Towards Self-improving School Systems

Lessons from a city challenge

Mel Ainscow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317816768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This important new book draws lessons from a large-scale initiative to bring about the improvement of an urban education system. Written from an insider perspective by an internationally recognized researcher, it presents a new way of thinking about system change. This builds on the idea that there are untapped resources within schools and the communities they serve that can be mobilized in order to transform schools from places that do well for some children so that they can do well for many more.

Towards Self-improving School Systems presents a strategic framework that can help to foster new, more fruitful working relationships: between national and local government; within and between schools; and between schools and their local communities. What is distinctive in the approach is that this is mainly led from within schools, with senior staff having a central role as system leaders.

The book will be relevant to a wide range of readers throughout the world who are concerned with the strengthening of their national educational systems, including teachers, school leaders, policy makers and researchers. The argument it presents is particularly important for the growing number of countries where increased emphasis on school autonomy, competition and choice is leading to fragmentation within education provision.

Foreword by Andy Hargreaves, Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education, Boston College, USA

1

STRUGGLES FOR EQUITY IN EDUCATION

Oakwood High School serves a public housing estate in the North of England, where the residents are mainly from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. For years the school has had a dreadful reputation in the area because of low student attendance, bad behaviour and poor performance on national tests and examinations. However, the school year 2009–10 saw a sudden and dramatic improvement. Student attendance improved significantly, and in the national examinations taken by English students at the age of 16 the overall school performance improved by over 20 per cent.

Across the city, about eight miles away, Victoria Grammar School, serves a very different community. Students are selected for the school as a result of tests taken at the age of 11. In the main they come from relatively better off families; indeed, some could be described as wealthy. The performances of its students in national examinations are, predictably, outstanding, making it an attractive choice for aspirational parents, many of whom move into the area in the hope that their youngsters will gain a place.

The rapid progress made at Oakwood arose, to some extent at least, as a result of its partnership with the Grammar School. Through this unusual relationship, involving the crossing of various social boundaries, new energy and expertise was made available to Oakwood. Commenting on what happened, the headteacher of the Grammar School explained:

I spend about three days a week over at Oakwood and one of my assistant heads works 50 per cent of the time with the senior leadership team there to build capacity. It was apparent from the outset that the team at Oakwood had the skills to move the school forward but its members were not forged into a team and were not made accountable.

She also commented on the benefits gained for her own school, not least in respect to the opportunities it had provided for some of her staff to address new professional challenges.

This story is one of many examples of how school-to-school partnerships of various kinds can help to stimulate improvements in practice and expectations. These unusual relationships were encouraged through a three-year initiative known as the Greater Manchester Challenge, the purpose of which was to improve outcomes for children and young people across the city region, focusing in particular on those from low income families. The budget for the project was £50 million and I had the role of Chief Adviser.

In this book I provide an account of what this involved. In so doing, I add to the growing literature that attempts to make sense of the successes of the City Challenge initiative in England, first of all in London and then later in the Black Country (in the West Midlands) and Greater Manchester (i.e. Ofsted, 2010; Hutchings et al., 2012; Hutchings and Mansaray, 2013; Barrs et al., 2014; Claeys, Kempton and Paterson, 2014; Greaves, Macmillan and Sibieta, 2014; Kidson and Norris, 2014). What is distinctive about my contribution is that as a participant observer I am able to explain what happened from the inside. This has enabled me to draw lessons that will, I believe, be useful to those in other parts of the world who are interested in system level change.

As I will explain, this does not result in the sorts of simplistic and prescriptive recommendations that too often permeate the literature on school improvement. Rather, my insider stance enables me to engage with matters of detail that draw attention to local complications that can act as barriers to change processes. This leads me to formulate a strategic framework that can be used to analyse existing arrangements in order to develop powerful improvement approaches. More specifically, this framework helps to pinpoint resources that can be mobilized in order to overcome the barriers that exist through collective efforts that involve many stakeholders. I argue that this is a different way of thinking about how to develop school systems that are more equitable, one that requires an engagement with the social and political factors that are fundamental to the way these systems work. The flexible and responsive nature of this approach means that it can be adapted for use in different national contexts.

Strengthening social capital

Central to the way of thinking that I present are attempts to develop new, more fruitful working relationships: within and between schools; between schools and their wider communities; and between local and national government. A helpful theoretical interpretation that can be made of these strategies is that, together, they help to strengthen social capital. In other words, they create pathways through which expertise and lessons from innovations can spread.

In recent years, the work of Robert Putnam has been influential in making the idea of social capital a focus for research and policy discussion. He explains:

Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to the properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.

(Putnam 2000, p.19)

Writing about the more recent situation in the United States, Putnam states that ‘what many high-achieving school districts have in abundance is social capital, which is educationally more important than financial capital’ (p. 306). He also suggests that this can help to mitigate the insidious effects of socioeconomic disadvantage.

Reflecting on his work with schools serving disadvantaged communities – also in the United States – Payne (2008) comes to a similar conclusion. Thinking specifically about school contexts that are characterized by low levels of social capital, he argues:

Weak social infrastructure means that conservatives are right when they say that financial resources are likely to mean little in such environments. It means that expertise inside the building is likely to be underutilized, and expertise coming from outside is likely to be rejected on its face. It means that well-thought-out programs can be undermined by the factionalized character of teacher life or by strong norms that militate against teacher collaboration.

(p.39)

Mulford (2007) suggests that by treating social relationships as a form of capital, they can be seen as a resource, which can then be drawn on to achieve organizational goals. There are, he explains, three types of social capital, each of which throws further light on the processes that could be developed within an education system. The first of these is ‘bonding social capital’ – this relates to what can happen amongst work colleagues within a school. ‘Bridging social capital’ is what can occur between schools through various forms of networking and collaboration. And finally, ‘linking social capital’ relates to stronger relationships between a school and wider community resources.

As I explain in subsequent chapters, the work of the Greater Manchester Challenge involved a series of interconnected strategies that fostered stronger social capital of all three types. This helped to break down barriers within schools, between schools, and between schools and other stakeholders, in order to facilitate the sorts of mutual benefit that I have mentioned. However, it is important to recognize that, within the context of changing and, at times, contradictory national policies, the gains made through such approaches were often hard won, and remained fragile and therefore easily lost. Here, continuing tensions regarding priorities and preferred ways of working between national and local policy makers, and, indeed, between schools and local authorities, were factors that continued to create barriers to progress. So, for example, some of those near to central government remained preoccupied with achieving short-term gains in test and examination scores in ways that created barriers to efforts for promoting sustainable improvements. Coupled with this was a mistrust of local authorities – the staff of which were often seen as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution – and doubts about the need to have separate strategies that fit particular contexts.

Self-improving school systems

Current efforts in many countries to create schools that can reach all students effectively have often failed to deliver (Giroux and Schmidt 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009; OECD 2010; Schleicher, 2010). Whilst they may have raised the bar, they have not closed the gap. In this book I present a different way of thinking about this task, one that is led from within schools.

In thinking about what is meant by the idea of a self-improving school system I draw on the work of two distinguished scholars, both of whom share the same surname. From Andy Hargreaves I draw on what he and his colleague have described as ‘the Fourth Way’ (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, 2012). This is based on what they see as the limitations of three previous ways of thinking about educational change:

• The First Way was characterized by state support and professional freedom. In this context, innovation was encouraged and practised, but was often random and inconsistent.

• The Second Way attempted to achieve more cohesion and consistency by focusing on market competition and educational standardization, approaches that were imposed at the expense of professional autonomy.

• The Third Way attempted to combine the best of state support and market competition, and balance professional autonomy with accountability. However, it was limited by its emphasis on performance driven targets and testing.

Reflecting on these earlier formulations led Hargreaves and Shirley to conclude:

Educational standardization has dumbed down our curriculum and burdened our schools with bigger government and overbearing bureaucracy, and has not enabled us to adapt flexibly to the future. These old ways of educational change in the 20th Century are ill suited to the fast, flexible and vulnerable new world of the 21st century.

(Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009, p. x)

As a consequence, they argue that a Fourth Way is now needed. Having analysed examples of school change from various parts of the world that have helped them in developing their new formulation, they argue that this:

brings about change through democracy and professionalism, rather than through bureaucracy and market forces. It transfers trust and confidence back from the discredited free market of competition among schools, and reinvests them in the expertise of highly trained and actively trusted professionals. At the same time, it reduces political bureaucracy while energizing public democracy. This means a fundamental shift in teachers’ professionalism that restores greater autonomy from government and introduces more openness to and engagement with parents and communities. The Fourth Way, therefore, means significant change for everyone – governments, parents, and teacher unions alike.

(p. 72)

Within the Fourth Way, teachers set shared targets, rather than attempting to meet the targets demanded by others. In this way, it is argued, democracy plus professionalism replaces bureaucracy and the market – it is less about government and more about democracy. Within the Fourth Way, the government is not there to drive and deliver, but to steer and support. Finally, in the Fourth Way, responsibility comes before accountability, because it is collective responsibility for performance that ultimately will lift the system. As a result:

The Fourth Way pushes beyond standardization, data-driven decision making, and target-obsessed distractions to forge an equal and interactive partnership between the people, the profession, and their government. It enables educational leaders to ‘let go’ of the details of change, steering broadly whenever they can and intervening directly only when they must – to restore safety, avoid harm and remove incompetence and corruption from the system.

(Hargreaves and Shirley 2009, p. 71)

Whilst not suggesting that the project that is the main focus of this book was driven by these ideas, my analysis of the lessons that can be learnt from what happened most certainly was. In particular, my conclusion as to what is needed to foster the development of self-improving school systems is based on the argument that we need to go ‘beyond standardization, data-driven decision making, and target-obsessed distractions to forge an equal and interactive partnership between the people, the profession, and their government.’

Related to this, my analysis also makes extensive use of David Hargreaves’s conceptualization of what a self-improving system would look like. In a series of what he describes as ‘thinkpieces’ written for the National College for School Leadership in England, Hargreaves presents a set of important ideas that are crucial to the conclusions I arrive at in this book (Hargreaves, D. H., 2010; 2011; 2012a; 2012b). He argues that there are four ‘building blocks’ for the development of a self-improving system: capitalizing on the benefits of clusters of schools; adopting a local solutions approach; stimulating co-construction between schools; and expanding the concept of system leadership. He further suggests that in order to move forward these building blocks have to be strengthened, so that schools collaborate in more effective forms of professional development and school improvement.

Writing about the changing policy context in England in 2010, which saw the election of a new government, Hargreaves argues that:

increased decentralisation provides an opportunity for a new vision of school improvement that capitalises on the gains made in school leadership and in partnerships between schools. It would usher in a new era in which the school system becomes the major agent of its own improvement and does so at a rate and to a depth that has hitherto been no more than an aspiration. It is essential that such a change would enhance parental confidence in the quality of schools and the effectiveness of teachers, on both of which better educational outcomes depend.

(Hargreaves, D.H., 2010, p, 4)

This book looks at the practicalities of putting this thinking into action on a large scale, within a changing policy context that, so far, has proved to be less favourable than the one implied here by David Hargreaves. Indeed, as I will illustrate, it proved to be a context in which the Fourth Way thinking envisaged by Andy Hargreaves and Denis Shirley was mixed up with a contradictory and confusing mix of assumptions related to their other three Ways.

Educational equity

The two schools referred to at the beginning of this chapter – Oakwood High and Victoria Grammar schools – illustrate the central challenge facing the English education system and, indeed, many other systems around the world. Though the two are both state funded, circumstances to do with massive inequality between different communities mean that ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Andy Hargreaves
• Preface
• 1 Struggles for equity in education
• 2 A city challenge
• 3 Keys to success
• 4 Families of schools
• 5 Mobilizing community resources
• 6 Leading self-improving school systems
• 7 Addressing the politics
• 8 A different way of thinking
• Bibliography
• Index