A focus on performance alone will lead to behaviour designed to achieve those results without necessarily understanding how best to achieve it. If we instead focus on understanding learning then we will get both learning and performance too. How can we as teachers do this? John Hattie’s study (2009; Visible Learning: Routledge) concludes that it is knowing one’s impact as a teacher – making the learning visible – that can make the teacher a more significant agent for change: when teachers see learning through the eyes of the pupil, and when pupils see themselves as their own teachers, then the learning of, and feedback to both that teacher and those students can become highly productive.

It may be acceptable to think “if I can’t measure it, I can’t manage it.” However, it is also right to think “If I don’t understand it, I can’t necessarily improve it.” By ‘knowing thy impact’, a teacher in their classes and the school to which they belong can understand, and therefore improve learning, which will improve the results considered important by society. Additionally, this way of achieving results will surely generate a wider and deeper understanding of that knowledge and the skills, which could help employability – particularly as society moves towards the increased need for problem-solving, creativity and innovation. Top-down decrees to improve results that ignore the uniqueness of individual people in their unique situations can only succeed by luck, and then only likely to achieve ephemeral results.