What The Repair Shop taught me about teaching
By Tony Cross, Principal – Byron Community Primary School
Last week I had the privilege of attending EDUtech AU, one of Australia's leading education conferences. I came home with a notebook full of ideas, a few provoked assumptions, and one metaphor I have not been able to shake.
Keynote speaker Andrew Hargreaves, one of the world's most respected voices on teaching and school culture, used the TV show The Bear to make a point about what excellent practice actually looks like. High standards. Deep craft. The willingness to say "not good enough. Do it again." It landed hard in a room full of educators.
But on the flight home, it was a different show that kept coming to mind.
The Repair Shop and the heart of teaching
If you haven't watched The Repair Shop on the BBC, the premise is simple: people bring in broken, damaged, or neglected objects (a grandfather's clock, a child's music box, a grandmother's wedding veil) and a team of master craftspeople restore them. Lovingly, patiently, and with extraordinary skill.
It is, on the surface, a show about old things.
But really, it's a show about people. About what we carry. About why some things are worth preserving.
Hargreaves presented a framework built around three elements: the craft, the people, and the world. His central argument was this: the expert practice of teaching is connected to the people it belongs to, in the world they experience together.
Watch one episode of The Repair Shop and you'll see exactly what he means.
The craft: excellence takes time
Every restorer on the show is a master of their discipline. They don't rush. They diagnose carefully, research deeply, try things, fail quietly, and try again. The standard they hold themselves to isn't good enough. It's right.
This is what we aspire to at BCPS. Teaching is a craft. It takes years to develop, constant reflection to refine, and a genuine love of the work to sustain. Our teachers bring that commitment every day: to their lesson planning, to the way they respond to a child who's struggling, to the relationships they build across a whole school year.
Craft doesn't happen by accident. It's chosen, practised, and renewed.
The people: start with the story
Here's the thing that makes The Repair Shop genuinely moving. The restorers always begin by listening. Before they touch the object, they ask: What does this mean to you? Where did it come from? Who did it belong to?
Hargreaves made a similar point about teachers. The question isn't "why won't teachers just do what the evidence says?" The more generous and more useful question is: "Why do teachers do what they do, especially when they resist?"
At BCPS, we try to hold that same posture with our kids and our families. Every child who walks through our gate carries a story. Our job isn't to process them through a curriculum. It's to know them well enough that the curriculum actually means something to them. That's what a small school like ours can do that a larger school simply cannot.
The world: restoration is still possible
Objects arrive at The Repair Shop damaged by time, loss, accident, neglect. Forces no one could control. And yet the restorers never start from despair. They start from what's still here, and what's still possible.
Hargreaves reminded us that schools today are squeezed between competing pressures: political forces pulling in different directions, technology moving faster than anyone can keep up with, and a generation of children growing up in a world that looks very different from the one most of us were educated in.
That's real. We feel it at BCPS too.
But like the craftspeople in The Repair Shop, we don't start from what's broken. We start from what's here: a remarkable community, a team of deeply committed educators, and children who are curious, creative, connected, and committed. We build from that.
There was another session at EDUtech that stuck with me. Dr Jared Cooney Horvath spoke about the myths that drive a lot of edtech thinking. One of his challenges was the assumption that education is broken. That framing, he argued, tends to drive us toward quick fixes and shiny tools rather than toward the slow, human, relational work that actually makes a difference.
The Repair Shop never tries to replace an heirloom with something new. It restores what's already precious.
That feels like exactly the right orientation for a school like ours.
Tony Cross is the Principal of Byron Community Primary School, a small independent community school in the heart of Byron Bay. BCPS welcomes enquiries from families who share a belief that childhood is worth getting right.