Monthly Musing: On Creativity...

I was watching The Middle recently when a throwaway comment about every snowflake being unique caught my attention. It’s not a new idea to me, but something about hearing it in that moment made me pause in a different way. Not in a poetic sense, but in a very literal surely that can’t be true? kind of way.

Perhaps it’s timing. The idea has likely passed me by before without landing, but this time it stayed long enough to follow. And, as tends to happen, that led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Snowflakes all begin in the same way – a tiny particle, a simple structure, the same underlying pattern. And yet, no two are the same. Not because they are trying to be different, but because they have travelled differently. They are shaped by the conditions they move through – temperature determining their structure, humidity shaping the detail, and the journey itself influencing what they become as they fall, change, respond and adapt.

It’s a simple idea, but one that sits very clearly alongside our work in schools. What we see in front of us – the behaviour, the presentation, the pattern – is not the starting point. It is the outcome of a journey.

Children don’t arrive as finished forms. They are shaped over time by the environments they move through, the relationships they experience, and the conditions they are asked to navigate. Dysregulation, withdrawal, control, overwhelm – these are not random or isolated; they are patterned responses, formed through experience.

It brings to mind the work of Dr Lisa Cherry and her framing of faces, spaces and places – the idea that children are continually shaped by the people around them, the environments they inhabit and the experiences they move through. Seen in this way, behaviour begins to make sense, not as something separate, but as something situated.

Snowflakes don’t grow in isolation; they are shaped by what surrounds them. And when the conditions change, so do they. The same holds true here. Change sits in the conditions – in the environments we create, the relationships we offer, and the consistency we hold over time.

In practice, this is rarely dramatic. It sits in the quieter shifts – noticing before correcting, prioritising felt safety, remaining consistent even when that consistency isn’t immediately returned, and holding the child in mind, especially when their behaviour makes that difficult. Small relational moments, repeated over time, gradually change what becomes possible.

Snowflakes follow the same rules, but they each have their own journey. The same is true for us.

And with that comes something else. When we understand that what we are seeing has been shaped by experience, it becomes much harder to respond with judgement alone. Compassion, empathy, understanding, acceptance – these don’t sit alongside the work, they sit at the centre of it. Not as abstract ideals, but as necessary conditions, particularly in a world that often feels anything but steady.