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Our current understanding of school culture remains trapped in an outdated, anthropological model—one that tries to freeze culture into neat typologies or lists of traits.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.