I was told the story of a teacher in Ontario who reluctantly participated in a project to improve her students’ learning. After several months she found that “her students performed better than she had even expected herself.” When she told her story, she wept. She felt she had let down hundreds of students over her 20 years of teaching by not having high enough expectations.The power of expectations was demonstrated beautifully in 1968 in a seminal piece of research.

Researchers deceived teachers into thinking a group of students were ‘late bloomers’ who would see great progress over the course of the year. Those expectations became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the end of the year, the fake late bloomers became real late bloomers, with higher levels of IQ relative to their peers.

A culture of high expectations is one of the commonalities of high-performing education systems. Jurisdictions that have a way to go, like England, are attempting to change the culture in recognising how transformative higher expectations can be for children’s lives. It’s no longer excusable to say that a student from a poor background can’t achieve at the same level as someone from a rich background.

The Canadian province of Ontario is an example of a jurisdiction that has successfully changed the culture of expectations. In combination with a series of reforms to improve student learning, it seems to have had a bearing on results. Over a 10-year period, from 2003 to 2012, high-school graduation rates have steadily climbed from 68% to 83%.

Having low expectations is not to be confused with a lack of dedication. Teachers in Ontario were as caring and dedicated 10 years ago as they are today – it’s simply that they didn’t have a culture of believing that all students had the potential to learn and achieve.

So how did they change the culture? First, they identified and shone the light on ‘lighthouse’ schools that had progressed against the expected odds to show what is possible. Second, they provided funding to each lighthouse school to connect with a school that was struggling, matching schools by the demographic profile of their students so they could share their secrets to success.

In New Zealand, socio-economic background has a larger bearing on student achievement than it does in other OECD countries, and poorer achievement among Maori and Pacific students is often lamented.Shining the light on failure identifies the problem. Shining the light on success has the potential to transform not only the expectations but also the reality of student success.