The freedom to lead? six think pieces
March, 2013
The freedom to lead? The shifting education landscape suggests new leadership responsibilities and challenges. More than ever, leaders need to be clear on their own answers to significant and core questions including: • • •
What are schools for? Who should lead them? To whom should they be accountable?
To stimulate debate around these core questions, here is a collection of provocations from LCLL’s Academic Visitors. They include contributions from headteachers, chief executive officers and academics and are presented as personal think pieces debating the complexities of schools and education today. We hope they stimulate your thinking and provoke debate amongst your colleagues.
Think piece 1 - What are schools for? Rachel Macfarlane, Headteacher, Isaac Newton Academy Redbridge Think piece 2 - What are schools for? Kevan Collins, Chief Executive of The Education Endowment Foundation Think piece 3 - Who should lead schools? Dr Vanessa Ogden, Headteacher, Mulberry School for Girls, Tower Hamlets Think piece 4 - To whom should schools be accountable? Lesley Saunders, formerly Senior Policy Adviser for Research at the General Teaching Council (England) Think piece 5 - To whom should schools be accountable? Professor David Woods, CBE. Formerly Chief Adviser for London Schools and Principal National Challenge Adviser for England Think piece 6 - What are schools for? The case for a whole system approach, Ron Glatter, Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration and Management at The Open University
Think piece one Firstly, schools are for equipping young people with the knowledge, learning power and character necessary for success in later life. When I say ‘in later life’ I mean at university, in future study, in their careers and the workplace, in parenthood, social and civic life. Schools have a duty to equip students with knowledge. Subject knowledge is, of course, vital in order to pass examinations and to achieve the top grades that will enable young people to progress to higher education. And we should be aiming to support all students to access higher education. Quite apart from the intellectual stimulation and social richness of the university experience, research shows very strong links between higher education and greater earnings, better health and extended life expectancy. It is good for individuals and for society that schools equip students with the knowledge that will be their passport to further study. But schools should not just be focusing on the knowledge that forms the content of examination syllabi. Students should be supported in exploring and researching a wealth of topics, feeding their imaginations and curiosity, finding out facts and continually extending their knowledge bank. In the age of internet search engines, many would question the point of learning facts and scavenging for knowledge. Surely it is enough to know how and where to find information when we need it? Yet the student who leaves school unable to talk animatedly about a period of history, a scientific phenomenon or a developing nation lacks confidence, self-esteem and,
What are schools for? Rachel Macfarlane, Headteacher, Isaac Newton Academy, Redbridge
to quote Francis Bacon, “power”. Learning power is the crucial partner to knowledge. Great schools systematically cultivate habits and learning dispositions that enable young people to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently and creatively, in the knowledge that students who are confident of their own learning ability learn faster and learn better, concentrate more, think harder and find learning more enjoyable. Building learning power is about helping students to build up the mental, emotional and social resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexity (the 21st century world). Schools have a responsibility to support children to learn how to learn, to develop learning tools and to know which one to use in which learning situation. And as for character, what school would feel satisfied in the knowledge that its alumni had first rate examination grades and life-long learning skills but not the personal qualities and depth of character to use them altruistically and with integrity? Schools should be actively cultivating character in their students – discussing, noticing, praising and developing such
characteristics as honesty, humility, optimism, bravery, determination and patience. Related to this, is my second response to the question ‘What are schools for?’ Schools, I believe, should demonstrate to young people how society can and should operate. They should model distributed leadership, shared accountability, equality of opportunity and a culture of trust. The structures by which the institution is led and managed should be transparent and openly discussed, giving children an insight into how to operate democratically. Collective responsibility should be a premise on which routines and systems are designed and operated. Youngsters should be able to see that to live in a community where racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination are always tackled and addressed, and gradually eliminated, is achievable and desirable and to feel equipped with the skills to play a part in this. Students should be shown how to build positive and meaningful relationships based on honour and respect, by staff who themselves have this as a priority. And, in an age when research suggests our levels of trust in each other are declining significantly, children should be taught to trust others and to behave in a trustworthy fashion. Their school systems and structures should role model an assumption that members of the school community are trustworthy, not in need of supervision and a watchful eye at all times.
The freedom to lead? What are schools for? Kevan Collins, Chief Executive, The Education Endowment Foundation Think piece two After your family, the most intimate and influential institution that shapes and informs the people we will be, both collectively and individually, is the society we live in therefore deciding the question as to ‘What are schools for?’ is a fundamental purpose of democratic and civil society. To Dewey a school is three things: 1. What we teach – core skills and capacity and desire to learn, core common knowledge and a recognition that this can be contested. The core skills remain unchanged whilst context evolves through social change, environmental issues and the pace of change in knowledge. But, core remains core. 2. How we teach – professional places where we bring the best of what we know and reliably and relentlessly ensure that every child secures the basics and makes progress. Variation is the shame of our profession and our collective failure to meet the needs of all children. Quite frankly we aren’t scientific enough. Schools are places to apply evidence not constantly engage in indulgent, undisciplined experimentation. 3. The kind of place we are – we use the authority given to us as democratic and accountable institutions to shape the values and character of our children through ethical underpinning and constructing confident institutions that build a sense of self, family and community and nation. The serious questions we need to ask of ourselves are; Can a system where over 100,000 children leave primary school failing to read well qualify? Can schools that fail to make use of evidence qualify? Do schools that are unconnected to their local communities and accountability qualify?
Who should lead schools? Dr Vanessa Ogden, Headteacher, Mulberry School for Girls, Tower Hamlets Think piece three Over the autumn term 2012, whilst I was considering this question, several things happened in my school which focused my mind on two connected leadership concepts: leadership within democratic professionalism (Whitty 2002) and system leadership (Higham, Hopkins and Matthews 2009). Traditionally, the headteacher’s position has been viewed to be the pinnacle of a school’s leadership structure and in the public mind, this image still lives long. However when in my school, after successful parents’ visits led by Year 10 pupils who talked authoritatively about the school’s practice, those pupils announced to me with complete self-belief, ‘We don’t need teachers anymore’, I experienced a combination of feelings that is difficult to describe. If pupils feel they do not need teachers anymore, then possibly the same applies to headteachers. Who, then, should lead schools? The pupils? What about the staff and parents/carers too? The co-construction of a school’s leadership with pupils, staff and parents/carers is, of course, an enormously complex task. It requires a potent repertoire of professional skills and a detailed professional knowledge base to support decision-making, relationship-building and planning. Fundamentally, it depends on a right reading by the headteacher of the complex change that goes on in schools daily, together with strong structures and a corporate understanding of the direction of travel and the rules of prioritisation. It also depends on the headteacher’s judgement about when to cede power and control over particular kinds of decision-making or when to step in if necessary. Democratic professionalism in this way is closely tied to a robust understanding of the community in which a school is situated and how to work with it to maximise every possible chance for pupils to achieve as well as they can. ‘Place’ is intricately interconnected with education (Lupton 2006; Riley 2012): the social characteristics and dynamics of where a school is play out daily. They influence the way in which leaders shape the school’s structure, policies and practices as well as how teachers teach and the approach that is taken to curriculum, inclusion provision and parental engagement. In this way, a school is a system of its own. Whilst the concept of system leadership in education is intended to transcend an individual school (Collarbone and West Burnham 2008), schools are not monoliths.
The freedom to lead? (continued)
They are fluid and sensitive, reflecting the changing human dynamics of the people that belong to them as well as those of the society and the local community into which they are plugged (Riley 2007). Leaders of inner city schools, for example, often talk about the speed at which the nature of the challenge in their schools can change (within hours) depending on what has happened in the community the night before and how it plays out in school the next day. This is where system leadership in its more accepted sense – as leadership of more than one institution – becomes of such value. The London Challenge 2002 – 2010 was a government education policy for school improvement which became a model of successful system leadership. Designed to provide school to school support, pairing strong leaders with those whose schools were experiencing difficulty, it transformed London’s secondary education from the worst performance to the highest, despite London trailing behind the rest of the country for many years. Through excellent local intelligence about schools’ performance and a strong infrastructure led by a central leadership team of serving heads and London Challenge advisers, London became an expert-
led system for school transformation, taking school leadership well beyond ‘prescription’ and into ‘professionalism’ (Hopkins 2012). Key features of the policy’s success were the figurehead leadership of three successive Chief Advisers for London Schools combined with the tight teamwork of the London Challenge team which managed the brokering and matching processes for the work, created a climate of moral purpose and held supporting leaders to account for performance. These formed the ‘system glue’ (Fullan 2011) which held the London Challenge together in a way which a now much more dispersed, selfdeploying collection of NLEs (National Leaders in Education) cannot. The ecological approach to the development of Teaching School Alliances which assumes their natural growth as universal leaders of the system has not yet materialised as planned (Hargreaves 2011). As Fullan points out, moral intention will not yield moral purpose without leadership and direction (Fullan 2011). Thus, this short paper argues for leadership of the system which is regional, locally intelligent, based on challenge and support and focused on school improvement led by schools. This is not an argument
in support of returning to Local Authority control – those days are gone and the system is into a new era. It is an argument for enabling practising leaders to take responsibility for the system, as with the London Challenge, working alongside policy-makers within a framework of high challenge and high support, incentivising heads to enact their moral purpose for the unconditional benefit of all a region’s children and their families and to ensure the highest quality provision. Such is the responsibility of serving school leaders to their school communities within the democratic professional context of public service in this country. Young people deserve no less. References: Fullan, M. 2011, The Moral Imperative Realized. Thousand Oaks: Corwin. Higham, R., Hopkins, D., and Matthews, P. 2009, System Leadership in Practice. Berkshire: Open University Press. Hopkins, D. 2012, ‘What Have We Learned From School Improvement About Taking Educational Reform to Scale? In Chapman, C., Armstrong, P., Harris, A., Muijs, D., Reynolds, D. and Sammons, P. (Eds) School Effectiveness and Improvement Research, Policy and Practice: Challenging the Orthodoxy? Abingdon: Routledge. Lupton, R., 2006, ‘How Does Place Affect Education?’ in Delorenzi, S. (Ed) Going Places: neighbourhood, ethnicity and social mobility. London: IPPR. Riley, K. 2012, A Place Where I Belong: Leadership of Place – Stories of Schools in the US, UK and South Africa. London: Continuum Riley, K. 2007, Surviving and Thriving as an Urban Leader. London: LCLL. Whitty, G. 2002, Making Sense of Education Policy. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
To whom should schools become accountable? Lesley Saunders, formerly Senior Policy Adviser for Research at the General Teaching Council (England) Think piece four Teaching, like the other major professions, is grounded in a hardwon combination of specialised expert knowledge and espoused ethical values – though, perhaps unlike the other professions, teaching concerns itself with the future, with helping to equip young people to live full lives not only now but also as the adults they will become, intellectually, emotionally, civically, socially… In England, however, also unlike all the other major professions and unlike the other administrations of the United Kingdom, teaching possesses no professional body, independent of the government of the day, with the remit inter alia to articulate and publish a coherent and unifying code of values and practice, and to safeguard teaching as an expert and increasingly specialised service in the public interest. The teacher unions and professional associations cannot, almost by definition, play this unifying role because they seek to differentiate themselves from each other and to appeal to different constituencies of teachers. At present, the standards and values of teaching are set by the Department for Education and its agencies, although in practice these are strongly mediated by the culture of individual schools (or of the individual organisations that run chains of schools). This is resulting in what Professor Geoff Whitty calls “local” or “branded” professionalism. Teachers, particularly those new to teaching, are at risk of being inducted into the culture and practices of a particular institution rather than into the foundational values, entitlements and responsibilities of an independent profession.
In my view, the situation has come about partly because of the many failures of imagination on the part of successive governments, which have misunderstood and misrepresented the complexities integral to teaching. The earlier conception of teachers as curriculum thinkers and developers, as scholars and collaborative researchers, which was articulated and encouraged by Lawrence Stenhouse, is hardly ever spoken of these days especially by policymakers. But the idea goes to the heart of teaching: how to engage young people, given their hugely diverse temperaments and aptitudes, with what it is they need to learn, not in the abstract but in the everyday realities of schooling. So amongst all the many and competing definitions of a “profession” is one I find compelling: what characterises a profession are the inherent dilemmas with which practitioners are faced on a daily basis and about which they must take difficult decisions. It is by virtue of their combination of explicit values and expert knowledge that professionals are able to
make and defend their decisions. And this, I believe, gives us the meaning of professional judgement - not a rather vague and ultimately unjustifiable ‘autonomy’, but the necessary suppleness and sensitivity in weighing equal, perhaps equally valid, but not easily reconcilable considerations. Finally, my provocation is this: how can parents and the public at large be assured that teachers’ professionalism and accountability go deeper than compliance with the government’s standards framework on the one hand and particular conditions of service, on the other? Or, to put it another way, where are the safeguards and counter-balances against the potential fragmentation of the teaching profession for the sake of a particular political ideology?
To whom should schools become accountable? Professor David Woods, CBE. Formerly Chief Adviser for London Schools and Principal National Challenge Adviser for England
Think piece five There is a general consensus that schools should be accountable to parents, pupils and communities and their governing bodies. To this end, various governments have published a wide range of data and information about every school and how it performs. Data on the progress and attainment of pupils are published annually but there is also other information available online on such issues as the curriculum, the school budget, attendance and a range of school policies and programmes. Good schools disseminate information effectively through informative and well-organised web-sites and easy on-line access to current information, but they also exercise their accountability function through questionnaires and reviews, the OFSTED parent view site, open days, and a range of face to face opportunities for parents. Accountability to pupils can be exercised through a well organised ‘pupil voice’ not just school councils but also regular consultations with pupils on a range of issues including learning and teaching. One of the main functions of governing bodies is to monitor and evaluate educational standards and the quality of education provision, holding school leaders to account, asking challenging questions and pressing for improvement. Governing bodies are themselves held to account, along with the school as a whole, at the time of inspection.
The ‘middle tier’ of accountability is much less clear with a new emphasis on creating a more autonomous school system. Local authorities (LA) are now free to define how they will support school improvement. Some are offering school improvement as a traded service, others are brokering and commissioning support from other providers, and others are largely leaving it to the schools themselves with reserve powers of intervention for underperforming and failing schools. LA’s as elected bodies still do have a role in ensuring fair access to all schools, and standing up for the interests of parents and children, particularly vulnerable pupils in the local area. Sponsors and chains of academies are a growing part of the “new middle” holding their schools to account and often running their own school improvement services as they are directly accountable to the DfE for the performance of their schools. There is also a growing sense of “lateral accountability” within the self-improving schools system with a multiplicity of Partnerships, Federations and Alliances of schools which could also be said to be part of the “new middle”. For example, schools in Teaching School Alliances are accountable to each other for their performance, as are partnerships or federations supported by NLEs and National Support Schools. Clearly it is important that in these cases accountability is both supportive and challenging.
Furthermore, the State has considerable powers to intervene where it considers school performance to be inadequate. Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education) is the national, independent regulator which publishes inspection reports as an important part of making schools accountable to parents but also as a means of informing the State as to the quality of education provision. Ofsted has now adopted a highly proportionate approach to inspection – the weaker the school the more frequent the monitoring with increased levels of accountability, whilst outstanding schools are exempt from routine inspection unless there is evidence of decline. Schools should clearly be primarily accountable to their parents, pupils, communities and governing bodies which leads us to another debate as to how that accountability is best exercised. As far as the “new middle” is concerned, much depends upon the legal status of the school although all schools have an obligation to meet the needs of all pupils and parents in the locality. Other than that there can be a range of accountabilities some of them voluntary. Finally, there is accountability to the state which is shared by all public services.
What are schools for? The case for a whole system approach, Ron Glatter, Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration and Management at The Open University Think piece six One of the most chilling findings I’ve seen in the last few years is that in this country more of the variation between the performance of different schools is connected to the socio-economic character of the school’s intake than in any of the other 33 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) except little Luxembourg, and when the OECD add another 30 ‘partner’ countries not in the organisation but included in the data we’re still one from bottom. In the UK, more than three-quarters of the variation in performance is related to the school’s intake compared with less than a quarter in Finland and less than a half in Canada – two of the best-performing countries. The OECD recently pointed out that we have one of the most segregated systems in the developed world in terms of the socio-economic composition of our schools, and also the financial advantages of having had a longer school education are greater here than in most other countries, so it matters very much to us. I’m glad there are some serious moves to try to deal with this huge challenge that are different from the punitive approach often adopted by policy-makers and which can’t work because so many forces are external, including at earlier phases of education. The work of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is very important (see Think piece 2). The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) published a report recently onclosing the attainment gap which had
some very valuable analysis and recommendations and drew on the EEF’s work. I was very struck by the title – ‘A Long Division’, which reminded me that 2013 is the 50th anniversary of the great Newsom report called ‘Half our Future’ – one of the series of reports under the umbrella of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) at a time when we were committed to pursuing educational reform by consensus. It looked into the education of 1316 yr olds “of average or less than average ability” and concluded that “there is much unrealised talent especially among boys and girls whose potential is masked by inadequate powers of speech and the limitations of home background. The country cannot afford this wastage, humanly or economically speaking”. I well recall being bowled over by this report when I first read it, and as an “occasional student” of the Institute I gave a seminar on it. The international evidence is now clear: the best systems combine excellence – high standards – with equity, and they have integrated, coherent systems not fragmented ones. When our policy-makers chide us for slipping down the international tables on performance their use of the data is sometimes questionable but to the extent that we fall short, it’s not because exams are too dumbed-down or there isn’t enough school autonomy or other nostrums but because there’s not enough focus on equitable, consistent provision. And what can’t work in a country as large and complex as ours is to have just two layers - the individual school in a
competitive local market and a distant central government and its agencies as the only political authority. That will be a highly unstable framework if it comes to pass. We need a whole system approach like those of the top-performing countries. Robert Hill, former No. 10 adviser and recently author of several reports for the National College, was spot on when he wrote: “For too long education policy has been about trying to create successful institutions rather than an effective school system”. And Ben Levin, who gave the 2012 LCLL Annual Lecture, an outstanding international analyst and hugely successful policymaker in his native Canada, has sent me a think-piece he has written. In that, he says that if we want a system that works to ensure that good practices are in place in all schools, it cannot be done by making each school an independent operation. So finally we get there. What are schools for? My answer is banal I’m afraid ... but an important one. Taxpayer-funded schools (as distinct from fee-charging ones) are for providing a good education to all the children. References OECD (2010) PISA 2009 Results, Volume II, Figure II.5.4 OECD (2012) Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators 2012, Country Note United Kingdom Ministry of Education (1963) Half our Future, para. 3. Hill, R. (2008) The Value of Partnership Working, Education Journal, Issue 109
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