By January, lots of teachers have made it through. The timetable’s back to something like normal after the shredded chaos of December. Trips done. Mocks marked. Christmas plays a memory. That “one more” data drop finally behind you.

You promised yourself it would be different this year.

Then the Spring term starts and within days you’re back in it. New seating plans. Intervention timetables. Catch-up sessions for the children who “fell behind” before Christmas. Behaviour systems tightening again because apparently the break made everyone forget how to line up properly. The promise you made yourself already feels like it belongs to someone else.

In the middle of all that, something else quietly happens.

A young person looks at you at the end of a hard lesson and says, “You were tired today.” Not as an accusation. As an observation. As an offer of grace.

Across all our work this year, one thing has stayed constant. Children’s sense of fairness, and their desire to humanise adults, seems to have no limits at all. This is what makes radical classrooms possible.

The classroom is still, as bell hooks reminds us, a space of radical possibility. Not because policy has improved. Not because behaviour systems have become kinder. It’s radical because young people keep choosing to recognise us as human, even when the system doesn’t always recognise them in the same way.

Paulo Freire wrote that oppressors can’t liberate themselves simply by doing nicer things to people. Only when those who are oppressed reclaim their own humanity, and remove the oppressor’s power to dominate, does anyone become truly free. The classroom is one of the few places where those tensions are live, every day, in the relationships between adults and children.

They notice more than we admit

In December we conducted focus groups with Years 5 and 6. The children described school life in a way that really cuts through the noise, revealing things that can be hard to hear. Let’s not forget that these children are brand new. Some of them have only been on the planet for ten years.

They can tell you exactly who carries a reputation and how it follows them into every classroom. They can tell you which “calm room” is really a punishment space. They can list the rules that are about safety and the rules that are about control.

They can also tell when you’re not yourself.

One teacher on our course told us about lining children up to come into the classroom. The rule in that school is clear: no coats inside. She realised she still had her own coat on, so she took it off. A child looked up at her and said, “Miss, are you cold? You can put your coat back on if you need to.”

The system had taught that child a script about coats and compliance. The child chose something else: to show a level of compassion that wasn’t permitted under the rule, and to check if the adult was cold.

In another school, a Year 6 boy listened to a classmate talk about how the behaviour policy lands when you have ADHD. He sat with it for a moment and then said, very plainly:

“I think that isn’t fair because there shouldn’t be the same number of warnings for you, because you’re just going to do some of those things more often because you have ADHD.”

That’s disability justice in one sentence. No training day. No slideshow. Radical classrooms emerge when children like this apply basic fairness to systems that haven’t yet caught up.

Their compassion reaches out to us

Think about the moments this year when a young person showed you a level of compassion you weren’t expecting.

In one Year 6 group, we asked, “If you had a worry, what support would be available for you?” A girl thought about it and said:

“If I have a worry I would just keep it to myself because, if I tell an adult then they might be upset or worried themselves.”

That’s a child protecting adults from their feelings. She’s absorbed the idea that her distress might be too much for us, so she chooses silence over the risk of burdening someone.

Another Year 6 pupil, thinking back to a school trip and the feeling of receiving handwritten cards from classmates, was asked what would help them feel that way more often in school. They answered:

“More equality for different people, different needs and, like, also having different things for different people.”

It’s hard to read that and not hear an invitation. More equality. Different things for different needs. They’re asking for adults to treat them in ways that feel fair.

During another incident, a child was throwing objects and a sudden noise startled the adult. They jumped, apologised and said, “Sudden noises really frighten me. It’s just how my body responds, even though I know I am safe here.” The child paused and asked:

“Did scary things used to happen to you before?”

Then they stopped throwing things.

In the middle of their own anger and dysregulation, they found room to consider the adult’s body and history. Two nervous systems were in dialogue, and the child chose to protect the person in front of them.

None of these moments feature on a school improvement plan. They don’t appear in an inspection report. They sit inside the live relationship between children and adults. They’re tiny flashes of the world we say we believe in, playing out on an ordinary weekday in familiar corridors.

The question under the data: when did they humanise you?

So much of the conversation about education recently has revolved around numbers. Attendance figures. Exclusion data. Recruitment and retention targets. The number of children “off track”.

Important questions, but they’re not the only ones.

For a moment, try this simple question:

When did a young person offer you more understanding and compassion than the system offers them?

There’s nothing “soft” about this question. It’s about power and responsibility. It’s a reminder that, despite everything, young people are still reaching for relationships. They’re still trying to recognise us. They’re still willing to believe that the adults in front of them are more than the worst thing they say on a tiring day.

During our foundational learning course we often listen to I Get Out by Lauryn Hill, and ask participants to hear the lyrics through the voices of their students. She sings about giving your life to a system that seeks to kill you, questioning who made up the rules, and pleads for you to be smart and save your soul. Imagine a young person saying those words about school. It stops being abstract. It becomes a very local question: what kind of system are we holding in place in this room? Are we building radical classrooms? And who is it serving?

The classroom is still a space of radical possibility

The classroom is still a space of radical possibility. Policies change. Budgets rise and fall. Narratives about “behaviour” get sharper. Yet every day, young people walk into classrooms ready to offer us the very things the wider system withholds from them: fairness, patience and a belief that we can do better tomorrow.The question for 2026 isn’t whether children are capable of that kind of compassion. They’ve already shown us that they are. The question is whether we’re willing to build radical classrooms, and schools, that deserve it.