3. Institutional and ‘Micro’-level Issues

Part 2. Managing Schools for Complexity

(Chair: Gábor Halász)

Gábor Halász: After talking about the learning environment, now we are going out from the classroom to the level of the institution, the whole organisation this afternoon, which is the second micro-level session. We will talk about managing schools for complexity and change. We shall have an introduction by Dale Shuttleworth from Canada, who was the general reporter of the School Management What Works study, and the main author of the book you received. I would like to ask all the presenters to try to keep the time limit so we would have more time for discussion. So, the floor is yours, Dale.

Dale Shuttleworth¹: I am coming here really as a practitioner because I have been in the field for a number of years as a teacher at the preschool, primary, secondary and adult education levels. Then I was a principal. I have been a coordinator in several programmes and a school superintendent. For the last six years I have been involved with a non-profit charitable organisation, which I guess would qualify as being in the private sector, offering programmes to students in the main body of one of the Canadian provinces. But my comments this afternoon are as a lead-consultant and author of a draft report for the study undertaken by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation.

The following countries have been involved in the OECD study concerning What works in school management: Flanders and Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden, England, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States. The first task was to ask myself the question: What is innovation? The overall objective of our study was to identify innovation in school management in the nine countries, for the sense of conflict that seems to exist between the language of top-down educational reformers, who promote an industrial age scientific managerial style, as opposed to that of bottom-up renewals, who advocate knowledge leadership for the 21^st century learning organisation.

How is innovation to be defined in the post-industrial age? There are 12 issues from the study which reflect these different perspectives.

1-2) Decentralisation and deregulation – The Netherlands and Flanders have had a long tradition of decentralised local school management through their right of choice policies, with a private, non-profit sector operating the majority of schools and the national government providing funding, while retaining control of curriculum and programme standards. This loose-tight system appears to be effective in engineering both national and local accountability. The devolving of operational responsibility to the local level also allows for greater flexibility in responding to the emerging needs of religious, immigrant and migrant communities. The Hungarian market-driven system, where new private-sector maintainers have the right to establish and operate schools, is another example of decentralisation, deregulation and action.

Charter- and grant-maintained schools in the US and UK are based on similar principals of school assessment. The United Kingdom Office for Standards and Educational Development (OFSTED) has implemented a school inspection system whereby every school would be assessed by an external team of inspectors within each four-year cycle. This team has been trained for the task using procedures set out in a manual of inspection. The quality of teaching and learning in each subject is reviewed together with the management procedures. The system includes parental and student input resulting in a formal report following the visit. The system is transparent in that the manual of inspection has its visitation criteria and inspectoral procedures available to the public. The formal report is also a public document, and schools are required to circulate a summary of the report to all parents.

A somewhat similar inspectoral assessment system has been implemented in the Netherlands. The primary education inspectorate conducts regular, two- to three-day intensive visitations every two years based on the schools plan. A system of external top-down assessment remains controversial, however. The competency of inspectoral staff has been questioned both by the school and the public. The fact that the procedure has been privatised in the UK brings into question the qualifications and the experience of the inspectoral team.

3) Self-evaluation – Traditionally, Greek schools have resisted any form of top-down inspection. The Greek government has introduced a self-evaluation project in six pilot schools as a much less threatening and truer approach to school improvement. Coordinated by the Pedagogical Institute, the project involves teachers, parents and students in the process. A handbook to guide schools in developing self-evaluation methodologies has been published by the Institute.

The Federal Government of Mexico has also launched a most innovative project for self-evaluation of schools at the elementary level. Beginning with 200 schools in the 1997-98 school year, the School Management in Elementary Education Research and Innovation project has now been extended to 1,000 schools in 15 states.

4) Student performance testing – Most countries have a standardised testing procedure and place to assess student achievement at fixed-grade levels according to standards mandated in a national or a state curriculum. Test results are often published in the media as lead tables. Controversy continues to be expressed as to the content and methodology used in test administration. The question of whether minority language and cultural backgrounds among students provide a fair assessment of ability is also an issue. The fact that this procedure seems to be derived mainly from the Industrial Age scientific management movement, as opposed to comparative indicators of Information Age learning and employability skills, remains a concern. Finally, the impact that such a procedure may have in classroom practice, for example teaching to the test, and the moral and self esteem of teachers, parents and students, continues to be questioned.

5) Merit pay – The Foundation for Catholic Education in Maastricht in the Netherlands is but one advocate in a growing movement to provide salary differentiation on the basis of merit. Through consultation with professional unions, criteria are being established for a system of premium pay and temporary extra increments for teachers demonstrating exceptional performance. Principals are trained in assessment procedures to identify personnel to receive merit pay. A large number of states and school districts in the United States provide salary bonuses or other incentives for teachers who earn national, professional teaching standard certification.

However, merit pay has been almost universally unpopular with teacher unions. They question who defines and assesses exceptional performance in a learning environment. Its introduction by the UK Department of Education and Employment has raised the ire of the National Union of Teachers. Last year one judgement in the High Court disallowed this policy.

6) Privatisation of service – Hungary has one of the most market-driven systems in privatising its in-service training, or INSET, and its quality improvement initiatives. Both their Comenius 2000 quality development and their INSET programmes use private consultants selected by tender to assist in implementing the strategies. England has also opened the privatisation door through its OFSTED national system of school inspection, which utilises inspectoral teams drawn from the private sector on a contract basis. In both instances the qualifications and skills of private sector personnel with no school-based experience are being questioned.

7) Childcare provisions – The community education movement has long championed the calls of a variety of public services sharing a mixed-use facility. Sweden has introduced the most innovative merging of services for children. Clear lines that often distinguished childcare, pre-school, recreation centres and primary schooling are blurring. Pre-school education from the age of one year is available for parents working or studying. A curriculum has been developed to provide a web of learning for child between pre-school and compulsory schooling. It is not unusual for a child to attend an intergraded pre-school, primary school or recreation centre from early morning to early evening. Parents pay for pre-school childcare and recreation services while schooling is free. In this intergraded management model one leader or a team from many of the three disciplines may be in charge of the facility.

8) Multi-service coordination – As previously mentioned, community education advocates the local coordination of human services, e.g. health, employment, child protection, adult literacy, family support, leisure activities, etc. A number of countries and school districts have policies in place in this regard. The active participation of the school and the leadership of its principal are essential in meeting human service needs, particularly in disadvantaged socio-economic areas.

9) Upgrading of facilities – Political policies reducing educational spending have often led to poorly maintained and deteriorating school buildings in many countries. Greece, through its reorganisation of school premises projects, has demonstrated that school facilities can be upgraded and the physical learning environment of the school improves significantly. The importance of school leaders in transforming a deteriorating shared-use facility into a more secure and educationally viable building was demonstrated in secondary schools in the Athens area.

10) Alternate resource development – As competition grows for a limited supply of public funds, schools and school authorities are reaching out for alternate sources of financial and any other kind of support. The search for government special project funding, philanthropic donations and commercial partnerships is part of a movement among school leaders to acquire grant demanding and proposal writing skills. One such approach has been the creation of an arm’s-length educational foundation or non-profit charitable organisation to seek alternative sources of funding and material support for school innovation and programme enrichment.

11) Micro-politics – The age of decentralisation and deregulation has driven decision-making and management to the local school level. As a result, school managers are very much part of a micro-political milieu which involves networks of individuals and groups both within and in the area surrounding schools, competing for scarce resources, even political power. The actors in this drama include principals, teachers, and other staff including unions, central office officials, school board members, parents, students, other community service personnel and employers.

Among the skills that the modern principal should possess is an astute sense of political awareness. Factors shaping the micro-political school environment may include shared decision-making bodies in their agency, collaboration, aspirations and needs of local politicians, socio-economic realities and community development. The study of micro-politics is becoming an essential means of survival for school leaders and other educators.

12) Leadership training – One of the most innovative approaches to the pre-school and in-service training of school leaders is to be found at the School of Management in Gent, Belgium. This programme for perspective secondary school leaders seeks to promote creative and critical problem-solving skills in school teams in their local environment. The use of a school-based management contest as a focus for the combination of theoretical and hands-on experience is unique. The fact that the programme is open to teams of school administrators, teachers, parents, school board members or other citizens is revolutionary.

Another innovation in pre-school training is to be found in Sweden, where university students study interdisciplinary human development curricula before later specialising in their professional field in, for example, teaching, child care, recreation, social work, human services, etc. This encourages more cooperation in complementary practice among future human service professionals, working together in a multi-use community service facility.

The role of the school administrator emerged in the 20^th century as a practicing teacher with added technical responsibilities. In the latter part of the century the role became that of a full-time professional manager of human, financial and other resources. Construction of leadership, staff evaluation, budget management, performance assessment and community relations were added to the job description. Many teachers, especially males, saw principalship as the crowning achievement of their educational career.

The politically driven school-improvement, educational reform movement has added a totally new dimension to the job. Principals are expected to be motivational leaders, demanding a high standard of performance from students and teachers. Decentralisation has often meant site-based management and deregulated school boundaries, requiring enhanced business and marketing skills in a highly comparative struggle to recruit students on the open market. The new economic age has also expected principals to be knowledge-managers, able to inspire teachers and students to be self-renewing learners in a learning organisation. Herein lies the conflict. Should the schoolteacher in the year 2001 be an Industrial Age supervisor of quality control standards, a powerful principal or a multi-dimensional knowledge manager of human and physical resources able to share power and decision-making as a facilitating source in a learner-centred community? Can these roles be combined? Where are we to find such leaders?

During the past decade, teachers and principals have been devalued, confused and frustrated by their changing role in society. Stress levels have risen as self-esteem has fallen – hardly good role models for children. Young people may think twice before choosing a career in education. Teachers may no longer aspire to a career path which leads to the stress and frustration of the principal’s office. This is at a time when thousands of new recruits are needed just to fill vacancies as baby boomers retire from their profession. We can ill afford not to pay teachers and principals well, not to value their contribution, not to renew our schools and not to properly prepare our young people to compete in a new economic age where unskilled labour is expendable. Strong inspiration of young, empathetic schools leaders and management teams is needed to span a link between the old Industrial Age and the influent flexibility of the new lifelong learner focused society.

This does not mean that schools, teachers and principals should not be accountable to the people they serve. What it does mean is captured in the words of economic visionary W. Edwards Deming: “True standards of performance are not set, they are created.” Extraordinary performance can only be achieved through a process of continuous improvement based on a clear, collective assessment of our learning needs, followed by an investment in the leadership and resources to fulfil these needs for all members of the community.

In the face of the global tendencies to force educational change to externally impose restructuring and reform, we should emphasise the parallel and often greater importance of improving the internal interactions and relationships of schooling. But schools are one facet of an essential public service infrastructure that has been struggling with decentralisation, tax-pay and accountability, restructuring and privatisation, with diminishing financial support. This is an organic, politicised service which must continually respond to diverse consumer needs. Public service can’t pick and choose its clients or manipulate its outcomes. It has a universal mandate to serve virtually all members of society. In a service economy it is the most accountable sector within the social order. If we are to retain and improve the standard of excellence our society deserves we must invest in renewing the self-esteem, learning capacities, problem-solving abilities and leadership skills of our public service professionals. Schooling by test scores, threats of sanctions, chronic criticism and employment insecurity are devaluing our human and social capital and are poor sources of motivation for improving performance among students, teacher and school managers. Our future social and economic wellbeing and quality of life are clearly at stake. Thank you.

Gábor Halász: Thank you very much for this very condensed and content-rich presentation, which brought in all the key messages and themes of the What works study, so even those who have not yet read the book now have an overall picture of its content. And all these came through the eyes of a practitioner. Now we shall have three national reactions from three persons. All three are representing their national ministry of education and all three have been involved in OECD educational committee work. The first is István Kovács from Hungary.

István Vilmos Kovács: I would like to concentrate on a very limited area or scope of our reforms. This is an important example of a situation where the national policy maker has a clear vision of schools in the future and the tool with which the national educational government tries to implement this kind of vision allows almost total freedom for the school in a scheme which creates an environment where teachers and partners can discover how to go into the direction of that vision.

Let me introduce a quite simple description of the life of our schools and the reaction of teachers during the last 10 or 20 years. Before the social changes, or in the real centralised era of the Hungarian educational system, the state gave clear directives to the schools and the head teacher had the task of transferring these kinds of messages and regulatory tasks to the teachers who, like an orchestra, simply implemented the central decision. In the second phase, after the social changes when local governments gained full responsibility for maintaining and directing the schools, the outside directives had weakened. The headmaster tried to follow the same instructive role that he or she had held before, but it was not so easy to manage these kinds of directives because the local government and the struggle between the schools and the local governments very often lowered or decreased the prestige of principals who tried to be at one time the representative of the school and in other cases the representative of the local government.

You should know that the Hungarian headmasters are appointed by the local government, but the staff have the right to vote on whether they accept the headmaster or not. Because of this confusing role of the headmasters in the early 1990s there were teacher initiatives to have confidence voting on all of the headmasters in Hungary. It also had political implications. Later on teachers and headmasters in many schools tried to arrive at a compromise when a headmaster let teachers be independent in the classroom, and this kind of crystallised structure became extremely rigid and resistant to change. Later on – it is a second step – the progressive schools recognised that common work and common thinking – the wisdom of the team – can improve schools, but some teachers resisted.

The newest vision that we would like to help to realise in schools tries to open them up. Teachers should not only work together but also involve partners from around the schools – parents, public administrators and other organisations in the local community. They should also consider broader expectations coming from the region or from the national policy. Over the geographical widening of the circle, schools increasingly face the expectations of the labour market and the economy.

What kind of system-wide assistance could help schools to cope with this kind of open vision? We started to think about possible quality approaches. First, we recognised that to change the schools we have to mobilise our existing system of regulatory tools like financing, teacher education, and legal regulations, but we wanted to give schools the ability to change themselves. The quality philosophy and the examination of the industrial quality management schemes let us create our own, tailor-made quality management scheme, which we call the Comenius 2000 programme. It enables schools to start with an easier task of involving partners and to try to define partner driven functioning, and later on sophisticating this kind of work, with a goal of arriving at a nationally implemented scheme, which is a powerful feature of most of our schools.

Both for institutional and for local government level we tried to introduce quality management step by step. The first institutional model, the first phase of the school quality management model concentrates on working together with partners in defining common goals to try to monitor the processes together. The second phase is a more sophisticated total quality management model where processes have already been defined and indicators introduced, and where clear feedback can improve the process.

These kinds of challenges for the school could not be overcome without several measures to support the steps of the quality management programme. The assistance of this model can give several techniques and solutions to smoothly regulate processes. These kinds of processes, like SWOT-analyses or planning influence not only the school life, but teachers also take these practices into the classroom. Sometimes they report that they take it home as well, so the functioning methodology is becoming a property of the whole school environment.

The maintainer level is also important. It will be the second round of our programme, we have just prepared the manuals for this more ambitious part of the programme and we hope that the maintainers, the local governments, will be able to benefit from these kinds of strategic systemic approaches as the schools do. In the first stage of the institutional model nothing too abstract is required. This is simply a framework for the joint re-planning the whole life of school.

The second stage is also easily understandable. This is, however, much more difficult to implement, which is why we were quite brave to try to find partnership with the market actors among the quality businesses. This is a very conflicting enterprise because we had to expect, for example, different price levels for the work of these quality experts. Sometimes the whole school quality management team receives about the same amount of money as one quality expert for a certain period of time. This kind of contradiction is a consequence of working together with market actors.

In the third stage we would like to use the good experiences of the pilot schools. These schools can undertake a role of multiplication, spreading the best practices, and you will see that the size of the first and second phases of this programme give short-term introductory chances for the whole system. The main numbers of the actual results of the programme show that 800 schools have been involved in the Comenius 1 institutional model and 144 have already been involved in the second phase of the model. If the schools arrive at the phase where they undertake the multiplication role then it shows our whole school system can participate in the programme. The number of consultancy agencies or organisations that provided more than 300 consultants for the work shows the significant participation of the private sector in this programme. The accompanying measures help schools feel that we are really doing something new and important. Some examples are the national monitoring system, free of charge in-service training for those who participate in the programme, a network for the schools who are participating, and also the many conferences and seminars exchanging experiences about it.

Soon we can count on the fact that all public education institutions will be obliged to have a quality assessment and management structure that is in line with the work of the other schools. To be honest I met several teachers working in their schemes, and I met about the same number of people who were extremely enthusiastic and reported emotionally supportive, successful experiments in the schools. Some of the teachers, however, are reluctant to undertake a new challenge, a new task which places a heavy burden on the shoulders of them, while they are quite satisfied with their general status both financially and as far as their prestige is concerned. But I think just to have more prestige and respect from society it is important to show consistent work and to involve our partners in work which is sometimes extremely difficult. Thank you very much.

Gábor Halász: We would be very happy to have some reactions to what was presented later on the discussion. And now, we shall have Gaby Hostens from Belgium.

Gaby Hostens: First of all, let me say a few introductory words. I will be speaking for the Flemish community in Belgium. First of all, because the governance of the system and the steering mechanisms are quite different in the Flemish community from the French community, I will also say something about the output of the system. Secondly, I am not speaking as an academic. I was a teacher, I was a school leader and I will say something about my experience as a school leader because it is a telling story, and for the past 12 years I have been a policy maker. I was part of the What works activity and several other OECD activities. There are four parts to my presentation.

First of all, I will say something about the national context for educational decision- -making, because it is important to know something about the local management of schools, and it is important to know something about what profile of school leaders you need. I will add something about my personal experience, and then I will talk about the current practice of selection, recruitment, in-service training and professional development of school leaders. I will then comment on the critical pre-conditions for schools to become learning organisations.

1) Briefly a few words to set the educational and educational decision-making scene. Dale has said something about the Netherlands and Belgium or Flanders freedom of education. Constitutional freedom of education has lead to a great diversity in schools because there the freedom existed to found schools, and there was freedom for parents to choose a school. It has lead to a great diversity of schools. It has also led to a rather market-driven system because schools have to compete for pupils, and thirdly, public, private partnership is a long tradition in our country, because ministers can’t decide just like that, they have got to decide in partnership with the providers.

The second thing in this regard is that the state system, in which I was a teacher, was a very centralised system, and over the past 20 years that system in Flanders has gradually become more decentralised. The Catholic school system runs the majority of the schools. The private, subsidised system has become rather more centralised, or schools have become more networked. There was great accord among their schools for all sorts of reason. So there was a decentralisation of the state system in Flanders on budget issues, human resources issues, and things like that, and a great accord within the private, Catholic school system. New public management has had its influence, as well, as far as steering mechanisms were concerned. The idea of steering at a distance, subsidiarity in steering the educational system, gave the minister a more independent position and steering mechanisms such as a national curriculum and output control through school reviews, quality assurance mechanisms and school reviews by a quasi-independent inspectorate.

The fourth thing about the national context that is quite important these days has to do with the fact that we have no national exams, no Flemish national exams, no standardised testing. The only external testing that we have is through international comparative testing schemes such as the one conducted by IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) or by OECD PISA. Our results for the Flemish community are in the annex of the publication of two days ago, Annex B, I think, where the Flemish results are being published. So, no national testing, no standardised testing. If you read the publication that followed TIMSS, you will see that for mathematics we are mentioned as only a participating country that has no national exams whatsoever for sciences. We are the only ones along with China as far as I remember. But these I just want to mention because it is these days we will talk about PISA, and I am the chairman of our INES IEA steering group in the Ministry, so I have got to say something like that.

2) To help set the scene for my personal experience I was a teacher, and I was expected to become a headmaster because I was an active member of the union. The union prepared and trained its members to become headmasters. And how did you become a headmaster? You had to pass an exam, an exam on legislation, which was completely useless. You had to make an evaluation of two lessons, which was more useful, and there was an evaluation of a portfolio.

But what kind of headmaster did they expect in a centralised system? They expected a sort of administrator, because there were no responsibilities, for we had fairly little responsibility over financial resources; they were decided in the central office. You had no responsibilities or very-very few as far as human resource management was concerned. So what type of headmaster did they need? They needed a pure administrator; they did not need a school leader.

If I can distinguish – I would say distinguish but not separate – three types of school leaders I would say administrator, manager and pedagogical leader, and I would prefer to use the term pedagogical leader, not school leadership, because I would say something on that later on. I could say a few words on in-service training in those days when I was a headmaster. These were just a few presentations made by public servants and which were useful to explain legislation, but which did not help you in any way to empower your teachers to help you to set the scene for human resources management. Things have changed a lot since the mid 1980s as far as selection, in-service training and professional development are concerned.

3) I would like to say a few words on selection nowadays. Selection procedures – and I will speak for secondary education because that is my field – the diverse selection mechanisms mirror the diverse educational landscape. We have many schools, but we have no unique model of schools. We have the state system, which is rather diversified these days in the Flemish community, and we have the Catholic school system, which is very diversified, so these selection procedures mirror the diverse educational landscape. Sometimes there are selection mechanisms that we recruit from within the school or from outside of the school (external selection). Internal selection has got something to do with senior teachers and, more importantly, selecting people from middle management, because middle management in schools is a very important element of school leadership. I will come to that later on when I say something on governance of schools, because those members of middle management are in a sort of preparation, a sort of training to become real school leaders. External selection happens in different ways but these days assessment has become quite popular. Yet to select headmasters, to select school leaders, even head-hunters are active there. But it is important to see that it is, in fact, a very closed system. Selection happens from within the school system, and there is no marker there, so to say, and there is also no mobility from one school to another. Once you have been selected for one school, you will stay there.

So we see a very closed system, with no mobility and no formal, previous training to become a school leader. These days they have abolished the certificate to become a school leader even in the state system. When I became a school leader, I had to pass an exam, which was a useless exam, but I remember questions on legislation were on things I would never have to use in the state system, but which were useful for the subsidised system. So no previous formal training, no certificate for school leaders as an entry ticket. Some school boards, especially the Catholic school boards, are against the system of certification because if you have an entry ticket, unions want you and it is a right, an entitlement to a position as a school leader. They are, therefore, very much against that system, and I agree with that position; I can’t agree with the position of the union in this regard.

In the early 1990s the Minister of Education in the Flemish community was also the Minister of Public Service. He introduced some reforms that were important reforms in the public service as far as human resources management was concerned. In the first place we started to work with job descriptions, evaluations and all the things that human resources management includes. In the mid 1990s he designed, or he helped design, the system of job descriptions for the teaching profession.

So when we designed a job description for headmasters for secondary schools and for primary schools, we hired a consultancy firm. This firm specialises in designing job descriptions. They also specialise in salary schemes and things like that. I think they did it for the Blair-Blunkett Administration a couple of years ago. So that firm designed job descriptions. And how were they designed? Through the help of panels – panels of employers, panels of headmasters and panels of teachers. We asked the employers, the school boards: “If you look for a new headmaster, what do you expect that man or woman to achieve? What is the profile you want? What are the objectives he has to achieve?”

We asked the same question to the teachers and to the headmasters: “What are the objectives you have to achieve?” That was the first thing and then we had all those result areas, objectives, they have to achieve. And I mention them, for example: the design of a pedagogical project, long-term planning, school organisation, quality assurance, self evaluation in the school, human resources management, communication and cooperation with parents, coordination and cooperation with partners within the school, financial management and things like that. I have a whole list of activities that are linked to those sorts of objectives that are to be achieved.

We designed a competence profile. What competencies do you need to achieve those objectives? And we have those competencies well, first of all technical, administrative knowledge. But that is not the most important thing, prospective thinking, problem-solving skills, team leadership, empowerment skills, organisational skills, flexibility and a few other competencies which are listed in that competence profile are also important.

We developed a whole list of attitudes, attitudinal indicators that are linked with that competence profile. It is an ideal type of man or woman, and an ideal framework, but school boards use it to design a job and a profile for new headmasters if they want to hire one. It is also used for in-service training programmes and professional development programmes. School boards use it as a framework to fit their own organisational needs, to fit their own human resources needs and their own pedagogical needs. So that is what the ideal framework job profile is about. This was designed through the intermediary of the Ministry of Education as an instrument, as a tool, to professionalise school leadership, to professionalise the running of schools.

As for in-service training and professional development programmes, since the early 1980s a whole range of programmes has been developed, some supply-led, some demand-led. Dale has mentioned an example of a supply-led programme, an interesting programme by a business school. In this a real business school on school management, the public educational authorities the universities, the Catholic network and the state network do something. There is a whole range of activities, a diverse range of activities, in-service training activities that reflects the diversity of the landscape and the diversity of needs. There are demand-led activities that are very important because of the headmasters themselves, the networks of headmasters, who try to organise them according to their own needs. It is quite important that such groups exist and that they try to work as self-run organisations.

There is discussion these days on tenure, which is quite important. Tenure has always been the cornerstone of public service personnel management and also in school personnel policy. But these days it is questioned. It is questioned and we would rather have contracts for fixed periods to promote mobility, but also because the job is so challenging, so demanding. The idea to stop tenure for school leaders is an idea that comes from new public management ideas, and I am very much in favour of that. Unions, as you can suppose, are very much against it. But there is also very tough resistance from headmasters themselves because they think they would be in a weaker position vis-<133>-vis the school boards and other authorities they have to face.

4) There are some preconditions to having schools as learning organisations or for schools to become learning organisations. I would like to mention three issues in this regard. The first point involves local governance of schools. Here I would like to use the words school leadership and not school leaders, because there is an important role for school boards. It is debatable in some countries because I know they would like to weaken the position of school boards, but I think – from my perspective and as I can see in my country – school boards are quite important for imbedding the schools in a local community, to have strong ties with the local community, and they can be very supportive of local management of schools. Most of all, they can be very supportive of change and innovation in schools for educational reform. There must be a link somewhere between the school leaders and the national ministries, and I think school boards can play this role.

I would like to stress the important role of middle management. We cannot accept a lone leader at the top of a school, and therefore the idea of school leadership by middle management of a whole team comes into play, not only because that person can’t sit alone at the top, but because it is important for organisational learning. It is also important to externalise tested knowledge on the leadership of school – it helps enhance organisational learning.

The second thing I would like to talk about is how the essential preconditions for schools to become learning organisations relate to what responsibilities they have. It is essential to have a national core curriculum, and I stress the word core curriculum, which should leave space for schools, for the creativity of schools, and the freedom for schools to develop their own plan, to develop their own curriculum. The idea of detailed guidelines is counter-productive to producing a learning organisation. If schools want to become learning organisations, they should have considerable responsibilities over their financial and human resources.

I would like to quote a man who came to Flanders when there was a site visit for new management approaches, and who was struck by a school. He said in his country unions would not accept that teachers worked so hard. The unions should not be the boss in the schools, that is my feeling. I think it should be the headmasters.

The third thing we must work to change in the organisation of schools is how schools these days work along fixed timetables, along workloads for teachers, 20 periods a week, periods of 50 minutes. We do not go to prey the rest of the minutes, but I would like to say that if we want to implement effectively ICT in our schools, we can’t go on, or we can’t continue with that fixed organisation of our schools, with that fixed organisation of our educational system. Thank you.

Gábor Halász: Thank you very much for this extremely rich insight into the Flemish, Belgian problematic, and now we shall have Jan van Ravens from Netherlands.

Jan van Ravens: Thank you very much, Gábor. My introduction will focus on a recent project in the Netherlands to develop a totally new and comprehensive national strategy for educational learning. And out of that strategy there are important changes in terms of governance. My focus, and the reason for that strategy, is indeed as the title of the session says: Growing Complexity and Change and the need to respond to that. It is remarkable that responses were very much in terms of governance, and not government saying what should happen, but how it should be decided upon – process rather than content. I will try to focus as much as possible on dilemmas, and I will not tell you the story of how it is going but the problems we face with in our struggle with this new strategy.

I do have to start by saying something about this phenomenon of freedom of education. We have never been aware of the uniqueness of it, until, well, a couple of decades ago in international comparisons. But indeed as early as 1917 there was a law that said education could be on the basis of private initiative but still publicly funded. I would like to say something about the historical reasons because it is funny to see how past circumstances can have a new meaning.

The historical background is, very shortly, that there is a lot of religious diversity in the Netherlands: we have Catholic groups, Protestant groups, a lot of variety within those groups, non-religious, high socio-economic status, low socio-economic status and none of these groups is big enough to be dominant. So these groups were very much aware of their own identity and struggled for their own interests, and education was a part of it. It was very important for these groups to have their own schooling system in which they could develop and maintain their own identity. So there was a need for Catholic schools, Protestant schools, non-religious ones, etc., and these groups found it extremely unfair that just because you are Catholic you have no access to public funding. This is how we started the principle of private initiative and the group of parents with a vision of “our schools”. If the school was big enough it had access to public funding. And there were certain conditions, of course.

Through the years this principle gained new meaning. For example, apart from religious diversity it also responded to the need for pedagogical diversity, which became very easy under this law, even though it was not meant, for instance, for starting a Montessori school or a Jena plan school. And in very recent years it has provided a very good framework for Islamic groups or Hindu groups to start their own schools. One remark should be made: it produces a big diversity of schools, but this diversity is among schools and not necessarily within schools, and these are two very different things. The real challenge is then to have diversity of learning and cultures within schools, not to have an Islamic school, which should be allowed, of course, but to have a school where Muslims, Catholics and Protestants are very much at home, that is the real challenge. Naturally, there is a framework of conditions involved: freedom of education is not total freedom. There are conditions and there is a challenge between the two: how free is free? I will come back to that.

I would like to refer to the topic of school autonomy. I would like to refer to documentation produced by Eurydice. For those of you who are not from Europe, Eurydice is an information-documentation centre of the European Community. They have produced a publication called Key Data. It contains a very interesting and very attractively shaped dashboard that indicates for school managers in primary and secondary education which pools they can stream on their level and which they can’t. It would be very interesting background documentation on the basis of what we saw: it shows that actually two countries are further in school autonomy than the others, and that these are the UK and the Netherlands. That made us more aware of the uniqueness of the situation, all despite that unusual position, where the main strategy is to go even further in school autonomy. It is very strange to have schools already so autonomous internationally prepared to go even further along that road, but that was really the outcome of this process of strategy development that I started talking about. We think there is an increasing diversity of local needs, and secondly, that there is increasing awareness of that diversity, as well as an increasing awareness that this diversity matters. There are, therefore, a lot of reasons for this strong awareness of how meeting diversity is one of the big challenges of the new strategy.

Perhaps it is better to explain why I started saying that a new strategy is about governance more than about content. Because the government is always too far away from the local situation, developments and always too late in their responses. So there is a very strong need to empower the school manager and to increase his autonomy. And by the way, if government would respond, what would it respond to? Government by definition can only respond through reform, and there is a very strong tendency for reform to be all-encompassing. The whole concept of reform is in contrast with diversity. Innovation is what you want to have in response to diversity.

Now we looked at the work of Schooling for Tomorrow. One of the documents you have is about Schooling for Tomorrow, an OECD project which was very helpful in determining the general strategy. And what is actually totally familiar with those six scenarios? The first two scenarios – one is to maintain the status quo, the other is a crisis in the present situation – are, of course, rejected. Then there are four more attractive scenarios, and we will look at those scenarios. Which one is best? Which is the one we prefer most?

There is a tendency to prefer number 2A. That is the scenario where the school is in the middle of the social community, opened to the local community, and responsive to development. There is indeed a very strong development in the Netherlands towards that model, but then if you look at the other scenarios, 2B, where the school is a very focused learning organisation, there is not much wrong with that. Then if you look at 3A and 3B, where the school is much more ICT-driven learning and networks to some extent market-influenced, these are all elements that are attractive, so we ended up saying: the Schooling for Tomorrow work is perfect, not because we can now make the choice, but because we know that we cannot make the choice. And this is by no means a criticism to Schooling for Tomorrow, because it was helpful in making that decision – we said there is so much logic in four of those six scenarios that we cannot really make the central decision for just one of those models. This is how we ended up with the so-called DRA-model.

Before, I elaborated that it was absolutely not sensational what I was going to tell you. Now this is very familiar, but we thought by giving this name (DRA, and in Dutch it sounds different) it becomes a yahoo! and may be helpful in really making this thing come alive in the heads of everybody. The “D” stands for “direction” – well, we say the government should always set the general direction. We are not in a total market situation where the government has no opinion about what happens. There is a direction, otherwise certain general goals, like the Swedish colleague insisted this morning, democratic values, tolerance, etc. meeting a number of basic skills will not be acheived. But also, even within schools there are certain requirements in terms of absence of violence, tolerance, etc. You can’t just make any school; there are conditions to freedom, and at the end of the day there are standards to be met or efforts to be made, and there is a whole discussion that I would like to come back to. We are not so sure any more if in terms of the outcomes that the government requires from the schools we should actually set standards and say we should meet these levels.

That is one approach. But as some colleagues indicated already this morning, there is a big danger in setting standards and working towards the standards. Some schools say, “listen, you’re not helping us with standards because we are a non-religious school in disadvantaged areas. Listen, we have wonderful plans where we can take these children in our neighbourhoods much further than they are but they would never meet the standards and it’s simply discouraging.”

So there is a discussion about whether we should go for standards or make schools accountable for the efforts they make, even if they do not meet the standards. Now the “R” stands for “room to manoeuvre”. Now given the smallest possible set of conditions that the government sets, schools should be as free as possible to do whatever they like. A very recent example that goes to higher school management: we recently abolished the requirement that the school manager has to have teaching experience or teaching qualifications – a school manager can be somebody from the business sector or the health sector or the social sector – again emphasising “who are we, as the government, to decide what a good school manager is?” There are other ways of making the school manager accountable than by saying “Mr. XY, you should have had teaching experience”, or something like that.

Now the “A” in the DRA model stands for “accountability” where, at the end of the day, the school has to be accountable for its freedom. There is no freedom without accountability. And here is where we face big dilemmas. I have already talked about whether we should have methods of standards. There is a system of giving yellow cards like in the soccer world, where a yellow card is given if things are not quite right and if it remains wrong than the red card comes out and this is the end of the school. No red cards have been given, because the yellow cards should prevent the red card and so far it has worked. We do have the concept of the inspector as a critical friend. You may have heard of that, a critical friend who says this: “I am a critical one, I assess the school and if it’s not right I’ll tell you so, but I’m also a friend who wants to help.”

This is where the use of indicators and benchmarking comes in. There is – as opposed to in Belgium – a national system of testing, so the inspector has the results from that school and he can benchmark that against the national outcomes, but there is a lot more information, quantitative background information – if necessary – about the school, about the financial situation, human resources, but also the environment, the type of students, etc. An inspector could, for instance, on the basis of the information that he has, say “there is something wrong with maths teaching, but that is not very surprising because this is your situation, and I know a school in more or less the same situation, or that used to have problems with maths teaching, but they corrected it.” He will then establish contact between the schools, and this is the critical friend, the empathising friend. But at the end of the day, and this is the dilemma we face, it is very difficult to find the balance between freedom and accountability.

A last point that I would like to mention, because we would like to have your reactions to that dilemma, is what to do about disclosure to the general public of quality information about schools. I have already mentioned that there is an increasingly rich set of indicators on the school level, but nationally harmonised so every school can benchmark itself in terms of achievement, financial etc., and one day a young journalist said: “I would like to have that information and I am going to publish it in my newspaper.” The school board or the association said: “No, no, no, that is ridiculous. We will not give you that, that is unheard of.” And he went to the minister and the minister said, “No, this is not possible, you must be kidding!” He then went to the judge and the judge said, “Wait a minute, is there an argument, is there a reasonable argument why the general public, including parents, should not have access to fairly reliable information on the schools they may send their children to?” And actually the journalist won his case. These data appeared in the newspaper one day, and the minister realised he could not stop the development. He then agreed to publish it on the Internet. And that is a problem because the tendency is, as you can imagine, that it becomes clear for parents that they should identify the weaker schools and not send their children to them.

The more optimistic view is that there is competition anyway, and now we have much better information. Also, you actually push the competition to a higher level in a sense that it is not just in terms of outcomes. For example, you know if your child has a learning disability you are not looking for the school with the best outcomes, but rather the school that is best in the remedial teaching, and that should be revealed also in those school score-percentiles. At the moment we are absolutely not clear on where this is going and I would really like to have your opinions during the discussion about the issue of the publication, the disclosure of information about the performance of schools. Thank you very much.

Gábor Halász: Thank you, Jan. As all the other countries you are in an open situation. Let’s have our coffee now and I suggest that we come back for discussion at 3:50.

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Dale Shuttleworth: In the United States and in time I spent there was that in some cities there were two reasons for going in this direction of having the principal be a non-teacher. One was, you could pay them significantly less money, making it a budgetary consideration. Secondly, there was, in some instances, a very strong involvement from the commercial sector in the governance of the school not through an elected process, but rather through influence by an arm’s-length organisation that seems to have a lot of interest and power within the political context of the school. In one city, for example, the largest employer in the city had a lot of redundancies. Middle management people wanted to give what they called the “golden parachute”, and so they said, “well, we’ll put those in as school principals because then it will save us some money because then we won’t have to pay them as much.” In another instance a large military base had some middle management generals who were not measuring up to the challenges, and they were going to be candidates to operate the schools.

This kind of thinking does not encourage the teachers who are going to be reporting to these people. It does not give them a lot of confidence and a sense of value to their position. I am not saying that there aren’t people out there who have the ability to be good managers in that kind of context. Perhaps there are. The implication, however, is in terms of the morale problem that potentially exists. If you have a school situation where you are trying to build the learning community, and then comes General So-and-So who is off the base and is going to take over the school, it would seem that that person is not very talented, and that might have an impact on the morale of the school. That could be, therefore, a real detriment to your sense of academic community.

These are just some examples, but certainly where I have come from in Canada they have proposed the idea of non-teachers in these roles and it is significant for two reasons. One is that they feel that they will have better control over these people if they were appointed from the financial side and secondly they would not pay them as much money because you know a principal usually makes a higher salary than a teacher at the top end. So there are some considerations there now. I am not saying that this is part of any of the facts that are here, but I am just saying that there is a perception out there, and I think it is something we have to deal with. If we are going to try to build the idea of a bottom-up approach, working together to create excellence, and so on, we have to be very careful that we do not trigger something moving in the other direction.

Bill Mulford: I have three areas of interest, but I will only talk about one, and if there is time I would like to come back to the other two. The first one relates to the mention of competencies. The second – if there is time later – has to do with school councils. And the third one is really a position I would take on the issue or dilemma between empowerment and accountability, or accountability and freedom. And if there is time, today or tomorrow, I certainly would like to have a full understanding of school councils and to have some discussion on the possible dilemma between empowerment and accountability.

Going back to competencies, I am interested in what evidence there is from those countries that use competencies that they have any predictive validity and what that predictive validity is of those competencies. And secondly, what is the cost effectiveness of having what seem to be increasingly long lists of competencies?

I will mention something that has happened in my state that linked competencies. There was an attempt by the state government to link competencies with merit pay for school principals. The argument was that the principal could be paid more if the results were better and the competencies were at the good end of the various scales. This created much discussion among the school principals, and after about a year they decided to refuse that offer. Their argument was that it was not the school principal who was primarily responsible for the results of the children, but rather the collective staff of the school. That in turn led to the school principals forming a Principals’ Institute, which now not only guarantees quality school principals for the state through a registration process, but also (I heard one country has made it) involves re-registration. So there is no assumption that once you are a principal you will always be a principal. But the principals themselves are – and it has only just started so I can’t give you evidence of its existence – making those judgements. So the question is about competencies and what the evidence is of the predictive validity and cost effectiveness.

Zoltán Poór: On the basis of what Mr. Hostens said regarding school leadership, it was middle management you would have preferred. Now, this is something we happen to lack in Hungary. Within school management we do not have the system of middle management as such. That is, there is a head teacher and usually two deputy heads and that is it. If it is a school of 800-1,000 students, that would make about more than 40 teaching staff members, and some 10 extra non-teaching staff. Usually there is a financial official and that is it. Among the teachers there is no real hierarchy, which means there are no real job prospects. On paper we have the position of so-called heads of department for subject-specific departments. We call them teachers’ communities or working communities of teachers, but these are just positions on paper because they have no real responsibility to share. There is no real professional responsibility. There is only budgetary or personnel-specific type of responsibility. Though as soon as the national core curriculum arrived, and the framework curriculum arrived, these people all got the responsibility for the local syllabuses, so there is some kind of professional responsibility but no real authority given to that. In short, there is really no career prospective in teaching.

As soon as you enter teaching at around the age of 22-23, and you have no drive to become a manager, you leave the job at the age of 62 from the same ordinary teacher’s job that you held for about 35-40 years, and there was no real change in your life. In the middle of your 40s you face a real burnout situation, because you will do the same for the rest of your 20 years of service that you did the years before. So this is something that we really miss, and I am sure that the managers missed that kind of shared responsibility, too.

Being involved in the consultancy job for the Socrates national agency, I can see what the difficulties are that schools face nowadays, where there are some motivated teachers who would like to take responsibility for the international, European educational projects. They believe they would be competent enough to coordinate those projects, but it depends on the personal culture of the head teacher whether he or she delegates the responsibility for that project at all.

So what happens is that people work out projects themselves, but they are not made responsible, and we do not have the authority to manage those projects anymore. So there are a number of difficulties like that and because delegating responsibility and jobs is not part of our managerial culture in schools. Of course, there are examples and exceptions, and good exceptions, and perhaps I am over-generalising, but this is something I felt when I was a young practicing teacher: that I did not really have a job prospect as such, a career prospect, because I did not want to become a manager and there was nothing else to drive me.

Gábor Halász: Katalin Stadler, who is the programme director of the Comenius 2000 Quality Assurance, Quality Development programme, has asked for the floor.

Katalin Stadler: I would like to add some more detailed information about the Comenius 2000 programme, which was presented by my colleague. I would like to outline two different areas for the moment and give a little more detail on the supporting environment: the Ministry of Education is providing for the schools who are participating in the programme and this is linked to the agenda of the morning session, “School as a Learning Organisation,” and shows you in very brief and very big steps what is actually going on in the schools who are implementing this programme.

First, before launching this programme in 1999, the Act on Public Education was modified and in this altered version of the Act the quality assurance related tasks of the public educational institutions were included and outlined. It means that sooner or later each public educational institution in Hungary has to implement its own quality management system, and this can be one of the incentives to join to this programme at this moment, because at this stage these schools can get state subsidies in order to help them to implement these systems. At this moment the only possibility for joining the programme is to apply or to participate in the competition schemes. Invitations to the schemes are issued by the minister of education and the Comenius 2000 programme management unit.

What other elements of this supporting environment should be mentioned? The quality improvement manual was elaborated at the very beginning, which is a common document on the basis of which all schools are working. This quality improvement manual contains the detailed description of the Comenius models, the Comenius 1 partner focused operation and the Comenius 2 implementation of total quality management, so all the minimum requirements which the schools participating in the programme have to fulfil. Of course, they can go above these requirements, but there is a common set of requirements to be fulfilled.

To this quality improvement manual we have developed methodological guidance materials, which are also available on CD-ROM for the schools and on the Internet website of the Ministry of Education. With these guidance materials we would like to help the institutions find the best-suited methods for them to fulfil the requirements. We are also thinking about the institutions outside the programme, because in Hungary we have more than 8000 public education institutions, and at this moment around 1000 institutions are participating in the programme, so we would also like to help those who start implementing the Comenius 1 model on their own. We have therefore developed the guide for the implementation for them with case studies and a detailed description of the implementation procedure.

The second element of support to the institution, is given through financing consultants. The third element of the supporting environment is the free-of-charge training courses for the teachers of the institutions in quality matters, and also regularly organising refresher courses for the consultants on different topics. One of the major elements of this supporting environment is the monitoring system we operate. The monitoring system has three main elements and three main roles. First of all it is a supporting system, because it is very important to give all the professional help possible to the institutions and to help them to implement the models successfully. There are also regular work reports and the experts of the PMU (programme management unit) are conducting site visits at the institutions.

The second main role of the monitoring system is that, especially in the first phase, we have to gather information both on the applicability of the models within the education sector and also about the way these models are implemented within the schools.

There is a third function of this monitoring system. Because within the programme public funds are used, we also have to control the utilisation of these funds. For helping the institutions in their work and in order to promote the principle of learning from each other, which is actually the basic principle of the programme, we have established the Network of the Comenius 2000 Club. This means that we operate clubs on an institutional level, and these clubs are gathering so that the institutions can exchange experiences at these club meetings. We also regularly organise conferences and forums for exchange of experience.

Now, very briefly, the main steps of the Comenius 1 model. The partner-focused operation is now implemented in more than 1500 schools in Hungary. We are in a good situation concerning the Comenius 1 model because early next year 320 institutions will finish the project – 18 months of implementation. Early this summer, on the basis of the experiences gained so far, we could improve the model which was developed by the experts in order to offer the institutions who started the implementation from September 1 this year an improved model.

The logical flow of the Comenius 1 model has 10 main steps. The first step is that when the institution starts the programme it has to conduct an open self-assessment with the involvement of all staff of the institution. Dialogue will be open within the institution about the status and quality matters of the institution. As the second step, the institution will identify the partners, both direct and indirect. The direct partners are, for example, the pupils themselves, the teachers or the maintainer, and the indirect partners are the organisations who can impact the operation of the institution.

As a third step the institution will survey the needs and the expectations of these partners and analyse these demands. The institution will set the objectives and prioritise these objectives. The institution will then draw up an action plan in order to implement and to achieve these objectives. The implementation of the action plans then takes place, and from time to time it should evaluate the implementation of the action plans. If necessary, corrective actions should be introduced. And as the final step, a controlled self-assessment should be carried out which has already certain aspects on which the whole operation of the institution should be assessed. Based on the outcome of this controlled self-assessment, the institution can define or decide how far it has proceeded the way of partner-focused operation, whether it should repeat this cycle again or the partner-focused operation is already established within the institution. So there is a good background to step forward with implementation of the second model, the total quality management which already comprises all the fields of the institutional operation.

István Vilmos Kovács: I would like to raise the question of whether the model of learning organisation will provide a well described and stabile learning environment for schools. As far as I know, the results of the PISA programme show that those schools with a disciplined organisation and high academic demand, and precise and clear homework – which are the values of traditional schools – can live together with the learning organisations. I would raise the analogy or a parallel model of a knowledge-based company where hierarchy, efficiency and strict organisation rules can be combined with a system that is built on equality, trust, the mutual benefit of changing knowledge, etc.

I think this is something that we can learn from companies, but to learn from this, the schools’ managements have to be extremely well prepared, as some of the tasks are brand new. If this parallel case of knowledge-based companies could be implemented in schools as well, then the complexity of managements’ tasks would be really serious. This is a simple idea that I would like to hear you opinion about.

Caroline Macready: I was going to pick up another point from earlier in the discussion rather than respond to the one just raised. I was going to go back to the question of accountability and how much information schools should expect to produce on results. Different parts of the UK feel differently about these things, but in England we remain convinced that it is important to publish school-by-school results as part of accountability to parents and to the tax-payer. But if you are going to publish performance tables, you need to satisfy three conditions: they must be accurate, they must be comprehensive and they must be as fair as any performance measures can be.

Accuracy – Clearly you need to have national tests. You also need to check them in detail before you publish them because they can effect school reputations, and it is not a cheap process to publish as many performance tables as we do.

Comprehensive – You do need to give as much context as you can of the situation in which the school is operating, like the size of the school, number of children and the special educational needs in the school, to put the raw results into perspective. Also there is a danger that if you publish only some results, schools will concentrate on those more than other things. For instance we do have national tests for children at ages 7, 11, 14 and 16, as well as at 18. For some years we have only published the results of the 11 year-old tests and the 16 year-old tests. We found that the 11 year-old results moved up, the 16 year-old performances moved up, while the 14 year-old performances remained static because those were the tests we were not publishing. We have now decided to do so.

Fairness of measures – There is indeed a danger that if you just publish results of exams and tests, parents and other readers will not be sophisticated enough to make a differential intake. Finally, it looks as if from next year we will be able to publish value-added performance measures in which we will compare each school and its results, with the results the average school would get taking into account the attainment of its pupils at the previous stage. We are going to do this using an index around 100, so that a school within a particular key-stage that has made a lot of progress, perhaps with pupils who were not star performers at the previous level, will show up as over 100 and as having added a lot of value. Whereas the schools whose children perhaps were good achievers already, perhaps because they came from privileged backgrounds, but for whom the school has not done a great deal in terms of its teaching, they may have a score below 100. And this will add a very useful new dimension to what parents can see and read about. Of course, we have difficulty persuading our teachers that any measure is fair, but we hope that finally we will be able to produce something that is a valuated measure which will be accepted as being as fair as you can get. But that, too, is going to be a very expensive process: putting together all the information and getting it accurate.

As well as seeing schools’ performance results, parents and the public can see the reports of our inspectors on schools. Any time OFSTED goes into a school it produces a report and that report is publicly available to anyone who wants it. That again gives a lot of quality measures to acquire. Occasionally schools have felt harm done by, and have taken OFSTED to court over inaccurate reports. That is their sanction. But by and large those reports are reliable and reliedon.

We have further information available for schools to evaluate themselves in the areas where we do not produce school-by-school performance tables. For instance, we have something we produce every autumn called the “Autumn Package”, in which the schools can look at the average performance of other schools with children in the same socio-economic group as measured by take-up of free school meals because we have found a great difference between socio-economic groups, as confirmed by the PISA study. A head teacher or governing body in the privacy of their own study can look at what they ought to be achieving with children of that socio-economic background and see whether they are.

Finally, because now school governing bodies have the responsibility for school standards, we are trying to improve the information available for governing bodies to do serious and sophisticated comparisons with the performance of other schools like theirs, what we call statistical neighbours, by producing best practice examples for them to use. And I think it would be very difficult for us to go back to a system where no such accountability information was available.

George Papadopoulos: In the absence of a French delegate’s representative of our expert, it would be interesting to see what the situation in France is with regard to this particular point. The French government does not publish itself results of its evaluation. But once a year a very respectable weekly journal called Le Monde de L’Education publishes a special supplement which is really the derby of the research. It is based on data available within the ministry at the evaluation unit, which is established in the ministry. And they give a ranking not only in terms of their assessment but also in terms of bachelor’s access, in terms of subjects of specialisation, in terms of the quality of life and a couple of other terms of discussion. And this is very highly valued by the French public. But this is the way the French solved the problem that perplexes our Dutch friends.

Bill Mulford: It is responding also to the last two speakers and quality evidence. I must say that I worry about the OFSTED inspection data from England, which uses very limited criteria for leadership and very limited criteria for school results, which is academic achievement. And some of the data I have been privileged to see, for example, shows that almost 30% of the relationships they looked at between leadership and student outcomes even in a limited form had categories such as the following: schools with a leadership that was very good or excellent but there was only satisfactory or worse pupil achievement. There was another group where the management and leadership by the inspectors was classified as unsatisfactory or worse than unsatisfactory, and the pupil achievement was good or satisfactory. Still another group existed where the leadership was satisfactory but the student outcomes were good or even better. So if we are going to use evidence as the basis, I think we need to be very careful about the quality of that evidence.

If I could move on to the PISA results. As I understand them they operate on at least four levels: the student, the classroom, the school and beyond the school. Donald has already mentioned that at the student level what has been found to be important is called the student controlling the learning process. At the classroom level it is creating positive teacher-student relations and a good disciplinary climate, but still important, though much less important, is an emphasis on academic performance and high standards. I am trying to put your interpretation in the context of these before it is lost on the group.

At the school level there are a range of issues to do with the qualifications of teachers – the resources that the students use in the school, the staff-student ratio – but in terms of the school policy in practice it is where teachers have high expectations of students, teacher moral is high, there is a strong commitment to the school and where the school has autonomy in decision-making. And that is a little different from what we have seen.

Then, at the outside-of-school level, what is important is not only privileged social background, socio-economic status, but also that home educational environment, what they call in the report “having a classical culture in the home”. I do not know who thought up those words, but it means art and music and so on, but also having more social and cultural communication at home. All of those results are related to academic achievement.

The report also goes on to say in 20 out of 28 countries more than one in four students consider school a place where they do not want to go. And the report then goes on to say how important these other results of schooling are as well as academic achievement. If we are on about lifelong learning and learning to learn, then those results are also important, and I will be encouraging OECD to peruse those other results in greater depth. There is a lot of work that has already been done on the academic side.

George Papadopoulos: Shall I make one final remark with this? It is not directly related to any questions that have been raised, but I remember seeing statistics which indicate that in Europe 85-90% of a school’s educational budget goes to teachers’ salaries. In the Unites States of America, the percentage is less than 50% that goes to teachers; the rest presumably goes to administrative and organisational infrastructure. If it is still true (my data date back a couple of years) it shows the remarkable chasm between the approach practiced in Europe with regard to the use of resources for education, and the approach used in America. It would be quite an interesting area to explore, perhaps within PISA it might be useful.

Gábor Halász: You may have a short reaction to that and then we ask Donald to give his first reflection.

Bill Mulford: Sorry, it was not a reaction; it was to come back to – if I could have a few minutes – school councils, which were raised in the issue on accountability and freedom. We gathered a lot of data about the role of school councils, and I would be very interested to understand more what the expectations are in different countries of school councils. What we have found, for example, is the closer the issue is to the classroom, the less impact the school councils have. So the school councils or school boards tend to function mainly in administration and policy. If we link that with our research, it is the least influential on student outcomes, that is, the range of student outcomes not just academic achievement. We also find when we ask who influences school councils and school boards, it is not surprising perhaps that the school principal dominates the influence of school councils. And 75% respond that way, teachers and parents 50%, the community more widely than parents at 20% and school students 5%. So there is a hierarchy there in terms of who is involved. And perhaps that has something to do with underlying values related to democracy and so on. When we ask questions like: “should you leave decision-making to experts in schools?” we have almost a third of principals and teachers who say “yes, you should.” But if you ask community and parent school council members, the number drops dramatically. So there is a range of issues about expectations for school councils and given those expectations what we can expect that they will contribute to the school.

Gábor Halász: I ask Donald Hirsch to give his first reflections on this second session.

Donald Hirsch: Well, this time I am going to have to explain how PISA results refer to what we have been talking about. Because Bill has very accurately done that, except to add to his last statistic of quota of children not wanting to go to school at 15, in most counties. There are, I think, five countries where this is over 35%, and Hungary is one of those countries. So this is disturbing news for Hungary there. It is very difficult to sum up or to have some general reflections on what we have been talking about because we have been talking about many different dimensions in which the management of schools is being re-thought, and it is worthwhile to think over these dimensions simultaneously. So I will just run through a few of those.

The first dimension is institutional responsibilities and relationships, and in particular I think the issue of how much central and local government imposes on schools and how they do it. I do not think there is any simple model of decentralisation which has emerged. It is a complex process which is constantly being rethought and redefined.

A second dimension which is being rethought is the whole process of improvement, and in particular we have heard of Hungary applying different quality improvement models. Here perhaps there is more clarity because there is quite a lot to draw on from the principles of management from outside the education sector, and these things are becoming clear. The Hungarian experience does seem to me to show how you can apply some general principals about change processes and improvement processes within education. I am taking the lessons from management more generally.

A third and again a more general set of relationships or changes is about people and their roles. We have heard a lot this afternoon in particular about how you get the whole school and everybody in the school involved in management and in change, and not just being dependent on a single powerful leader. But that ties in as well to the very interesting question of how you motivate people who are further down the school in terms of their career paths and having responsibilities to delegate to them.

A fourth area tied with change relates to the role of outsiders in two ways: one is as a resource and the other is as a stakeholder. On the resources side, how and to what extent we are willing to bring in expertise from the private sector and to what extent our teachers and our principals and others in the schools are willing to listen to others within the education sector as critical friends? There seems to be a great desire to exchange experiences, and in Hungary that certainly is happening. In the UK, where I am from, there certainly is a big desire to use a sort of horizontal relationship, a collaboration between the schools to create a collaborative model for improvement. One of the difficulties is that this has happened in a decade when there has also been in many ways more competition among schools, and I would say that can be an uneasy relationship.

The next thing it leads to is a more awkward thing, which is the critical non-friends, or the critical people like inspectors, who come in just to help you as far as you are able, but they also call you to account. This relationship is also between sort of talking openly about your problems, and benchmarking also relates to the issue of release of information. Because how willing will you be to benchmark and to use tools if they can help you, if they are doing so you are going to create a problem for yourself, something which people can hold you accountable for or something which we publish? So I think in all of these areas, educational management has a very good idea about the broad directions it wants to change. But it is obviously not an easy process and it creates a lot of tensions.