The Roundup - Edition 87

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

It has been the usual busy week at St Chris. Sixth Form mocks are underway, parent consultations have filled diaries, mock results have landed for the V Group (Year 11) alongside relationship talks, Major Official election rounds, Junior School Aladdin rehearsals, Forest School compost collections and everything else that makes a school feel alive rather than tidy.

Amidst all that movement, I was grateful for a number of brilliant conversations with students this week.

I spent time with some Junior School pupils talking with total seriousness about their prowess at darts and how it was sharpening their maths and arithmetic. I had a thoughtful and challenging conversation with a student about what progressive schooling really means and where he felt we were getting it right and wrong. Another student explained, straight-faced, his future plans involving riding an ostrich. And I ended up in a long lunch discussion with a small group of Sixth Form students about Greenland, geopolitics and power imbalance. The central thesis was that meaningful negotiation is impossible when power is unequal and thus never true…. It was genuinely fascinating, and they had a point I thought. 

The outcomes of these conversations were clear enough.

• A request for a darts board, or possibly a darts arena (!).
• A suggestion that we acquire some ostriches for Arunwood, purely for training purposes.
• And a request for a St Chris debate and guest speaker on geopolitics and the nature of negotiation within political tension and power imbalance.

It got me thinking about their requests. Or more accurately….their bids.

I have been reading the work of John Gottman, an American psychologist who has spent decades studying relationships. Not the dramatic moments, but the quiet, everyday ones. Gottman analysed thousands of couples, some who stayed together and some who did not, and asked a deceptively simple question: what actually makes the difference?

His conclusion was not about grand gestures, compatibility, or happily ever after. It was actually about something he called “the bid”.

Gottman said a bid is any small attempt to connect.
“Can I show you something?”
“Can you help me?”
“Have you got a minute?”

When a bid is made, the other person has a choice. They can turn towards it or they can turn away. Turning towards a bid says: "I see you. You matter. You are worth my attention."

Turning away, especially when it becomes habitual, sends the opposite message. Often unintentionally. Often silently.

Gottman found that couples who stayed together responded positively to around 80% of each other’s bids. Those who separated responded to closer to 30%. Relationships, he argued, do not usually break in a single dramatic moment. They erode through small, repeated acts of inattention.

What struck me is how relevant this is to school life.

Students make bids constantly. Some are obvious and confident. Many are not. A question asked at the wrong moment. A story that is not very well formed. A challenge disguised as humour. A complaint that is really anxiety. A request that sounds unreasonable until you pause and listen to what sits underneath it.

Staff make bids too.
“Have you got a minute?”
“I am not sure this is working.”

We as parents make bids as well. Sometimes calmly, sometimes clumsily, sometimes wrapped in frustration or worry. Rarely because we do not care. Almost always because we care deeply.

A school like St Chris is built by how we respond to those bids.

Our values talk about openness, respect, individuality and care. But values only exist when they are practised in moments of pressure, distraction or fatigue. Turning towards a bid is one of the simplest and most powerful ways those values become real.

Turning towards does not mean always saying yes. It does not mean indulging every idea, fixing everything immediately, or agreeing with every viewpoint. Ostriches remain off the table.

What it does mean is this: we pause, we listen, we acknowledge the humanity of the person in front of us. We say, implicitly or explicitly: “I see you. I am taking you seriously. You matter here.”

Turning away, on the other hand, rarely looks dramatic. It looks like being too busy. Too distracted. Too quick to close a conversation down. A non-answer. A delayed response. A habitual deflection.

And just as Gottman found in relationships, the damage is rarely caused by one big moment. It is caused by patterns.

At St Chris, our job is not perfection. It is attention.

It is noticing the student who is hovering at the edge of a conversation.

It is staying curious when a question feels awkward or challenging.

When students feel that their bids are met, they take risks. They think more deeply. They challenge ideas. They feel safe enough to disagree, to fail, and to grow. When students feel seen, partnership becomes possible.

None of this is glamorous. None of it fits neatly into a policy document. But it is the daily work of a healthy, values-led school.

Ostriches, it turns out, are surprisingly expensive. And Niall Ferguson remains unavailable.

But buying a dart board might just be an option…