Culture is Constructed, Not Discovered

According to theorists like Crotty (1998), constructivism suggests that meaning doesn’t exist in a vacuum, waiting to be discovered—it only emerges when consciousness engages with experience. Culture, then, isn’t something “out there” to be found. It’s something we create together through shared experiences, values, conflicts, and decisions.

In the context of a school, this means culture is not handed down from a mission statement or imposed by leadership alone. While the institution may predate its current staff, its culture is continually shaped by the people within it. As Bryman (2008) explains, culture acts as a “point of reference” rather than a fixed structure—something that exists in concept, but only takes shape through human interaction.

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Multiple People, Multiple Cultures
Social constructivism also acknowledges an essential truth: there are as many constructions of meaning as there are people. That’s crucial in schools, where culture doesn’t emerge uniformly. A teaching assistant, a headteacher, and a pastoral lead might all describe the school’s culture differently—and all be right. Each interpretation is built from unique perspectives, shaped by role, experience, power dynamics, and personal values.

This explains why efforts to capture school culture in a single Ofsted descriptor or policy document can feel both hollow and divisive. Leadership must understand that culture isn’t singular—it’s layered, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory.

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Culture Is Always in Motion
Another powerful implication of a social constructivist view is that culture is never finished. Because it’s continuously renegotiated through interaction, the culture of your school today is not the culture it will be in six months. A change in staffing, a safeguarding incident, a shift in leadership focus—any of these can recalibrate the social atmosphere in profound ways.

This has two major consequences for school leadership:

• You can’t define culture once and be done with it. Culture isn’t something you implement—it’s something you steward. It requires ongoing reflection, open dialogue, and responsiveness.

• You need to listen, often and widely. Because everyone’s construction of the culture may be different, it’s not enough to rely on your own view—or even your leadership team's view. You need to hear from the margins: from support staff, early-career teachers, SEND coordinators, lunchtime supervisors. Their stories are your culture.

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So What Should School Leaders Do?

• Create space for multiple perspectives. Social constructivism tells us that culture is plural. Make sure your understanding of it is, too.

• Acknowledge culture as changeable. Don’t treat it as a fixed asset—treat it as a living, breathing process that evolves with your community.

• Lead with humility. You are part of shaping culture, but so is everyone else. Share that responsibility intentionally.

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References

Bryman, A. (2008). Social Research Methods (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Crotty, M. (1998). The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. SAGE Publications.

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The Label Experiment & School Culture

Imagine you’re teaching a class and you're asked to choose just one word to describe each of your students. Now imagine that every student is required to wear that word on a badge every time they enter your classroom. You might be tempted to have a bit of fun with it. After all, there’s always one student who comes to mind straight away—often because they’ve been pushing your buttons all term. But what about everyone else? The quiet student who's been quietly building confidence? The unpredictable student who's shown real moments of brilliance? 

Reducing a whole human being to a single word isn't just reductive—it’s misleading. And uncomfortable.

Now flip the scenario. Let’s apply the same challenge to your colleagues. One word for each teacher in your department. One word for each member of the leadership team. Imagine them walking around with that word pinned to their chest. Suddenly, what started as a thought experiment becomes ethically murky, if not completely absurd. Because we know how unfair it is to be summed up by a single aspect of ourselves.

And yet—ironically—we often do this exact thing when we talk about school culture.

As school leaders, we are sometimes encouraged to distil our school's culture down into one-word descriptions: “inclusive,” “ambitious,” “supportive,” “rigorous,” “traditional,” “trauma-informed.” These words might sound impressive in a strategy document or Ofsted report, but they’re often a gross simplification of something far more complex.

School culture is not a slogan. It is not a branding exercise. It is the daily lived experience of students, staff, families, and leaders. It’s shaped by everything from behaviour policies to the way we greet each other in the corridor. From how decisions are made to how conflict is handled. From who gets heard in meetings to who feels safe in the staffroom.

For school leaders, the danger of trying to define culture in a single word is twofold:

1. It silences nuance. When we fix a label to our culture—especially a positive one—we risk overlooking the uncomfortable or unresolved parts of our community life. If we say our culture is “inclusive,” do we stop looking at who might still feel excluded? If we call it “high expectations,” do we risk ignoring the quiet burnout among staff?

2. It encourages performance over authenticity. A culture described in glossy terms can become a performance that staff feel pressured to uphold, even when their experience tells a different story. Leaders must be especially mindful of this. Culture isn’t what’s written in a handbook; it’s what happens when no one’s watching.

Instead of forcing culture into neat typologies, we need to cultivate spaces where the contradictions and complexities can be named and explored. We need to move from branding to belonging.

For school leaders, that means listening more than labelling. It means holding space for honest conversations. It means embracing complexity rather than fearing it.

So next time someone asks you to describe your school culture in one word, try this instead: tell them a story. Talk about your students. Talk about your staff. Talk about what’s changing, what’s working, and what still needs work.

Culture, like people, is always in motion. It deserves more than a badge.

 

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The Messy Truth About School Culture

School culture has become a buzzword—easy to say, harder to define, and even harder to change. It’s the thing leaders claim to “build,” Ofsted tries to “judge,” and consultants promise to “fix.” But somewhere along the way, the complexity of what culture really is—and how it actually works—has been lost. Instead, we’ve ended up with a flattened, overly sanitized version of culture: something static, surface-level, and easily branded. This blog is a call to reclaim the conversation.

Our current understanding of school culture remains trapped in an outdated, anthropological model—one that tries to freeze culture into neat typologies or lists of traits. This is a lethal oversimplification. Culture isn’t static; it’s living, breathing, and constantly evolving. A sociological approach is needed—one that embraces the messy, dynamic, ever-changing nature of real school life, rather than trying to box it into fixed categories.

Culture isn’t a checklist or a mission statement. It’s not captured in a policy document, nor embedded by motivational posters on the stairwell. Real culture is messier, more human, and infinitely more powerful than that. It is woven into the daily interactions, rituals, conflicts, compromises, and contradictions of school life. It lives in what schools reward, what they tolerate, what they overlook, and what they truly value when nobody is watching.

Because culture is a social entity—created and re-created in every interaction—it is inherently fluid. It evolves with each conversation in the staffroom, each classroom response, each parental encounter, and each new student who walks through the gates. That’s why culture cannot be fully defined by a single word like “toxic,” “performance,” “power,” or “learning.” These words may describe aspects of culture, but they can never capture its totality. To reduce culture to one of these labels is to deny its complexity and its capacity for contradiction, resistance, and change.

When we hijack culture for performative purposes—whether for branding, compliance, or inspection frameworks—we strip it of its richness and reduce it to a managerial tool. Worse still, we risk pathologising schools that don’t fit the dominant narrative—particularly those serving complex communities—by implying their culture is broken or deficient, rather than simply different, evolving, or in flux.

To truly engage with school culture is to enter a space of humility and curiosity, not control. It demands that we listen carefully, observe honestly, and resist the temptation to impose ready-made templates. It asks us to see culture not as something we manufacture, but as something we steward: fragile, organic, and deeply rooted in the lived experiences of everyone in the school community.

If we want to nurture meaningful school cultures, we must stop looking for clean definitions and start paying closer attention to the mess. Culture isn’t what we declare—it’s what we live.

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