I’m increasingly of the opinion that it takes huge bravery to occupy the middle ground. Too easily maligned as beige fence-sitting, our instincts often lead us to extremes and the narrative preferences in this place and time favour polarisation over complexity and nuance. In education we seek fervently to codify and to rationalise our work, to make it easily replicable, to make it clear and understood – and this is laudible and important. The same instincts, though, lead us to articulate our position as much for what it is not as what it is. On the increasingly toxic platform that is ‘X’ we see good people ridiculed, vilified and maligned for stating position. Others understandably use the platform to gain followship and do so by making bold, brash, hyperbolic statements that leave no room for complexity. The dialogue that ensues becomes increasingly polarised and, despite being undertaken by well-educated people the comments can become gratuitous and unpleasant.

In so many different parts of life and society, including education, there seems to be little room for holding opposing views in tension and appreciating the middle ground: not as compromise, but as a recognition that life is neither linear nor binary, that education, schools and the business of school improvement is multi-faceted, messy and full of contradictions; that some things work in some places and that all things work somewhere but that rarely does anything work everywhere (to marginally misquote Tim Brighouse).

I would like to be a proponent of the middle ground. Here, we see more than one perspective and agree and disagree along lines of personal and organisational preference, with an openness to challenge and change. Here we recognise that two oppositional ideas can at once be true, however inconvenient this is. Here we value dissonance, difference, and the itch of disharmony in the pursuit of excellence. We can believe in reducing exclusions wherever possible and still make the difficult decision to exclude. We can commit passionately to increasing student belonging and still live with the inadequacies of our own system. We can re-think our lessons and our classrooms and our schools in light of increasing need and still insist on silence and compliance at times.

As someone who finds it reasonably easy to visualise a future that is as yet unrealised, I have spent more than twenty years in the sector designing the next thing whilst tending to today’s reality: holding two concepts in tension in this way has become a habit that I believe to be increasingly rare and important.

If we are unable to find comfort with the ‘other’, to hold space for silence and dialogue between opposing positions, there is little hope.

The middle ground isn’t devoid of passion. To describe it as non-committal is to misunderstand. The middle ground is fertile – here fall the seeds of a range of different thoughts, and here grow up ideas in one another’s shade, in colours and arrangements previously unseen and unknown. The middle ground is not simply compromise: it’s complex, it’s creative, it’s curious. It takes bravery to occupy the middle ground, and brave people to resist the urge to seek assurance about what they are in light of all they are not.

There’s space in the middle ground for a few more us though: see you there.