Why we have to be different.

It is that time of year again. The Pumpkin Latte is back in stock, the leaves are falling from the trees and schools are updating their websites and marketing videos. There's nothing wrong with this, of course - schools must position themselves in the marketplace and anyone who thinks otherwise is either foolhardy or sitting on a terrifyingly enormous endowment.

If, like me, you work in the sector, then your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - perhaps even the dreaded TikTok - accounts will have been flooded, in recent weeks, with promotional material from every school under the sun - each one promising, of course, that they have the secret recipe to give a child the magical education that every school wants for their child - like Hogwarts, only without the running, screaming, dying and (at times) questionable acting.

Drones plough through cathedral windows, scallywag children drop through a box in one classroom and emerge in another, smiles beam radiantly out from choirs blasting something sort of contemporary but which has enough traditional oomph to it to appeal cross the generational boundaries at top volume. A clearly hot-shot sporty kid scores an improbable [insert scoring mechanism for game] in a hotly contested but amicably settled game of [insert game with regional appeal] while a spindlier youth in the background seems to be happy just to be involved. Every uniform is ironed. Every face is clean (apart from where artful deployment of mud tallies appropriately with the ethos of the school or where someone on SLT asked the fateful question: 'do you think we should get the CCF involved?').

It is - to some extent - a game. It is not my intent to malign the good work done by very many companies who provide this service to schools They do wonderful things and they work, sometimes, in very challenging conditions. But most schools, if we are honest, want themselves to be presented in a very similar light.

The quest for the USP (my proposed title for the next Indiana Jones film) is a conundrum. If a school chooses to say it is going to do something very differently, it has to ask itself the question (a) is it sensible to highlight this point of difference and will we alienate parts of the market by doing so and (b) can we actually do this different thing in a way that is not pathetic tokenism.

Summer schools are no different and - in many ways - they are worse. Agents, parents and pupils looking at the market place for brief stays in the UK tend to be more particular about what they are looking for. They are less interested in the quirky mosaic, thought to be from Roman times, discovered by Winifred, the archaeology-obsessed fourth former from Ulan Bator than whether or not your programme includes a trip to London and whether or not you have an accredited qualification at the end of it.

There are some baselines, then, that have to be kept the constant - some sine qua nons of the Summer School world. You have to offer English lessons - and you have to be able to offer differentiated pathways for those of differing abilities. You have to make sure that there is choice at mealtimes and that you are transparent with expectations around accommodation. You have to have a clear mobile phone policy and robust first aid procedures in place. None of this, however, is particularly sexy - and even directed by Spielberg, underpinned by a sumptuous John Williams score, it's not likely to make a very impressive video.

And some schools and summer schools will stop there, and I suppose there's sort of a quiet dignity about that: "Fictitiousham Hall. We're a school. We do school stuff.' I think, as a parent, I could be attracted by such a no-nonsense, no frills approach and, one imagines, it would certainly reduce the marketing budget (probably in direct proportion to the school role). Pupils

Others take what I like to think of as the 'car manufacturer' approach. When I was growing up, cars were actually quite different from each other. There were big ones, small ones, angular ones, rounded ones, ones that moved, ones that didn't - my family seemed to have a particular penchant for the latter. Nowadays, however, it's all a bit samey and the consumer expectations are so high that the adverts have gotten faintly ridiculous: a chic black vehicle drives through the alps, skidding and throwing itself about (in a way that no self respecting owner of the car would ever even attempt, but they are happy to know they could if they wanted to), an eagle passes and looks lustfully at the four-by-four as it mounts some peak or other; the cello music swells, the shot changes to the interior and [insert celebrity] reclines against the headrest while a sultry voice intones "The Volkaudivo 4.2 - now with cupholders as standard.". I won't point fingers at the schools who take such an approach, but you know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

To actually be different is not as easy as it sounds. It costs effort and it costs time and it requires the construction and tireless maintenance of a culture in which this difference is not just celebrated, but actually welded on to every aspect of the experience.

Anyone who has worked in the education sector this year will have sat, with weary dread, in some auditorium somewhere in the dying days of August and heard some senior leader deliver a talk about how different the school is going to be this year. I have delivered such orations in my time and can report back (and perhaps it is just me) that the imagined response of the teaching body throwing you up onto their shoulders and parading you in triumph around the school grounds in ecstatic jubilation, is less common than Sharon from Geography approaching you immediately afterwards to check whether you've ordered more toner for their photocopier.

We wanted to make Oswestry Summer School different from the outset - but we didn't want to do it just for the ability to say 'we're different' or so that enterprising film-makers could capture footage of children learning Latin while skydiving. That wasn't the point.

There is a culture of variety at Oswestry school - the unofficial motto, of course, being 'doing things differently since 1407'. It's not a bolt on. It's not something that has been grafted on by over-zealous marketing. It's just true. Every pupil or member of staff at Oswestry knows it to be true not on the surface - but deep inside - and anyone who attended the open day this weekend will have seen that in the flesh.

So we wanted the Summer School to carry that ethos with it. We needed the right people, we needed careful planning and we needed the pupils to understand what they were signing up for - it would never have been the tremendous success it has been without any of these core elements.

But why bother? Why not stick to a traditional programme - teach some English, watch Les Mis, throw a disco or two and print some certificates?

Because these are children. This is their summer. They deserve it to be spectacular.

It was Darwin who introduced the notion of 'disruptive events' as part of his theory of natural selection. The notion that something occurs that is of significant magnitude to profoundly affect the course of development. This is what we wanted out education to be about - in fact this is what we want all education everywhere to be about, isn't it? You want children to be so utterly bamboozled by something or staggered by it or overwhelmed by it that it sets of the sorts of fireworks in their mind that have only previously been adequately depicted by Disney in Ratatouille. We're all about stimulating curiosity, about nurturing interests, encouraging creativity and making connections.

And it isn't about gimmicks or expensive technology - it's about the brilliance and creativity of a team who get and who understand children and who want them to enjoy themselves in their learning. I was very fortunate to work with some exceptional people this year and I look forward to doing so again in 2025.

I'd like to finish this slightly wayward ramble with some feedback received just yesterday from the mother of a pupil who joined us from Japan this year. "Since he has come back," she says, "he has started to try everything. He just wants to find out about everything and to have every experience on offer - and I know this started with you."

Summer programmes may be short - but if you choose to do them differently, they can still pack one hell of a punch.