It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Whole Education, a group of school leaders and determined idealists who are resolved to “keep the faith”. By that they mean they are united in their common resolve to do “more than the basics” and share ideas on curriculum, timetable and school organisational practices that enable that to happen.

Their annual conference at the end of this month is called “Doing More With Less” - a theme that causes all schools to scratch their heads. It is all too easy to decide where painful cuts have to be made but more difficult to overcome the obstacles, not to mention the Jeremiahs who seem to emerge to poison the atmosphere at such times.

Schools, of course, have to look to themselves for answers. They can expect precious little help from a government so fixated with Brexit that it turns a blind eye as the major public services on which we rely, such as the NHS, social care and education, gradually disintegrate.

The latest stage of consultation on schools funding, for example, is a breath-taking exercise in ill-timed irrelevance: it sets schools against schools both within local authority areas and between those areas and there can be precious few schools looking at anything better than a slightly smaller cut in resources as a result of it being introduced at a time of savage cutbacks.

Whole Education and others, however, are attempting to overcome this grim outlook. The more obvious approach, which almost all schools are considering, will be to disperse leadership by sacrificing some senior posts and marginally increasing class size, while holding on to resources. But that is scarcely “doing more with less” just doing what has to be done.

Fuel intellectual curiosity

So, what will raise the spirits? I suggest three priorities. First, no matter how much you cut, sustain - even increase - the budget for staff learning, development and wellbeing. Staff intellectual curiosity and energy is the fuel on which the school runs: you’ll need it more than ever in the next few years, so preserve it.

Second, carry out an exercise in mapping the “low-effort/high-impact” and “high-effort/low-impact” practices in schools with a view to adopting the former and ditching the latter. To get ideas running, start by putting the same word - for example “marking” - in each box and get everyone in a faculty or phase to discuss what is ineffective and effective marking. The same exercise will enable schools to identify the “breakable plates” and allow them to stop spinning.

A third suggestion is to involve students more. It is the neglected Cinderella of school improvement. Get beyond token monitors, prefects and school councils towards peer counselling, mentoring and tutoring.

Some schools involve pupils systematically in budgets and staff appointments; others in faculty management or staff development; and a few have a student-led school improvement plan to mirror and complement the one for which the governors and SLT are responsible. In those schools that have gone furthest, teachers swear by “flipped lessons” and pupils run many of the extra-curricular activities besides being involved in self- and peer-assessment.

It reminds me of the inspector who, on visiting schools in trouble, often remarked: ‘The staff are working flat out and are exhausted - the trouble is the pupils aren’t.” I have a fear that if we don’t heed the messages from the likes of Whole Education, there will be more staff exhaustion. We need to avoid that at all costs.

Sir Tim Brighouse is a former schools commissioner for London