Monthly Musing: On Misdirection...

I was chatting with the Headteacher of one of the schools I work with regularly when she casually said, "We lost £90,000 overnight... just like that." She clicked her fingers.

Naturally, my immediate response was something along the lines of, "Huh?" The actual words I used were considerably stronger.

She went on to explain that changes to the eligibility criteria for Pupil Premium meant that 30 families were no longer eligible. Those families may have disappeared from the funding formula, but the children had not disappeared from the classrooms, playgrounds or life of the school.

We carried on talking and, before long, the conversation turned to the Government's announcement of increased investment in SEND. On the face of it, that's fantastic news and something I would wholeheartedly support. Then she simply shrugged and said,

"It's robbing Peter to pay Paul."

The headline wasn't wrong – SEND funding has increased. It just wasn't the whole story.

That conversation stayed with me. Not because I wanted to write about education funding, but because I found myself noticing the same pattern elsewhere. A magician never really makes something disappear – they simply become exceptionally good at directing our attention somewhere else. While we're watching one hand, the other quietly gets on with the real work.

That's misdirection.

The challenge with misdirection isn't necessarily that we're looking at the wrong thing. More often than not, we're looking at something important – we're simply not looking at the whole picture.

Our brains are wired to respond in this way. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense. We notice movement before stillness, threat before safety and novelty before familiarity because our brains are constantly scanning the environment, asking, "What do I need to pay attention to right now?" It's an extraordinary survival mechanism. The difficulty is that what captures our attention first isn't always what deserves it most.

Once I'd noticed it, I started seeing it everywhere. We can become absorbed by attendance while overlooking belonging, focus on attainment without noticing engagement or become captivated by behaviour while missing the distress it may be communicating to us. None of those things is unimportant – they're simply not the whole story.

Years ago, I came across Beacon House and, in particular, their What We Say resource. Their work challenged me to think more carefully about the words we choose and has influenced both my thinking and the language I use ever since. Words don't simply describe behaviour – they shape the stories we tell ourselves about the people in front of us. If you're unfamiliar with Beacon House's work, I thoroughly recommend exploring their trauma-informed resources. 

If we describe a child as defiant, our thinking can stop there. If we stay curious instead, we begin asking different questions.

What happened?

What does this child need?

What might this behaviour be trying to communicate?

It strikes me that behaviour is a little like a headline. It's the part we see first – the outward manifestation of an internal experience. What sits beneath it might be fear, shame, grief, sensory overwhelm or a nervous system that has learnt to survive rather than feel safe. We can't always see those experiences directly, but we almost always see the behaviour they produce.

Perhaps that's true far beyond schools. We make sense of the world through headlines, snapshots and first impressions. We almost have to – there's simply too much information for our brains to process everything equally. But sometimes those headlines become our conclusions rather than our starting point.

Again and again, I find myself coming back to the same question.

What might we be missing?

It invites curiosity before certainty.

Relational practice doesn't ask us to ignore the headline – it simply invites us to keep reading.

Perhaps that's the invitation this month.

The next time something captures your attention – a headline, a conversation, a behaviour or an assumption – pause before accepting that you've seen the whole picture.

Then ask...

What might we be missing?