Local Management of Schools

Some Practical Issues

Ernie Cave, Cyril Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134943494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The provisions of the 1988 Education Reform Act have given many schools the turnover and responsibilities of a medium-sized business. The Act is certainly the most important educational legislation since 1944 and local management is the key issue, requiring schools to undertake specialist functions, such as budgetting and marketing, never tackled before at the institutional level. This book introduces some of the practical issues associated with planning and implementing new functions now being devolved to school level. It will enable schools to focus on the implications of the Act and the issues it presents. It stresses the need for the whole school to meet the challenge. Each chapter looks at a different issue, including: * resource management * financial management * budgetary preparation * performance measurement * the uses of information technology * marketing and the school * the legal context * personnel management and staff selection * time management and priority setting. The book does aim to be a practical manual on local management but to provide a clear-thinking and sympathetic discussion of the urgent practical issues now facing all schools. It will be invaluable to all involved in educational management, whether in schools, local authorities, training organisations or academic life.

Chapter one

The changing managerial arena

Ernie Cave

Despite considerable professional apprehension and widespread opposition, the Education Reform Act 1988 has become law and provides the framework within which schools must now operate. The Act is arguably the most radical and certainly the most comprehensive attempt ever to redesign the education system for England and Wales. Parallel legislation has been introduced for Scotland and for Northern Ireland. The Act will succeed in its ambition to reform the system, in the sense of reshaping it, by introducing extensive restructuring. Whether or not it will succeed in its declared ambition to reform the system, in the sense of making it better by the removal of existing imperfections, remains to be seen. In introducing the Bill, the Secretary of State for Education claimed to see it as a means through which standards in education would be raised. What constitutes standards is not explicitly defined but is implicit in that they are to be measured by an arguably narrow range of academic achievement and by examination success.

The means by which standards are to be raised are clear: it is to be achieved by restricting professional autonomy, by increasing parental power, by exposing the system to the forces of open market competition and by streamlining the governance of schools through curtailing the role of the local authority middle tier and greatly increasing the powers vested in the Secretary of State for Education, with the assumption of 415 new powers many of which relate directly to schools. The raising of standards is to be made visible through the system of pupil testing at the ages of 7, 11, 14, and 16. No convincing analysis has been made to support an argument that all these means will end in higher standards. The real fear is that while there may be some advantage for a minority of parents and pupils, the new provisions will certainly not result in the greatest good for the greatest number. The pessimistic view is that schools now struggle for survival in an arena not of their choosing, under rules which they find professionally disagreeable, and for prizes which they do not value.

Implications for schools

The national curriculum

There is no doubt that the Education Reform Act will have considerable impact on schools. Professional autonomy in determining the curriculum will be diminished by the introduction of a national curriculum, the provisions for which are seen by the government as the cornerstone of the programme to raise standards. All children are to receive a ‘balanced and relevant’ curriculum in mathematics, sciences, English, history, geography, technology, music, art, and physical education, and children of 11 to 16 are to study a foreign language. Parents will be given results of the assessments at 7, 11, 14, and 16 for their own children and aggregated results for schools so that comparisons may be made. The truth, of course, is that the curriculum a child actually receives is determined by what happens in the classroom within the general ethos and relationships of the school as an organization. Education is essentially a process the outcomes of which are difficult to measure. The belief that better education can be provided through centrally prescribed programmes of study assumes unrealistic levels of monitoring and control over what happens in classrooms.

The intentions of the national curriculum are praiseworthy but will only be realized if the professional educator is a willing partner in its delivery.

Open enrolment

The Act provides that parents will be able to enrol their child at any school that has the physical capacity (initially based on the 1979 admission number) to accept them provided that it is appropriate for the age and aptitude of the child. Open enrolments will apply in secondary schools for the 1990 intake. The assumption behind this legislation is that the operation of open-market competition for pupils will ensure that good schools will flourish and bad schools will be forced out of the market. No logical analysis or substantive evidence is presented to support such a view. The equation of freedom of choice and quality assurance may not be as valid as the Act assumes. There is little certainty about the criteria which parents may use in selecting a school. Research by Elliott (1981) provides some indication of possible factors, for example, good management, which may have influenced parents in a particular area to choose a particular school. The study is far from conclusive, however, in that it is dangerous to generalize from the choices of parents ‘many of whom occupy managerial roles in local industry’. Elliott also admits that he suspects ‘some parents responded in terms of the choice pattern they felt ought to, rather than did, obtain.’

There is no evidence that schools which already have been forced to close or amalgamate are bad schools or that schools which are over-subscribed are good schools. Many schools which have closed have been those serving small rural communities, those in large housing estates suffering from an ageing and immobile population, or those in run-down inner-city areas. Such schools are vulnerable to the movement of a quite small minority of pupils, and parents who wish to continue to send their children to a particular school are deprived of that choice if it closes.

There is a danger that schools facing falling enrolments because of environmental factors become caught in a downward spiral of decline over which they have no control. There are other real dangers. Parents may exercise their right of choice for social rather than educational reasons and refuse to send their children to schools that have large numbers of socially or economically deprived pupils, thus reinforcing social divisions. Similarly, schools with large numbers of ethnic-minority pupils may be unpopular with some white parents, thus creating racial segregation. Pring sets out a valid argument:

The inappropriateness of the market metaphor needs to be exposed. It is a dangerously misleading analogy for understanding educational processes and for directing educational policies. All children matter, not just those whose parents have learnt to play the market effectively. And the improvement of schools requires long-term planning—not a quick alteration of a commodity to meet changing fashions. Furthermore, the stress upon individualism—upon individual preference—at the expense of social responsibility and cohesiveness must be a matter of concern as we become ever more closely interdependent rather than less so.

(Pring 1988:96)

Parent power

The government’s commitment to increasing parent power in education is central to the new legislation. Introducing the second reading of the Education Reform Bill, the Secretary of State for Education declared:

We must give consumers of education a central position in decision making. That means freeing schools and colleges to deliver standards that parents and employers want. It means encouraging the customer to expect and demand that all education bodies do the best job possible. In a word, it means choice.

(Hansard 1987 vol. 123:77)

The notion of parents shaping educational provision is a considerable extension of previously held views on parental involvement in schools.

The desire for increased parent power may not be as widespread as the Act assumes. A clearer understanding is required of the kind of involvement parents desire and of the conditions necessary to make such involvement productive. It is accepted that parents in general are interested in their children’s education and that they wish to be informed about their progress and prospects. Parent governors have usually been the most active and supportive among the members of the school’s governing body. But it is the experience of many schools that parents have no wish to interfere in professional matters relating to the organization and management of internal affairs.

The emerging evidence suggests that they are more interested in outcomes than in processes. While there have been a few politically motivated parents who have seized the opportunity to exercise the new powers available to them, there has scarcely been a rush by parents to put themselves forward for election to governing bodies. Rather the contrary. The new governing bodies represent the core of continuing government policy to establish greater parent power. The Times Educational Supplement reported the results of their survey of sixty-one primary and secondary schools which took part in parent governor elections under the requirements of the 1986 Education Act, and concluded:

Parents in many of the country’s schools have failed to take part in Mr. Kenneth Baker’s parent power revolution. In more than one in three schools which took part in Britain’s biggest ever round of parent-governor elections, the turnout was less than 25 per cent. And in more than four out of ten schools, no elections were held because not enough parents were prepared to stand.

(TES 21 October 1988)

The proposals for local management of schools place new and perhaps intimidating responsibilities on school governors. Although technically the local education authority continues to be the employer, governors will have ‘hire and fire’ and disciplinary powers over staff and will have individual liability for discriminatory or unfair practices which may well deter parents from serving. Parent governors may well find themselves to be the only members of the governing body who are not covered in such cases, the others being representatives of supporting bodies.

There has been a similar lack of enthusiasm to take part in the new accountability procedures through which parents can question the school’s performance and possibly take corrective action. Parents continue to be interested in parent-teacher meetings and in written reports which give an account of what is going on in the school but public meetings at which headteachers are held to account for the school’s performance have been poorly attended. For example, the Manor School, Cheadle, Cheshire, is exemplary in its determination to inform and involve parents and to enlist their support in ensuring that the children are given the education they deserve. It is worth quoting the school’s experience of annual parents’ meetings:

The first Annual Parents Meeting was held before the end of the summer term to comply with the law. The second was held to ensure that the parents were able to consider the examination results at the earliest possible time, and more particularly because the Annual General Meeting of the Parent Teacher Association had to be held, according to the constitution, before the end of October. It was felt that it would be helpful to combine the two meetings since all parents and teachers are members of the Parent Teacher Association and governors are invited to their Annual General Meeting as a courtesy. In addition the Parent Teacher Association provides at least one glass of wine to persuade new parents to attend. Unfortunately the attendances were equally unsatisfactory on both occasions. At the first meeting there were 26 parents, the Head Boy, two teacher-governors, two parent-governors, four other governors and the Head Teacher.

(Tomlinson 1988:16)

The Manor School’s experience is simply an illustration of the findings of a number of studies which show the poor response from parents to the government invitation in the 1986 Act to call schools to account for what they do. Mahoney (1987) investigated experiences in Leicestershire and Derbyshire and found that in one-third of the annual meetings to receive school reports, fewer than 5 per cent of the parents on the school register attended. The attendance figure of around 5 per cent is confirmed in other studies.

In most schools the opportunities which have been increasingly provided for class teachers and parents to discuss the work of the individual child continue to command high support. Evidence is not yet available but it is reasonable to conjecture that the new complaints procedure for parents dissatisfied with the school’s curriculum and assessment will be used to pursue individual discontent rather than the balance and relevance of the curriculum of the school as a whole.

Financial delegation

In several of its proposals the 1988 Act seeks to accelerate trends already evident in the education system, which can be traced back to the scheme in Hertfordshire when Newsom was Chief Education Officer. Over the past few decades there have been various trial schemes seeking to give schools greater autonomy in administering their own finances. Early experimental projects, of which the Inner London Education Authority’s Alternative Use of Resources scheme is well documented, gave schools control over a sizeable portion of the budget. Leicestershire Community Schools (Phase III) had block budgeting budgeting from 1978. In 1982 Cambridgeshire initiated a trial scheme for local financial management of schools which is now regarded as a prototype in that schools were provided with a lump-sum allocation and were encouraged to become ‘self-managing institutions’. A similar scheme, known as the school financial autonomy scheme, has developed in the metropolitan borough of Solihull since 1981.

Under the provisions of the 1988 Act all secondary schools and those primary schools with 200 pupils or more will have control over their budgets. In some areas, primary schools with fewer than 200 pupils will be included. There is, increasingly, an acceptance that control over the uses to which the school’s finances are put will enable those making decisions on the development, organization, and operation of the school to have greater flexibility. It is also likely that the introduction of school-based budgeting will lead to greater awareness among teachers of the financial implications of educational decisions. Nevertheless, there is considerable concern among heads over how the complex operations of financial management are to be carried out. These misgivings arise largely from the fact that changes have been introduced without a planned programme to develop the capacities needed. Although the legislation provides that the governing body is charged with the responsibility for the school’s budgets it is likely that in many cases the tasks involved will be delegated to the headteacher.

In the short term LEAs may be willing to offer assistance with staff development in this area but such provision is likely to be transitory and to focus on general principles rather than detailed procedures. Undoubtedly some schools will seek expert help from accountants or other financial consultants. In the past, however, schools have been accustomed to receiving in-service training and advisory support free of charge and may find the cost of outside professional services something of a shock. The expense for individual schools seeking to purchase financial and budgetary expertise from freelance consultants or from commercial enterprises may be more than they are willing to pay. Ways have to be found to provide for immediate assistance in actual budget preparation and, in the longer term, to help them to become self-sufficient in managing their own financial affairs. In the Education Management Unit of the University of Ulster the idea is being explored of using financial expertise in the Faculty of Business and Management, in conjunction with the Faculty of Education, to build training programmes and workshops for groups of schools around an actual budget prepared for a school typical of the group. Training which involves actual budget preparation should prove to be more economical than the engagement by individual schools of experts simply to do the budget for them.

An alternative approach, common in the independent sector, of appointing a bursar to manage the school’s finances has already been adopted in several state schools. The delegation of financial management to schools will undoubtedly accelerate this trend, perhaps with the appointment of a bursar to a group of schools. One problem is that, traditionally, ancillary staff have been highly valued but seriously underpaid. School governors may be well advised to give serious consideration to recruiting and suitably remunerating someone with appropriate financial and possibly entrepreneurial competences, since the effective planning and utilization of the school’s budget is one of their significant new accountabilities.

School governors

Headteachers and governors will be required to work closely together to ensure that the children are receiving the best possible education through optimum uses of resources. Their general responsibilities will include:

• the establishment of the educational needs and priorities of the school;

• a cost-benefit analysis of alternative allocation of funds to meet those priorities;

• the detailed deployment of resources;

• the monitoring of the impact of decisions taken;

• an evaluation of the effectiveness of programmes undertaken.

There is reason to hope that one of the beneficial outcomes of the Education Reform Act will be to give a stimulus to the development of close and rewarding partnership between the staff of schools and their governors. Many promising initiatives were already under way even before the Act. Followin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The changing managerial arena
• 2 Resource management in schools: some conceptual and practical considerations
• 3 Local financial management
• 4 Computers in school management
• 5 Marketing the school
• 6 The legal context
• 7 Staff management and the school principal
• 8 The management of time
• Index