"I Would Trust Nothing — Because Learning Is About as Invisible as Leadership"

Leading For Depth: What It Truly Takes to Be an Outstanding School

What evidence would you actually trust, if you walked into a school today and wanted to know whether the learning happening there was genuinely outstanding?

That's the question Dr Helen Wright puts to her panel partway through this conversation — and headmaster Tomas Duckling's answer is the one that lingers: nothing. Not the data, not the displays, not even the teacher. "Learning is about as invisible as the leadership," he says. What he'd actually do is watch the kids — not the performance, the attention.

It's one of several moments in this webinar where four experienced school leaders pull apart the word "outstanding" and ask what it actually means — and, more provocatively, whether it's even the right word to be using.

What this conversation is really about

Anthony Simpson, principal of Erskine Stewart's Melville in Edinburgh, opens by saying he doesn't like the word "outstanding" at all — arguing that the moment a school believes it's arrived, complacency follows. Stella Zhou, founding principal of three bilingual schools in China, talks about holding two definitions of success at once: the one parents see (university offers) and the one that actually matters (children who grow as people, not just applicants). Denise Scala, now leading a Montessori school in Australia after years in Scotland and across Australian school systems, makes the case that excellence is contextual — and that chasing a compliance framework's idea of "exceeding" can mean abandoning the philosophy that made a school distinctive in the first place. And Tomas Duckling, headmaster of Dubai College, brings the conversation back to something most school marketing avoids: the emotional, deeply personal stakes parents bring to every decision about their child's education.

Inside the full recording, the panel tackles some genuinely uncomfortable territory: how to tell if a school isn't as good as its website claims (Denise's answer involves asking your hairdresser), why the gap between a school's "front-facing" side and what's actually happening behind it matters so much, and why educators need a seat at the policy-making table. There's a memorable extended metaphor about why schools don't need to be "AI beanbag innovation centres" — sometimes the best thing a school can do is be brilliant at the thing it already does, like the best sandwich shop in New York. And the panel closes with a reflection on what leaders quietly sacrifice — their own classroom time, cross-faculty collaboration, staff wellbeing — in the relentless pursuit of being outstanding.

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Leading For Depth: What It Truly Takes to Be an Outstanding School is part of the Outstanding Schools webinar series. Featuring Tomas Duckling (Dubai College), Anthony Simpson (Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools), Stella Zhou (Hiba Academy Shanghai) and Denice Scala (Forestville Montessori School), hosted by Dr Helen Wright.