What therapeutic education reveals about institutions that can change—and those that cannot.
Something remarkable is happening in British primary schools, and most people haven’t noticed.
Across the country, schools are quietly restructuring themselves around a different understanding of children. Not as objects to be filled with curriculum, managed through behaviour policies, measured against targets. But as subjects—embodied, relational, carrying their histories in their nervous systems—who need to feel safe before they can learn.
The names vary. Therapeutic Thinking. Emotion Coaching. Attachment Aware Schools. The Attachment Research Community’s whole-school approach. But the underlying shift is consistent: these schools are applying decades of scientific research to transform how adults meet children, how behaviour is understood, how the school day itself is organised.
This is not a curriculum add-on or a wellbeing programme bolted to the side. It is structural transformation. And it is spreading because it works.
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The science behind this transformation has been building for seventy years, across multiple disciplines that rarely talk to each other.
It begins with John Bowlby in post-war London, observing what happened to children separated from their mothers. His attachment theory—developed with Mary Ainsworth’s research on the ‘strange situation’—established that human beings are wired for connection from birth. The quality of early relationships shapes the developing brain, the stress response system, the capacity to regulate emotion. Secure attachment is not a luxury; it is the foundation on which everything else is built.
Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, developed from the 1990s onwards, added neurophysiological precision. The autonomic nervous system, Porges showed, is not simply fight-or-flight versus rest-and-digest. There is a third state—the ‘social engagement system’—that emerges only when the nervous system detects safety. Learning, play, connection, creativity: all require this state. A child whose nervous system is scanning for threat cannot access the neural pathways that make learning possible. Safety is not a precondition for education; safety is the precondition.
Meanwhile, the embodied cognition revolution was overturning a century of assumptions about how minds work. Antonio Damasio demonstrated that emotion is not opposed to reason but essential to it—patients with damaged emotional processing cannot make good decisions. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Anil Seth showed that the brain is primarily a regulatory organ, predicting and managing the body’s needs, with cognition riding on top of this more fundamental activity. The mind is not a computer running programmes; it is an embodied process, inseparable from the flesh it inhabits.
These streams converge on a single insight: you cannot educate a child whose regulatory system is in survival mode. The dysregulated seven-year-old throwing chairs is not ‘choosing’ bad behaviour. Her nervous system has detected threat—real or perceived, current or remembered—and mobilised accordingly. Punishment makes it worse. What she needs is co-regulation: a calm adult nervous system that her own can attune to, borrowing its regulation until she can find her own.
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What does this look like in practice?
In a traditional school, the child who cannot sit still is a behaviour problem. She is removed, sanctioned, isolated. The implicit message: regulate yourself or be excluded. But if she could regulate herself, she would. The demand presupposes the capacity it punishes her for lacking.
In a therapeutic school, the same child is met differently. The adults around her understand that behaviour communicates. They ask: what is her nervous system responding to? What does she need to feel safe? The approach is not permissive—boundaries remain clear—but the orientation shifts from ‘what consequence will change this behaviour?’ to ‘what relationship will help this child?’
Staff are trained in recognising nervous system states. Classrooms are designed to reduce sensory overwhelm. Transitions are scaffolded. Repair is prioritised after rupture. The language changes: not ‘naughty’ but ‘dysregulated’; not ‘bad choice’ but ‘survival response’; not ‘he knows what he’s doing’ but ‘he’s doing what he knows’.
And crucially, the adults’ own regulation is supported. You cannot co-regulate a child from a dysregulated state. Therapeutic schools invest in staff wellbeing not as a perk but as infrastructure. The deputy head who has processed her own attachment history can offer something different to the child whose history mirrors her own.
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The results are striking. Schools that adopt this approach report reductions in exclusions, improvements in attendance, better academic outcomes. But the numbers miss what matters most: children who were failing are now flourishing. Not because they were fixed, but because they were finally met.
I spoke recently with a deputy head at a primary school that made this transition six years ago. ‘We had children facing exclusion,’ she told me. ‘Permanent exclusion, aged eight. Now those same children are thriving. Not because they changed—because we changed. We learned to see differently.’
The transformation is spreading through practitioner networks, conferences, local authority initiatives, and simple word of mouth. Teachers visit therapeutic schools, see what’s possible, and return to their own settings determined to do things differently. It is a grassroots movement as much as a policy initiative.
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Why does this matter beyond education?
Because these schools are demonstrating something that theorists of institutional change have largely missed: some institutions can be transformed from within, and others cannot. The difference is how they face up to reality.
One morning recently, I was reminded of three books that had made a deep impression on me. Jean Boulton’s The Dao of Complexity, Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse, and Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman’s Children of a Modest Star. Three books drawing on widely different streams of knowledge—complexity, colonial history, and social governance—all converging on the same diagnosis: multilateral institutions generate ever more sophisticated representations of fairness while actual relations remain extractive. ‘Many of the most important challenges are’, in Blake and Gilman’s phrase, ‘ungovernable within the current institutional architecture.’
International institutions operate through elaborate, well-established shared concepts that are symbolic maps of reality, rather than reality itself. Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster book Sapiens showed how our species developed that capacity. The grandmother in Caracas, embedded in her actual relationships—family, neighbourhood, land, local economy—is invisible to the legal instruments that determine her fate. The feedback loops are so weak that symbolic representation can run indefinitely on its own outputs, generating SDGs and Paris targets while actual relations remain colonial.
Why? Part of the answer, I want to suggest, lies in a piece of Roman legal infrastructure so foundational we no longer see it: dominium. Absolute ownership. Subject standing over against object. This legal grammar—the owner possessing the owned—became, through the particular path Western civilisation took, the foundation of international law. Nation-states, corporations, legal persons on one side; resources, territories, ‘the environment’ on the other.
Rome did not invent the pattern of symbolic representation running ahead of regulatory feedback—that tendency is inherent to symbolic intelligence wherever it develops. But Rome is where our particular inheritance took legal form. The same pattern appears through different cultural materials in Ming China’s treasure fleets, the Mongol extraction economy, Japanese imperial Confucianism. What matters is not that Rome is uniquely culpable, but that dominium is the legal grammar through which the pattern passed to us—and we can trace it forward through feudalism, colonialism, corporate personhood, and the international architecture that now proves ungovernable.
You cannot negotiate subject-to-subject relationship within architecture that only recognises subject-to-object relations.
Schools are different. A primary school has daily, bodily, unavoidable contact with actual children. A dysregulated seven-year-old can, of course, be processed through symbolic representation—and in too many settings, she is. Her behaviour gets labelled ‘naughty’ or ‘defiant,’ and dealt with accordingly. What therapeutic thinking offers is a different framework: one that recognises what’s actually happening in her nervous system. She is there, in front of you, in her body, and her nervous system is responding to yours. Once you can see that, you cannot unsee it.
This is why therapeutic schools can transform while the UN cannot. Not because the people are different, but because the institution’s contact with reality is different. When flesh-and-blood children keep inconveniently showing up, demanding to be met as subjects, symbolic frameworks that refuse to see them eventually become untenable. The feedback is too immediate, too embodied, too real.
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The therapeutic schools movement did not wait for education law to be rewritten. It transformed practice within existing legal structures. Ofsted still inspects. The statutory curriculum remains. But the actual governance—how dysregulation is met, how relationships are built, how learning happens—shifted to subject-to-subject. The visible legal shell persists; the invisible relational culture transforms what actually occurs.
This suggests that transformative energy may be going to the wrong places. Enormous effort goes into reforming institutions furthest from reality—the international legal architecture, the financial system, global governance. This is trying to fix dominium from within dominium, at the scale where symbolic representation is least constrained by actual regulatory feedback.
Meanwhile, institutions that can’t escape reality—schools, hospitals, local governance, cooperatives—may be far more open to relational change. Not because the legal shell changes, but because reality keeps breaking through. When enough people within such an institution begin practising subject-to-subject, the organisational culture shifts even while the dominium framework nominally persists.
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The quiet revolution in our primary schools is not just about education. It is a demonstration of how institutions change when they cannot escape the reality they serve.
The dysregulated child forces the teacher to deal with reality rather than a concept. The science—Bowlby, Porges, Damasio, Barrett—provides the conceptual framework. The practitioners do the work, day after day, meeting children as subjects, co-regulating nervous systems, proving through practice what theory alone could never establish.
And slowly, school by school, the culture shifts. Not through policy reform. Not through international agreement. Through daily contact with reality—the simple, irreducible fact that actual children keep showing up, in their bodies, demanding to be met.
Perhaps this is how institutions have always changed. Not from the top down, but from wherever reality has not yet been fully filtered out. From wherever human beings keep inconveniently appearing, in their flesh, with their needs, requiring relationship.
The revolution is quiet. But it is real. And it is spreading.
Terry Cooke-Davies
Distinguished Fellow, The Schumacher Institute
