Using the Law of Requisite Variety to raise adaptable young women

Sydenham & Dulwich Girls uses the Law of Requisite Variety to develop agile learners, young women ready to curious and flexible whatever challenge presents itself.

 

Gillian Panton, Head of Junior School at Sydenham & Dulwich Girls GDST, explains why the schools teaches its girls to have more than one answer, using the Law of Requisite Variety to raise flexible, resilient and truly capable young women.

There is a question asked a great deal in the Junior School at Sydenham & Dulwich Girls. It is not a complicated question. In fact, it is just four words long. But in their experience, it might be one of the most important questions a young person can learn to ask herself.

That question is: 'What else could I try?'

It sounds simple. But behind it lies a powerful idea that is shaping everything the school does, from the way the youngest Reception girls approach a tricky puzzle to the way Year 6 pupils navigate friendships, setbacks and challenges that genuinely matter to them.

'The school is not trying to raise girls who always have the right answer. It is trying to raise girls who always have another answer.' says Gillian Panton, Head of Junior School.

The idea behind the approach

In the 1950s, a British mathematician and cybernetician named W. Ross Ashby developed a principle that he called the Law of Requisite Variety. At its core, it says something beautifully straightforward: in any situation, the person with the greatest range of responses has the greatest ability to cope.

Put another way: if life can throw ten different kinds of difficulty at you, but you only have two or three ways of responding, some of those difficulties will always overwhelm you. The solution is not to predict which difficulties are coming. The solution is to expand your range of responses so that whatever comes, you are ready.

Ashby was writing about machines and control systems. But when the school first encountered this principle, it was immediately clear that it described something the school had been working towards for years without quite having the language for it. It described what an education at Sydenham & Dulwich Girls actually looks like.

What this means for girls, specifically

Research into girls' education consistently shows that girls are more likely than boys to internalise failure, to seek a single "correct" answer before acting, and to repeat the same anxious response when things go wrong. They are more likely to give up on a task they find difficult and more likely to attribute struggle to a fixed lack of ability rather than a temporary lack of approach. This is not to criticise girls, but to examine societal teachings and understand where this response may be coming from. Those who praise the right answer, implicitly or explicitly, train children to fear the absence of one. And girls, who tend to be highly attuned to perceived expectations, feel that fear most acutely.

The Law of Requisite Variety offers a different frame entirely. It tells us that strength does not come from having the right answer. It comes from having many possible responses. Flexibility is not a consolation prize for those who are not clever enough to be certain. Flexibility is the mark of genuine capability, the sparkling glimmers of a successful, future changemaker.

That reframe, embedded consistently from the age of four, changes something fundamental in how a girl understands herself.

How the school brings it to life in the classroom

The youngest pupils are not handed a textbook on cybernetics, naturally. But from their very first term, children begin to encounter this idea through the language used, the questions asked and the stories told.

In Early Years and across the Pre-Prep, the school builds what it calls the Toolkit. When a child feels stuck, she will use the classroom 'Ideas Compass', a simple resource filled with suggestions for what to try next. Could she ask a friend? Draw it out? Walk away and come back with fresh eyes? Try a completely different approach? Over time, children begin to reach for the 'Ideas Compass' instinctively. More importantly, they begin to internalise the habit of generating options rather than waiting for rescue.

Story choices in these early years are deliberate. Books like The Most Magnificent Thing give children a language for the experience of trying, failing, learning and adapting. After each story, pupils are asked: what did she do when the first way didn't work? What tools did she use? What could she have tried instead? These are not comprehension questions. They are habit-forming conversations.

In Lower Prep, pupils graduate from using a compass to navigating their own 'Choice Map'. This visual tool sits in every classroom, mapping out the different paths a pupil can take when facing a difficult or emotionally challenging situation. The map lays out diverse routes, such as the Dialogue Trail (talking it out), the Quiet Clearing (taking space), the Pit-Stop (asking for help), the Scenic Route (using humour), the Discovery Path (approaching with curiosity) and the Journal Track (writing their thoughts down). Children are encouraged to explore their personal terrain, noticing which pathways they tread by default and which routes remain completely unexplored. The goal is not to force them down a single, predetermined road; it is to expand their internal map, helping them realise they have the agency to choose their own destination.

By Upper Prep, girls are ready to engage with the idea more directly. The phrase "The Law of Requisite Variety" is introduced as a piece of serious, grown-up knowledge, because girls aged nine to eleven love being trusted with serious ideas. It is explored through history, examining the lives of women who succeeded not because circumstances were in their favour, but because they had the flexibility to navigate circumstances that were not. Florence Nightingale, Ada Lovelace and Malala Yousafzai are studied, not as exceptional anomalies but as exemplars of a learnable skill.

A shared language across the whole school

One of the things Sydenham & Dulwich Girls is most proud of is that this is not a programme that lives in one lesson on a Wednesday afternoon. It is woven into the fabric of daily life at the school.

This consistency matters enormously. Research into how children develop psychological flexibility shows that it is repetition, not intensity, that builds lasting change. A child who hears 'what else could you try?' from her Reception teacher, her Year 4 teacher, her Head and her parents at home is a child who begins to hear it from herself.

What the school asks of parents

The school is honest with the families who join: this approach works best when it is a partnership. Not because parents are expected to become educators at home, but because children are remarkably good at noticing when the adults in their lives believe something consistently.

At the start of each academic year, families are given a short guide to the language the school uses and some suggested conversations for home. Questions like: what didn't work today? What did you try instead? What is a new tool you used this week? These are not homework tasks. They are dinner table conversations that take three minutes and can, over time, change the relationship a child has with difficulty itself.

The parents who engage most enthusiastically with this approach report the same thing: their daughter has stopped saying "I can't do it" and started saying "I haven't found the right way yet." That shift, from fixed inability to temporary challenge, is one of the most significant intellectual and emotional transitions a young person can make.

Beyond Resilience

The school is aware that "resilience" has become something of an educational buzzword, and it is worth being clear about how this approach differs from a simple resilience programme.

Resilience, in its most common usage, tends to mean the ability to bounce back. To endure. To keep going. These are genuinely valuable qualities, and the school absolutely wants its girls to have them. But resilience on its own, without flexibility, can become something closer to stubbornness. It can mean doing more of the same thing, harder, for longer, and wondering why nothing changes.

The Law of Requisite Variety takes the next step. It says: do not just persist. Adapt. Do not just try harder. Try differently. This is a subtler and, the school believes, more powerful message, because it moves the focus from effort alone to the quality and variety of effort.

A girl who has learned this is not merely resilient. She is agile. She is inventive. She is the kind of young woman who, when she faces something genuinely hard, does not panic and does not give up. She gets curious. She thinks: I have not found the right approach yet. I wonder what it might be…

May 2026