Known knowns, known unknowns, unknowns unknowns

5th June 2026

Welcome back. I hope that the return for you all has been smooth. We now have all of our pupils, students and colleagues are all back from the break. Who’d have thought that the past two weeks would have been so good, from a meteorological perspective. A lovely warm (too warm for some?) bank holiday break and then cooler weather for the return to school and college; especially important at exam time. The weather gods shining on us at last? No doubt before the end of the academic year we’ll have some days which will bring a weather-related challenge or two – be it being too hot, too windy, too wet or too cold (especially important when I’m out on the yard at Sitwell Junior School).

It’s that time of the year when, in addition to getting through the daily challenges, we are projecting ahead, thinking about what the next academic year might bring. We recognise that there are so many things we really can’t control or know the answer for/to right now. Some of those things will hit us ‘between the eyes’ before the summer break, some will emerge through the summer and some will feel like a virtual ‘juggernaut’ come September; be that the exam results, pupil/student numbers etc. But projecting ahead is a must. The 6 Ps: Proper Planning Prevents a Particularly Poor Performance. Or, control what you can control so those other emerging ‘challenges’ don’t derail or destabilise. We could get into, as I’ve discussed before, the Donald Rumsfeld ‘known unknowns’ and the like. We won’t do the deep dive into this now, but there was more sense to what he said than was suggested through the media mocking.

Importantly we understand that there is power in planning. It’s so easy in schools and colleges, which are incredibly intense and busy – that’s what working in a school or college is like, it comes with the territory – to deal with the immediate, be reactive. However, and critically, we understand that those individuals, teams, institutions which take a moment to pause, to breathe, to spend some time thinking ahead, are much more likely to find that they have a future which they can control, rather than lurching from crisis to crisis. We don’t do crises, because we mitigate, we manage, we are strategic.

At this time of year I am encouraging the school and college leaders to invest in some future thinking and future planning?  We will accept that there will be things we don’t know, or can’t do yet. But we won’t let the known unknowns disable us. We know enough, we control enough, we are powerful enough, we have the permissions, we have the right, we are leaders, we will be strategic.

It’s horizon scanning time.

‘Report as we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.’  Donald Rumsfeld

 ‘Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.’ Paul J. Meyer