Don Bosco, who began this family of schools in nineteenth-century Turin, left his teachers a
deceptively simple test: are the children known? Not managed, not ranked, not merely taught —
known. It is the measure we still hold ourselves to. A teacher here can post excellent results
and still be having a difficult year, if the quiet child at the back has slipped past unnoticed.
His method has a name — the Preventive System — and three plain ingredients: reason, religion
and loving-kindness. Reason, because children deserve to be told the why of a rule and
not merely handed it. Religion, understood broadly, because a school should point at something
larger than a mark sheet. And loving-kindness, the hardest of the three to fake, because a child
can tell within a week whether an adult is genuinely on their side.
We do not ask whether a class did well. We ask whether every child in it was known by name.
That conviction shapes ordinary Tuesdays. Class teachers meet weekly and talk about individuals
— this one has gone quiet, that one has stopped putting a hand up, another has suddenly bloomed —
long before any of it would surface in an exam. The habit we prize most is unglamorous and
unpaid: the teacher who stays back twenty minutes for the child who is a step behind, and who
does not mention it again. We would rather appoint a patient teacher than a brilliant one, and
we are fortunate to meet many who are both.
