For as long as I’ve been a teacher, there’s been one word above all others that has driven dread into my very soul. It’s cropped up in every school I’ve ever worked in and even on occasion has crossed my own lips, despite my great misgivings. It seems that in so many schools the watchword at all times is “consistency”.

I speak, of course, of that constant need to see sameness around our establishments (not of the sloppy custard on offer in many a school kitchen). But the problem with consistency - like so many other things in schools - is that it can be taken too far.

Often consistency can be the very thing our pupils seek from their daily schooling. In troubled parts of the country, the consistency and security offered by schools and teachers can be one of the few things that keeps children coming in each day.

Likewise, for those who have lacked proper boundaries at home, or with little experience of social settings, consistency in approaches can be a vital tool in the whole-school toolkit in supporting improvement.

I’m certainly not one to argue for anarchy. I like the consistency of uniform rules: everyone knows where they stand and, more importantly, parents are saved the constant bother of arguments that “everybody else wears it”. I also appreciate consistency in behaviour management; I think students do, too.

The need for consistency could be a barrier to improvement in schools 

But if senior leaders are spending their time scouring the school with checklists to ensure that everybody has used the correct coloured backing paper on displays, then we’re losing the plot. When the drive for consistency obsesses over the font used on labels, or the type of ink used in teachers’ pens, or whether books in class A look identical to those in class B, it strikes me that leaders have stopped thinking about what matters.

It can be tempting to think that by ensuring consistency we’re ensuring a fair playing field for every child, but it isn’t always the case. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Just because things are consistent, it doesn’t mean they’re good. Indeed, arguably, the need for consistency could be a barrier to improvement in schools. How does any teacher try out something new? How can educational research make in-roads if we are tied to keeping things the same?

It’s only a short step from “we like things to be consistent” to “we’ve always done it that way”. Or that very worst sort of leadership, that demands that each teacher should be remoulded in the image of the headteacher.

There’s a time and a place for consistency. Fair enough, if you’re a headteacher who has taken on a failing school, and teachers aren’t planning learning and never think to review children’s work, then some minimum expectations might be a good starting point. But in such (rare) cases, I’m sure there are bigger fish to fry than worrying about the way tray labels are printed.

Consistency is fine for setting a minimum bar, but if your ethos rests on making everyone do the same, then there’s every likelihood that for every improvement you make, you’ll hamper someone who could be doing so much more.

Teaching Year 1 is not the same as teaching Year 6; teaching maths is not the same as teaching geography; teaching a full timetable is not the same as teaching six hours a week. We do teachers a huge disservice if we forget it.

Michael Tidd is deputy head at Edgewood Primary School in Nottinghamshire @MichaelT1979