Now it’s one of the top schools in the country for accelerating pupils’ progress in English and maths. Children there learn rhyming games, play instruments, sing together and study all kinds of subjects through the gateway of music. And they are flying!

So since it works so well, why don’t all schools do it?

Well, education is a complex, people-based matter and what works with one set of teachers and pupils, in one environment, won’t necessarily translate to a different setting. And there are all kinds of ways that schools can help children do better.

Some schools have started to teach mindfulness meditation to help pupils learn how to be quiet and reflective, while others are using specially-trained petting dogs to encourage their more fragile pupils to grow calmer and more confident.

“Some schools are using petting dogs to encourage fragile pupils to grow more confident”

Some swear by handing out iPads and putting technology at the heart of all learning, while others are turning their back on technology in the belief that an undiluted diet of old-fashioned pupil-teacher interactions is a better way to go. Forest schools take children outside in all weathers, while a growing number of schools swear that regular daily exercise is the key to unlocking their pupils’ potential.

All these schools are right up to a point. Their approaches to schooling work for them, even if what they are doing is a world away from what other schools swear works. There is obviously no single answer to what makes a good school.

However, all these different schools almost certainly have many things in common. Whatever they are doing, they are doing it because they genuinely care about the happiness and success of their pupils. They will have thought long and hard about what they believe will help pupils do better and will have implemented it with rigour and care.

They are also likely to be schools with strong leadership and good management structures and the self-confidence to go against the mainstream flow of schooling.

In turn, their pupils will automatically sense that their school is a place where they are respected and cared for, and where people are working hard to encourage and support them. Almost any approach to education can get results if brought in in this way.

On the other hand, innovations brought in as only trendy fads are likely to be little more than superficial gimmicks.

So in many ways the important thing is not what a school is doing – but the spirit in which it is doing it. Having said that, though, there is one approach to education that is almost certain to make pupils unhappy and to deliver only short-term gains: focussing entirely on exam results and not on the pupils doing the exams.

This may manage to get good results on paper, but teaching to the test, drilling information into children, leaving no room for enquiry, exploration and individual growth practically guarantees a school will be turning out anxious and stunted young people. Their results might look good for now, but those educational underpinnings will turn out to be far too flimsy and inadequate for the demands of later life.

So when looking around for good schools for our children, we parents should always be looking not only at what individual schools are achieving, but also at how they are going about it.