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In a way this all sounds very trite, but it can have profound con-sequences on the ways schools operate. No one is saying that simply telling students that we expect them to do well will work miracles. Few students respond to this kind of feel-good fakery—but they do respond to teachers who take a genuine interest in their well-being. What the research says is that expecting all students to do well can involve rethinking how we teach and how we run our schools. For example, most schools are the slaves of their timetable. Students either successfully complete their course in the time allotted or they do not, even though they learn in different ways at different speeds. Until we make the timetable flexible enough to accommodate different rates of learning, we inevitably condemn some students to failure. To set high expectations for all students carries with it the obligation to set up conditions that make it possible for them to meet those expectations.

Students are more likely to do well when their teachers know them well enough to detect potential problems, to gain their trust and confidence, to encourage and challenge them, and when needed to discipline them without losing their respect. This means that teachers must be able to get to know their students thoroughly and ensure that no student is neglected or overlooked.

The most obvious way to do this is to make sure schools and classes do not become so big that basement waterproofing students get lost in the crowd. Some researchers are suggesting these days that no school should take more than about eight hundred or so students. Where schools are bigger than this, they can be broken down to schools within the school, each holding two or three hundred students and working more or less as independent units, so that they can create a sense of belonging and commitment among their students and build close links between students and teachers. Schools are increasingly using advisory groups, whereby throughout their school life fifteen or so students meet regularly with a teacher-adviser, who gets to know them well and serves as a source of advice, help and support when they need it. Another approach, found mostly at the middle years/junior high level, but increasingly in high schools too, is to create teaching teams of three or four teachers, each a specialist in a particular subject, but sharing responsibility for ninety or a hundred students and planning their own teaching timetable so that they can organize teaching as they see fit. In this way, teachers can work together, get to know their students more closely and combine the academic and advisory duties that are central to good teaching. A less ambitious approach, recommended by the Radwanski inquiry into school dropouts in Ontario in 1987, is for teachers to teach two subjects to the same group of students, and so get to know them better. Whatever approach is chosen, the aim is the same: to find a way for every student in a school to be known well by at least one teacher and to make sure that all students have at least one teacher they trust enough to turn to when they face a problem.