4. Panel Discussion

(Animator: János Setényi)

János Setényi: Ladies and gentlemen, we are starting the last programme of this working day. This is the panel discussion, my name is János Setényi, I am from Hungary, and I am the animator of the panel discussion. I would like first to introduce the panellists: George Papadopoulos from OECD, Jan van Ravens from the Netherlands, Alexandru Crisan from Romania, Péter Drahos from Hungary and Guy Haug from the European Union. We organised the discussion around three topics, three problems, and fortunately, these are three problems reflected in the discussion of this working day pretty well.

The three topics are the following: first, managing complexity and change in education. The second is managing or handling new partners, supranational organisations and the private sector in education, and the third is the management culture and its relationship to the world of learning, especially at the school level. But, of course, the panellists are free to place their own emphasis and stress main topics within this very broad framework.

First, I would like to raise the topic of change and complexity. When we are talking about grand concepts and projects, we always mean change in education. On the other hand, people who work on the school level can sometimes observe desperate teachers who do not understand the big ideas, who think what is going on in education is chaos, and the big ideas can wait five years, because another government will push different ideas, while the schools are just desperately adapting to the new challenges from the political centre. So there might be a contradiction between the ideas of change and the practice of the working day. What is your impression about this potential contradiction?

Jan van Ravens: It is easier said than done, but the bottom line should be a shift from reform to innovation. There is so much complexity and change going on already in the environment of schools that that is enough for teachers and school managers to deal with. They should respond to that, and they should not spend their days responding to new regulations of the government. The easy answer is to change from reform to innovation. From being centralised with top-down changes in use by the government, to innovation, which is the grass-roots process of decentralised responsiveness to change in the direction of environment. But like I said, that is an easy answer because the problem then becomes that it would lead to maximum freedom, and you are right back to the dilemma of freedom and accountability.

Péter Drahos: I would like to comment on Jan’s view on reform and change, because my generation was brought up in Hungary in a decade when every second word was reform. If you look at the school level or at the educational system level, the schools and teachers and those who are managing the organisations can’t live in an area where everything is reformed all the time.

There was a book published in Hungary in the beginning of the 90s called, Anything but Reform! The book urged a stop to reforming the whole system every second year and instead try to find how change can be brought into the school, into the organisation itself, and how can they be made able to manage their own situations. If you search for the vehicles which can bring this change into the school, the Hungarian example shows that the first step is always leadership. In Hungary the management training of the last five years was the first vehicle which was able to train the principals and to let them to have a different identity, not only just one of the teachers who is the head of the school, but that they have a role, they have a professional role which is called principal and the management, and that is different.

The second was INSET, which was a good tool, a good vehicle again to provide opportunities for leaderships to take change into practice in your own school. Another vehicle was the “quality management”, which we have heard about in the Hungarian example of this quality management programme, the Comenius 2000, which starts with external relations and then leads to internal projects and internal processes of the school. But this is only the first step, and there is a second, which we may need to arrive at sometimes, which is about the learning organisation or the changing organisation itself. We heard about middle management or the organisation which has functions to use or, for example, HRD (human resource development) in school, which is very rarely done nowadays, how to manage human resources inside the school or how to create internal learning processes inside schools or how to use the knowledge inside the school and these kinds of things. So I hope that after working with the leadership we might arrive at the level where we can work with the organisation itself, and changing and building the change and the capacity of change inside the organisation.

Alexandru Crisan: We clearly no longer like the word “reform”. So I do have a kind of recent experience in South-eastern countries. In former Yugoslavia, for instance, Western experts are coming, and they are talking about reforming the system. Everybody is like letting the Roman going somewhere else. Because the word is a kind of word which is not only rejected, but also the concept behind it is rejected. So, change is maybe the best thing that we can talk about, and I would like to introduce into the discussion two ideas that are very important in the whole discussion concerning the bottom-up and top-down types of changes.

It would be interesting to discuss the source of the change. I would like to mention here the initiators of the change process, because we are examining different educational systems. It is very clear that some changes start from a central, let’s say, initiator: a group of experts or a group of people in a ministry of education or a research institute, and that happened in many countries that initiated reform, at least in this part of Europe, but there is also the model where the source of the change is at the bottom of the system, so schools and so on.

The second issue I would like to raise is the level of participation of different stakeholders, actors, partners and so on in a change process. We are talking here about education, which is a very sensitive sector. Which are the mechanisms by which – whatever is the source of and the initiator of the change – stakeholders, different actors are to be involved in the process? And here reference should be made first to teachers and schools and I would say, real teachers, real schools, not representatives of teachers, not representatives of schools. And today I had the impression that talking about management and leadership we were focusing too much on the people who lead the schools. We were talking a lot about principals, we were talking a lot about the leaders of institutions, but the real question is to what extent, for instance, a change can happen because of the corporate work of a staff in which the principal is just a facilitator?

Guy Haug: I think you said we were talking about managing complexity and change. I think we have talked mainly about managing change. I would just like to emphasise that on top of what was said today, we mainly emphasise the need for change, the need for learning etc. We may not have emphasised enough the extraordinary diversity which exists. That is one of the difficulties we face. There are no clear goals; there are no instruments to measure progress. It is not really peculiar to the educational system, but it is something which is particularly marked in the education system. We did not mention, for example, professional education this morning. We talked about learning in a fairly abstract way.

The second thing I would like to say is about complexity and managing change. My impression is that there is a sort of hidden assumption that is generally accepted, which is that education systems, schools and universities are so much more conservative and more difficult to change than other organisations. I would challenge this. I say that basically organisations are difficult to change, and this would certainly also include private sector organisations, including business organisations. If we had had the level of change needed, for example, in airline management, a number of recent disasters would not have occurred. We should not lose sight of this.

There is no easy answer to this question, and if you want to see the change that is necessary, we need to approach this from all possible angles. One of the things I fear is, for example, the comparisons of what is called best practice, the import of one element from a system, putting it into a totally different environment and then saying, “oh, it did not function.” Of course, because it was successful in some other environment, it was also because the environment was different. Basically what I am saying is that change for the sake of change is not what we want. Reform for the sake of reform is not what we want. And there are a number of things which have been done well for years that have not produced fully satisfactory results, but we should also avoid throwing the baby away with the bathwater. There is a new awareness that this might well happen if we just push for change without being reasonably certain that what we want to put in place is better than what we had before. So I am for change, but I think we should be a little bit careful.

One of the things which might favour change, the management of change and complexity, is to expose teachers, headmasters and leaders or leadership, to different realities. There are two main ways this can be done in the private sector. It would be valuable if teachers had more leaving and coming back, more exchanges with the private sector. This is developing in a number of countries in professional education. It is not developing to the same extent in general education.

The other way to expose teachers to different realities is to enhance considerably the mobility of teachers for short periods within Europe, and perhaps internationally in a more general way. The main result I would expect from this is mainly for teachers to realise that well, of course, it is an ongoing process of reforms, but it is the same elsewhere. I worked a lot with the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and there is always, when consultants come to a conference or speakers come from elsewhere, the impression that “oh, these people want us to change in their direction.” The audience is not necessarily aware that the same process of change, the same pace is happening elsewhere. I would suggest that one possible way to favour change and to give change a meaning, to give change a direction, would be to expose teachers to these different realities, so that they can learn that change is required everywhere.

George Papadopoulos: Change implies some sort of innovation. The difficulty is that small innovations are easy to put into place, and it might be successful on a very limited basis. The problem then is how you generalise. How to generalise about innovation is an important issue. My second point is that considering the immensity of the educational enterprise it is not surprising that the word complexity has been used in your heading of this particular topic. My old belief is that having witnessed, particularly within the French system, the repeated efforts, over and over, at general reform of the system promoted by the minister, and then it falls flat either because the students revolt or there was no money to implement these things.

The present minister, Jack Lang has adopted a different policy. He is not talking about reform, he is talking about measures. And what he is doing is he has selected a number of strategic measures which need to be introduced into the educational system in order to meet certain objectives that he has in mind. One of them is the introduction of a greater amount of cultural and artistic sensitiveness within the educational establishment. Another one is the fight against school violence. It is what I would call incremental change rather than “once-for-all” reform. I fully agree that there can be no change unless the stakeholders are given propriety in their change. We seem to have forgotten that one of the main obstacles to changing many of our educational practices is the parents themselves. We all know how parents resist the introduction of different assessment schemes for their children. They want to know how much their children got on a scale of ten. Did he get an “8” or a “9”? So parents have to be educated, which involves a much greater effort between the educational establishment and the parents’ associations to convince them about the change.

Jan van Ravens: There seems to be agreement about the fact that there needs to be more responsiveness and to get this innovation across. The question remains how exactly to do this, and all panellists have made attempts to answer that. I can’t help speaking in terms of questions and dilemmas instead of answers, and my dilemma is the following. There seems to be a tension between opening up the school, opening up to the environment on the one hand, and on the other hand staying focused on learning. Let me briefly explain. I keep coming back to the work of Schooling for Tomorrow, because it is a very clear-cut instrument for clarifying these questions.

The two most favoured scenarios are, on the one hand, school as the centre of the community, and on the other hand, the school as a focused learning organisation. If we take the first one, it seems to be all about being responsive to the environment. It is about the school engaging partnerships. It is about external orientation, about sensitivity to change in the environment and being responsive towards it. It includes the idea of the consultant, like it is in the Hungarian case, or the imported manager from outside the educational system. There are also instruments that would help to make the school more responsive to change in the immediate environment and respond to it.

On the other hand, we want schools to stay focused on learning and achieve the maximum learning results possible. That seems to point in the opposite direction: of not having a school manager from outside the city, not engaging in all kinds of complicated partnerships, etc. It seems that schools are rather closed organisations. It seems like the teaching profession and the teaching community is a rather closed community, and my question is focused on the school manager: is there a way for school managers to get the best of both worlds? Is it possible to reconsider it? Or is there a trade-off between being very good at teaching and being responsive to the environment?

Guy Haug: Just two brief footnotes. George underlined the role of parents as resisters to change. We may also underline the role of students, maybe at a later stage, maybe mainly in upper secondary education and even more so in higher education. And there are very good reasons to why this resistance should be there. In higher education, once you have made it into university there is a clear tendency to try and close the door immediately behind you. We all know that this exists, so it is the parents but it is also the students.

Secondly, because we are talking about managing complexity and change, I was very interested to hear this morning that in Canada and in the US there were attempts to hire headmasters from outside because then you can pay them less. I think it would be very difficult to pay less in a number of countries in Europe, so we are also looking for people who are expected to manage an extremely complex situation, a large population, a large group of individuals and students and teenagers are certainly not easier to manage than staff working in a traditional business company, and for very >

George Papadopoulos: I do not see the conflict between the two models as Jan stated. Schools have always had a socialising function. In fact, the socialising function is an essential element of its educative function. After all, I have always been in favour of schools because I know that children learn mostly from each other. And you can’t have a better socialising institution than a properly run school. So I fail to see a conflict between the pedagogical or learning functions of a school and the role that it has traditionally played in the community. What does make it a little bit difficult now is that we are more sensitive to the problems of those children who are either underprivileged or of insufficiently adequate aptitudes, traditionally measured. Therefore there is a need to try and raise these children to levels which are equitable and as such try to enable them to continue their education.

I still do believe that the fundamental problem of basic schooling is the eradication of failure. And when you consider that in practically all systems 25% of students fail, that really remains almost a tragedy, a social tragedy. The problem is that there have not been enough resources. For example, go back to the 60s and 70s with the massive expansion of education, where there was a doubling, more than a doubling of school populations. There were secondary schools where the population more than doubled over a period of ten years, bringing in new clients from different socio-economic backgrounds. And they were confronted with the same curriculum that had been prepared for an analytic group of about 25%, which was the practice before. There has been no chance, they have not found the alchemy of seeing that educational differentiation which was tried was now simply re-enforcing social differentiation, through special schools and things like that.

The other point is the essential equality of resources, how the resources have been available and whether the curriculum been rethought and reorganised. Things would not have reached the stage as you know it now if they had been so. I really do think that a right increasing school failure remains the biggest challenge for educational change in compulsory schooling.

János Setényi: Let me refer to the dilemma raised by George Papadopoulos. If in a very diversified, complex national system of education, the main source of change is bottom-up innovation, then obviously a good government should pick up the best examples, the best practice, the best models, and to disseminate and generalise somehow among the schools. This is what we call in Hungary horizontal learning instead of vertical. Vertical is that you do not know, I know, I teach you, I show you. Horizontal is when teachers work together with teachers, schools work together with schools. We talk about the era of horizontal learning in the educational system. Can we create new working models of horizontal learning and exchange of ideas within national systems of education? Today we have already heard about the British example, some exemplary schools disseminating their best practices, the Hungarian Comenius club system and so on. Could we think about this problem of horizontal learning a little bit more?

Alexandru Crisan: Horizontal learning has a really good chance. Think about a single example like teacher training. Traditionally speaking we all know that teacher training takes place in central institution teacher training centres, and of course the trainer’s status is different from the trainee’s status. Just imagine creating a model by which we can train teachers to become excellent trainers. And so, for instance, we have had an interesting experience by which primary teachers have been trained to become trainers for their colleagues and it was a kind of peer-training that functioned in an excellent way. If such a horizontal learning is not just theoretical learning, i.e. carrying out courses and lectures on different subjects, but teachers can see what their colleagues are really doing in their classrooms, that would have a tremendous effect on them.

Personally, I think that in the future we should reflect on changing the whole system of training teachers, as in many countries already an important part of pre-service teacher training actually takes place in a real school setting. My big question is how much youngsters should spend in pre-service training centres in the so-called “theoretical” type of training and how much they really should spend in the type of training which is the well-known French model, l’école normale, which is excellent.

There is another example that can encourage us to think through very carefully future teacher training. There the many distance learning, distance trainee-programmes in many countries. For qualified teachers and unqualified teachers who teach in a real school and at the same time participate in distance learning training schemes, which is extremely successful. Also, research shows that carrying out this parallel type of on-the-job training is successful.

Jan van Ravens: As for horizontal learning, schools learning from one another is a very good idea. One question is: could governments promote it? It is again a dilemma. It seems by nature a spontaneous process, schools finding one another and learning from one another. There are ways for government to stimulate this process. We already mentioned the exchange of data where schools can identify one another as being in more or less the same situation, having the same problems, etc. The role of the inspector is one. Finally, there is an interesting project in Portugal called Bona Esperanza, which means “Good Hope”, where the development of learning networks among schools is actually stimulated very strongly by government, and despite the top-down stimulation of bottom-up developments, it does work.

Péter Drahos: Let me bring in the example of the Hungarian INSET system, which shows that horizontal learning is an emerging occurrence in Hungary. In the Hungarian INSET system there is a programme accreditation process, and among the accredited programmes it is only less than 10% of the programmes which have been accredited by schools themselves. But if you compare it with the number of trainings conducted, you see that all of the training programmes credited by schools were actually running programmes, and they sold it, and they were effective targeting other schools. However, among the other 90% you find a lot of different institutions, like, for example, higher education institutions who accredited a big number of programmes, but less than the half of these programmes were able to find their customers. In Hungary, schools are actually buying these accredited inset programmes with state money. This shows that schools, even if they do not know it, have their knowledge which they can show or sell in a much more effective way to others than other organisations.

János Setényi: Guy, can the EU create a common market for horizontal learning in education, where, for example, Dutch or Hungarian trainer teachers could train German teachers? Is it the 21^st century programme?

Guy Haug: There is obviously no clear answer to this. There may be a contribution, for example, in benchmarking and peer-review. Value is always added if the people are not all from one country or one region in Europe or in the world, to give you a fresh view on what you are actually doing. This is something which the European dimension may add, whether this is done through European programmes or just through cooperation or exchange between institutions is a different story.

Where I see the problem is exactly in what George Papadopoulos said, “Can this be generalised? Should it be generalised?” And well, as much as I like, for example, the exchange of best practice, what I fear is the complete acceptance of one. In my own country, France, what you see is when there is a sample of good practice at some stage then the ministry may actually be attempted to say: “Oh, we found the recipe” and then to try and apply that recipe across the board, and then you are again in trouble. There are limits to what can be done. I do believe that value is always added if you bring in a different viewpoint, either from the private sector, civil society or from a different country. And you may actually combine all these.

George Papadopoulos: Before you can train teachers you have to find them. The problem now is that most countries are facing a serious shortage of teachers. In some cases the situation is almost drastic, because teachers are not entering the field. Many countries have a teaching force which is past middle-age. The forces need to be renewed, so one has to always think how teaching can become a more attractive profession, because without an attractive teaching profession you can’t implement any change or innovation. I think what we should begin is to think about these problems, as well, rather than merely the processes by which we approach change. There are fundamental problems of a logistic nature which have to be taken into account.

János Setényi: Let me link these two approaches together, the shortage of teachers and their low status on the one hand and the necessity of knowledge management and horizontal learning on the other. Is the problem that in the current teaching corps there are no stars, that is, well-paid, appreciated people who can create products from their hidden knowledge, who can disseminate their knowledge, who can train other schools, other teachers, who are the high-flyers, the successful people with country-wide publicity, and other people who are behind? The differentiation among teachers is a very important topic.

Guy Haug: I share the analysis but not the conclusions. If we had stars of this kind, most probably they would be tempted to immediately leave the profession and you would lose the benefit of the process.

Alexandru Crisan: This is not always so. There are many cases where it is a very good idea. Why not create and if not create, then encourage, this star movement, which can be beneficial for education. I think that in any system there are many stars, but it is also a matter of how, for, instance we can develop certain mechanisms and incentives by which these people really can be publicised. Some days ago we had an interesting meeting on starting a national programme of encouraging reading and parents reading for their children, just to get back people a little bit towards books. It was very interesting, because people were looking around for who would be the biggest figures of the nation that really can get through to the public. In education also we can create a kind of... I would not recommend here a Hollywood type of promotion of good teachers, but why not?

George Papadopoulos: The absence of stars extends far above teachers. Has it ever occurred to you why, in spite of all the glory within which education is propagated now in every political scene, why there is such a shortage of charismatic spokesmen for education at the political level? If you think back to a previous time when you could identify three or four politicians, figures on the European or the American scene, who really had charisma and their voice counted, where are they now? It is quite a curious phenomenon.

Guy Haug: Well, I maybe misunderstood what you mean by stars. Of course, I think it is possible to provide more incentive to increase the status to acknowledge the special contribution of certain teachers, that is a different thing. But if by star you mean the Bill Gates of the teaching profession, then I have my doubts.

János Setényi: We experienced in Hungary that teachers are often very smart, but being smart is not something you can disseminate at a national level. You have to create, again a bad word, an intellectual product from this experience and smartness, as you already mentioned twice, Guy, inviting the private sector. So invite them. Could they help to pick best examples and practices, create intellectual products from smart examples and help the dissemination of those examples on a national level? Or is it the task of the national authorities like ministries and governments?

Péter Drahos: I have some doubts about national styles and national dissemination in this sense. I think education is rather a local matter. When I work with schools as a consultant I see that they would like to search for how they are different from the other schools, as well as what they can show to the others. And in this local network, local dissemination is much more effective than if we searched for somebody on the national level to be a spokesman. This works on the local level because they can help each other, and even in Hungarian rural areas there is cooperation among schools, which is sometimes not supported by the local governments, but they know how and why they should somehow work together. And in this sense there are the so-called basis schools, and they would like to have this kind of name on their table to say “I’m different, and I can show this in our local community.”

Alexandru Crisan: One interesting matter for this horizontal learning is also school networking. It was mentioned today that in a certain sense schools can compete with each other, but there are also excellent examples of school networks. These networks are truly excellent because generally they are created around a so-called magnet-school that is promoting at a certain moment a certain type of innovation and simply some other schools like that innovation, so they take it over. I am not talking about copying a certain model, but rather a smart type of seeing what is going on there and then going home and after a good needs analysis developing your own model after seeing some other good models.

There are also interesting networks of schools, according to certain areas of interest. For instance, the most interesting experiences are displayed by schools in disadvantaged areas that are doing very interesting work because they feel they have a certain interest which can put together schools, creating certain clusters. So it is mostly a kind of cluster based, interest based or whatever based thing that can connect schools. Personally, I think that schools are isolated as institutions, and so what the system can do is to encourage, through different types of incentives, this school networking. And of course in such an issue private institutions can also have a very good influence.

Generally, if the state or the central authority made a star out of somebody, schools would not trust it. When something comes through official channels, it is generally badly perceived, at least in our countries. The self-made examples and the schools that build up their own trust on the fact that they are doing well as compared to themselves one year before or two years before, and not as compared to others necessarily is a good, good thing.

János Setényi: I think that the local initiative systems of horizontal learning like networks are a very good research topic for the future. This is a very interesting area.

Jan van Ravens: I have one last point about the teacher shortage. Far from having the solution, I do want to mention one element that can be a small part of the solution, just not more than that because the idea of the “teachership” as one station of many along your own personal walk of life is not heard very often. I will explain this. We can think in terms of becoming a teacher and staying this all your life, or retaining the teachers within, trying to keep them from going away. Paradoxically, one of the solutions could be precisely the opposite, i.e. making it more normal to work as whatever, perhaps in the business sector or in healthcare or in social work, and then becoming a teacher, doing it five years and then leaving. If that becomes normal, and it does not have to be the only pattern, I mean next to that you can have lifelong teaching, but if that becomes more normal than it is now, it may become more attractive. It can be more understandable by recruitment offices in the business sector: “oh, here is somebody with five years of teaching, just five years, that’s interesting!”

The reason for this is, and this is the source of inspiration, not policy but just a personal motivation, we have had some positive results in trying to attract people from the business sector to become teachers. People in the business sector in general are on a high level of work pressure, not saying that pressure in teaching is low, but it is different. It is a different kind of pressure. After a great many years of working extremely hard in the business sector or in other sectors, with that kind of stress, market stress or promotion stress, it can be very relaxing to have a different kind of stress – which is the stress of teaching – recharge your battery and then go back.

Likewise for the school and the students it can be very inspiring to have a person like that for a number of years. We keep coming back to those two scenarios, the pattern fits in very well in the scenario where the school is an open institution responsive to the environment, but poorly into the scenario where the school is a focused learning organisation, where teacher training becomes longer and longer. It keeps coming back: whether your solutions are good or not strongly depends on your general strategy for the educational system.

Guy Haug: I think it is quite right to emphasise the role of the horizontal processes in this topic. It may function well also in the possibility to hire teachers from the private sector or from health care. It would be even better if it was worthwhile to work in both directions.

János Setényi: Well, according to these approaches, the future staff room will consist of three types of people. One small group is the local innovators – the hardest working people in the staff – the second, much bigger bunch of people are the commuters – those who come, teach some years and then leave the school, and the third group is made of people who can accept the combination of depressed salaries and great job security – the civil servant type of teachers who provide the stability for the school. Can we handle the teachers as a unified, homogenous group in the future? How can we differentiate between them? How can we create a quality learning environment on the basis of these very different people? What do you think about this? Sorry for being so provocative, but that is my role at the moment. Alexandru, what do you like most?

Alexandru Crisan: Yes, just that you can differentiate inside the organisation which is a part of the organisation’s role, how you can make different functions and divisions inside the school. So today a school has a principal, a deputy or two, and then the teachers. That is not a real organisation, when it does not have any functional jobs or functional characteristics of jobs inside the school. This leads to the question of how to differentiate inside the school as a principal and how to make a dynamic inside your organisation.

The second part of this differentiation, which is not inside the organisation’s HRD but outside, is the professional career. The question is if you are very good in your profession does it mean you leave your profession? Have the professional people who help schools from outside left the profession? Are they outside if they are not working as a teacher in the school? How can we define the profession? How can we define the professional career? And how can we see that those people who are outside and now working as consultants, experts or decision-makers in education, still belong to this profession?

János Setényi: Well, you are talking about the blurring boundaries of the traditional teaching profession of who is a teacher.

George Papadopoulos: Going back to the question of the teaching profession not having enough hierarchy. That is the big question. There are probably many arguments in favour of such hierarchies; the problem will be how to sell it to the teacher organisations, to the unions, that is really the big problem. That has been the stumbling block all along.

Alexandru Crisan: Maybe it would be interesting to examine the teaching profession and the structure of the career from this point of view, because the explanation of the lack of this hierarchy inside of the teaching profession also relates to the lack of the educational organisation of the schools at the level of the internal functional structure. When you compare schools to other type of organisations, learning or non-learning organisations, the functional structure of the educational organisation is less formalised. Do we need a supervisor in a school like in a factory? Is there an organisational function for that?

I also think that internal functions of schools as organisations and, generally speaking, of educational organisations should be discussed at some point because the level of formalisation of different internal organisational functions can or will necessarily determine a certain restructuring of the career structure. Nowadays teachers simply teach in a school or they do some other things but not so many things. What is the level of formalisation of different functions inside an educational organisation? Because, what is very interesting is that there are organisations in those schools where the level of delegation is unimportant, for example, where staff members in a school have clear job-descriptions, with clear assignments that are very specific. In such a school, theoretically speaking, one can establish real and functional hierarchies.

Donald Hirsch: Furthering that point, it seems to me the problem for teachers is not so much that they do not define their functions, as we still have one very dominant function in schools: teaching, and so much revolves around that. I wonder to what extent this radical change which is being suggested in this conference, whether the world is really ready for them. For example, in the United Kingdom primary school teachers have been given supplementary roles as subject specialists in the last several years. But this is often very difficult because they still have to teach their classes. I wonder to what extent the function of being in front of a class – one teacher in one class, particularly in primary education but also in secondary – is really continuing to dominate in practice a model of education and whether we are really willing to move away from that model.

János Setényi: You have raised actually the third question, namely the linkage between the new managerialism and the world of learning, and the concept that I teach lessons, and the growing duties, tasks of developing, mission statement, quality control, self evaluation and so on. There is a clash or a growing conflict between the two, or is there? That is the question, but what is the solution?

Another comment is that when we enter a school, apart from the organisational adjustment of the school we can find some people who lead projects, and they are the hardest working people. So it is a pretty elaborate organisation, but still a modern school working along projects, which is another clash. What is your opinion on this situation? Can teachers become small managers?

Alexandru Crisan: Yes, it is a good example. In a school we do have a principal and other teachers do have projects. Certain teachers are doing more and they have at least a better perception of the other members of the staff. So it is possible for the future to develop incentives like project-work or even organising the internal structure of the organisation based on projects. Teachers, in my view, should and can be managers even if they are managing small, basically unimportant things. In a school there are no unimportant things.

Péter Drahos: Yes, I think we reached the boundaries of management change inside the schools with this. The most frequent resistance against change of management is coming from two sources according to the things I have seen. The first is an attitude question: they do not want to take responsibility for their own work. The attitude is: “somebody should tell me what to do in the lesson and give me the things I need. I go into the classroom and I teach it. And I am not taking responsibility for the whole teaching process.” It is not “was that good enough? Can I improve this process somehow?” If you refuse to take responsibility then you do not want to consider things on a larger scale.

The second resistance arises from the time question. The basic response is, “let me teach. Do not want me to talk about these processes at the school, because that is not my matter. That is for the principal. I would like to simply teach”, which means they do not want to take the time to work on these issues, to work on improvements, which comes back, in the Hungarian case at least, to the question of an unclear workload for teachers, which is very unclear because this is a full-time job. Of course, they do not spend their time in the school, partly because they have other things to do, and as it is an under-financed sector with low salaries they think, “I don’t spend all my time in the school, but that means that I accept and I respect that it is a low salary job.” So if you do not have a clear workload situation and you do not have the attitude, then you do not have an organisation, and these are certain boundaries in the school system, at least here.

Jan van Ravens: I do think that teachers can become small managers. There is enough to think they can do projects for innovation in curricular development. They can become and they do become account managers, for instance, in primary education. A teacher can have a number of schools of secondary education where children may go and keep contacts with those schools and talk about the way students make the transition. The secondary education can have accountability such as in schools in primary education. You can have caseloads where teachers have responsibility for a number of students and their parents. More in particular, they can specialise in immigrant children or not, etc. You can have ICT managers keeping contact with the suppliers organising ICT courses for adults in the evening and things like that. If that is unclear then I like unclear.

We use a different word to describe the same thing. But what it keeps coming back to is: is the school an open organisation or is it focused on learning? And it keeps coming back to the tension because some teachers would regard such a workload, such a diverse workload as something that keeps them away from teaching. And then your teachers keep that vision of the world that they perhaps had better stay in teaching. It really depends on the strategy of the school.

George Papadopoulos: I think the best way to turn teachers into managers is to break down the traditionally established classroom basis of the organisation in the school. It is unthinkable in the 21^st century we still have homogenous (age-wise) classes of 40-45 minutes teaching and so on. Surely, we know enough now about the development of children to realise that chronological symmetry does not necessarily go along with intelligence and aptitude and so on. So we have to find ways, but we should diversify the delivery of teaching in schools. Breaking down the classroom system is probably the best way out of the problem. It is an enormous job and it would require a massive effort, but in a lot of places teachers have real management positions, because you have to manage different activities and people at different times. But are you – the archpriests of educational change and innovation – prepared to embark on a policy of breaking down the traditional classroom structure of school organisation?

Alexandru Crisan: That is an interesting challenge. But once we examine, for instance, the manner in which we are currently training teachers, it becomes clear that they teach because we are training them just to teach. The whole teacher training is built on a kind of subject-based teacher training, and there are not many countries where we are talking about training the so-called generalists – teachers that teach mostly at the primary level.

I am simply wondering about training teachers for lower or upper secondary education with a very important strand of general teacher training, that is, train them as generalists and as subject teachers, because they should teach some subjects, two or three subjects, or whatever. Currently teacher training does not encourage or at least prepare teachers for such a huge step. That would be a big jump towards such a model, which is very challenging.

Coming back to the traditional school where the teachers are teaching and the principal leads the process, I do not think that in these schools the principal really leads a process. He or she leads something that is not even an organisation. The true identity of the organisation as a learning organisation comes from the quality of learning activity, not so much of the teaching activity, but also from the quality of other things which are basic, that is, the educational component of what is going on in schools.

The big question is when and who is teaching us when we really learn the true-to-life things which are not taught in school. It is a bit paradoxical that we are spending 90% of a lesson just teaching, and we learn life’s real lessons not from school but from outside it.

János Setényi: George Papadopoulos raised a very interesting point about this great change, the breakdown of the traditional class system. Actually Europe is full of schools like that – we call them alternative schools or reform schools. Seemingly this horizontal learning does not work. Why can’t we find the example? What are the obstacles within the national system, the public, and the state systems of education when we approach these reform schools? That is an interesting dilemma. We should not respond to this dilemma right now, but it is an interesting topic. Do you have any other comment about the topic?

Dale Shuttleworth: I have been sitting here listening to the discussion and it is extremely interesting, but there seems to be an underlying assumption that teachers are good managers. I spent 15 years evaluating teachers and evaluating schools. I also work a very great deal in the private sector with companies and so on. My impression is teachers are, pound-for-pound, better managers in the sort of work they do. There are a lot of people I see also in private industry. And you know the thing that really concerns me is when we talk about bringing in people from private industry to be managers in the schools, or why do we not let teachers go out and manage in the private sector, in hospitals and social workplaces, and the enterprise centres and all these other kinds of things, why is it only one way?

The problem is why we do not have teachers coming into the profession and why they do not want to be here anymore is because there is a cloud that hangs over the head of the profession now that they are a bunch of losers. This is serious because the best academically prepared people do not want to become a teacher because it has a low status. This can’t go on. We need the best people, the best, smartest minds and the most creative leaders to be doing this because our future really depends on it. We do not know whether the kind of curriculum we have right now in schools is going to take us into the 21^st century and used successfully. Not as nations, not as individuals and not as families do we know that. We are making some suppositions about it. And I am talking about content.

As far as managerial skills, you take a person who can work with 30 inner-city kids and really create a learning environment where they are having some success in spite of all these burdens and baggage they have to live with. That is pretty impressive. I have spent 15 years in those classrooms and our students and teachers were tightly evaluated every third year. They had to have a four-scale evaluation: three visits – one visit to set it up, a visit to see them in action, a visit to come back and watch and give them the results of this.

This was in a context of principals and schools and so on. I am getting a little concerned that we are missing the point here. Can we do better? We can do better. But so can the economy do better. Those people that were invested in the run and now are going to lose a lot of money, are those people put into evaluation for their managerial skills? There has to be a clear idea of what we are talking about here.

Tibor Baráth: I would like to make three remarks. The first is regarding the teachers as managers, and whether they can be managers or not. I think it depends on the paradigm of the teaching profession, mainly who is responsible and for what. If a teacher considers that he or she is responsible not for his/her performance in math or in English or in any other subject, but responsible for the results, and not only subject results but the development of the student, then he or she is a manager who manages the process.

There was a question whether schools are organisations or not. Schools can be an organisation but it is not necessary. The sound of the school bell may keep the school together, which means that if the school is well-regulated, then when there is the sound then teachers and students go to the classroom and something happens there. The question is only what is happening there: what we want or do not want. If the school is an organisation then it must have clear and controllable aims and all procedures organised by the school should go towards those aims.

The third remark is on the different kinds of development strategy, that is, the top-down or bottom-up strategy. Is it possible to combine them? I think it is. The actors of the educational system can play different roles in that kind of development. The central governance should define clearly the frame. The other prerequisites are strict accountability, defined standards, open competition and monitoring of the system. If we can have these then the extra result can be an ongoing learning procedure at an organisational level and also at a personal level. The benchmarking and all these efforts can provide new possibilities for teachers who can play other roles than only teaching in a classroom, like it was mentioned regarding consultancy work or schools and teachers who can provide training for others.

István Vilmos Kovács: I have three short statements. First is that it is an illusion that we will have or we can have the smartest people in the teaching profession. Rather because we need more and more people with training or a teaching role, that is why this job has to be considered in the future as a profession. Also, our teaching society believes too much in talent and missions, and they have very few and quite narrow skills, techniques and professional tricks to replace the talent that will not be able to be the major cornerstone of future success.

The second point is whether to keep the traditional classroom. I think “room” is not important in this term. The “class” is the important unit. So working in teams is impossible without a team. A working methodology is inevitably necessary to keep together a group and if we would examine earlier ages then it’s even more important. And the other thing is that the traditional organising of classwork gives certain security also for less talented teachers. It keeps a frame for the common work.

The third thing that I would like to mention is in connection with the previous two: if a teacher is entitled or equipped with techniques then he or she can undertake the moderator role that we emphasise in the learning organisation, when teachers do not need to be the cleverest and the most powerful thinker. They have to be the best organiser of a learning team. Just one example: in an informatics class, if the teacher is a good moderator and can use the most talented students to organise sub-groups of the team and to let horizontal learning among the sub-groups, then they can be a well skilled organiser of the team, but he can be the learner, one of the participants who learn from this common work.

Gaby Hostens: About horizontal teaching, I feel that institutional generalisation by the politics of some good practices could be dangerous because it could kill some of the inner dynamics of these projects. The role of politics there should be to relay them and not to institutionalise them. The politics should also avoid thinking about reform or a change as a final act, but as something that is perpetual. In the early 1990s, about ten years ago, we discovered in Belgium that we never had defined the objectives of education. Since then we first defined the general objectives for primary schools, secondary schools, high schools and now we have imposed on all the schools the duty to define their own school projects. We create there a dynamic. It is probably too soon to have a good evaluation of it, but in each school you have the teachers, the authorities, the director, the parents, the civil society – all the partners of the school. This is an ongoing project. When you think about change you have to think about perpetual change and not of definitive steps.

János Setényi: According to my duty now I have to close the panel discussion. First I would like to thank you for your attention and patience, and then I would like to thank the panellists. I think that it was a lively discussion, a little bit too young and I missed the female voice, but next time probably we will provide that element too. Thank you very much.