Stephen Mitchell

Every September, a new class arrives carrying with them a collection of memories from previous years at school.

Some remember learning to read. Others remember a residential trip, a science experiment that went spectacularly wrong or the excitement of performing in the school play. Many remember a particular teacher. Far fewer remember the worksheet they completed on a rainy Tuesday in November.

I have often found this fascinating.

Education spends a great deal of time discussing what children should know, and rightly so. Schools exist to help young people develop the knowledge, understanding and skills they need to flourish in the world beyond the classroom. Curriculum matters. Assessment matters. High expectations matter. Yet when adults reflect upon their own education, they rarely begin by talking about attainment data or carefully sequenced units of work. Instead, they tell stories.

They remember the teacher who stayed behind after school to help them when they were struggling. They remember the assembly they were asked to lead despite believing they would never be capable of speaking in front of an audience. They remember the production in which they discovered, perhaps for the first time, that other people enjoyed listening to them. Sometimes they remember a single conversation that altered the way they saw themselves.

These memories are not simply nostalgic recollections. They reveal something important about the nature of education itself.

Children rarely experience school as a series of isolated lessons. They experience it as relationships, emotions, challenges and moments of discovery. The curriculum is undoubtedly central to that experience, but it is woven together with countless interactions that shape how children come to understand themselves. Long before they leave primary school, many have already begun constructing quiet narratives about the kind of person they believe themselves to be.

“I am good at maths.”

“I’m not very creative.”

“I’m shy.”

“I’m the funny one.”

“I’m not the sort of person who speaks in assembly.”

These beliefs are rarely taught directly, yet they are learned nonetheless. They develop gradually through repeated experiences and, perhaps more significantly, through the responses children receive from the adults around them. Every time a child is trusted with responsibility, encouraged to persevere, listened to carefully or invited to contribute an idea, another small piece of that story is written.

It is one of the reasons I have become increasingly cautious about the labels we attach to children. Describing a pupil as quiet, disruptive, anxious or naturally confident may seem harmless enough, but children have an extraordinary ability to absorb the expectations that surround them. A label offered casually by an adult can become part of the story a child tells themselves for years afterwards.

Fortunately, the opposite is also true.

Schools have a remarkable capacity to rewrite those stories.

I have watched children who arrived convinced that they had nothing worth saying gradually discover that their ideas mattered. I have seen pupils who avoided every opportunity to speak in front of others volunteer to lead assemblies by the time they reached Year 6. I have worked with children who believed they were destined to fail until one carefully chosen moment of success began to alter how they saw themselves. None of these transformations happened overnight, nor did they occur because somebody simply told them to be more confident. They emerged because, over time, the experiences children encountered were powerful enough to challenge the assumptions they had previously held about themselves.

When I think back over my own career, it is striking that the moments I remember most vividly are not those in which a class produced exceptional assessment outcomes, important though those achievements undoubtedly were. Instead, I remember the child who finally found the courage to speak during a discussion after months of listening in silence. I remember the pupil who discovered an unexpected talent through drama. I remember the conversations that took place after the lesson had ended, when children spoke with an honesty that could never have been captured on a piece of paper.

Those moments remind me why teaching has always felt like a profoundly hopeful profession. Every school day offers countless opportunities to shape not only what children know, but how they understand themselves and their place within the world. Much of that work is invisible at the time. We seldom know which conversation, which opportunity or which gesture of encouragement will stay with a child long after they have left our classroom.

Perhaps that uncertainty is part of the privilege.

Years after children have forgotten the specific objectives of a lesson, they may still remember how it felt to be listened to. They may remember the teacher who noticed them when they believed they had gone unnoticed, the class in which it felt safe to make a mistake or the moment they realised they were capable of something they had never imagined possible.

We cannot choose which memories our pupils will carry into adulthood. Nor should we imagine that every lesson will become a defining moment in a child’s life. Yet we can choose the kind of classroom in which those memories are formed.

We can create classrooms in which curiosity is valued more highly than certainty, where mistakes are treated as opportunities rather than failures, where every child believes their contribution matters and where learning is experienced not simply as the acquisition of knowledge, but as an invitation to become more fully themselves.

Children will remember far more than we realise.

The question, perhaps, is not whether they will remember our classrooms.

It is who they will believe themselves to be because they were there.