​As the news settles that children at a high-performing school were subjected to 'isolating, shaming and humiliating' practices, this moment must mark a turning point in how our education system understands its purpose. The safeguarding review showed that the academic success of Mossbourne academy, one of the UK’s highest-performing schools, was achieved “at too high a cost” for some pupils. The report makes clear that this issue is not limited to one school. Now is the time to redress the balance between wellbeing and academic achievement.

The Department for Education is currently putting the final touches on its White Paper, which will define its policies on behaviour, engagement and inclusion for at least the next parliamentary term. More importantly in the wake of the Mossbourne review, the White Paper will set the tone across the system on what school is for – implicity in how purpose is framed and explicitly with what the system measures.

At Mossbourne, the focus on discipline, tests and targets incentivised staff behaviour that led to children going to a school that had deliberately created a ‘climate of fear’. The vision of academic progress was well-intentioned, but the school system caused harm to the very children it was designed to serve. Too much focus on achieving can create a negative impact on thriving.

So what happens if we flipped it and focussed on thriving instead? Data from the OECD shows that students who reported feeling sometimes or always happy had higher reading scores. Students with more developed social and emotional skills outperformed their peers on Maths. A focus on thriving can have a positive impact on at least some academic areas.

But that’s almost beside the point. While this is definitely not a call to lower our academic ambitions, it’s also not about a focus on thriving as another way to chase after test scores. It is about rejecting the idea that thriving and achieving are necessarily a trade-off. Our children and young people are navigating an increasingly complex world – they need to feel safe, valued and included at school. Success is not just about whether a child excels in the academic content, but how they engage with learning, build healthy relationships and go on to thrive in life.

So what does that mean for the White Paper? The Mossbourne review must inspire deep reflection on how behaviour policies and practices can become skewed. It must inspire difficult conversations on what gets measured and what unintended consequences and incentive structures that creates. We’ve seen that fixating on results can inadvertently harm children. Fixating on thriving, by definition, cannot. It’s time for the Department for Education to put thriving first.