Schools are places where intentional teaching and learning happen, and they are also cultural atmospheres that shape the intellectual, social, and inner lives of young people over time. When I hear my school called a ‘bubble’ or that people are ‘institutionalised’ into the school, it indicates the immersive quality of our culture. Such descriptions could be concerning when the bubble is unexamined, but can be positive when we are aware and intentional about the kind of place we are shaping.

I have previously written about culture as the shared and often unspoken elements of school life: purpose, values, stories, relationships, behaviours, and language. Students encounter learning materials, classroom environments, and teacher instruction, while absorbing ways of speaking and listening, norms of attention or disruption, assumptions about intelligence and effort, and expectations about who belongs, who speaks, who is seen, and who is heard. The question is not whether schools produce culture; they do. Rather, it is whether this cultural formation is deliberate, ethical, and coherently aligned with mission, vision, and values.

Recently, in conversation with Fionnuala Kennedy, Head of Wimbledon High School, she described what students and families value most about her school as “the air we breathe every day.” That phrase stayed with me as it names the accumulation of small daily actions that shape our community’s experiences. The air we breathe in a school is what I call the “tangible intangibles” – the way classes begin, the ‘vibe’ in the yard, the buzz in the staff room, the feeling visitors carry with them as they move through the grounds. The cultural air we breathe can be evident in explicit things (school values, communicated messages, behavioural expectations, position descriptions, policies) but develops largely through daily exposure and immersion. The cultural atmosphere that percolates through every interaction in a school cannot be packaged or labelled, but it can be felt.

The power of Fionnuala’s metaphor lies in the constancy of breathing and its absence of conscious decision. Breath comes in and out, sustaining life through unassuming repetition. We often don’t take time to consider and value the air we breathe. We may not notice a change unless there are sharp changes in its quality – temperature, pollution, smell, humidity. School culture operates in much the same way. It exerts influence through repetition and immersion. It shapes what feels normal, possible and admirable.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offers a way of understanding the cumulative effects of schools’ cultural atmosphere, and how school cultures endure. Habitus describes how dominant social and cultural conditions are established and reproduced. Individuals absorb dispositions, ways of perceiving, valuing, and acting through participation in social contexts, which are then reproduced through practice. In this sense, habitus is the embodiment of how cultural norms are sustained over time through prolonged exposure to particular cultural conditions.

Schools generate habitus through their structures, routines, language, and expectations. Policies encode assumptions about what matters and what is tolerated. Timetables, assessment practices, technology use, and pastoral structures all contribute to the conditions in which learning and wellbeing unfold. What we measure and make time for signals what we value. Teachers shape the air of classrooms through their relationships with knowledge, students, and each other. Leaders shape culture through what they communicate, what they protect and interrupt, and what they allow to pass without comment. The stories of a school’s alumnae often reveal how particular ways of thinking and being, shaped at school, are reinforced and carried forward over time.

One of the challenges of culture is that it is harder to see from the inside. We enter an organisation and are absorbed into its normalised ways of thinking, speaking, valuing, listening and acting. Early in my principalship, I remarked that “you cannot read the label when you are inside the jar” and I was, at that time, outside the jar – new to the organisation and able to be an observer of culture. With time, immersion brings familiarity, and familiarity brings ease. Now immersed in that culture, I am reminded that over time the air becomes less visible to those who breathe it daily. We can take the good, the bad, and ‘the way we do things around here’, for granted. What feels comfortable to those on the inside may feel constraining or confusing to those arriving from elsewhere. We need new eyes, ears, and voices to enter our schools to constantly show us what observers can see that we cannot, to challenge us to be aware of the air we are breathing and the culture we are constantly creating. Schools benefit from inviting new staff and families to tell us what they notice as they enter our community.

Thinking of culture as the air we breathe helps us to understand leadership as stewardship rather than directorship. It involves sustained attention to mission and values, pace and pressure, coherence and alignment, and the quality of intellectual and emotional conditions. It asks leaders to consider whether operational structures support excellence and care, whether teachers have the space and trust to teach with energy and depth, and whether students experience challenge as meaningful opportunity for growth. These are ethical considerations as much as strategic ones, because students and staff do not opt in or out of the air they breathe.

As my school prepares to launch a new strategic plan, I find myself returning to these questions. Strategy can be approached as a list of actions to be implemented, or it can be understood as a means of cultivating culture through careful attention to the conditions that sustain learning and human flourishing over time. Every strategic decision carries assumptions about learning, relationships, authority, and care. Each one shapes how a school feels to those who inhabit it daily.

The most important strategic questions may be experiential ones. How will this be lived by students and staff? What forms of attention will it invite or discourage? What kind of learner and teacher will it make possible? What kind of air are students breathing each day, and what does that air make possible or difficult for them?

What schools offer, day after day, is the air in which young people grow, think, and come to know themselves. That responsibility demands humility, intention, and leadership committed to tending the conditions in which values are lived and people enabled to grow and thrive.