Class 13 is an education equity charity working to transform schools from the inside out. Since September 2025, we’ve been embedded full-time in a primary school in Lambeth as part of a four-year pilot working alongside teachers. We’re not as there as inspectors or consultants, but as critical companions in the ongoing work of making classrooms more equitable. I’m Aoife, Class 13’s Primary Practitioner. Part of my role is working one-to-one with teachers through the Equity-Driven Practice Cycle: a sustained process of reflective practice for teachers that routes through each teacher’s specific practice.
The first teacher I worked through that cycle with was Brigid – an experienced teacher with a career across Early Years, Key Stage One and Key Stage Two. She loves it. “I love teaching but I think schools are the weirdest place. Absolutely.” She’d never truly questioned whether you could actually change it. The two things sat alongside each other, unresolved. She’d never seen a workable alternative built for the schools where most children actually go.
Now, in the Summer term, we sat down to talk about what that process had been like; what shifted, what it cost, and what it looks like when the change starts happening from the inside.
When Class 13 came in, Brigid was moving between year groups, a change of phase, practice already in flux. She’d heard bits from colleagues who’d been through the course. She trusted the head who’d brought us in. And there was something else underneath the trust. “It was so evident that something was needed,” she says. She’d felt for years the weight of what she describes as the grind in every school she’d been in. Children move through the system, pick up a reputation, are not served. That feeling had nowhere to go. The course felt like somewhere it might.
But what she wanted – what any sensible teacher wants before committing to something – was for someone to just tell her what it would look like. In a classroom. On a Monday morning. Concretely. But when she asked, people would tell her different stories of what they had worked on through the course. “The hardest thing was trying to ask anyone what it was about – they’d go, well, you kind of just have to think about it. It was all abstract.” She found that maddening! It makes more sense now.
The course
Our project in Brigid’s school has two interlocking parts. Four training days bring teachers together to encounter liberatory theory; deficit ideology, race, power, the structures underneath everyday classroom life. These aren’t passive days. This is reflective practice for teachers that goes beyond surface-level review of lesson plans.Teachers reflect on their own practice, challenge their assumptions, and start to build a shared language with colleagues. Then comes the one-to-one work, where that learning routes through your specific classroom, your specific children, your specific habits of mind. The training days give you the concepts. The conversations are where you find them in yourself.
For Brigid, a significant moment came during the training days, when the ideological structure of deficit thinking suddenly clicked into place personally. She already understood how misogyny operates in the world – the victim blaming, the pseudoscience, the way it always forces the harmed person to carry the burden of proof. Seeing the characteristics of deficit ideology clearly mapped out, she recognised the shape of it immediately. It wasn’t abstract theory but something she already understood in her bones and could now see the shape of in education.
Brigid and I would meet regularly and talk about what was actually happening in her classroom that week. Specific children, specific moments, specific dynamics we’d noticed. Not every conversation was easy. Part of the role is bringing observations that a teacher might not yet have the frame to see, and being with them while they surface what that means. That kind of openness has its own weight. But the learning went both ways. Brigid pushed me to feel out the edges of theory in practice and to meet her desire for change with the same commitment she was bringing.
One week, something kept coming up. A pattern in how she was responding to a particular child. I suggested she write it down each time it happened. Just a note. Just to see how often it was coming up.
When we met together again, Brigid did not have a single noted instance of the dynamic playing out. Not because she forgot, but because each time she went to reach for the pen, she just stopped doing the thing she was going to note down. Caught herself. Went a different way. Once she started looking for it, she couldn’t stop seeing it And once she was noticing it, she couldn’t keep doing it. What she was interrupting, each time she caught herself, was a practice she now understood as harmful – harmful in the way that unremarked patterns often are. I remember thinking: that’s what this role is for. Not to hand anyone a new script. To be part of the dialogue that eventually happens inside the room, inside the teacher, without us there at all.
What shifted underneath that moment was something bigger. Brigid is an experienced, committed teacher. She wasn’t yelling at children or running a particularly harsh classroom. What she was doing was what most teachers do, what the system trains you to do, what you see modelled around you, what nobody flags as a problem because it’s so entirely ordinary. She’d spent her career watching it – “how people run a classroom and what is seen as a good class being run well. But also just the suppressiveness of it all.” In primary schools, the machinery of shame is quiet. It often doesn’t look dramatic. But it’s there, and it’s already doing its work; constructing certain children, in the eyes of the class and eventually in their own eyes, as the ones who can’t quite manage it.
The classroom is never neutral
Brigid had understood her classroom the way most teachers are trained to: as a relatively neutral structure, into which children arrive. Most children settle into it. When they do, the system takes it as proof that it works. But some don’t. And in this model, someone must fix those children.The classroom just is what it is. The children are the variable. We make them the problem, rather than questioning the structure.
That model doesn’t survive contact with the course. What Brigid came to understand – slowly, through conversations, through watching her own reactions, through the training days – was that classrooms are never neutral. They’re always doing something. The way a room is organised, the way behaviour is managed, the language used about children in staff meetings and planning – all of it actively constructs who those children are in the eyes of the school, and eventually in their own eyes. Children aren’t discovered in classrooms. They’re made there. And the practices that feel most routine, most unremarkable, most professional are often the ones doing the most damage, precisely because nobody’s examining them.
Once Brigid could see that, her planning shifted. Continuous provision became more deliberate, shaped around what her children were showing her about themselves. But the deeper change was in how she understood the everyday management of the room. She moved away from approaches that used the group as an audience for an individual child’s correction – not because someone told her to, but because she could now see what those moments were building. She still held clear expectations. Her children were still making strong progress. What changed was the question underneath everything. The question stopped being about what was wrong with the child and started being about what the structure of the room was producing, and what she could change about it.
This is what deficit ideology actually looks like in practice. Not necessarily the high profile incidents. The texture of ordinary moments – who frustrates you and why, what you call a problem versus what you let pass as just how things are. Brigid’s sustained conversation, over time, rooted in her specific classroom and her specific children, made it possible to notice those assumptions at all. To examine them. To choose a different response. There is no Monday morning script because the script would miss the point entirely.
Limbo
There’s a cost to this kind of seeing. Brigid calls it limbo. “There’s a bit of limbo because there’s the system that is in place, you’re striving to move away from that. And it puts you in a limbo place, I feel, because it’s like you can’t quite be one or the other.” She pauses. “Limbo is very much a word that I’ve been feeling.”
It’s a precise description of something that doesn’t get named often enough. Brigid can see clearly what the system is doing, what it costs children, what it costs teachers. But she’s still inside it. The pressures are still the pressures. There’s a pulling, she says, like elastic being stretched further than it was before. Your own sense of what’s right, what’s possible, what you want your practice to be, now exists in tension with what the institution asks of you daily. “I hadn’t really articulated that till today,” she says.
Saying it out loud
What makes it bearable is being able to say it out loud. Having a colleague who’s been through the same process, who has the same language, who has crossed the same threshold. Brigid describes finding that with one colleague in particular – “it feels strong. That relationship feels trustworthy in that you can say things that are quite… yeah, just kind of tricky sometimes.” The conversation where you can say, listen to what I did this week, and have it land as reflection rather than confession. That’s rare in schools. It matters more than any single session on the course. We’ve watched it happen between colleagues who’ve been through the course together – a shorthand develops, a trust, a shared willingness to examine practice without it becoming a blame conversation. It is a solidarity rooted in a commitment to change.
A colleague passed through her classroom recently and she mentioned one of her children in passing – “Oh yeah, I know about him” – in the way the adults had once talked about that child. Brigid caught herself. “No, I don’t mean that at all,” she said. She didn’t need to explain the course or the theory. She just knew the difference between those two ways of holding a child, and she couldn’t go back to the first one. What struck her afterwards was how shocking it felt to hear that old language. How foreign it had become.
Brigid still thinks schools are the weirdest places. That has not changed. What has changed is that she has somewhere to put that feeling. She has language for what she is seeing, colleagues to say it with, and a practice that is shifting because she has had the space to examine it honestly.
Come and think with us
That is what this work offers: reflective practice for teachers that is sustained, specific, and rooted in what is actually happening in your classroom. It’s not a new script. It isn’t a behaviour strategy dressed up in softer language. Not another set of lesson plans to squeeze into an already crowded week. It offers something deeper: a way to notice what school is doing, what our practice is producing, and what becomes possible when teachers are not left to make sense of that alone.
If you are a teacher who has always felt that schools are strange, but has never quite known what to do with that feeling, our next Foundational Learning dates are now open.
Come and think with us.
