We talk about dreaming all the time at 100Voices. I want the children to really believe that dreaming is how we get things done; how we make things better for ourselves and for each other. I tell them that this school was a dream once. A hot steam of ideas. Didn’t that make us the product of some sort of strange condensation, suggested one child, down through ice into warm objects? We liked that - the gradual coalition of molecules from dancing stars to solid things. The wonky science of that still excites me.

Thrillingly vivid and bright, yet always only moments away from total dispersal, I tell them that we think of dreams in an almost exclusively positive, benign way. In reality, they can be stubbornly resistant to clarification; crumbly when picked at, fickle and often untrustworthy. And they don’t always share easily. I also warn them that big dreams can, with apparent ease, be dismissed as madness, or be simply too big to hold. A moment ripples across the assembly as each of us immediately realises how touch and go solidifying this place must have been; how easily it could have simply not been.

We talk about dreaming all the time at 100Voices. It almost always helps.

Disclaimer:  Let’s imagine our school is a work of fan-faction, indebted to all those wonderful rebel school start-up narratives.  Not all of it is untrue.