A Year 5 girl said something in a StoryQuest workshop that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

"Miss, school is like a jail."

That child saw something adults had normalised. And she named the part that stings most: when children resist, schools blame the home.

Parents watch their children change. Reception: curious, excited, bouncing to go in. Year 4: resistant. Year 6: defeated. "I hate writing. I'm rubbish at school." The parents who notice this and try to help are told to stay behind the gates. When they raise concerns, they are given feedback about home environment. As though the child who builds Lego for three hours, creates elaborate imaginary worlds, and teaches himself skills from YouTube somehow lacks a home environment that supports learning.

The same child is not broken. He is responding rationally to an environment that does not honour him. But questioning the school environment is harder than blaming the family, so schools blame the family.

Here is what happened when we changed the school environment instead. Across 465 children in 9 schools, every single child engaged. 100%. Including the children whose home environments had been cited as barriers. Tom Hirst at Dixon's Manningham put it plainly: "Even the kids who don't like writing didn't want to leave. They wanted more." Claire Light at Beckfoot Heaton observed: "Taking away boundaries of grammatical perfection freed up creativity. The joy in the room was infectious."

Neither of them blamed the home. Both of them changed the classroom. And the children who were supposedly the problem turned out not to be the problem at all.

That year 5 girl understood exactly what was happening. The prison environment wasn't at home. It was at school.

Parents and teachers both want children to thrive.

But partnership cannot exist while schools are pointing fingers at families locked outside the gates.

When the school environment changes, the home environment stops being the excuse. 465 children proved that. Nine schools proved that.

The question is what you will do with that evidence.