What institutions teach us to believe about ourselves.

Excellence is integrity. At least, that is the central idea I have come to believe in.

Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in a question that is rarely addressed when we talk about education, culture and professional institutions: what do institutions teach people to believe about themselves?

We tend to evaluate institutions through visible outcomes. We look at academic results, artistic achievements, professional trajectories, rankings, reputation and measurable performance. We discuss whether an institution is successful, competitive, innovative or excellent. We also increasingly discuss safeguarding, wellbeing, equality and institutional responsibility. All of these conversations are important. Yet there is another dimension that is much harder to measure: the effect that an institutional culture can have on a person's perception of themselves.

Some forms of institutional harm are obvious. They can be identified, named and, in certain circumstances, addressed through formal procedures. But I have become more interested in what happens beyond those visible cases: the quieter forms of influence that may never constitute a clearly identifiable act of misconduct, but that can nevertheless shape someone's sense of worth, competence and belonging.

A phrase such as “you should know this” may appear insignificant. In an educational environment, however, language is rarely neutral. When it comes from someone who occupies a position of authority, it can contain an unstated judgement: you should already possess this knowledge; you do not; therefore there is something deficient about you. Repeated over time, these small judgements can become internalised. The institution no longer needs to tell the individual that they are inadequate. The individual begins to tell themselves.

This is what makes institutional culture so difficult to examine. The most consequential effects are not always produced by explicit rules or deliberate decisions. They can emerge through expectations, hierarchies, habits, silences and assumptions that nobody has consciously designed, but that everyone has learned to reproduce. An institution can therefore cause harm without considering itself harmful.

There is an important distinction here between institutional policy and institutional culture. An organisation may have excellent policies on paper while continuing to reproduce behaviours that contradict them in everyday practice. It may speak about wellbeing while rewarding exhaustion, speak about equality while reproducing unequal structures, or speak about excellence while creating environments in which people become afraid of making mistakes. The existence of a policy does not necessarily mean that the culture that surrounds it has changed.

This is also why I am sceptical of the idea that institutions can simply “solve” these problems by creating new procedures. Procedures are necessary, particularly when serious misconduct has occurred, but they cannot by themselves transform the beliefs and behaviours embedded within an organisation. There is a risk of confusing the existence of a response mechanism with the resolution of the underlying problem.

The more subtle question is not only what an institution does when something goes wrong, but what it teaches people every day about who they are supposed to be.

In education, this question becomes particularly important because institutions are not simply transmitting knowledge. They are participating in the formation of identity. A teacher, mentor, conservatoire, university or cultural organisation can influence how someone understands their own abilities and limitations. The consequences of that influence may remain long after the person has left the institution.

This makes the selection of teachers and mentors an issue of enormous importance. Educational systems often place considerable emphasis on expertise, credentials, professional achievements and reputation. These qualities matter, but they do not necessarily tell us whether someone is trustworthy with another person's development. Being an exceptional expert does not automatically make someone an exceptional mentor.

Perhaps institutions should therefore ask a different set of questions when deciding who should occupy positions of influence. Not only: How accomplished is this person? How knowledgeable are they? What have they achieved? But also: How do they use their authority? How do they respond to vulnerability? Can people around them make mistakes without being diminished? Do they develop independence in others, or dependence? Do they strengthen another person's sense of self, or gradually replace it with their own judgement?

This becomes even more complicated when we recognise that institutional cultures are often reproduced by people who were themselves shaped by those cultures. The person exercising authority today may have been educated within the same system yesterday. What appears to be individual behaviour can therefore be part of a much longer cycle of transmission.

For this reason, I think we need to move beyond a simple distinction between victims and perpetrators, or between good institutions and bad institutions. The deeper issue is often cultural. What behaviours are rewarded? What forms of authority are respected? What kinds of vulnerability are tolerated? What does an institution actually mean when it uses words such as excellence, professionalism, resilience or commitment?

There is also an uncomfortable relationship between excellence and power. Institutions often select and promote people who have demonstrated extraordinary achievement. Yet extraordinary achievement does not necessarily correlate with integrity. A person can be highly accomplished and still create an environment in which others lose confidence in themselves. Expertise without responsibility can become another form of authority without accountability.

This is why I have increasingly come to think that excellence and integrity should not be treated as separate concepts.

Excellence is often understood as reaching the highest possible standard of performance. Integrity introduces another dimension: how that standard is reached, what it costs, and what happens to the people involved along the way. An institution cannot genuinely claim excellence if the conditions through which excellence is produced systematically diminish the people who inhabit it.

Perhaps the question we should therefore be asking is not simply whether an institution produces excellent results, but whether it produces excellence without compromising human dignity, autonomy and trust.

This is particularly relevant to the arts. Artistic education has traditionally relied heavily on hierarchical relationships, authority and highly individualised teaching. These structures can be extraordinarily productive when the person exercising authority is trustworthy. They can also become deeply damaging when expertise is confused with entitlement to control.

The most effective teacher may therefore not always be the person who knows the most. It may be the person who knows how to make another person capable of discovering what they know, what they do not yet know, and who they might become.

I do not think institutions need less excellence. I think they need to reconsider what excellence means.

An institution should not have to choose between high standards and human integrity. On the contrary, perhaps the highest standard is precisely the capacity to maintain both.

The institutions that matter most are not those that merely produce impressive people. They are those that allow people to become impressive without first teaching them to doubt their own worth.

That, to me, is where excellence begins to become integrity.