For years, we have used “high standards” as shorthand for outcomes, culture and credibility.
But too often we have allowed a quiet, corrosive loophole. Some schools have been able to look exceptional while children with the greatest needs quietly orbit the edge of the system, spending more time out of lessons, out of class, or out of school altogether.
In other words, we have sometimes praised excellence that is not fully for everyone.
That is why the most important reform Bridget Phillipson is driving is not a new initiative or a new acronym.
It is a change in what we mean by the word “standards” in the first place.
Not standards that work when pupils arrive ready to learn, regulated, confident and supported at home. But standards that hold when childhood arrives complicated, anxious, distracted, disrupted or carrying needs that schools struggle to meet.
In 2026, in the middle of a fast-changing childhood, that is the only definition of standards worth having.
A more uneven world
Children are growing up in a world that is noisier, more intense and more uneven than the one many adults remember.
Social media and smartphones compress adolescence into a constant performance. Poor mental health and neurodiversity are more visible, more discussed and often more acute in how they show up in classrooms. Family life is under pressure from the rising cost of living.
The system has not always kept pace with those realities, and the result has been predictable: more unmet need, more disengagement, more absence, more escalation and a growing sense among too many pupils that school is not “for them”.
So, the question for policy is not whether we choose standards or inclusion. It is whether we finally admit they are the same project.
The very best schools have always understood this. They do not run two systems. They build one culture, one curriculum, one set of routines, one set of expectations.
Then they design the support so that every child can meet them. They keep children in school not by lowering the bar, but by strengthening the scaffolding.
Walk into these schools and you can feel it. Classrooms are calm and behaviour is explicit and largely predictable. Teaching is precise and adaptive. Support is early and normalised, not locked behind a fight for paperwork.
SEND is not treated as an awkward bolt-on. It is part of the craft of teaching.
High standards must mean inclusion
The barometer of “exceptional” should sit not just in headline results, but in the distribution of success.
Does the school’s curriculum stretch disadvantaged pupils as well as it stretches everyone else?
Does the school keep children present, engaged and learning, especially those most at risk of drifting out?
Because if a school is outstanding only for the easiest to educate then it is not outstanding.
High standards must mean inclusion, and inclusion must mean high standards.
That sounds like a slogan until you recognise what it does to the incentives in the system.
It says that belonging is not a “nice to have”, it is foundational. It says that attendance is not an afterthought, it is a precondition for opportunity.
It says that mainstream inclusion is not sentimental, it is the practical route to better outcomes when properly resourced and properly designed. It says that excellence is measured by who you lift, not who you lose.
A challenge to the sector
This approach also carries a message to the sector that is both respectful and challenging.
Respectful, because it backs professional judgment and elevates the work that great teachers and leaders already do every day, adapting, supporting, stretching, noticing, intervening.
Challenging, because it removes the comfort of saying “we are a high standards school” while quietly accepting patterns of exclusion, internal isolation without an endpoint or low ambition masked as “realism”.
The prize here is bigger than any single policy. It is a reset of the social contract between schools and society at a moment when childhood itself is shifting under our feet.
If we want a generation to grow up knowledgeable, capable and hopeful, we need a system that does not ration its best teachers to the pupils easiest to reach.
We need schools where the most vulnerable pupils are not an inconvenient statistic. but proof of the school’s quality.
So, let’s be clear about what “exceptional” means now. Exceptional is a school where disadvantaged pupils thrive, not just attend.
Exceptional is a school where children with SEND are taught by expert practitioners, supported early, and expected to succeed.
Exceptional is a school where high standards and inclusion are inseparable, visible in classrooms and outcomes and felt in the daily experience of every child.
That is the shift Phillipson is trying to hardwire into the system. And if we get this right, it won’t just improve results, it will improve childhood.
