7. Rapporteur’s Report

by Donald Hirsch

Introduction

Any discussion today about approaches to school management is bound to become a wider discussion about approaches to schooling. This would not be so if good management were mainly a question of finding strong and effective individuals to run schools. Yet this seminar made it amply clear that it is about much more: about improving the organic development of the school. So it is appropriate that an event following up the OECD’s study of New School Management Approaches¹ was given the wider title, “Managing Education for Lifelong Learning”. Unsurprisingly, the two days of discussion addressed a great range of subjects, from new pedagogies to the relationship between central and local government. Yet through the prism of managing schools for lifelong learning, it created a relatively coherent and fruitful conversation, yielding insights into the future direction of schools as learning organisations.

The seminar also served to underline the centrality of management issues to the future of schooling. For just as school management is today about the whole development of the school and its mission, so the achievement of educational objectives has come to depend on developing effective forms of management and regulation not just good pedagogies or curricula. Teaching, learning and managing in education have become inextricably intertwined.

The organisers of the seminar had three goals: to disseminate and pursue more deeply the themes of the OECD study; to relate its findings to wider “macro” issues of developing school systems and to public management reform; and to reflect on the particular experience of Hungary in reforming schooling and school management. The discussion started by looking at the “micro” level of the learning environment, then went on to consider issues around managing schools and finally broader “macro” issues concerning educational governance and public management reform. Inevitably, these three levels overlapped considerably – the context of the governance of schools and their relationships with public authorities, for example, has direct implications for the ways in which they are managed and respond to change. This report summarises some of the key insights that emerged from the seminar, highlighting of some main points that emerged rather than giving a comprehensive list of topics covered. Each of the main seminar papers is in itself a powerful synthesis, and this report does not attempt to replicate all of their arguments.

An essential feature of the discussion was the instructive example of the host country, Hungary, which is very consciously setting out to undertake in practice some of the transformations described in principle by the seminar experts. Hungary’s education minister, József Pálinkás, introduced the proceedings by describing how the country is endeavouring to create new kinds of learning and new processes to achieve it. In the past decade, Hungary has decentralised its education system, but more recently it has been seeking to ensure that certain objectives in terms of learning outcomes and quality standards are met within decentralised structures. A new curriculum and assessment system aims to combine managerial autonomy for schools with a new approach to learning content that allows schools to develop more useful curricula based more around developing competencies for lifelong learning, and less around reproducing knowledge in university-imposed end-of-school exams. At the heart of this change is a redefinition of teacher competencies and career structures, to relate them more closely to the multiple demands being made of teachers in the 21^st century. Against this background of radical system change, speakers from Hungary explained (as referred to below) the country’s efforts to make schools into learning organisations, consciously pursuing quality improvement.

Institutional and “micro” level issues 1: Creating and sustaining high quality learning environments

The first main discussion in this seminar looked at the challenge of making schools into “learning organisations” where teaching and other resources were organised to produce high quality learning environments.

For a century, declared Mats Ekholm, the head of Sweden’s National Education Agency, we have thought of education as the transmission of knowledge from old heads to young heads. Only recently have we started to teach students how to learn. This may have been a caricature of past and present approaches to teaching, but it struck a common chord at this seminar. Across OECD countries educators are trying to engage students more directly in learning, to make them co-workers with teachers in the learning process rather than just recipients of knowledge. “Real schools”, it was suggested, are places where real learning takes place in the sense that students do things because they are interested rather than because they are told.

While not all speakers appeared to take such a stark view of the transformation needed as Mr Ekholm, the idea that the modalities of learning must change was widely shared. Speaking from the perspective of a system that has in the past been governed tightly from the centre, Alexandru Crisan from Romania saw gradual decentralisation as a prerequisite for a creating and managing an effective learning environment. The country’s vision of creating a “re-schooling scenario” like that described by CERI³ depended not just on the centre letting go, but also building capacity in institutions to enable teachers and students feel more in control of learning processes. Other countries, such as Korea reported (in replying to the questionnaire sent to participating countries), a distinct shift towards “learner-orientation” in schooling. Zoltán Poór from Hungary reflected on the associated challenge of developing autonomous personalities, who must be capable of setting set aims, goals and objectives, of defining the content of learning, of identifying their own needs and so on. Such aspects of autonomy were discussed in relation to both students and teachers.

There was thus some consensus that new kinds of learning relationships are desirable in 21st century schools. However, there was also a widespread belief at the seminar that change in this direction was slow. The traditional model – the teacher in front of the classroom – is still very much the prevailing model in the teaching/learning interface. The reply to the seminar questionnaire by the delegate from Belgium (Flemish Communities) showed a frankness in describing what is surely a common phenomenon among member countries:

At the same time there was some questioning at the seminar of whether new and more open methods of learning were always necessarily preferable to old, tested and tightly structured approaches. Inevitably a seminar of this kind could not do justice to the larger debate about teaching methods and what works in the classro om. But the strong message that came out of this part of the discussion was that one cannot prejudge what works in a given educational setting. Part of the challenge for schools is to evaluate approaches as they unfold, and to be willing to adapt strategies in the light of their outcomes, as well as applying multiple strategies as appropriate to different contexts. In other words, in developing new learning approaches for students, schools themselves had to be good at learning. Teachers and managers also needed to be aware of a number of strategies for teaching and managing, rather than relying excessively on one method which might not always be appropriate.

Thus the relevance of new curricular and pedagogical approaches to the management of schools lay partly in the importance of establishing appropriate processes for change. But in addition, the particular idea of restructuring the learning process, to make it more participative rather than didactic, has specific implications for the management of schools. This underlines the importance of ensuring that management training and development should give sufficient attention to managing the learning environment. It implies new types of relationship between students, teachers and managers.

A transformation in the way that students learn, it was argued, has a number of different kinds of implication for the development and management of schools. It requires students, teachers and managers each to develop greater autonomy, rather than being told what to do by a higher authority. Autonomous learners must, for example, learn to identify their own objectives and needs and to select appropriate tools for meeting them. Teachers, in their turn, have to take responsibility for their own work and help to formulate the curriculum rather than just acting as agents for the system. School managers have to be able to deal with staff with a variety of attitudes and skills, and to reflect on their own performance. In each case autonomy refers to the need for partners in the learning process to take responsibility, without however denying interdependence.

These parallel processes show how new approaches to the responsibilities in schools are linked to new approaches to student learning. In the process of leading schools, principals need to understand how factors connected with engagement help to motivate teachers and students. Yet evidence presented to the seminar reminded participants that the relationship between strong leadership and good student results is not a direct one. Bill Mulford from Australia presented powerful research carried out in Australian schools showing that leaders operate in a complex web of relationships in which good leadership helps foster the kind of school climate in which learning flourishes, rather than directly inspiring students to achieve. Specifically, this research (the “LOLSO” research project) found that:

“Organisational learning, or a ‘collective teacher efficacy’, is the important intervening variable between leadership and teacher work and then student outcomes. Said another way; leadership contributes to organisational learning which in turn influences what happens in the core business of the school; the teaching and learning. It influences the way teachers organise and conduct their instruction, their educational interactions with students, and the challenges and expectations teachers’ place on their pupils.”⁴

The proposition that principals’ influence on learning can only work indirectly rather than, for example, as a direct inspiration on students seemed self-evident to seminar participants, yet in recent years the emphasis on the role of the school leader has led some politicians and others to conclude otherwise. In practice putting all one’s hopes in the powers of a charismatic principal has rarely provided a long-term solution to a school’s problems, and has sometimes proven counter-productive. The achievements of such leaders tend to fall away after they leave, unless their approach has worked through the transformation of others, rather than through the leader’s own magnetic presence. Certainly some of the best examples of successful school management identified in the OECD’s study involve team approaches. But as was pointed out at the seminar, this does not just mean a cohesive team of senior managers. A number of participants felt that the key was to give meaning to the careers of ordinary teachers beyond the context of their individual classroom responsibilities. Teachers need to be part of the management of change, and that may mean giving them areas of responsibility, for example by putting them in charge of specific projects. Even though this may not be a large responsibility that draws them excessively away from classroom work, teachers who feel at least part of the management process will help carry forward change more effectively. It is in this context that the single most important reform identified by the Hungarian Education Minister was the creation of a new career structure for teachers in which they did not have the same responsibility, pay and status at each point in their career.

Overall, two powerful messages that emerged from this discussion about the relationship between learning and management were, first, that there is now strong evidence that good management and leadership make a difference to learning outcomes, but secondly that managers need to operate cleverly within a complex set of relationships rather than seek simplistic solutions. Dealing with the complexity resulting from the multiple stakeholders and processes involved in education is a critical skill needed by school managers at every level. This theme was the backdrop to the following session, concerned with educational change.

Institutional and micro-level issues 2: Managing schools for complexity and change

The second main session of the seminar considered the different approaches to management in schools in the context of societies and systems undergoing rapid change. There have been important changes in decision-making structures, with many responsibilities devolved to schools, transforming the context of management and leadership. Relationships between the school and the wider community interests become highly relevant in this new environment, adding to the complexity of a school’s mission.

The response in practice of OECD schools and school systems to these challenges were explored in detail in CERI’s report on new approaches to school management, the main background document to this seminar. As set out in opening the session by Dale Shuttleworth, who had worked on that study, new political and societal demands are being made on schools, often provoking a sense of perpetual pressure or crisis. At worst, schools feel that these new demands are not being matched by support and resources needed to meet them. Yet there are also many instructive cases of schools responding to new challenges by effectively changing the ways in which they work. This part of the discussion drew out three themes in particular: how to address school quality drawing on wider management principles; how best to apply these principles in an environment of public accountability and openness; and how innovation can be spread through a system.

Principles for improving quality through organisational learning

The Hungarian government has recently emphasised quality improvements in school education through its “Comenius 2000” programme. This provides a national framework for school level initiatives, based on the assumption that quality assurance concepts developed in industry can be adapted for application in schools. An important aspect of this approach is the use of consultants from a range of backgrounds including the private sector. The programme involves three phases or models – the first aiming to create a commitment to stated goals defined in partnership with local communities to meet relevant needs; the second the implementation of total quality management through the creation of learning organisations, and the third the dissemination of this process throughout the system. At the heart of this approach are the principles, reproduced in Box 1, according to which schools are expected to make progress towards their goals, in the second phase, total quality management.

These processes were by no means unique to Hungary, but brought together many of the elements described by other countries participating at the seminar. At the most radical, countries have attempted engage a wider range of external expertise in helping to improve quality. The Flemish Community’s education system in Belgium, for example, has been keen to bring in skills of outsiders. It has lifted the requirement for school managers to be formally trained teachers, and asked a private management consultancy firm to draw up job descriptions incorporating a competency profile based on discussions with panels of employers, principals and teachers. The United Kingdom government wishes to engage the private sector in the provision of public services where it can improve delivery – though this can be controversial. In education, for example, private sector companies have been brought in to rescue or provide services on behalf of local education authorities which are failing or severely under-performing. There is no bar to companies or private individuals running state maintained schools. Recently three struggling schools in Surrey have been entrusted to private companies who have contracted with the local education authority to improve performance in return for an annual management fee.

It is of course one thing to elaborate a model for change such as Hungary’s, and another thing to implement it successfully. Discussion in the seminar about quality management and organisational learning brought to the surface a range of difficult issues that schools need to address when going down this path.

One derives from the challenge of becoming less insular. Schools can benefit from working with outsiders, not just from other schools but from outside the education sector. Yet to do so can be difficult not just because of cultural resistance by educators but also because of the need for outside consultants to understand the intricacies of education and the constraints of education policy. Nevertheless, there was optimism at the seminar about the benefits that can be gained from looking beyond established parameters dictating who is involved in managing schools. One participant suggested that recruiting some managers without professional teaching experience would have a twofold benefit: first, because being detached from the teaching profession would make it easier for such managers to become more directly accountable for outcomes; second because they could bring a perspective that helped schools deal with some of their outside partners – for example other public services such as health or social services.

Moreover in working with others inside the education sector, the challenge of “horizontal learning” from colleagues and hence of networking is crucial, and these processes were emphasised time and again within the seminar. They can take the form of exchange of ideas across schools, but also involves an important culture change within schools, in which classroom teachers learn to work in collaboration with colleagues to a far greater extent than they have done in the past.

However perhaps the biggest challenge relates to the process by which schools as organisations go about learning. The systematic approach of identifying goals, analysing what needs to happen to meet them and openly monitoring progress while learning from one’s mistakes is one that requires a very conscious effort by school managers, who in the past have not been asked to develop their organisations in this kind of way. One thing that was clear throughout the discussion is that the politics and policy-implementation processes of education do not always make it easy for schools to adopt such a model in practice. Their efforts to develop as organisations are overlaid by many external demands and day to day pressures. The following section considers one aspect of this public context: the need for schools to be open and accountable for what they do.

Following these principles in a climate of openness and accountability

One of the complexities of managing education, as well as other public services, is the need simultaneously to be effective in producing desired outcomes and to be open and accountable about the processes by which these outcomes are arrived at. A specific difficulty, which emerged at the seminar, was that the honest self-evaluation that is essential to a learning organisation can create problems for bodies that are publicly accountable and cannot admit to failure. For example, a school that monitors its own performance cannot easily keep the results of this process secret, yet is liable to suffer if it is perceived to be failing.

Different countries have responded in different ways to this dilemma. In some, there is still an acceptable level of confidentiality around information designed for internal monitoring. In others, there is a legal requirement to publish results. Sometimes the transition from the first to the second state has been accelerated by the assertion of the public’s “right to know”. For example, it was reported that in the Netherlands a newspaper had gone to court to force schools to publish results that had come from a benchmarking exercise not designed to produce public comparisons. The danger is that the assertion of a public “right to know” will deter honest self-evaluation that is an essential part of institutional learning.

The seminar did not offer a specific solution to this very real problem, but the discussion suggested two possible ways of addressing it. The first is to develop assessment tools that are appropriate in terms of the goals that schools want to reach. Publication of crude tests of students performance may sometimes create perverse incentives if they are not accompanied by wider measures of educational outcomes. Assessments such as PISA which are less narrowly based on curriculum and attempt to measure student characteristics as learners are one step in this direction, but a still wider range of indicators would include a range of non-cognitive outcomes of education. Yet even with assessment instruments perfectly matched to a school’s objectives, there may still be a disincentive for a school to look honestly at its performance as part of the improvement process. A second part of the solution therefore needs to be the development of new attitudes to failure. In the private sector (in some cultures) failure is seen as an essential part of the learning process. Could this become so with schools? For that to happen, a new political discourse is needed in which it is made clear that educational initiatives, at system or at school level, are part of a continuous learning process, rather than each initiative being sold as the latest solution which is certainly going to work. Systems have already made some progress in recognising and dealing with failure in schools over recent years. But they still need to progress further in creating a sophisticated set of instruments that are good at correcting and learning from failure, in an open environment.

The rights and wrongs of experimentation and innovation

These two (paraphrased) attitudes seem to present conflicting perspectives about the desirability of implementing radical change in our education systems. The “schooling for tomorrow” scenarios recently described by CERI⁵ were presented as possible future directions, without forgetting the huge basic tasks that schools already achieve in terms of organising and socialising children and providing stable institutions in often otherwise fragile communities. It is certainly not easy to “start again from scratch” in designing the logistics and methods of schooling, without endangering this stable set of functions. Yet this is not sufficient reason for ignoring the changing missions of schools and the need for new approaches to tackling them.

In thinking about these apparently conflicting pressures for continuity and for change, the seminar reflected on some important distinctions in terms of the role of new initiatives. One is the distinction between piecemeal initiatives and a genuine process of experimentation. When political initiatives are “piloted”, for example, governments, local authorities or schools must be prepared to abandon what does not work and to build on what does. This means accepting that just because a new educational idea is intuitively attractive, this does not mean that it will certainly work or be appropriate. It also requires a new approach to evaluation. Full evaluations now take so long that by the time they are published they have little scope to influence the project in question. New approaches are required to produce genuinely independent yet timely assessment of whether changes are working.

A related issue is how successful innovation is disseminated. The Hungarian model puts a strong emphasis on active dissemination across the system, as do initiatives such as Beacon Schools in the United Kingdom. But can local autonomy be reconciled with the need nationally to ensure that change is not fragmented and the best gets disseminated. Much depends on the success and strength of networking mechanisms, and one of the biggest tasks of governments is to build and support these linkages, rather than trying to impose innovation by decree.

The seminar also showed some enthusiasm for cross-national dissemination of successful innovation. While recognising that the national level would continue to be more important for some time to come, participants felt that things have changed from the days in which lessons from other countries were of rather incidental interest. Indeed, the very high level of interest in Hungary’s present experiment, together with the close attention paid to the international benchmark represented by the recently-published PISA findings, were indications that educational change will increasingly be developed and judged in a cross-national as well as in national and local frameworks.

System-wide “macro” issues: paying attention to governance

The final session in Budapest tackled the broader horizon of management and governance at the system level. In looking at decentralisation and consequent changes in education, it addressed the main currents of public management reform and how they relate to the case of education. In practice, it proved very difficult to separate out this theme in the discussion from the previous one, since the “system” level of public management cannot be easily distinguished from the “organisational” level, and much of the thrust of change in decentralised systems consists of disseminating good practice across organisations. However, a particular macro-level issue which was the focus of attention here was that of governance, which was understood not just in terms of the formal direction given to schools by governing bodies and central agencies but also in terms of the ways in which multiple stakeholders’ views and interests needed help govern a school’s actions and objectives.

Professor Ron Glatter introduced the session with a paper arguing that governance is an educational issue which (relative to management) has been neglected, and that getting to grips with it is not easy. (“Theories of management abound, those of governance are few.” He drew attention to a wide range of governance arrangements in different countries, based to varying degrees on competitive markets, school empowerment, local empowerment and quality control – four models of governance which did not exist in pure form anywhere but were combined in different ways. The key point for management is that this context determines the type of leadership are appropriate – although sometimes school managers can feel themselves pulled in several directions simultaneously. The discussion shed light on the degree to which these different models can compete, conflict or co-exist.

One of the most striking features of this seminar was the manner in which decentralisation was analysed: in terms not just of its benefits but of the tensions it can create. In the past decade in most countries the governance of schools has been flowing away from central management and towards local control. In some countries this decentralisation has been overlain by new forms of centrally-defined outcome requirements and assessment mechanisms, and by greater accountability for outcomes. In others, including Hungary, there is a concern that decentralisation might initially have led to less even standards and a reduced capacity to meet system-wide goals. Kari Pitkänen of Finland’s National Board of Education emphasised the degree to which education remains a national public issue backed by a national educational strategy. Moreover, just at a time when there has been decentralisation of some responsibilities to schools, there is an emerging supranational agenda, whose principles were outlined by Guy Haug representing the European Commission. This emerges from some key common goals such as the development of skills for the knowledge society, the development in particular of ICT skills and the need to focus more than in the past on science and technology. The tools for common pursuit of this agenda are firmly voluntaristic – agreements among countries to share functions or roles, common development of instruments to monitor progress, the sharing of information more generally and the agreement of Community-wide action where that can add value. There was a real sense however at this seminar that these common interests – as reflected in the event itself – were growing so strong that so was role for collaboration at the international level, for example in the dissemination of good practice.

In light of these national and cross-national interests, the seminar identified a clear need to consider how decentralisation can be reconciled with overall system quality and objectives.

Each country is working out this relationship in respect of its own system. The result, according to one participant, is that the “rolling back of the state” is being combined with a “rolling in of new, dispersed forms of control”; or as another put it, attempts to “re-establish control where accountability has been devolved.”

At worst, this can create contradictory pressures and tensions. At best, it can establish multiple forms of governance and control, each with its own part in the system. There was a strong feeling among participants that the state did need to ensure that quality was maintained. But very different mechanisms for doing so had to be used now than in the past. The Hungarian model of establishing quality-management processes in some schools and then spreading good practice looks very different from a centrally managed system. However, when it comes to who decides, for example, what is in the curriculum, it is clear that a stable model has not yet emerged. In Finland, for example, the movement is currently towards far greater school autonomy in curriculum matters, while other countries such as the United Kingdom have opted for a centrally defined model, even though presently they are looking for ways of authorising and encouraging local diversity.

Another unstable and uncertain position is that of local authorities and other bodies between the central state and the school. Some participants saw them as useful mediators between central requirements and local priorities. However, the importance of such a mediating layer has in many countries been reduced. The seminar took some interest in certain other forms of mediator, such as Hungary’s education ombudsman, who has acquired an important role in the education system as a mediator of conflicts.

Finally, the role of boards or other bodies directly governing schools has not been adequately studied: there is a science of management, but not a science of governance. Yet such bodies play an essential role, for example, in giving local communities a stake in the running of schools.

For the school principal and other school managers, running a school well means negotiating with multiple powers that each have a stake in the governance of education, rather than simply asserting the school’s autonomy as an independent unit or following the orders of a single master.

Conclusion: consensus and conflict on the route ahead

This seminar made it clear that it is impossible to detach the improvement of the ways in which students learn within schools from the ways in which schools themselves develop as learning organisations. Developments in management and in pedagogy, which tend to be looked at as separate, need therefore to be seen as intricately linked.

Schools, it is clear, are complex things to manage. Yet they are not unique in their complexity. As the Hungarian case has illustrated, there is ample scope for adapting, to education, models of change developed in other complex organisations, both in the public and in the private sector.

Yet much of the discussion at this seminar revolved around the multiple pressures on education systems and the tensions that this raises for those who manage them. A key conclusion is that one of these complexities is the lack of a clearly defined route map. There is not an ideal model of teaching practice, of educational structures or of any of the other elements that determine the success or otherwise of schooling. Change cannot therefore be a linear path towards clear predefined models, but needs to progress along a route in which the map is constantly being refined.

Nevertheless, the discussions created a degree of clarity at least about certain stable characteristics of the map, as well as about some of the tensions that are likely to form a more or less permanent part of the landscape. Perhaps the most important stable or agreed feature was the centrality of genuine participative teamwork in the running of any successful school. Management, it was universally agreed, has to be about more than charismatic leaders. Engaging all the staff in the mission of the school did not preclude some hierarchical relationships, but could not take place without a shared sense of mission and of responsibilities.

Two particular tensions on the route ahead stood out. One was between constructive evaluation and accountability. Can organisations learn effectively when they are in the spotlight? Perhaps, especially if they are emboldened by a more tolerant attitude towards short-term failure, but at a political level this will be hard to achieve. Second, there is clearly a tension between the radical change that may be needed to create what at the seminar was labelled “real learning” and the need to preserve stable and workable systems for instructing children. Quite apart from significant political resistance to radical system change, systems of the scale and complexity of education are in practice constrained in the speed at which such change is feasible.

And what of the people who will have to follow this route map, and to revise it en route? Relatively little was said in this seminar about the managers themselves, either in terms of the personal characteristics that they will require or the training and development that they should receive? But it was clear that what is needed today is far more than a pedagogical leader; rather someone capable of making complex systems work – someone who can listen, negotiate and steer while still keeping sight of the organisation’s fundamental goals and values. It may thus be as important to the future of schools that systems and those who work in them should better understand the principles of good public management, as that they should improve their understanding of how students learn.