In a recent conversation with Professor Deborah Eyre, I found myself rethinking one of the most deeply ingrained assumptions in education: the idea of ability. For generations, schools have operated on the belief that each child has a fixed, inherited set of cognitive limits and that the job of education is simply to help them reach – whatever their “potential” happens to be.
But according to Deborah, this concept is not just outdated, it’s actively holding back students and schools.
Over decades of research into how the most successful learners think and learn, her conclusion is remarkably clear: successful learners are made, not born. And the science has now caught up with what great educators have long intuited; almost anyone can become a high performer with the right opportunities, support and practice.
The end of the “ability” era
Deborah pointed out that, even when she began teaching, psychologists were already questioning the notion of fixed ability. The evidence accumulated gradually, then suddenly.
Carole Dweck’s work popularised the idea of growth mindset, but she was far from alone. Anders Ericsson’s “deliberate practice” research showed that expert performance is built, not inherited. To the point where he famously declared: “Talent is grotesquely overrated”.
At the same time, researchers like Robert Sternberg and James Flynn were demonstrating that IQ, long treated as a hard boundary around children’s capability, is far more malleable than we once thought. Flynn’s global IQ research revealed year-on-year gains that traditional psychological explanations simply couldn’t account for.
By the early 2000s, psychology was moving decisively away from diagnosing ability and toward developing performance.
Then neuroscience stepped in and completed the picture.
The brain is plastic (exquisitely so).
By 2015, neuroscientists were able to show that the brain is not just capable of change; it is designed for it. Neural pathways strengthen through practice, creating faster, more efficient patterns of thinking. The more students practise the right things, the better their brains become at learning.
Add to this the emerging field of epigenetics (demonstrating how behaviour and environment shape gene expression) and the conclusion is impossible to ignore:
There are no meaningful, inherited cognitive constraints for the vast majority of young people. Performance is buildable. Ability, as a concept, is obsolete.
As Deborah put it to me, we should be building high performance in everyone, not reserving it for the minority who appear to have “ability”.
Why aren’t more schools working this way?
If the science is so clear, why hasn’t the education system shifted?
Deborah argues that, while many individual schools are already operating in this new, evidence-informed space, the system as a whole is still catching up. Policy frameworks, inspection models, accountability structures and basic assumptions about intelligence are all rooted in 20th-century thinking.
But in schools that embrace performance development rather than ability sorting, the impact is profound. Students develop agency, self-belief and competence. Teachers stop segmenting learners prematurely. Curriculum and pedagogy shift from “delivering content” to developing thinking. And performance rises. For everyone.
From research to reality: the High Performance Learning framework
In 2004, Deborah became a Chair Professor for her work into successful learners. By 2010, she felt certain that schools could deliberately create them at scale. But instead of working through government, she decided to build a global proof of concept.
The result is High Performance Learning (HPL). A framework codifying the cognitive competencies, values, attitudes and attributes that empower learners to become high performers.
The theory is sophisticated but the application is profoundly practical:
➡️ Teach the competencies.
➡️ Make them explicit.
➡️ Give students regular opportunities to practice them and remove the ceiling on expectations.
Ten years later, more than 160,000 students are in HPL schools, with many more adopting elements of the model. The impact is visible not just in results, but in student mindset, quality of work, teacher morale and school culture.
When Deborah publishes the updated edition of her book High Performance Learning: How to Become a World-Class School in spring 2026, she intends to use it as a springboard to scale this thinking across England where, in her words, “DfE and MATs are currently behind the global forefront of practice.”
Rethinking what we believe about learners
The message that stayed with me from our discussion was strikingly simple:
It’s all to play for.
We can build better brains — if we choose to.
For leaders and teachers, that means designing environments where success is not rationed. For policymakers, it means updating the assumptions that underpin curriculum, assessment and accountability. And for parents, it means recognising that their child’s future is not written in cognitive stone.
The challenge now is not scientific. It’s cultural.