The first steps of school change are usually the hardest.
Not because the ideas are bad. Not because they’re particularly hard to explain. It’s because the old system is very good at being itself.
The timetable works. Exams are understood. Teachers know their role. Students know how to play the game. Every part of a school is tuned, quietly and over years, to keep doing what it already does.
Then you introduce something genuinely different — a real project, student agency, a different kind of evidence of learning — and suddenly everything starts moving at once. Roles blur. Old certainties stop applying. And it’s easy, right at that moment, to look back fondly at the old model and think it looked smoother, more solid, more finished.
This is why schools retreat too early. They compare the first attempt at a new model against the hundredth year of the old one. That’s not a fair fight, and it was never going to be.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal over the past two weeks, which I spent in Hong Kong with the team at DSHK, where we launched our new concept high school and the Passage Year — something we’ve been designing together for the better part of a year.
Alongside the DSHK team, our CTO helped shape an Andromeda learning system that turns everyday learning activity into usable insight at extraordinary speed. It sits alongside the work we’ve begun to integrate AlmachTM into the school’s operating model — not as a bolt-on tool, but as infrastructure the school actually runs on.
But the ambition here is bigger than another layer of school technology. It’s to help schools dynamically build modules, integrate Chinese and international learning pathways, track capability growth over time, and use AI to coordinate learning — without outsourcing the very human things that matter most: judgment, relationship, the teacher’s read on a room.
That is the bottleneck we are trying to solve. Not “how do we add more technology to a school,” but “how do we make sure the technology is in service of something we can actually see and name.”
If we’re unclear about what we’re trying to accomplish, the technology itself has limited use. So the discipline has to come first: make learning visible. Then build from there.
That discipline is also, as it turns out, the answer to why school change is so hard in the first place — and how it actually gets done.
For genuine transformation, you don’t start with a declaration. You start with what’s manageable for your capacity and your vision right now. Concretely, that’s meant:
We run one excellent project. We teach when the teaching is needed — not on a fixed schedule, but when students are ready for it. We let students make real decisions with real autonomy. We collect evidence of what happened. We reflect on it honestly.
Then we do it again.
Project two is easier than project one. Project three is better than project two. That’s not a coincidence — it’s the mechanism. That is how schools change: not through a declaration, not through the usual jargon, but through grit and determination, one well-run project at a time.
A huge thank you to DSHK for being such an ambitious partner through this process. Building something genuinely new asks a lot of a school — of its patience, its trust, its willingness to look at an imperfect first attempt and see the shape of what it’s becoming rather than measure it against a system that’s had a hundred years to smooth its own edges.
We’re confident that what DSHK and Almach are building together — the high school, the Passage Year, and the learning infrastructure underneath both — will become an important reference point for the region.
Impact on learning has to come first. Everything else, including the technology, is in service of that. Make learning visible. Then build from there.
