We know how learning works. So why do we forget when it comes to adults?

Somewhere in the next few weeks, someone in your school will sit down to plan September INSET. This is about what happens on that INSET day, and what happens in the three months after it.

Imagine you are sitting behind a learner driver at a set of traffic lights.

The lights turn green.

They stall.

What do you do?

You could wait a few seconds while they restart the engine, find the biting point, check what they are doing and try again.

Or you could lean on the horn.

Which one do we genuinely think is more likely to help them move forward?

Because the horn does not make them a better driver. If anything, the pressure makes them more likely to stall again.

Most of us understand this instinctively. Learning takes time. People need opportunities to practise. They need feedback. They need to make mistakes without every mistake becoming evidence that they are incapable. We understand that nobody becomes a proficient driver simply because somebody has shown them how to drive.

So why do we sometimes expect teachers to learn differently?

We already know this

Across the country, teachers are getting ready for September.

Lessons are being planned. Curriculums are being reviewed. Teachers are thinking carefully about sequencing, scaffolding and what their learners need before they can move on to something more complex.

And somewhere near the beginning of the year, there will probably be some form of assessment. Not because teachers think young people learned nothing last year, but because they understand how learning works. What has stuck? What has been forgotten? What can they confidently apply? Where are the gaps? And what needs revisiting before we build something new?

This is not a sign that last year’s teaching failed. It is teaching.

Yet, on an INSET day somewhere this September, somebody will introduce an important idea to a room full of staff. There might be a presentation. Perhaps an activity. Maybe a handout. And three months later, when practice has not changed in quite the way we hoped, somebody will say:

“We did this in INSET. They should know.”

But should they?

Why would learning work differently because the people sitting in the chairs happen to be older?

Knowing is not the same as being able to do

Teacher training gives us plenty of language for understanding this.

Take Bloom’s taxonomy, as Anderson and Krathwohl revised it in 2001. We know there is a difference between remembering something, understanding it, applying it, analysing it, evaluating it and eventually being able to create something with it.

You can recognise an idea without being able to use it. You can explain a concept in a training room and still struggle to apply it when a lesson is falling apart at Period 5 on Friday. You can agree with a new approach while still defaulting to an old habit under pressure.

That is not necessarily resistance. Sometimes it is just learning.

Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development gives us another useful way of thinking about this. There are things we can do independently, things we cannot yet do, and an important space between the two where we can succeed with support.

Teachers work in that space with young people all the time. We model. We prompt. We scaffold. We ask questions. We practise. We gradually remove support. We revisit things. Then, eventually, something that once required enormous concentration becomes almost automatic.

That is what learning looks like.

And yet our approach to professional development can sometimes sound more like:

“We told you.”

“We sent the slides.”

“It is in the policy.”

“We covered that on INSET day.”

As though exposure and learning are the same thing. They are not.

Schools already have the people who know how to do this

There is a huge amount of untapped power here.

Many middle and senior leaders are in leadership partly because they were brilliant teachers.

They know how to break down complex ideas. They know how to notice when somebody has misunderstood something. They know that one explanation will not work for everybody. They know that feedback matters. They know the difference between somebody refusing to engage and somebody who genuinely does not yet know how to do what is being asked of them.

They understand learning.

What if we saw those skills as central to leadership? Not just managing staff. Not simply holding people accountable. Actually teaching and developing the people around us.

When I first became a manager in youth work, somebody gave me a piece of advice that has stayed with me:

Your workers are now your young people.

Not because adults should be treated like children. Absolutely not.

The point was about patience.

Bring the same belief in people’s capacity to grow. Understand that development is continuous. Allow people to try things, get them wrong, reflect and try again. Do not confuse somebody needing support with somebody being incapable. Do not expect the finished product while somebody is still learning.

That shift changed how I thought about management. Because accountability and learning are not opposites. We can have high expectations of people while recognising that getting there is a process. In fact, that is what good teachers do every day.

What would an INSET day look like if we really believed in learning?

Perhaps the question when planning your September INSET day should not only be:

“What do staff need to know?”

It might also be:

What do we eventually want people to be able to do?

What prior knowledge are we assuming?

Where will they practise this?

Who will support them when they try?

When will we come back to it?

How will we know whether the learning has transferred into practice?

What happens when somebody stalls?

Because if the answer is simply another blast of the horn, we should not be surprised if people become anxious, defensive or reluctant to try.

The goal is not to remove accountability. The goal is to make accountability useful. A learner driver still needs to learn to drive safely. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. But we understand that becoming a driver involves instruction, practice, mistakes, feedback, more practice and gradually increasing independence.

There is even a little green P we can put on the car to tell the rest of the world: this person has passed, but they are still developing their confidence. Perhaps there is something wonderfully honest about that.

What would the professional equivalent of P plates look like?

A school culture where saying “I understand the principle, but I am still learning how to do this well” is treated as the beginning of development rather than an admission of failure.

It is why we let people come back

This thinking shapes our own approach to Foundational Learning at Class 13. People who have previously completed our Foundational Learning programme are welcome to come back and experience the sessions again. That is deliberate. It is not because we think they failed to understand it the first time. It is because we understand how learning works.

You will not hear an idea in exactly the same way two years later because you are not the same person hearing it. You have had different experiences. Different conversations. Different successes. Different frustrations. Something that felt theoretical the first time might suddenly explain something happening in your school now. A question you dismissed might become the question you cannot stop thinking about. You might understand something differently because another participant brings an experience you have never encountered before.

Learning is not simply receiving information and storing it permanently. We revisit. We connect. We practise. We question. We forget. We remember. We apply.

And sometimes we stall.

The question is what happens next.

Foundational Learning returns this autumn

Our next Foundational Learning programme begins in September 2026:

Session 1: The Big Short, Monday 14 September

Session 2: The Usual Suspects, Thursday 1 October

Session 3: Mission Impossible, Tuesday 13 October

Session 4: Inception, Monday 19 October

The programme is designed for people working with young people who want the time and space to think more deeply about equity, deficit ideology, power and practice.

And if you have completed Foundational Learning before, you are welcome back.

Not because we expect you to have forgotten everything. And certainly not because we think you did not get it the first time. Because learning does not finish when the session ends.

Perhaps that is something worth remembering as we plan this year’s INSET day.

We already know an enormous amount about how people learn. The challenge might simply be whether we are prepared to extend that same understanding, patience and possibility to each other.