We owe it to every stakeholder in a school to honour their investment, to celebrate it, and to make sure the good stories get told.
Every school has stories being told about it, whether or not the school participates in telling them. They’re being told at soccer on Saturday morning, at playgroup, at church, in the pub, in the newspaper, around the dinner table. Some of the storytellers are from inside the school community, and some are from well outside of it.
The loudest stories (often the negative ones) tend to win, and over time, those loud stories converge and give rise to a generalised ‘perception’ of your school.
Stories that come true
My observation of many schools in Australia is that they carry a reputation that has been assigned to them via loud stories, often with a tenuous relationship to what’s going on inside the four walls.
Inaccurate, biased or partial stories have a prophetic quality. Told often enough, they become a reinforcing loop that draws the community’s experience towards that story. Elena Vasileva, writing on what she calls narrative inheritance, puts it like this: “Every transformation begins with a fracture in inevitability.” A story that has hardened into “that’s just what that school is like” has to be cracked before anything else can move. In other words, the prophetic inevitability has to be broken.
Chris Bonnor and Jane Caro found one version of this in the Australian school context. In What Makes a Good School? they noticed an asymmetry in how outcomes get explained: success at an elite private school tends to be credited to the school and failure blamed on the parents; success at a public school tends to be credited to the parents and failure blamed on the school. Similar outcomes, almost opposite attributions. Their argument is about school choice and segregation, which is a bigger subject than this piece, but the mechanism they describe is similar. Once a story about a school converges into perception, the everyday evidence is sorted to fit it, for better or worse.
Three questions to help determine the fairness of a story
So let me reframe the provocation. There are two stories in play: the one your community tells about your school, and the one your school tells about itself. Rather than asking whether either is fair, ask three questions of both.
Is it accurate?
Does the story connect with reality?
Dr David Willows, who has spent years thinking about how schools are experienced, asks one question of a school’s mission: “If we say this matters, where should I be able to find evidence of it in the design of the school?” Not in the words about the school; in its timetable, its budget, its enrolment process, the way a typical day runs. His phrase for the common failure: the mission has entered the language of the school without yet travelling as deeply into the experience of it.
The same test applies to any story about a school. Is it based on something observable? Often there’s a gap. Sometimes it’s a parent working from a misunderstanding, or from something that was true five years ago. Sometimes it’s the school. Simon Lightman explains why that second gap is so normal. Institutions, he writes, “can name the kind of learner they wish to form more easily than they can redesign the conditions that make such formation possible.” The aspiration is sincere; redesigning the conditions is the part that gets skipped.
Uncomfortable though it may be, a school might be the worst-placed to assess whether a story about it is accurate. In 1998 three psychologists, Gilovich, Savitsky and Medvec, described what they called the illusion of transparency: we systematically overestimate how well other people can read what’s going on on the inside. A school tends to believe families understand its values and approach from what it says and does. That belief is a bias, and it often isn’t reflective of reality. Keep this in mind as you explore the evidence base for a particular story.
Is it honouring?
Does the story identify, respect and celebrate the moments happening every day?
In 2024 Christian Schools Australia and Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program surveyed 22,092 students across 57 Australian Christian schools, tracking which everyday practices had the largest measured effect on students’ flourishing. The top of the list was unprogrammed and relational: laughing with other students (22 per cent), a sense of playfulness (17 per cent), teacher humour in class (9 per cent).
The sort of things that make the prospectus cover or website home page (student leadership, service learning, creative and performing arts, the fancy new sports oval) were the ones near the bottom. The same report acknowledges that a school’s experience can be a source of deep hurt where stated and practised values diverge. What’s worth telling and what’s easy to photograph turned out to be different things. A story that honours the school is one that notices the first list, not just the second.
It takes effort and intentionality to ‘mine’ for the stories that honour the work and investment being made by your people. The stories are worth it.
Is it empowering?
Who does the story give a voice to, and who does it quiet?
While the first two questions help us check for truth and reality, this question is one of authorship.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a talk in 2009 called “The Danger of a Single Story.” Her point was that one story, repeated often enough by people with enough reach, becomes the only story, whether or not it’s accurate. “The problem with stereotypes,” she said, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” She borrowed a word from Igbo for the force behind it: nkali, roughly “to be greater than another.” Power, in her words, “is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”
Who is telling the story in your school?
A school holds real institutional power over its own story, and if that story papers over the lived reality of its people, then it’s using that power to quieten the people who matter most to it. The remedy, whichever direction the power runs, is the same one Adichie offers: not a better single story, but more of them. Diversity of voice is a powerful (and empowering) storytelling device.
So, is your story fair?
I don’t think fairness is a question a school can answer particularly easily from inside its own walls. But these three questions are ones you can go looking for answers to. What story is your community telling about your school right now, and what story are you telling back? Is it accurate? Is it honouring? Is it empowering?
And if it passes those three, there’s one more question to consider. Where is it taking you?
Sources
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED (2009)
- Elena Vasileva, on narrative inheritance (2026)
- Chris Bonnor and Jane Caro, What Makes a Good School? (2012)
- David Willows, Yellow Car — “Finding Evidence of a School’s Mission” (2026); on the illusion of transparency in schools (2019)
- Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky and Victoria Husted Medvec, “The Illusion of Transparency” (1998)
- Simon Lightman, Designing with and for Life (2026)
- Christian Schools Australia and Harvard Human Flourishing Program, Student Flourishing in Australian Christian Schools (2026)
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.
