There is an insidious belief that still quietly shapes too many decisions in Education and Society: that a child’s background sets the ceiling for what they can achieve.
Dr Tim Mills has spent his career disproving that idea. As head of Angel Oak Academy and Primary Director at STEP Academies Trust, his work shows what becomes possible when schools combine cognitive science, rigorous curriculum design and consistently high expectations.
I’m fortunate that Tim also serves on the advisory board for a new MSc in Education Leadership that I am leading, with Professor Amanda Goodall, at Bayes Business School. He brings something vital. Not just theory, but proof by outcomes. This aligns strongly with something Professor Deborah Eyre shared with me, in my recent post: “Ability is an outdated concept.” Except in cases of particular neurological impairment, cognition can be built. If we accept that, then the limits so often assumed to be in children are, in fact, in our systems. Sorry to shout, but: it’s not our children that are broken, IT’S OUR SYSTEMS.
The Quiet Power of Low Expectations
Tim is clear that the issue is not conscious pessimism but quiet acceptance. “Because the data suggests children from disadvantaged backgrounds perform less well, people have accepted this as a given.” And yet high expectations are not enough in themselves: they mean very little without a curriculum and pedagogy that make achievement possible. The science is now unambiguous: human learning is responsive to design. The challenge is whether we are willing to redesign.
Building the Ladder
To describe what an effective curriculum looks like, Tim paints a useful picture: if we ask pupils to reach a high academic bar, we must build a secure ladder, with consistent rungs, to get them there. That ladder is knowledge — sequenced deliberately and taught cumulatively. He emphasises three kinds of knowledge that must work together:
✅ Procedural knowledge that becomes automatic (decoding, handwriting, number facts).
✅ Disciplinary knowledge which helps pupils understand how thinking works within a subject (have a look at what Bedrock Learning are doing to support this).
✅ Declarative knowledge that forms the conceptual and factual foundation for further learning.
For primary schools especially, Tim is unequivocal: reading must be at the centre. High-quality texts, sequenced thoughtfully, are the most powerful vehicle for connecting and extending knowledge.
Teaching that matches how humans learn
A curriculum, no matter how well designed, only lives through teaching. Tim’s focus is on hiring intellectually curious teachers and giving them a shared pedagogical approach rooted in cognitive science. “The answer to: ‘How do you teach maths?’ should be: ‘In the same way we teach everything.’” This is not uniformity for its own sake, it is consistency around how learning actually works. Critically, he insists schools move away from labels such as “high ability” and “low ability.” They obscure, rather than illuminate. Instead, diagnose real difficulties: phonological awareness, working memory, fluency, and teach directly to them. The challenge is the difficulty, not the child.
What This Means for Leaders
His advice to school leaders is intentionally simple:
Be deliberate. In the same way that businesses measure return on investment (ROI), teachers should always ask: What is the return on learning of this decision (ROL)?
Watch your most disadvantaged pupils. Their outcomes tell you whether your system is working.
Make the purpose of education explicit (think XXX). Not just what to learn, but why it matters.
And his most counterintuitive message may be the most important: “Don’t try to make children ‘happy’. Make them well-educated and their future happiness becomes far more likely.”
The Bottom Line
The central message is deceptively simple: trust education. When curriculum and pedagogy align with how humans learn, children flourish. We no longer need to ask whether pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds can achieve at the highest levels. They are doing so in schools where expectations, curriculum design, and pedagogy reflect what we actually know about learning.
The question is whether we are prepared to redesign to make that possible everywhere.
Let me know your thoughts….
❓Why is this approach not the norm across all schools?
❓If you work in a school or trust, where do assumptions about “ability” still show up in decision-making?
❓How do we bring about the changes you need to make?