2. Institutional and ‘Micro’-level Issues

Part 1. Creating and Sustaining High Quality Learning Environments

István Vilmos Kovács: Then now we would start our first session, about the theme “creating and sustaining high quality learning environment”. The main presenter of this issue is Mr. Mats Ekholm, the Director of the Swedish National Board of Education.

Mats Ekholm: I would like to jump into what we have already heard: that if you are really going to go with learning as an important outcome of schooling then we need to sometimes really understand what learning is. And in my country we are slow learners. I come from Sweden, and it took us about 100 years to put learning as a skill into our national syllabus, before we accepted that one of the most important things to learn at school is to learn to learn. And nowadays, when we have accepted it, we see other consequences of what we have struggled with for about 100 years. Because if you are going to create and sustain high quality in learning environments, and I will especially speak about schools, you need to know something about the basic idea of what you are doing.

If you look, for instance, at a school, a school is a very simple, “finning” in Swedish, which means invention in English. And then invention is simple, as it was once upon a time back in George Papadopoulos’s old homeland, Greece, when it was started as a concept. It was created as an exercise, where one old man or woman, usually a man, was sitting down and telling some younger people what he knows. And he was talking and talking and talking. And actually, like in history, when this concept was created, when it started to work as a basic idea on how you make a school, it was an idea that was created in a time when texts were very rarely seen, where people could not remember what could be remembered on the mechanical issues. So, therefore, we were talking and talking and talking.

When you look at the modern school it has a long inheritance here. In schools there are people called teachers who talk and talk and talk. For hours. Meanwhile, young people are still expected in modern times to sit down and listen to all the knowledge that the old ones have in their heads. And the old knowledge happens to jump out of the heads into the younger heads. And thereby we have disseminated knowledge.

But, while history went along, a concept of school that was already around 1,000 years ago or 800 years ago, has already found its basic organisation that we have people to come together in not such big groups, and not in small groups, but in groups that have a certain amount of people: 50, 100 or 20-25 – there have always been quarrels about how big a group could be that could listen and consume what was in the head of the wise man. We already invented many years ago the way in which we could organise and cut down the day into smaller pieces. Usually, the time amount that education is following all over the world is where education is cut down into 50-minute lessons or 45-minute lessons – which happen to be one hour minus the 5-10 minutes where the monk and the nun were praying to God. And thereby it developed into a kind of time-rhythm, which we put into the organisation of schools. But basically the whole organisation of a school was based on the invention that the old man or the old woman’s knowledge would jump out through the mouth, usually into the heads of the young ones.

When the first information revolution came, when Guttenberg presented some smart ways to print books, you could have come over to another way of dealing with a school. You could have helped people to read, which we have been doing all the time in school, and they could take part in the collective memory that is put into books and find their way to these memories in another way than listening to a teacher. But the teacher went on and talked and talked all over into the 20^th century. In 1896 we had a very big challenge come up in the invention of a school, because at that time, for the first time, we tested the idea that actually had been presented in 1500 somewhere in France whereby a school could perhaps be a place where teaching is not the main activity, but learning. And if you start to put that idea into practice, you end up in a different school than the old school. So when the first real test came around and it happened to take place in the United States, in more schools inside the Chicago University, where this idea was really tested. It was the first school where the school organisation was based on the idea that learning is the most important thing that can take place in schools. And when you start to do that practice, when you have that idea in your head, you manage the school in a different way than if you are a believer of the old idea.

Out of that idea comes such interesting things as teacher team-teaching, where you have teachers going together in teams trying to understand how students learn so that you can organise yourself, following the learning of the student instead of following how long teachers may teach before they fall down. The old time-schedule was thus thrown out in those schools that went over to this idea, and new environments were created that were friendly towards learning, that were demanding learning, which means that in schools organised on this idea you find different things than you find in schools trying to maximise teacher talking. When I say this is, well, if you are going to make or create a learning environment where you really want to maximise learning, you have to rethink the basic idea of what you are doing.

In my country we try to help school managers and school principals to adopt this way of thinking by introducing them to a school-leader training programme while they are still new to the job. It has been running for three years. They spend about 10% of their working time developing an in-depth understanding of the basic idea of what they are doing. We also try to help them understand the expectations society has of their role. What we are trying to do is help them to develop fruitful, useful and practical ways of not only thinking about the main theme of a learning environment – learning instead of teaching – we also want them to look at these kinds of thinking where if you are going to be able to help people to really learn, you have to build an environment where people want to learn. Because without having the will for learning involved, it is very difficult to learn.

Papadopoulos cited Winston Churchill; he is not the only one who hated school. There are many of us. But when we have created the new school, we try to make schools in a different way than it was 100 years ago, 200 years ago or 20 years ago. And, if a good school manager is going to be able to build that kind of school, then the school leader, the school principal, needs to not only understand and know something about work motivation, and especially such work motivation that helps those who want to learn, or that you hope to arrange an environment to help them to want to learn, but it is also a question of using that knowledge to arrange the whole situation so that you take the consequences of what we know. We know a lot more about work motivation, but here I put forward what could be useful for a school principal to use when he is arranging his school or manages his school, that he ought to know that you need to build a feeling of security in the school. A feeling of security that you could go there, that it is warm, that you are treated well as a partner to other people in that school, and that you are treated with respect.

We also know that the work motivation in learning environments is growing if you arrange the situation so that you get a lot of social togetherness to come out of the situation. It is also important to have a kind of pulsation of change, that change comes and goes. That it is not boring. That for instance if you have a school manager who sees that in grade 3 and 4 that the student is sitting there and making the same additions over and over, time after time, he can help the teachers to see that this might kill the interest of learning for the students. You perhaps need to find another strategy because this has nothing to do with the pulsation of change that human beings usually need to have, and at the same time feel secure in the situation. If the work motivation in learning is going to be maximised, you need to work on the question of meaningfulness. To have the relationship between central and peripheral, between what is done on, let’s say, a system level, you also have to put forward expectations on the schools as well as on the school managers to participate in changes and to help them to learn.

This very popular concept that has been kept alive now for 15-20 years in different areas of society is important for school managers to realise what it really has inside, because schools ought to be learning organisations. Some schools are not. They are repeating the same interesting mistakes that have been repeated over more than hundreds of years. So, if you are going to act as a school manager and really arrange the situation for students, for people coming to the learning place to learn, the organisation needs to organise itself to really be able to learn. And if the organisation organises itself to learn, then it has to plan and take actions aimed at learning.

For instance, if you believe you could study a foreign language by using, say, three hours on studying English – common for Europeans – which we spread out over the week to keep the teachers going, or whatever we do it for. Well, in some countries and in some schools you make experiments where you arrange situations where, for instance, you will explain to yourself that for three weeks now our school is going to be an English-speaking school, and let’s see what happens with the students’ learning. So instead of spreading out small portions of learning, you put it together into big showers – work in English for three weeks, which when we do it in Sweden we have a lot of fun with it – school managers can come out and say the children loved it, because they suddenly understood that some old Swedish people could not speak English in a very proper way. And that gave the students a high self-esteem, which they understand that if we agreed to try to exist in a foreign language, they are not the least knowledgeable at the school. They have a lot more to come with than some of the grown ups.

Organisations that really learn from their own actions, observe themselves and the reactions of others, analyse the outcomes of the actions and sort out the lessons learned. All this is work that takes time and that is not included in the ordinary expectations of teachers and school managers. So it has to be taken care of. It has to be put into the agenda of the school if the school is going to act as a learning organisation. And, if the school is really going to do that, it also helps to remember that memory is needed if you have learned something. And well, that is not as simple as it sounds in the modern time of computers. How do you build a memory in a school, where people come and go, where a story that could be told just disappears when the people disappear? How can you arrange for remembering everything or some parts, the most important parts, of what you have done, where you need to store the lessons learned, one way or another, and where you also need to build up a system for grasping the information when you need it, when you really want to translate it into new situations?

Finally, I will say something about some strategies that we know are useful for people who really want to manage their educational institutions and create and sustain high quality learning environments, where there is a good need for the school manager to build up the strategy or several strategies for some sort of continuous development at the local school. Where the systematically long-term planning is one thing which is also followed then by building systems for open, and I say relatively honest criticism, self-criticism, we cannot be too brutal with each other. But without a real critical, self-critical system, there will be very little learning and there will be very little improvement, because improvement always builds on fair evaluations.

We also need reward systems where risk-taking and creativity are highly valued, and that is a question for the management body of the school to give signals to people that they are allowed to take risks and that they can make different constructions than we had before. To have this system with rewards system together with the criticism, self-criticism, you usually need small distances between people, otherwise this will not function, which also creates a situation where the school manager needs to avoid distancing himself from people if the system is going to move. I have also noted that it is better to give responsibility to those who really do the task and that there is a need for personalised goals. There is a need for ongoing developmental interviews with each other if you are going to manage a school that really can sustain high quality. Thank you.

István Vilmos Kovács: I have to mention the structure of the discussion and certain time limits for the contributions. Now, this presentation will be followed by two responses and these responses should keep to the maximum twelve-minute time limit. After these two contributions, we will have a coffee break and after the coffee break an open discussion will be encouraged. So now I would like to ask Mr. Zoltán Poór, Senior Lecturer of the University of Veszprém in Hungary.

Zoltán Poór: In my reaction I would like to have a look at the issue of learning new teacher’s roles in the resourceful and meaningful learning environment that a school is. I would also like to have a look at the changing roles of educational management at school level. I am based at a university, a faculty of teacher education, and I am looking at these issues from the point of view of a teacher educator.

What kind of challenges shall we or should we respond to in the coming decade? What shall we have to prepare our students for? What teachers to train? As one of the subtitles of our seminar is “Creating and sustaining a high quality learning environment” let me just have a look at the question of high quality: what high quality is from the point of view of education in general terms. Quality, or high quality, could probably mean meeting the objectives we aim at. What are our objectives? Our objectives are: to educate and develop the personalities of young people, who will be able to first of all, take responsibility, to take the control over their own lives; secondly, to educate and develop the personalities of young people who will take the responsibility for the their own self-realisation in terms of health, wealth, emotional and mental development; and again, to educate and develop the personalities of young people who will be able to monitor and reflect on it all, on their own development through their lives.

So, if this is our aim, this is our objective, do we meet our objectives at all? That is, do we produce quality? Do we offer quality in education? This is the big issue, the big question we have to answer. The personality who I have just outlined, the person who is able to take control over his own life, the person who is able to take responsibility over his own learning and development and is able to carry it all throughout, monitor it all through his or her life, this is an autonomous personality. And an autonomous personality is aware of his or her own learning, as a firm foundation for self-awareness, that is, can maintain his or her self awareness. An autonomous personality is able to set aims, goals and objectives. An autonomous personality can define the content of learning or the content of development, the content of self-development as such. And an autonomous personality can identify his or her own needs. The autonomous personality can also plan a time frame and plan the speed of progress. This autonomous personality, who we aim at, who we would like to see in the long run, can pace the achievements of partial goals. This personality can also select resources, approaches, methods and techniques for his or her own development and learning. And this personality who we aim at to be, who is going to be autonomous, this personality has to be able to develop the methodology for reflection and self-assessment.

As far as lifelong learning is concerned, an autonomous personality is ready for lifelong learning. So we arrive at our objectives, we achieve our objectives, as soon as we are able to develop autonomous personalities. Now, what are the teachers’ tasks in creating and sustaining a high-quality learning environment from the point of view of developing autonomous personalities of young people whose development, whose education we are responsible for?

First of all, if you want young people to be able to take responsibility over their own development, then the teachers also have to learn to be responsible for their own work. And this is what one of the most important components of new educational policies in Hungary is about, that is, quality management, quality assurance as such. Teachers who take responsibility for their own work have to learn to design curricula or syllabuses. And this is what has been done for the past decade in Hungary on the basis of national core curriculum and now on the basis of the frame curricula. Teachers have learned to design the local – that is school level – syllabuses, the local curricula. And in the framework of that, teachers have been learning to design their own teaching materials. As further tasks, as soon as you are responsible for your own educator’s work that you deliver, you complete in the framework of your own developed curricula and syllabuses; you have to be able to reflect on your own work as a teacher. It is, again, a very important component of quality management, quality assurance. And because our aim is to develop autonomous personalities, who are ready for lifelong learning, we also have to teach learners to learn and develop themselves. We develop learners to be able to develop themselves, that is, we teach learners to learn in a resourceful and meaningful learning environment. Teachers have to learn to create and maintain a resourceful and meaningful learning environment, and in this learning environment they have to create stimulating and natural situations, real situations versus realistic situations.

Let me refer to both Mr. Papadopoulos and Mats Ekholm when they were talking about real tasks, real situations in the class. Péter Medgyes, one of the language educators in Hungary, when he talked about communicative language teaching approaches, he said that the most important issue is to shift from realistic classroom situations to real classroom situations. The difference between realistic and real is: realistic is a situation when you have to say something. And real is a situation when you have something to say.

To interpret this idea into general terms of education, here I would say something like realistic is a school or classroom situation where whatever you want to do does not matter, you have to do what you are asked to do, when you have to discover something that you are supposed to do. Real is a learning situation where you discover or explore something that you are personally interested in, that you need for your further aims and objectives. So this is one of the most important tasks of teachers for the future: to learn how to create natural, real and stimulating situations in the frame of the high-quality learning environment. And these teachers who are responsible for themselves, they also have to learn how to develop themselves. And this is what the in-service training project in Hungary is about: teachers are made responsible for their own professional development and to take responsibility for their own professional development into their own hands.

This is a new challenge again in countries where there was a prescriptive type of education. And now, with the decentralisation other local needs are also to be met – local needs do not only mean the needs of the local community, but the needs of the individuals within the local community.

Again, personality and cultural diversity as such is an important issue. And thus, teachers have to be able to learn to be tolerant of diversity as such in their classrooms, towards cultural diversity. And here cultural would mean two different things. According to Michael Byron, there are capital letter “C” Cultures and small letter “c” cultures. The small letter “c” culture is the culture of the individual, and capital letter “C” Culture is the culture of the community – big and bigger communities. So teachers have to face this kind of challenge, they have to be able to handle the cultural diversity and teach the learners’ communities tolerance of cultural diversity, because teachers themselves are lifelong learners, as such, and teachers themselves are members of learning organisations. The learning environment that teachers create for their own pupils, for their own learners, for their own students is actually the learning environment for their own profession-specific development. So they create learning environments with dual purposes.

So what could be the duties of school management to support teachers, to meet the needs and objectives of the learners to become autonomous, independent personalities? How can managers support this? First of all, as Mr. Ekholm referred to it, delegate responsibility to teachers, to those who do the task. And this is something that we have to learn, that is, teachers are people who are responsible for other people’s development and work. How can we delegate responsibility to teachers for their own work? By setting up projects completed by teams. An example is what has happened in Hungary: the designing of local syllabuses in teamwork, or developing teaching materials and international educational projects. Nowadays, in many of the newly accepted countries, the associated countries to the European Union, the Socrates projects, the Leonardo projects are very important. And thus, European, educational joint projects are important issues. Teachers have to learn how to cooperate. Delegating responsibility to teachers could be done by introducing schemes of teacher self-development. This is, again, a very important aspect of quality assurance of quality management at schools. Managers of schools encourage teachers to learn to develop themselves. How? By setting up short-, mid- and long-term classroom research projects or by integrating formal and informal ways of in-service teacher training schemes, self-development as such. This is where team-teaching plays an important role and mutual observation schemes, that is, attending each other’s classes.

Further tasks of managers nowadays are to provide the financial and administrative background for creating and maintaining a meaningful and resourceful education environment for the teachers, creating a stimulating learning environment that provides them with the finances and the administrative support, that is, the legacy for that and, again, providing financial administrative support for contemporary technologies to be used in education to support development. And as the teachers have to learn to be able to handle various cultures, the cultural diversity in the classrooms, managers also have to learn how to handle a staff with various values, various attitudes and various abilities, that is, with various educational cultures as such. There is no “only possible way”. There are lots of other ways. And as learners have to learn to become independent by reflecting on their own development and teachers have to learn to be independent by reflecting on their own educational procedures, managers also have to learn to reflect on their managerial work.

The question then arises of whether higher education and teacher education have ever answered all these challenges. Coming from the higher education sector, coming from the faculty of teacher education, I have to confess that unfortunately we are far behind schedule, that we are still in the position of talk and chalk, that is, “a teacher is a preacher” and not a facilitator of learning. We are still in the framework of pure and bare academia and care very little about the practical side of education as such. As soon as we identify that these are our needs, we have to identify the ways, the contents and the methods of our teacher education and how to meet all these needs.

Thank you very much for the chance to go through how to go about teacher education in the future. Thank you for your attention.

István Vilmos Kovács: Now I would like to give the floor to Professor Bill Mulford, Director of Learning Research Group of University of Tasmania, Australia.

Bill Mulford¹: I would like to first thank you of all, the Hungarian government and OECD for inviting an Australian. If nothing else, I know now what all the postcards with snow on them mean, when we have Christmas in the middle of summer. I now understand what all your Christmas cards really mean. Could I also congratulate OECD and the Hungarian government for “stopping bumping”? Now, what do I mean by stopping bumping? I have just finished a year of study-life in England and one of the books on philosophy that I found that I liked very much was a book by A. A. Milne called Winnie-the-Pooh. I do not know if you are familiar with Winnie-the Pooh. The first words of the book, Winnie-the-Pooh, are: “Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now: bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs. But sometimes he feels: there really must be another way – if only he could stop bumping a moment and think of it.”

Sweden, congratulations on stopping your teachers, giving them time to reflect. Congratulations, Hungary, for stopping all that bumping, all that pressure, doing things to reflect, and similarly to the OECD. I want to start my contribution by building on this book that we all have, New Management Approaches, and in particular the section that has 10 conclusions, 10 implications. The work that I would like to put before you this morning relates to five of those. First, the involvement of those distant to use changes is one of the implications. The second is the importance of teamwork. The third one is learning organisations. Those words have been used a lot already this morning, and another is leaders developing other than the formal role of school principal or head teacher. Now I want to, as you will see, build on Mats Ekholm’s presentation as I was asked to do. Another of the conclusions and the last one I will mention, the fifth in here, it says there is a need to build on these findings, but to use relevant research, because it is essential for informed policy development. We need to be informed by evidence. How do we decide on whether we have quality evidence?

I want to talk about leadership for organisational learning and improving student outcomes. My worry about a lot of evidence – to use the old computer-adage – is that a lot of evidence is like “garbage in”. And if it is garbage in then it is garbage out. We really do need to focus on the quality of the evidence that we have before us. What I hope you would agree with me is that the evidence that I am going to put before you now is quality evidence.

I believe it is quality evidence because it has integrity and it has predictive validity as well as clearly defined variables. The evidence has integrity in the sense that it is complex enough, coming closer to the reality faced by those in schools than much of the previous research in the area of school leadership. It also has integrity because the data is gathered from other than school principals. I do not know if you would be surprised to know, but the research shows clearly that school principals tend to overestimate the success of initiatives in their school. If you rely just on evidence from schools, just from school principals, then you may have a problem with the quality of that evidence.

Also, this evidence has been collected by people who have not been involved with the changes. There is a disturbing trend in our country for the government to contract people to develop a change and implement it, and then to hire the same people to evaluate it. That is a worry in terms of quality evidence.

And finally, the evidence I will present now also has predictive validity in the sense that it tries to link to student outcomes. Certainly the link to student outcomes is a very rare event in the literature on school leadership.

The project is called the LOLSO project (Leadership for Organisational Learning and Student Outcomes). We started in 1997 in secondary schools with 3,500 students in two Australian states and their teachers, over 2,500 teachers. The following year we conducted in-depth case studies in four schools of best practice. In the third year we returned to half of the schools in one of the states and we resurveyed the students in the schools when they are in year 12, the last year of secondary education. Then we used all of that qualitative and quantitative material to develop problem-based learning pseudo-materials for use in the training of potential new school principals.

Results of the project can be grouped around some of the major questions: How is the concept of organisational learning defined? What leadership practices promote organisational learning? What are some outcomes of schooling other than academic achievement? What is the relationship between the non-academic outcomes and the academic outcomes? And, I guess, the major question for this conference: Does school leadership or organisational learning contribute to student outcomes (both the non-academic and the academic)?

And finally: Are there other factors that contribute to leadership, organisational learning and student outcomes (the size of the school, the socio-economic status of the school, the home educational environment, the gender of the principal, the age of the teachers, all those types of things).

What did we find out about organisational learning? We found from our research that there are four sequential factors that define organisational learning. In other words, you must have the first one before you can move to the second and to the third and the fourth.

Those four factors are: first, establishing a trusting and collaborative climate – unless you have that you cannot go to the next step, to the next phase of the organisational learning. The second phase is having a shared and monitored mission – not just owning it, but, if you remember Mats’ presentation, interrogating it, monitoring it. We need to have that phase or step. You need to stand for something, you need to have an identity, to be able to go to the next stage, which Mats also mentioned, which is: taking initiatives and risks. But taking initiatives and risks comes after the collaboration and standing for something. And the final of the four areas is: ensuring ongoing, relevant professional development.

If you turn to page 4 you will see what leadership practices promote organisational learning in schools. (Now, another timekeeper is going to get really annoyed with me. Because all of this information is in the paper I am going to move very quickly now.) There are two types of leadership that promote organisational learning: one, the position of head teacher, the position of leadership. But that leadership needs to be transformational. And that is the finding there. The other leadership is distributive. And distributive is of two types: the administrative team is the school member of secondary schools and the teacher leadership. So you will see in that diagram that there is a direct line from the head teachers’ leadership to organisational learning, as well as direct lines from the administrative team and teacher leadership, but the head teacher or the principal’s leadership also contributes to distributive leadership.

So there are direct and indirect relationships to organisational learning. And the only factor that came out of all the organisational learning, organisational climate question is the one there: staff feeling valued. And you can see how it interacts, from teacher leadership through organisational learning. One of the groupings of items that will be important as we go on here is having a community focus in the school. And I will come back to that.

Those results so far are the result of teacher voice, of the teachers answering the questionnaires. Now let’s turn to pupil voice. What did the pupil say? What did they say for some of the other than academic achievement outcomes? On page 4 are the results. The first was teachers’ work. The second was academic self-concept. The third was participation and the fourth was engagement. And you will notice each of those is defined in the paper, a diagram shows the relationship. It should not be a surprise to note that the teachers’ work is the link to the two attitudinal and the one behavioural outcome of schooling. What may be a surprise is that the behavioural aspect, the participation is the link to the two attitudinal ones: the academic self-concept and the engagement.

To page 5: What is the relationship between those non-academic outcomes and academic achievement? The results that the children received at the end of their year 12 schooling. The diagram indicates that the link is from participation in schooling to academic achievement and that engagement is linked through retention, that is, having the children stay in school through to academic achievement. You will notice there is no link between academic self-concept and academic achievement.

Page 6: The school leadership and/or organisational learning contribute to student outcomes. I am sorry to all the school principals here, but your leadership does not link directly to student outcomes. It does not link directly. Here is the pattern. What in effect you have if you wanted to simplify that diagram on page 6 even further with two overlapping circles: on the left-hand side teachers participating actively and feeling valued, and on the right-hand side students participating actively and feeling valued.

And now, let us go to the last diagram on page 7. The three contextual variables that we found were important were school-size, home education environment and socio-economic status. The principal’s gender, and the age and gender of the teachers were not significant. You will notice that with school-size, the larger the school, the lower the head teacher or the principal’s transformational leadership; the larger the school, the less teacher leadership; the larger the school, the less participation of students in the school. Home education environment was an extremely important variable and you will notice the link of the home educational environment to teachers’ work, participation and academic self-concept. And our research found that variable was a much stronger predictor of student outcomes than socio-economic status. Although socio-economic status, you will see, was related to home educational environment, academic self-concept, retention and academic achievement, and interestingly was negatively related to help the students’ or the teachers’ work.

What are the implications here? One of the implications – importance of leadership – only indirectly affects student outcomes. It is important that it is distributive, and when it is positional, it is transformational. The importance of context, socio-economic status, school-size and, especially, the home educational environment where the parents talk to the children about the world (Would I have books? Would I have a computer? Would I have a study space?), that is the home educational environment.

Importance of development – Remember that organisational learning developed through stages. Had I more time, we could talk about leadership and development, the importance of broadening of student outcomes beyond academic achievement.

The reason we believe that having a community focus is not related, one of the reasons not related to student outcomes, is that it is related to perhaps another important outcome of schooling. And that is the development of social capital in a community, in the wider community, not the community of the school but the wider community to which the school is a part. So that is what we have been doing in our country, especially in rural Australia where the school is the last public institution. When all the banks have closed, the churches have closed, and the school is not focusing on the development of the community, often the community will collapse. So social capital is important.

The importance of academic self-concept, you will notice that is not linked to academic achievement, but there are others, and particularly in England, a gentleman at the London School of Economics who has linked academic self-concept to people’s, young people’s wages later in life, to their employment and unemployment later in life. It is raising this issue: how important are those exam results? What are they predicting about young people and their successes later in life?

Importance of valid participation – In a broader sense, I believe the implications are linked to the issue of balance. We need the balance between dependence (the relationships at different levels in our system and within school), independence and interdependence. I believe it has a lot to do with homogeneity and heterogeneity. How much diversity is in your system and in your school?

Continuity and constant change – Mats mentioned that: the balance between standing for something, having enough stability to be able to handle the change. Where is that balance? And the focus on individual and the community – where is the balance? Clearly, there are links; OECD’s recent report repeats the results, especially that report’s emphasis on broadening student outcomes to include a positive disposition towards learning, especially that report’s emphasis on home educational environment, and especially that report’s recognition of school level factors.

Finally, what I am most worried about, not only of this research, but on the developments, is what I have called procedural illusions of effectiveness, and that is elaborated in the paper. Let me conclude with an example of what I mean.

This is the story of the world’s worst bus service. And this bus service is in Staffordshire in England. In 1976 it was reported that the busses no longer stopped to pick up passengers. This came to light when one of the passengers complained that the busses were going right past queues of people. Then one of the local counsellors made transport history when he replied in the newspaper that if the buses stopped to pick up the people, they would disrupt the timetable. This is the procedural illusion of effectiveness.

I am glad we started at the school-level and the student-level, because I know we are going to go to the policy and government level. I hope you all will remember the procedural illusions of effectiveness when we get to the government level. Thank you.

István Vilmos Kovács: Now I would like to ask Mr. Alexandru Crisan from Centre of Education 2000, Romania.

Alexandru Crisan: I will refer to my colleague’s intervention, so I am not so unhappy now because I am a little bit out of the timetable. We have just finished our coffee break and now we start open discussions. I would like to refer to the question of today’s discussion from another point of view, which is this time the school point of view, because actually we are talking here about creating and sustaining a high quality learning environment, which actually a school should be. I will try to tell something about my personal history, as it seems to offer an image of the things that happened in Romania in these last years.

For five years I was the president of the National Board of Education. Then I suddenly moved to the other side of the barricade because I had the feeling that many of the policy developments – and I am talking also about policy development concerning management leadership and, generally speaking, administrating schools – at the policy level they seemed to be elaborated in an excellent way, but the big question remained on the other side of the barricade: what happens in real schools? And here I really appreciate what Zoltán said before on the difference between real and realistic schools, and on how actually policy can affect schools. When I left the central structures going towards basic structures, my first hypothesis was that actually bottom-up developments and events, and bottom-up processes can and should influence national policies. So that is actually the core of my intervention.

I would like shortly to refer to three main points here. The first one would be the current context of creating and sustaining a high quality learning environment in terms of policy movements in Romania today. Secondly, some framework and some mechanisms that have been developed to do so. And third, I would refer to one concrete model of creating and sustaining a high quality learning environment.

Coming back to the first issue, the context, I would say that I come from a highly centralised educational system. Up to 1990, and I would say that up to 1995, the Romanian educational system was a highly centralised one. The interesting fact is that all this time, in the 1990s it was a clear intention and even a clear political wish to decentralise the system. But at the same time it was a clear fear of the, I would say, the “nation”, that decentralisation will lead to chaos. I heard that word yesterday concerning what many people say is going on in Hungary. I do not think that this is chaos, it is a very good example you have here. And secondly, the fact that decentralisation will lead to de-structuring the system. So you can imagine that the context and the picture were not so happy when decentralisation started.

The funny thing is that in Romania in 1995 the decentralisation was conceived as carried out in a central way. And I would say that the centrally made decentralisation did not function. The cleverest thing is to ask ourselves: how bottom-up processes, facts and events affect, influence or even can change national educational policy? Which are actually the framework issues, and which are actually the mechanisms that ensure such a process?

First, I should refer to a certain legal framework that has been developed in order to encourage decentralisation and decentralising processes. A very liberal bill of education was conceived in 1995. Then in 1995 many possibilities were created for schools to have self-financing schemes and to resort to other financial sources than the state budget, which was a very good move forward. A new role was established with new principles for school inspection that became more a monitoring function than a control and managing one, and at the same time we assisted the development of a really open type of curriculum framework, and assessment and examination procedures.

It is very interesting that two different processes happened in Romania. First, the legal framework opened the system towards decentralisation, and the system did not answer to this openness. At the same time, just to make sure that things would not de-structure the system, certain monitoring mechanisms were created. Actually in Romania we consider as monitoring mechanisms those mechanisms that ensure the coherence of the system.

I will not talk any more about the unity of the system, but I am simply talking of a certain coherence that any educational system should have. In terms of monitoring mechanisms, we have four main mechanisms and institutions. The first one is the Core National Curriculum, which has a proportion of 60% to 40%: 40% meaning school based curriculum that is up to the schools. This really started gradually to be built up and actually to feed in back to the national policy in the sense that schools nowadays ask for more school-based curriculum.

Secondly, there is a national assessment and examination service that ensures the quality in education by means of national exams and by means of continuous assessment in schools, according to national curriculum and assessment standards. This is again something that makes schools more and more open in developing their own views on education, but at the same time keeping an eye on national standards that really ensure the coherence of the system.

There is also a national centre for accrediting teacher-training programmes, which nowadays are going very much towards the ideas that have been mentioned by my Hungarian colleague before, and at the same time, a national centre that accredits textbooks and teaching- -learning materials. In such a framework I would say that generally speaking the system and, at the same time, schools, are a little bit happier than before because they feel they really have a large scale of freedom but at the same time a clear frame of reference for different trends of the system. The first impression would be that this would stop schools from creativity and openness, which is not true. This is like confirming schools that once they do have certain frames of reference, they can refer to what is okay with them. This refers also to a discussion we had yesterday that educational systems have many traditions; there is a national background there. It is very difficult. Generally speaking, in Romania education was very centralised for 78 years, so you can imagine that certain processes really should go in a parallel way from what happens actually, so developing a legal framework which gives schools a large degree of freedom and creativity but at the same time making sure that the system develops a clear monitoring mechanism. That is what is going on now.

I would like to refer shortly to one example, which is actually a project very similar to that presented before. The name of the project is Education 2000+, and we started it four years ago with 80 schools. Today the project covers approximately 4,000 schools out of 40,000 in Romania. I would call the model a “holistic school development/improvement” one, and it has been developed as a support programme for implementing national change, national reform measures in education. According to the OECD new scenarios of re-schooling, I would say that the group of schools I am talking about actually enters under the umbrella of the so-called re-schooling scenario, and I would say that these schools are moving on a large scale between the type of school as core social centres and schools as focused learning organisations.

What is actually going on in these schools? The schools are working on developing their internal learning organisations’ culture by means of three main components: improving institutional capacity building, improving human resource development and at the same time developing clear school policies. The model used, and I will present it very shortly, a case study on the resource table. We are using here the so-called amoeba-model which is in the literature of my text. So let’s say this is the amoeba and as you know this is something that moves and changes all the time, so it is a dynamic model: what happened in a specific school is presented as a case study made by the teachers of that school.

Year 1 – that was phase 1 actually – could be called invitation to change, and I just want to compare the two researches because that is an action research, and it has many similar points with the one presented before. What happened here was that everybody of the school gradually learned to join the team and to understand why change was needed. The focus was on introducing cultural norms that support improvement. Everyone just thinks like that. Everyone has something to offer. We can discuss our differences; we are working on this together. This happened in the first year – in the year of invitation to change.

I recall some of the main events there: the school building became colourful, functional, modern; then staff-development changed a lot, the staff was considered as the treasure inside. Cultural norms have been developed for supporting improvement. I am referring to the same terms that have been referred to before: togetherness, continuous improvement, lifelong learning, mutual respect in the staff, openness, supporting celebration and humour and so on, shared goals, we know where we are going. Then a new structure, involvement of all stakeholders in the decision-making process, changing teaching and learning, so a student-centred approach.

The second year the shape and the format of the amoeba changed towards what we call “partners in education”. That, I would say, made the passage from the so-called first step, which was a kind of subjective step: invitation to change, the passage towards a more interactional approach, and what happened was actually linked with parents, linked with the community, improving internal communication in the school.

The third year, the third phase actually, was the so-called political level or school policy level, when coherence and clarity were developed. School strategic planning was developed, students’ personal development became gradually very important, and monitoring and evaluation measures were taken. Year 4, or the fourth stage, is actually networking, so the school, one of the best schools out of these networks, became a national training centre, the first one in Romania, which is actually in a school. The hypothesis was a very simple one. Once we are recommending teachers to go to a different training centre, and we are lecturing there, they can understand us, they can say: “yes, this is okay with us, but going back to our school we could not do that.” One of the schools became a national on-the-job kind of training centre where teachers from the country come and are trained in the school. They go to lessons, they actually participate in the staff work and they are there for two or three days. This is, in our view, one of the best examples in Romania. Maybe in the future we have to think of placing training centres not in the centre but at the bottom of the system, because the learning experiences of teachers there are very clear. They are real and not realistic.

The principal of one of these schools said, and this is very interesting for our discussion here, that they have found one important thing: that school improvement is a never-ending journey. Once you get to one end, which means an outcome for students, you should keep on looking for further improvements, and in this endless journey, teachers and students are energetic travellers.

What I would like to say is that these 80 schools at the beginning act in our system as a kind of tea bag. Just imagine that you have some hot water in a cup and then you introduce the tea bag. The system was hot enough to receive such a new thing. Gradually, the idea of building such schools infused the system and what we noticed these last years was that really the infusion model is one of the models that can be used in order to decentralise very centralised systems. This is also an example of how developments at the bottom of the system can influence the policy-making level. For instance, one of the last orders issued by the minister invited teachers, students, parents to look at these interesting models. This is not an order like, “please, copy them”. It is just saying, please, look at them and go home, analyse your own situations, think about it and see what you can do in your own places after seeing such models. Thank you very much.

István Vilmos Kovács: Now, we are about 35 minutes behind. I would like to say just divide into three the reductions in time of our future activities – 10 minutes off the coffee break, sorry for that, 10 minutes from the discussion and 10 minutes from the lunch break and hopefully the afternoon will be proceed closer to the time expectations. Thank you very much for the very interesting presentations, and this 10-minute coffee break will be interesting for discussion as well. Thank you.

BREAK

István Vilmos Kovács: I hope that we have many munitions from the morning presentations and we have the chance to discuss these findings. Now the floor is open and the rules would be that one contribution should not be longer that five minutes, but I will give a signal at three minutes.

George Papadopoulos: One question that comes to my mind is in regard to the policies that Sweden has put forward and the results of specific projects that we have here from Australia, Romania and Hungary. And the question is two questions at least: How do we know how the results of such specialised studies are being utilised or have an effect on the system as a whole? And in relation to that is a more general question of how you generalise innovation across the system. It would be an interesting question to discuss.

Bill Mulford: I will attempt to use the Australian experience with the first one, the first part of your two-part question. How did the results have an effect? The way that the Australian Research Council grants are structured, as such, is one answer. We are only able to receive grants if our research is used for practice. That means that you need to have partners in industry as part of the process. So, in the LOLSO project we have the Department of the Education from South Australia and the Department of the Education from Tasmania as partners in the research. And as part of the negotiation, one had to ensure that the results would be used. And that is why we developed a set of professional development materials for problem-based learning for use in the training of potential new school principals.

Andrea Kárpáti: We have heard several contributions outlining ideal personalities who are supposed to be leading schools or teaching at schools. I would like to raise some problems concerning the introduction of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), which is my area, and the way it affected school leadership and the restructuring of educational institutions. There will probably be the four points that I want to mention, probably those throw some shade on this extremely shiny picture of innovators and of the new school leader I say or model.

The big problem faced with the introduction of ICT is transparency. Schools that used to be closed institutions, teachers who actually preferred to work behind closed doors, will find themselves being put on-line, with appearance, getting access to all data of schools from absentee statistics to grading procedures and homepages of different disciplines and a lack of homepages for several other disciplines. So the interactive school homepage - that seems to be having de-subsidised in all European countries I would say, and certainly also in Hungary - will give an access to the school structure as such and the quality of its leadership and will make some of the traditionally hidden functions absolutely transparent for the outside public. It is a question whether school principals are ready for this absolute openness, whether they are willing in terms of appearance. They are quite eager to get more access, to have more say.

The second problem is the centralisation issue. Decentralisation of power and allocation of power on the school level seems to be on the agenda these days. However, ICT development is a central issue. If you decide to have a large selection of CD-ROMs covering all disciplines, or most disciplines, that will require ICT support and your language is not English, you have to be ready for centralisation, because otherwise adequate finances for the CD-ROMs and the interactive Internet pages will not exist. This is the unhappy truth. So in terms of ICT-content development, centralisation is an issue that should be juggled, and, as we all know, the content will have a hidden curriculum in itself. So once you have centrally developed CD-ROMs, you are also centrally offering content. Some principals might not like it.

The third issue I would like to raise in connection with ICT involves the personality traits necessary for innovation. Here we have heard what characteristics the ideal school leader should have, and apparently these characteristics seem to also be the ideal business leader. So the question is: is it realistic to assume that there will be a large number of people ready to lead change? Has there been any investigation? This is a question. Is there anybody looking at the personal characteristics of school leaders and their adaptability, their ability to change?

My research centre at Eötvös University, Budapest, at present is looking at personality traits necessary for utilising ICT. We are looking at teachers and students at the same time because we want to find out whether ICT can be adopted large-scale, whether everybody is ready and able, which is extremely important for working in a digital networked environment. I think we have to live with personality traits. Skills and ability structures we possess will influence the way ICT is going to be adopted by some schools and not as much adopted by others.

And the fourth issue concerning ICT and change: vast amounts of money are being spent all around – not just Europe but also around the world – on ICT development. And there are different training options that are offered. There seems to be one that was mentioned here and I am mentioning it again because it seems to be the best one: the on-the-job training mentioned by our Romanian speaker. In terms of ICT, schools seem to be more different than similar in terms of training requirements. They need on-the-job training, they need case studies, they need models that work and actually I am very happy to say that OECD has just concluded, or is about to conclude, a major research project called ICT and the Quality of Education. And we do hope that we are going to come up with some models that actually work. So, transparency, centralisation, personality traits needed for change, and on-the-job training or not on-the-job training – these are the four issues that I think are quite crucial for elaborating new models for schools.

István Vilmos Kovács: Thank you very much Ms. Kárpáti. I would like to ask you – I missed it at the beginning – to introduce yourself for the record of our discussion for the future documents of this seminar. Thank you, and the floor is open again.

Mats Ekholm: I have some comments on your comments. The transparency question – are school leaders ready for it? The experience from my country is that they are not at all. But it helps to throw them out into the water and have them swim, because they happen to be grown people who are responsible for what they are doing, and therefore they have to learn some tough lessons from reality, where not only parents but also the press is really looking into the schools now. It is sometimes painful, but it drives development.

As for the content, my experience in my country is the reverse: we do not fall into a highly centralised production of work material where we used ICT, because when you really go for an idea where the students get more power, the power over the “whats” and the “hows”, they run to the Internet, and they do not stay with the nice things that grown-ups have tried to select for them to learn from. They jump into all the shit and all the nice, interesting stuff that a teenage brain wants to experience through the net. So the learning becomes less controlled and more student-driven. And you can say that that is also something that goes together with the philosophy of letting the student participate in deciding what they shall learn and what and how to do it. My experience is that it also helps to do the on-the-job training and especially when it comes to the ICT, if I look at what we are doing with the school managers, we try to train them together with the teachers so that we really do it together. We have even made a kind of interesting move in my country to give half of the teachers free computers to start with because there have been so many teachers who have been so resistant to some changes in modern life, so that was our trick to do it, and it costs a lot of money.

You also asked if it is realistic to expect school leaders to lead change. Yes, if you train them. They will not do it voluntary, especially if they are just selected among all the teachers that were their colleagues, their peers, because then they are not in a social relationship or in a socio-psychological situation to lead change. But if they are trained and trained together with other people that know how they change their institution then it may happen. So it is a question of educating to create different attitudes, and it helps.

János Setényi: I would like to draw the attention to another sector of high quality learning environment, namely the high quality of teacher training as a learning environment. I feel a contradiction between the high quality learning environment of schools and the social and professional recruitment process of teachers – the social characteristics of teachers, their family background, their educational career and their capacities. So when we start to create a high quality learning environment, I think the first step is to create it in teacher training, otherwise the actors, the managers, the coaches of learning could not accomplish their tasks.

David Istance: I would like to ask a question that has been stimulated by Bill Mulford’s introduction, and it is a question of evidence. I suppose it is a more general question in terms of any other similar research that has been undertaken on the same kinds of lines in terms of understanding the processes, the determinants of outcomes based on different characteristics of schools and of the various variables. And the question to Bill is how far the research has confirmed established views, or has it really forced some kind of shift in thinking about what, or how schooling should be organised? And because you have the strong opinion that we should have a much stronger evidence base, how has that evidence forced a revision of view? And then secondly, what ways that you can see can actually shape schools and the way that schools and classes are organised?

Bill Mulford: I will try to be brief. Of the many findings there were three that were creating a degree of discussion, and through that discussion, therefore, influencing factors.

The first is the place of the leader and the position of the leader. And certainly in the United Kingdom or in England specifically, the results have questioned that country’s emphasis on the great man (or woman) theory of leadership – the investment in the person who is going to make all the changes. It is a policy strategy that has been used not just in England but also in some of the states of Australia, where there is great investment in principal training for the purpose of carrying out government policy. The results in a longer term have suggested that may have had an early positive affect but that those results have not lasted. And the reason being, we believe, is that the emphasis needs to shift to distributive leadership. Some of the results in recent OECD studies point in the same direction.

The other area that has created some controversy is the one on community and the fact that a school having a community focus is not linked through to either organisational learning or to student outcomes. There is some debate about what that means, and I do not have time to go into detail.

The third one, which has created the most controversies, is the one on academic self-concept. And there has been another report that questions equally the basis of emphasising self-concept more broadly, not just academic self-concept, and uses evidence such as that in California, where they have invested large amounts of money as government policy to increase the self-concept of disadvantaged groups, only to find that they did not relate to any positive outcomes. In fact, in some cases it resulted in a negative outcome – people were too self-confident in their abilities.

Could I just come back also to George’s earlier question, the second half of his question: “how does one generalise across systems?” I think it is related to the questions that you have asked, David. One is to present your findings at sessions like this and find out how people react from other cultures. The other, because of the importance of having good evidence, is to increasingly try and be involved in research that goes across countries. And that is why I believe the PISA research is so important. I, myself, will be involved in a cross-country study of successful school leadership – at the present time we have Sweden, the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia involved, and the survey part of that will be conducted in the year 2003. If there are people here who would be interested in joining that we would very much like to be able to use the same type of questions about leadership across a vast number of countries – so that would be a second way.

Jan van Ravens: My name is Jan van Ravens from the Netherlands, and I am very pleased to be here. My remarks and also question are a bit similar to the one just posed by David Istance but may be a bit broader. It occurs to me that most, if not all, of the presentations this morning and many of the comments had a common tendency, a tendency towards promoting some kind of climate in the school – talking about the safe climate, warmth, learner-centred, learner-driven education, motivation to learn being crucial to educational success, use of ICT, etc.

Now, make no mistake, I share that vision, absolutely. The only thing is that more or less – like David – I try to test that vision against some recent outcomes and less recent outcomes of student achievement and their origins. The recent PISA study, for instance, revealed – according to some, because the analyses are very fresh – but some say that the outcomes of PISA indicate that old-fashioned teaching is sometimes very successful. That is, structured, teacher-centred teaching, a lot of homework, the basics, no beating round the bush, seems to be most effective (large classes, etc.).

The Japanese schooling approach perhaps, and that is not an isolated outcome, and if you know the work, refer to a school effectiveness with such an approach and for a great many years similar outcomes have come out of the researches as well. And so, is there a contradiction? How do you witness those two things, the ideal, almost romantic idea of this, the way we sketched it, the ideal school, and those from outcomes, the outcomes that, for instance, suggest that in some cases motivation is not crucial to outcomes. For instance, in the Netherlands we have outcomes, we learned that some students are absolutely unmotivated but perform very well. For some groups there seem to be no correlation between those two.

The question is: is there a contradiction there? I do not think so, but I think we should strengthen our argumentations to give a good answer to people using that line of thinking, saying old-fashioned teaching seems to be better. And to give the beginning of an answer very briefly, we observe some schools, not many, unfortunately, but some schools that seem to have the answer. These schools would fit very well into the scenario, schools as core social centres. I now refer to the work of Schooling for Tomorrow, as one of the papers where there are six scenarios.

Two of those scenarios seem to be highly favoured by educationalists. One is schools as core social centres – the open, community-based school. And the other is the school as focused learning organisation. Now it seems, and some people actually like it, that the schools as focused learning organisation is what we want. That is actually the answer, the strategic answer to these PISA outcomes and the school effectiveness outcomes – schools should do nothing else but teach children. No strange things, no being part of the community, etc. Just do your job. But quite encouragingly, we observe some schools that are clearly social centres. Community schools, where school managers have understood that the pedagogical climate is one of pedagogical diversity, where there is no single best solution for each student and each face, but where they have clearly identified that, for instance, students with an immigrant background, depending on the country where they come from or their parents come from, are best served at a certain stage, not always, but in a certain stage, if they face very structured learning and that is exactly what they get. Others exist where the same student later can best be served by a much more student-centred, ICT-driven kind of teaching.

So the idea of pedagogical diversity does not have one vision saying, “Okay, that is my pedagogy, that is what I promote as a school manager in my school.” Pedagogical diversity, however, seems to be the answer, and no single solution emphasises very strongly the idea of knowledge management, schools as learning organisations, the school manager having an open eye to research outcomes, experiences elsewhere and trying to incorporate any best practice to further develop this idea of pedagogical diversity within the school. Thank you.

Ron Glatter: Just following on the issue: How do you design accountability systems, to refer back to George Papadopoulos’ point of the beginning, which actually re-enforce pedagogical diversity and not simply one style of pedagogic, which was the opposite of the style that Mats Ekholm, for example, and Zoltán Poór encouraged this morning, which was the idea of the teacher as facilitator and changing teaching schools into learning schools. Will you ever be able to do that when you have accountability systems which very often only stress the old-fashioned type of schooling?

Caroline Macready: Hello, I am Caroline Macready from England, and I want to pick up a few of the points that have been raised so far. First, we were asked how innovation can get into the system and be spread around. In England we do have two categories of school: normal and specialist schools, which actually receive extra money to disseminate to other schools what they do well. These are described actually in the New School Management Approaches, England section.

Specialist schools are selected for something that they do well, maybe a different thing for every school and receive money purely to share it with other schools. The specialist schools are also meant to develop excellence in a particular area and share that. But this is the reason we have these special statuses: partly because it is recognised in England at the moment that innovation is most likely to come from the school level and not the national level, and we do intend to make more of that potential source of innovation. The government recently announced intentions to set up an innovation unit that will exist simply to collect interesting things that are happening in certain schools and ensure they are shared through a network of schools and their teachers. That is on one point, which is about how innovation happens.

On a second point I would like to pick up the question of the head or principal as school leader and Bill Mulford’s conclusions, which, as he says, threaten some thinking that the position of the head is crucial. It seems to me that you can reconcile various views on the importance of the head by asking not merely how much and what leadership the head is given in educational terms, but also what and how good they are as people managers, because where the heads are good people managers they are able to cause their staff to work as a team, bring others into leadership and to delegate when you get better results and when the head is unable to do that.

We had a study recently of teachers’ workloads, about which they are very concerned in our country and of what they found most burdensome. A clear finding from that is the teachers are much more likely to see things as burdens if they are things they have not been involved in. So where either there is a national approach that teachers have not been involved in, or what they have to do in school is laid down by the principal without consulting them, then they not merely do it less well but do it much less cooperatively.

Finally, I would like to endorse what our Netherlands colleague said about the importance of school diversity. That is also a theme at the moment in the educational reforms the government is trying to make. In particular, we want to recognise the importance of some schools being schools that serve a wider community to have this new category of extended schools which may be providing for the learning, not just of the pupils, but also of their families and acting as social centres in the community. We would like those extended schools to be able to have status comparable with some more academic establishments.

Mats Ekholm: I would like to add something about the evidence-based research. The big pilot research is to me, as a member of a Nordic society, sometimes a little bit peculiar. What we are really studying is the relationship between interesting factors within the schools in relationship to academic outcomes, when we actually have schools that have a lot of other aims than academic outcomes. We have touched one such aim here – the skill of learning, for instance, when you try to study the outcomes of learning and having people who are able to learn on their own. That is when you really have to go into the construction of the local organisation to help explain parts of it. In Sweden we have tried to make studies because we have a national curriculum that we have been working with since 1919, which we have changed during the years and the big change came after the Second World War, where we happened to stay out of the war but learned a lot of lessons: what we were going to do without an educational system, where we wanted to use our educational system as a kind of vaccination against fascism, where we wanted to put democracy into the whole spirit of the society by using the educational system. How do you measure that outcome? Well, we have tried. And when we have measured the level of maturity to participate in democracy, the skills of preparing decisions, to participate in decision-making etc., that is when we end up with different conclusions of what the effective factors in schools are then the effective school research happen to reach. So it depends on what kind of outcomes you are interested in if you are also going to look into the bunch of research – what it can explain and not explain.

Tibor Baráth: We have had the possibility to listen to several lectures and other contributions which relate very seriously to the basics of education. We have a quite serious list of challenges that schools have to face. One of the greatest challenges in the future is whether schools want or are able to transform themselves from traditional organisations into modern organisations. The willingness and the ability are not the same, so we have to address them both. We know that schools have lost their earlier status as the main source of learning. The question is how schools and, inside schools, teachers can cope with this new situation.

From the lectures it came out that we have a quite clear picture of what we would like. The most interesting question is how we can reach what we would really like. I have some doubt when listening to the lectures and the conversation, that it is the ability of development of schools. So fostering the development of education in two directions is needed: one is organisational development and the second is personal development. The first is connected very closely to the question of quality on an organisational level, and the other is quality on a personal level, which means a new paradigm for teaching. And finally, the two kinds of development, I mean organisational and personal development, should be planned and carried out in harmony with each other.

Gábor Halász: Mrs. Macready mentioned school diversity, and it is a very important thing because if we have very different schools, certainly we cannot have one model which is optimal for enhancing high quality learning. And that is very closely related to what Jan brought in, talking about schools having a traditional type of management and producing high quality results. The way we try to answer this challenge in our management training, and I am talking about a programme which is led by Tibor, the previous speaker, is that we present a number of alternative models of managing schools. In a very detailed way, some of them almost exclude each other. We try to give as detailed an analysis as possible for each of them, and we tell the trained future school managers that you have to make your own analysis: you have to analyse your personality, you have to analyse your school, the teachers, the social and cultural features of the school, and on the basis of this very profound analysis you have to select one of the models. And you have to try out different models. Only after several trials can you decide which one is the best for you. But there is one exception, and this is connected to what Mats said about the Swedish intentions after the Second World War: undemocratic leadership is excluded – even if it fits your personality and even if it fits the conditions of the school. So there are certain limits.

Dale Shuttleworth: I am pleased to hear a conversation about diversity in learning because a part of my career during the 1970s and 1980s I was developing alternative schools and alternative school programmes in Toronto, which was at that time the leader in North America. The promise there was that parents, students and teachers could, in fact, create their own learning environment, and because they had different particular styles of learning, and we know a lot from Gardner and others about styles of learning, but these actually became small schools that were operated in a variety of different ways, not always so called “free schools,” and in some cases they were quite structured. They did, however, reflect the learning styles and the interests of parents, teachers and students, and either part of the three parties could be involved in the creation of such a programme. The school board at that time had a policy that allowed that to happen.

This is probably not as unusual in my studies in Europe, because you do have schools that are established from the community’s side, as opposed to being established from the state and national side. But these programmes, now in place for more the 25 years, have been quite successful. And the problem they are facing at this point, with the cutbacks and resources and so on and through economic conditions, is that small programmes now have to be closed because we have to integrate into bigger units because they are seen to be economically cost-effective. So instead of going more towards a direction of learning diversity, and I would say almost incubators of change and understanding, we are now being forced back into an efficiency cult’s kind of model, which I think is very disturbing, in the future and certainly in the sense of what we know of as a learning community.

István Vilmos Kovács: Thank you very much. Our final speaker is Mr. Donald Hirsch.

Donald Hirsch: I thought until the break this was going to be very easy to sum up because I thought it is basically the same model, and then after the break people emphasised that there are different models. I do think, however, there has been a consensus this morning in that what we want is real learning in real schools and that the way to get there is through replacing a process-driven system, a process dominated system with one which empowers students and which empowers teachers and, in particular, engages them. Now the degree to which this revolutionises education and the classroom has been slightly challenged by PISA and other sources that suggested some traditional approaches work. First of all, having been very engaged in PISA myself, I think that is perhaps not quite what it shows. Actually it does seem to suggest that there is a kind of complementarity about a number of different strategies. For example, it shows that students who like to learn competitively do better than average, and also that students who like to learn cooperatively do better than average. In other words, people or children who like learning do better than average and so, it is I think misleading to take it as a sign that traditional systems are best.