Jonathan Black – Connection in Education

Sometimes an idea rewrites your understanding of the world, forcing you to reassess assumptions you didn’t even realise you were relying on. This is how I felt whilst reading Radical Help by Hilary Cottam. You’ve likely had that moment too — when the underpinning of your assumptions falls away and you find yourself rebuilding the conceptual model you use to evaluate the world. These moments have led to some of the greatest personal and professional growth for me.

What struck me most was how relevant this kind of deep rethinking is for the challenges schools face today — particularly attendance and behaviour. Before we rush to solutions, we need to understand the systems that shape them.

Fast and Slow Thinking in School Leadership

The world is too vast, with too many stimuli, for us to consider every variable and make perfectly rational decisions. As an economics teacher, I often spoke to students about the fallacy of rational decision‑making. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow always comes to mind because our assumptions, honed through lifelong experience, allow us to make fast and mostly accurate decisions.

As school leaders, the need to respond quickly is essential simply to survive. And as Kahneman points out, it isn’t better to think fast or slow — it’s important to know when to do each. Your instinctual professional judgement isn’t a weakness; in fact, it’s likely what has driven your success. But how you respond when new information challenges those deeply rooted thought patterns does matter.

Fast‑thinking responses might lead to dismissing new information or experiencing a fleeting peak of excitement that never translates into action. Slow thinking, by contrast, gives us the space to interrogate our assumptions — a discipline that becomes essential when dealing with complex issues like persistent absence.

Radical Help and the Power of Systems Thinking

Cottam’s book is a beautiful attempt to unpick some of the stickiest problems we face as a society. Her work isn’t driven by identifying deficits in the systems that led to people becoming stuck, but by understanding the capabilities of individuals and the systems around them — and how both can be harnessed to overcome barriers.

It’s well worth a read and paints a compelling picture of how greater inter‑agency thinking can deliver lasting impact.

I was lucky that this book came to me while I was engaged in the Reach Foundation’s Cradle to Career programme — designed to help schools understand and serve the communities they reside in. If you haven’t heard of The Reach Foundation, they stem from a free school in Feltham built on the philosophy: “Great schools are necessary but not sufficient if all children are to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity.”

When my current Headteacher suggested we focus on this programme, I was dubious. We had just led a significant improvement programme and still had internal work to complete. I worried it would be a distraction with little impact. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the work was important — I just struggled to see how it would deeply affect student achievement and wellbeing. In hindsight, this was a classic fast‑thinking response.

Why This Matters for Schools Right Now

The relevance of this work for school leaders is huge. Cottam’s approach — arriving without a predetermined solution, seeking to understand the interconnected systems and data — is exactly the mindset we need when tackling the challenges in our schools.

Even if we focus purely on our internal systems and stakeholders, there is a lot we can do with this type of thinking. Many of the school implementation tools that have become popular recently are attempts to practise the slow thinking required to make change stick.

Fast‑thinking paradigms often sound like this:

• Attendance is lower post‑Covid → parents are less worried about students being out of school
• Students are passive in lessons → lessons are not exciting enough
• Behaviour needs to improve → more severe sanctions such as isolation

These paradigms conform to many of our experiences, but the rationale that follows is often not deep enough. They offer comfortingly simple explanations for problems that are anything but simple.

Attendance as a Case Study in Slow Thinking

Attendance is a good example of this dynamic. Fast‑thinking responses often lead to improvements — the quick wins, the low‑hanging fruit. These changes create a filter: students who can independently adapt to new expectations do so quickly, and we see a jump in attendance data.

But nationally, we can see that while schools have responded, persistent absence remains stubbornly high at just over 23%. This tells us something important: the students and families with the capability to improve already have. We are left with those whom our current systems do not serve.

Diagnosing the approach for these students is more challenging because multiple contributing factors intersect:

• EBSA
• SEND needs
• Complex home lives
• Deprivation
• Behaviour
• Family‑school relationships, trust, and historical experiences
• Transitions, belonging, and identity

This is where slow, systems‑level thinking becomes essential.

What Slow, Systems‑Level Attendance Work Looks Like

Addressing persistent absence requires:

• Understanding the data at a granular level — not just who is absent, but why, when, and in what patterns
• Bringing together qualitative information from multiple stakeholders
• Mapping the interconnected systems around each child
• Rearranging staffing and resources to provide targeted support
• Balancing high expectations with relational, capability‑based approaches

This work is crucial not just for overcoming current challenges but for building a culture that sustains high attendance for future cohorts. It allows schools to capitalise on the higher levels of attendance typically seen when students enter in Year 7 and maintain them over time.

The courage to rethink assumptions — to pause, slow down, and interrogate the stories we tell ourselves — is what drives real improvement. Fast thinking helps us survive; slow thinking helps us transform.

If we want to reconnect the disconnected, we must be willing to look beyond quick fixes and build systems that genuinely meet the needs of our communities.

Support for Schools Ready to Go Beyond Quick Wins

If you’re finding that your current attendance strategies have delivered the quick wins but not shifted the deep, persistent patterns—especially for your most vulnerable pupils—this is exactly the space I work in. I partner with schools to move beyond fast-thinking fixes and into thoughtful, systems-level work: using your data intelligently, listening carefully to families and staff, and reshaping support so it fits your community rather than a generic model. If you’d value a thinking partner to help you diagnose what’s really going on beneath your attendance figures and design something practical, humane and sustainable, I’d be very happy to talk.