Recently I attended one of the many achievement awards events run by the Jack Petchey Foundation. Few teachers outside of London or Essex will know about this organisation, which is such a shame because attending any of their celebrations is a masterclass in educational integration. Mantras like inclusion, differentiation and even the totemic duo grammar and comprehensive, lose all their Ofstedian bombast when you see the ideals these single words struggle to capture, physically smiling and shining on stage in front of your eyes.

Somehow this quirky organisation manages to rise above preconception and prejudice and delivers the simplest, most charmingly sincere celebrations of teenage effort, energy and will. It doesn’t matter what social class you hail from, how silver or tarnished the spoon life shoved in your gob, those teenagers the foundation celebrates share only one thing. They have done something at least one professional teacher is sufficiently astute enough to genuinely admire, as an adult.

Intermingled with the disco lighting, thumping rock music and the individuals receiving handsome medals from some local VIP, you will be treated to other teenagers willing to sing and dance, or stun you with their musical skill, however quaint or gentle. Whether it’s handbell ringers from a special school, dinging, donging and beaming their way immaculately through Run by Snow Patrol, or a lad playing a tenor saxophone half his size, as though he lived in smoke-filled, twenties jazz clubs, you will see something heart-warming.

No doubt much of this is down to Jack Petchey himself, an entrepreneur from a different age, as unassuming and low key as a bass pedal on a church organ. Unsuccessful at school, Sir Jack learned all of his maths and most of his skills from the navy. His business deals have involved the kinds of numbers most of his teenage beneficiaries will only ever see on a lottery ticket. He’s an unusual figure in a select club more usually populated by big egos and preening self-publicists. It’s that difference in style that I find so revealing and so pertinent for schools.

While pre-teens race to mimic what they think is adult (or at least celebrity) behaviour via the screens on their mobile phones, and TV and film companies churn out every imaginable fairy story, comic book trivia or magical fantasy, dressed up for adult consumption (even Game of Thrones is little more than Hobbit porn) that critical space between adults and children has become disturbingly grey. Schools need it black and white.

Schools have a vital role to play in introducing children to the idea that man is a supremely intelligent creature, capable of astounding scientific and cultural achievement. It’s in school where children should be introduced to what educational effort and success can create, where they should learn to understand what it takes to carry out ground breaking science or produce striking, insightful literature or art. When schools set their sights lower, whether constrained by real politicians, seduced by commercial interests, or driven by their own politicised narrow mindedness, into crudely delivering jobs, they sell the kids they teach, and their future, woefully short. The Petchey Foundation gets this, hence its unbridled optimism and emphasis on high aspirations.

How many schools I wonder, have lost the crucial ability to represent the adult world to children as distinct and admirable? How many events, activities, even the day-to-day contact that takes place in some schools, blur the distinction between adults and children, allowing the adult world to leak into the child’s, taking away the security and confidence most children need for them to succeed? How many teachers fall for the comic suggestion that comics can replace books? Isn’t that part of the reason so many teachers feel they have to work so hard to gain respect? That respect should be inherent in the job, a logical consequence of having studied hard and earned the right to stand up in front of a classroom full of children and convey what you know, as an adult, to them.

My career has criss-crossed back and forth between two distinct worlds, education and commerce. And the older I get the more I understand that biblical gem, you can’t serve God and Mammon. The idea that wisdom has to be earned has become taboo today. Political leaders in middle age appoint fledglings to powerful positions in government presumably on the basis that their political zealotry trumps any understanding of human behaviour they might have managed to cobble together in the months between leaving university and playing house in some bureaucratic playgroup. That stinging, widespread disaffection with political representatives of all shades that is busy planting its muddy, hobnailed boots so ungraciously on the white, vinyl desks of baffled journalists and media commentators globally, makes complete sense to me. No class has a monopoly on ignorance.

The little wisdom I’ve accrued over decades working in business and in education has alerted me well in advance these days to the omnishambles that can so often result when the public and private sectors meet. One side secretly abjures and castigates the other for not living in the “real world” while a self-righteous, public sector openly sneers and snides at anything to do with business, as though “profit” were a bad smell or a four-letter word, not the bread they love to butter so lavishly. It’s as though on the verge of adult life the goats choose greed and the sheep selflessness and God help any shepherd, however good, who has to manage both. Altruism on a balance sheet looks like faeces on new bed linen.

What The Petchey Foundation does with impressive confidence, is to rise above all of this because it behaves as all adult organisations should, treating teenagers with respect and admiration, but always from that hard earned top stair even Christopher Robin knew you only reach by surviving the bruises, failures and victories adult life inevitably dishes out. Schools too have to ditch their Pooh.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow TES on Twitter and like TES on Facebook