When we tell the story of state education in the UK, what do we say? We often cut straight to the most pressing and most recent element of the story, missing out the opening chapters, the character development, the careful scene-setting. There tend to be heroes and villains in a saga so heavily politicised that their very mention becomes synonymous with particular schools of thought.

It’s also rarely the case that we afford ourselves the luxury of taking anything other than a polarised standpoint on any given element of the narrative: to hold the middle ground, or more accurately, to be able to hold more than one competing perspective in tension, is both more complex and more onerous than simply engaging with the hyperbolic norm – and so, very often, we allow ourselves to be aligned with one extreme view or another as we tell our stories to each other in shorthand.

There is a problem with this.

Within our sector, when we fail to engage with, wrestle with and curate the narrative with real fidelity, we allow stories to be told about us, and about our children, that not only are untrue but are ultimately damaging over time. We all become the stories we tell ourselves, and our sector, too, moulds and shifts according to the dominant narrative more often than we realise.

Who gets to tell the story? And what do they stand to gain or to lose with the telling of it? How far does our sector story rely upon, and influence, our national narrative about self – and what would it mean if we intentionally curated a narrative with a greater dose of positivity and hope than dominant British culture might usually allow?

A recent trip to Singapore has challenged my thinking around narrative and the power of storytelling, particularly at national level. As a tiny yet highly influential and successful island nation, Singapore tells its own story with striking fidelity across different social strata. The curation of the national narrative, as told by the educationalists I met, underpinned one of my most powerful pieces of learning. (Too) simply put, the dominant narrative in the Singapore story is thus: our independence had a challenging start; we knew we had no natural resources and that our people were going to be our best asset; we doubled down on investing in education as our best and only option; at every point as the country has prospered, we have taken the opportunity to re-invest in education.

State education in Singapore is notably successful, is well-funded, and crucially is matched to state-funded practitioner research, development and review which itself is tied to policy-making. Headteachers in Singapore are hugely influential; successive governments have chosen to prioritise and confer status upon them as critical actors in the system. Teachers are recruited from the top third of graduates only, and once recruited they are bonded to the government as civil servants.

This approach is vastly different from our own, and exists within a different culture: we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, look to emulate it directly. How we tell our story, though, is something we can reflect upon.

We have had compulsory state education in this country for more than a century; we have national standards, a national curriculum and national system of independent review; we are at a critical point of system reform where educational leaders are trusted and empowered to make long term structural decisions that will outlast us all; schools are relied upon to maintain and to some extent dictate social norms in a fast-changing world. We are the hope of our communities, and in many cases their pride. We persist.

It is this last sentence that will be our strength in coming years.