Equally important, we also need to know where there are gaps:
Which teams rarely interact?
Which individuals carry too much of the school’s informal knowledge?
Which crucial relationships depend upon a single person?
Viewed like this, some of the most powerful school improvement strategies are attempts to reveal and strengthen mycorrhizal networks. Cross-department planning, coaching, subject associations, mentoring, instructional coaching and protected time for professional conversation can all increase the number and quality of connections through which knowledge can travel. Every new connection creates another pathway along which expertise, trust and professional judgement can flow. When it works, the result is a healthier organisational ecology, in which ideas spread more quickly, innovation becomes less dependent on chance encounters and valuable knowledge is less likely to disappear when experienced colleagues move on.
This also changes how we think about succession planning. Replacing a colleague preserves the formal structure, yet the greater loss may lie in the relationships, judgement and organisational memory that disappear with them. Resilient ecosystems contain redundancy, with several pathways capable of performing similar functions. Schools need the same quality. Shadowing, co-leadership, shared curriculum design and sustained induction help ensure that expertise remains a property of the organisation.
If we’re only able to see formal structures, we risk mistaking the map for the territory.
2. Carrying capacity
Ecologists have long recognised that every environment has limits. The idea of carrying capacity emerged from nineteenth-century studies of population growth. Building on Malthus’s observation that populations are constrained by finite resources, Pierre François Verhulst developed the logistic model of population growth, showing that populations cannot increase indefinitely but eventually level off as they approach the limits of their environment. Ecologists later adopted the term carrying capacity to describe the maximum population an environment can sustain without degrading the resources on which it depends. Beyond that point, growth becomes self-defeating and the system begins to consume the conditions that made growth possible.
