There's a charming article in today's Telegraph about a school that decided it needed a wood next to it:

When the school was built in a residential area of the town in the 1970s, it had a tarmac playground and a games field, which is how they still build schools today. "All the children could do at playtime was racket around, which resulted in bumps and bruises and poor behaviour," says Ruth Lippitt, who has taught here for 25 years. "Some couldn't deal with open spaces without getting into trouble."

Concerned about behaviour at playtimes, she contacted Brian Stoker, an education adviser for Cheshire County Council with a daisy-fresh approach to how children relate to space in playgrounds. She took his advice; parts of the grounds were imaginatively re-landscaped and a redundant patch of ground near the carpark was earmarked for a wood. Each of the 200 pupils and staff planted a 1ft whip, or young tree, as well as eight more established "standards" to give them an idea of how it would look in the future.

Read it all. It's fascinating.

But even before that bit, there was potentially grim news:

An Ofsted inspector described the woods at Lunts Heath Primary School in Widnes, Cheshire, as an "area for calm and reflection".

Ofsted likes it. So what's wrong with that?

What's wrong is that, instead of being inspired to take a look at what Ruth Lippitt has achieved in Cheshire, and learn from it if they can, and if they can fit it in around all the other things they're doing, teachers all over Britain will, I fear, in due course be "encouraged" to duplicate this experience. Perhaps partly because of this article, London will mull over what's been going on in this Cheshire school and decide to include it in its ever lengthening list of "best practices", and then try to impose it everywhere. Queue another initiative, and more forms to fill in, and in this particular matter, outbursts of titanic rage from teachers whose problem is that the kids in their charge are perfectly happy and well-behaved, but would benefit (in the teacher's judgement) from learning another language. But no. London ordains that the foreign language money that they've managed to scrape together by shaving bits off other budgets must instead be spent on bloody trees.

I'm not against trees. If you think that you've entirely missed my point. My point is that judgements about policy need to be made by those who are going to make them happen.

Anyone who has ever done anything in life, and that's most of us, knows that good things don't just happen, as the result of a one-off decision that they shall. They have to be backed enthusiastically, by people who are determined to make them happen and happen well. More precisely, they need one person who wants to make it work and is determined to make it work. The difference between doing something because you want to, see the point of it, and are determined to make it do what you want, and just going through the motions because some boring ass in authority over you has told you to do it, is all the difference.

This principle doesn't just apply to weird and wonderful things like planting a wood next to your school. It applies to everything. To understanding this distinction is to understand an awful lot that is wrong (but also a good lot that is right) about education in Britain today.