The Educator Magazine U.K. May-August 2026 issue. - Magazine - Page 60
When Standardisation Works:
Consistency Without Conformity
Robert Tarn CBE, CEO of GEMS School Management
The idea of standardisation can
sometimes be misunderstood in
education. When raised with school
leaders, it can spark an instinctive
concern that it may strip away what makes
each school distinctive. In reality, the right
kind of standardisation doesn’t threaten
what makes a school special. It is precisely
what protects it.
Consistency is not conformity
The distinction between consistency and
conformity matters. Nobody is arguing
that every school in a group should
teach the same lessons in the same way.
But when it comes to core operating
processes such as finance, HR, s
afeguarding, compliance, data and risk
management, consistency is not a luxury.
It is a necessity. Shared back office and
governance standards reduce risk,
improve transparency and ensure that
quality does not depend on the
capabilities of a single leader or the
institutional memory of a single team.
A 2024 report by the Learning Policy
Institute reinforces this point. Analysing
decades of reform in the US, it found that
in most districts, improvement efforts
have barely touched central operations
such as budgeting, HR, or facilities and
that these weak and disconnected
back-office functions actively undermine
instructional progress. Without standardised operational foundations, even
the most ambitious educational visions
struggle to take root.
Freeing leaders to lead
Resilience without rigidity
The most compelling argument for operational standardisation is not about control.
It is about capacity. When headteachers
are not consumed by duplicated
administrative processes, they gain
something invaluable: time. Time to
be visible around their school, to listen
to staff, to shape culture and celebrate
achievement. Research by the UK’s
Education Policy Institute confirms that
the quality of leadership is responsible
for the vast majority of what happens in
a school. The EPI found that replacing an
ineffective headteacher with an effective
one boosts attainment by an average of
two GCSE grades across all subjects, while
primary schools making the same switch
see pupils gain an additional three months
of learning.
There is a further benefit to operational
consistency that is too rarely discussed:
resilience.
I saw this first hand when I took over
Northern Education Trust in 2017 in
which a number of schools had never
been judged good in their history.
Turning those schools around was about
more than curriculum. It was about
building the management infrastructure
that allowed good leadership to take hold.
By 2023, every school was judged good
or outstanding.
As CEO, I led the implementation of a
consistent school improvement
model, underpinned by shared systems,
a common language across all schools,
and a high degree of strategic alignment.
This created the conditions for rapid
transformation – allowing leaders and
staff to work together seamlessly and
deliver change at pace. In practice, this
meant operating with the coherence of
“one school across many sites”: lessons
followed a consistent structure – from
how teachers welcomed pupils and
initiated learning, to the expectation that
marking took place during lesson time.
If leadership matters this much, school
groups have an obligation to remove the
operational noise that distracts from it.
A 2024 study by Professor John Jerrim
of UCL’s Institute of Education, found
that staff who held the poorest views of
leadership quality in November had a 30%
chance of leaving by the following
summer. Standardising finance,
compliance and reporting at group level
frees leaders to focus on what retains
great staff, trust, visibility and a culture
worth staying for.
Schools grow, leaders move on, external
pressures shift. When core processes are
standardised, the organisation absorbs
these changes without losing its footing.
A new headteacher inherits systems that
work rather than systems built around
their predecessor’s preferences. A growing
group can bring new institutions onto a
shared platform without starting from
scratch. Quality becomes structural, not
personal.
The strongest school groups share this
characteristic. They standardise what must
be consistent and protect what should
remain local. They do not ask every school
to look the same. But they insist that
safeguarding reporting is reliable
everywhere, that financial oversight is
rigorous and that data is coherent enough
to support good decision making. This is
not bureaucracy. It is the infrastructure of
trust.
Enabling, not constraining, creativity
The fear that standardisation stifles creativity deserves to be addressed head on.
In practice, the opposite is true.
When operational barriers are removed,
teachers and leaders gain more space for
the work that truly differentiates a school,
its curriculum, its pastoral care, its
teaching quality, its culture. The schools
that feel most distinctive are rarely the
ones in which the headteacher is
personally managing payroll. They are
the ones where leaders have the freedom
to build a working environment worth
staying for.
We need to move past the assumption
that standardisation is the enemy of
excellence. Done well, it is one of its
strongest allies, the quiet, often invisible
work that allows the visible magic of a
great school to happen. This is something
we at GEMS School Management have
come to understand, building on GEMS
Education’s 65 years developing worldclass school systems. The task for leaders
of school groups today is not to choose
between consistency and creativity, but
to build organisations that make room for
both.
Robert Tarn CBE is CEO of GEMS School
Management.
