Every school has a story about itself.
“We’re the affordable option.” “We’re the academic school.” “We’re the Christian school families pick when they want values.” “We’re the local school. We take everyone.”
Sit in enough leadership meetings and you start to hear these stories running underneath everything else like a low hum. They shape the website copy, the enrolment conversations, the way the principal answers a hard question at a tour. They often shape important decisions, too… like who to hire, whether to expand or consolidate, what subjects to offer.
These stories were inherited: absorbed from the school’s founding context, from a long-gone principal’s instincts, from what the sector said schools like this one were for. Somewhere along the line, a description hardened into a definition.
Nobody signed off on it, of course. The story simply got told enough times that it stopped sounding like a story. It became assumed. And we know what happens with assumptions.
Repetition manufactures inevitability
Elena Vasileva calls this narrative inheritance. Her observation about the mechanism is an extremely sharp one: repetition manufactures inevitability.
A story told once is a claim you can argue with. A story told for thirty years is just reality. “This is who we are. It’s how it’s always been. It’s what families expect.” Each retelling sands off a little more of the story’s storyness, until the account of the school and the school itself become indistinguishable: to staff, to families, and not least to the leadership team. The most influential narrative in any school is the one nobody recognises as a narrative anymore. Its invisibility is exactly where its power sits.
Chimamanda Adichie made a related point about single stories: their problem is incompleteness, not falsehood. The inheritance lens adds something to that. A single story doesn’t just leave things out. Repeated long enough, it makes the leaving-out feel like the natural order. The incompleteness stops being a gap and becomes a wall.
Many inherited stories began as good adaptations. “We’re the affordable option” probably kept the lights on through a decade when nothing else would have. “We take everyone” was likely a moral commitment before it became a ceiling on ambition.
The people who carried these stories forward weren’t lazy or unimaginative. They were doing what working stories are for, which is making decisions possible without constant re-litigation.
Faced with a tired story, many schools reach for the wrong tool. One common response is a rebrand: new identity, new tagline, new definitive account of who we are. And a rebrand can be worthwhile (I do this work; I’m not dismissing it). But notice what swapping one definitive story for a shinier one does. It relocates the monopoly. The school still has a single account of itself that nobody is allowed to question; it’s just fresher paint on the same locked door. Five years on, the new story has been repeated into the same invisibility as the old one, and the school is no more able to see itself clearly than before.
The deeper work is interruption
The deeper work is interruption: making the inherited story visible as a story, so that for the first time in years it becomes something the school can hold at arm’s length and examine.
Vasileva puts it in a line I’d want on the wall of every strategic planning day: “every transformation begins with a fracture in inevitability.”
My word is that a powerful line.
Can you choose your story?
Before a school can choose a different story, it has to recover the sense that choosing is possible at all. That’s what imagination means in this context. Not fantasy, not vision-statement optimism, just the basic perceptual capacity to notice that things could be otherwise.
The awareness of choice tends to reveal the same thing: a gap. The story being told about the place and the experience of being in the place have drifted apart. Rarely through dishonesty: the story was inherited and held still while the place kept living. Twenty years of new staff, new families, new programs, and the website still describes a school that mostly exists in 2006.
Who are we telling a story for?
With choice comes power.
Catalina Gardescu, writing and reflecting on storytelling in schools, asks the question that sits under all of this: if school marketers are storytellers, what stories are we telling, and for whom? Her observation about end of year is hard to unsee. At year’s end, schools publish the same montage: the acceptances, the ceremonies, the trophies, the hero who overcame.
A single story of success, cut with the same cutter across the sector. And the family whose year was mostly survival, who almost didn’t make it through but did? In her words, they “feel quite left out.” An inherited story doesn’t just go stale. It selects. It decides which families recognise themselves in the school, and which conclude, without ever saying so, that the place isn’t for them.
The aim is not a better-sounding story
So the aim isn’t a better-sounding story. It’s a story the place can verify. That alignment is worth wanting for three reasons:
- It makes a better story: more specific, harder to copy, durable in a way borrowed aspiration never is, because every tour either confirms it or doesn’t.
- It makes a better experience: families who chose the school the story described arrive at the school the story described, and belonging starts at the gate instead of after the disappointment fades.
- It is the ethical line, in a moment where families are anxious and the school holds most of the power. A claim that can’t be evidenced in the lived reality of the place isn’t ambition. It’s a debt, taken out against the trust of families who will discover the difference after they’ve enrolled.
This reframes the real constraint on a school’s communication. It’s rarely the quality of any individual message. Schools with tired stories often have polished websites and competent campaigns. The constraint is the felt inevitability underneath: the unexamined account that decides, before any brief is written, what kind of thing this school is allowed to say about itself. You can hire better copywriters forever and never touch that.
The role an outsider plays in helping you discover your story
What I can’t tell you is what your school should choose once the story comes loose. The moment an outsider hands a school its new story, the school is back where it started, living inside an account it didn’t author, just with a more recent date on it. Which is not to say the work needs no outsider. The fracture usually arrives from outside: the stranger’s reading, the question nobody inside can ask, the mirror held at the right angle. And the choosing itself is a craft: surfacing what staff and families already say about the place, testing which of it the school can keep, building the room where the decision gets made well.
There’s help worth having for all of that. But notice the difference between a facilitator and an author…
One runs the process, and the school writes the story. The other writes the story, and the school inherits again. The choosing has to be done by the people who will have to tell the story for the next thirty years and mean it.
If there’s one test worth carrying into that work, it’s this: choose a story you can keep.
Either way: the noticing can start today, with nobody’s permission – that the story you’re living in was inherited, that its solidity is an effect of repetition rather than truth, that it could be otherwise.
Worth asking, perhaps, next time someone in a meeting says “that’s just who we are”: who decided? And would we decide it again?
About the author
Jacob Shultz
Founder, Bolsta Education
Jacob is a specialist in experience strategy for schools. His focus is on improving the lived experience of schools — through story, systems and the small moments that shape how families feel.
