Pattern & Thread
Practice area

Systems & learning design

Every school runs on systems most people never see: how a wellbeing concern is followed up, how behaviour is recorded, how a plan gets made and checked. I design those systems with schools and organisations, and work alongside the people already doing the work well.

Pattern

Systems design

The internal systems a school runs on, and whether they fit the people inside them. Most schools have more of these than anyone has mapped, built at different times by different people, and pulling in slightly different directions.

  • Wellbeing and behaviour systems: how a concern is noticed, recorded, followed up and closed
  • Strategic planning: plans built around a few real priorities, and evaluation that shows whether they're working
  • Futures planning: where the school needs to be in five or ten years, and what has to change to get there
  • Pedagogy systems: a shared approach to teaching and learning that holds from one classroom to the next
  • Curriculum frameworks: with registration and compliance designed in from the start, so they hold the learning up rather than crowding it out
  • Aligning existing practice: finding where current practices pull against each other, and bringing them into line before adding anything new

Where the work starts

Diagram of a school's systems around learners and staff: wellbeing, behaviour, strategic plan, evaluation, futures planning, pedagogy and curriculum. Dashed lines mark where they often pull against each other, such as behaviour records that never reach wellbeing, and a plan whose priorities nobody evaluates.
Thread

Practice support

For people who already do the work and want to get better at it. Peer coaching, professional learning and action learning, blended with design thinking. It isn't a packaged programme. The method has been built over fifteen years of practice, draws on Helen Timperley's Spirals of Inquiry, and is shaped to the team in front of it.

  • Peer coaching structures that keep going after I leave
  • Inquiry cycles tied to a real question the team is already asking
  • Professional learning designed as collaboration rather than delivery
Ways to work together

Pick the size that fits the problem

Partnership

A sustained piece of work with a school or organisation: scoped together, designed with the people who'll use it, tested in practice and handed over.

Working session

Bring a difficult problem, a half-built structure or a curriculum that isn't sitting right, and work through it with me for ninety minutes or two hours.

Professional learning

Days and sessions built around your team's real question, with peer coaching to carry the work past the day itself.

Speaking and facilitation

Conference sessions, leadership days and facilitated planning. Ask about what you have in mind.

Get in touch →
How it runs

From a conversation to something that works

  1. A conversation

    What's happening, what you've already tried, and what would be different if it worked.

  2. A scope

    A short written plan: the question, the people involved, the timeframe and the cost.

  3. Design and build

    Designed with the people who will use it, tested early, changed when it doesn't fit.

  4. Hand over

    Your people can run it without me, and we check it's doing what it was meant to.

Contact

Bring a question

Write with what's happening and what you've already tried. That's enough to start a conversation.