The Performing School

Dennis Gleeson, Chris Husbands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134538331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This specially commissioned collection of perspectives offers an analysis of the new organisation of the teaching profession - reconstructed around the notion of performance and the implications of a performance culture. The Performing School examines the roots, directions and implications of the new structure by drawing together insights from policy, research and practice at this time of rapid change and debate. This unique volume addresses three interconnected issues of modernisation and education:
*what is the background to and significance of performance management in modernising schools and teachers at the present time?
*what are the likely future effects of a performance culture on teaching, learning and schooling?
*what will it take to ensure that performance management improves pedagogy and professionality beyond the narrow confines of performativity, managerialism and market reform in education?

Part I: Liontamers and jugglers?: Challenges and opportunities in managing the performing school

The first section of the book explores performance management from the perspective of school leaders, who will need to mediate the dynamics of performance management policy in the context of their own schools. Chris Husbands’ opening contribution explores the relationships between the complexity of schools as institutions with multiple goals and competing agendas, and the sharp focus of performance management. He argues that whilst performance management offers school leaders and policy makers a policy technique which closes the circle between macro- and micro-level interventions in schooling, the extent to which it prioritises the short-term and immediate – the ‘clear, concise and measurable’ phenomena beloved of performance management policy – raises issues about whether it will deliver the inclusive, successful education system on which the modernisation project depends.

This ambivalence about performance management underpins the remaining contributions in this first section. Chapters 2 and 3 explore performance management from headteachers’ perspectives. David Gentle and Richard Arrowsmith ask penetrating questions about whether performance management arrangements – hastily assembled and introduced with apparently scant regard for the realities of school management and delivery – can contribute positively to school improvement and effectiveness. Both headteachers highlight complexities and contradictions in the concept and approach. For Gentle, these complexities turn on the extent to which headteachers can transform their current internal management arrangements into leadership, line management and team coherence arrangements on which successful implementation of performance management depends. For Arrow-smith, the complexities relate both to teachers and to pupils, and the extent to which the rational planning assumptions which operate performance management literature speaks to a culture of schooling which depends on the capacity of teachers to inspire, enthuse and motivate young learners. The final contribution in this section, by Meryl Thompson, draws together these policy issues at the level of the school. Thompson is cautious about the ability of large-scale reform programmes – such as performance management – to transform teacher and school practice. However, she goes beyond such reservations to highlight the transformative potential of performance management if, or when, the opportunities are seized to take the twin preoccupations with pupil performance and staff development as the basis for a new model schooling, in which school leaders are able genuinely to pursue their own improvement agendas.

1 Managing ‘performance’ in the performing school: The impacts of performance management on schools under regulation

Chris Husbands

Schools, of course, are complex institutions. School management involves making a constant and unending set of judgements between competing priorities, based on principles which are difficult to reconcile. The rights of individuals must be balanced against the needs of groups; the need to prepare learners for examinations must be balanced against the requirement to equip them for the unpredictable demands of adult life; the pressure to provide knowledge must be balanced against the need to equip learners with personal and study skills. In a finite amount of time, a decision must be made about the best way to use time and to allocate it between competing curricular and pastoral demands each of which has individual merit. In a changing context, schools must consider how most effectively to mediate the demands of different interest groups for new curricular, pedagogic, assessment and managerial approaches: too much change, and the established routines on which all institutions depend are at risk; too little, and the most successful of schools atrophies.

The relationships between attainment and motivation, between curriculum and assessment, between the proper concerns for pastoral care and for pupils’ academic achievement, between individual needs and general provision, between the demands for time, resources and development of different curriculum priorities are complex. In key areas, school leaders make often intuitive judgements, between the short-term and the long-term, between the pastoral and the academic, between what is desirable and what is possible, between what appears urgent and what may be most important, between the demands, aspirations and expectations of pupils, parents, staff, governors, local authorities and government.

Over the past two decades, the imperatives on schools to respond rapidly to imposed change from central government have markedly increased. The introduction of performance management from 2000 represents the culmination of increased policy, public and research interest in the quality, effectiveness and measured improvement of schools over some three decades. What is at issue, therefore, is the nature of the school response; put crudely, what will performance management do to the cultures of school management and to the ways in which school managers mediate the pressures on them and their staff and pupils?

New Labour and the closing of the management circle: the operation of national performance and school policies

New Labour’s aspirations for the education system are ambitious: ‘our vision is of nothing less than a new and stronger fabric for our society. We want all our young people to emerge from school with a sound basic education, committed to continuous learning and equipped with the personal skills they need to succeed as individuals and citizens. We want people of all ages engaged with learning. We want opportunity for all. We want a nation equipped for the challenges and opportunities of the new millennium’ (Blunkett, 1999). The diagnosis is that ‘for most of the last 150 years, mass education has been of at best fitful concern to English political leaders, left and right. In consequence, central government has taken scant interest in standards too often dismissing as a matter of local concern what was in truth a chronic failure of national leadership and responsibility’ (Blair, 1999). In place of this neglect, Labour in opposition promised ‘rigorous assessment of pupil and school performance, and action based upon it to raise the standards of the worst schools to that of the average and the standard of the average to that of the best’ (Blair, 1996).

After the 1997 election, the new Labour government, whilst making important changes in school governance, largely accepted the frameworks of curriculum, assessment and accountability which had been introduced through the 1980s and 1990s (Halpin and Whitty, 1997; Gray and Wilcox, 1996). Onto a structure of largely autonomous schools operating in a marketised environment (Bridges and McLaughlin, 1994; Husbands, 1996), Labour grafted the activist role for the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) which Michael Barber, himself installed as head of the new Standards and Effectiveness Unit (SEU), had presaged in advising ‘politicians with a passion for education’, ‘how to do the impossible’ (Barber, 1996). The SEU, the Standards Task Force, the DfEE standards web-site and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) took lead roles in identifying and disseminating perceived ‘good practice’. National targets were set for pupil attainment in literacy and numeracy at age eleven, with nationally defined pedagogic strategies to support the achievement of the targets within five years. Circular 11/98 required that secondary schools set and circulate to parents targets for the number of pupils attaining given levels in national curriculum and GCSE assessments (DfEE, 1998). LEAs (local education authorities) were required to develop education development plans for approval by the DfEE that mediated the relationship between national and school-level targets. Through national strategies, approved schemes of work, and school-level targets, the DfEE defined, in greater detail and more extensively than ever before, the expected outcomes for specified facets of schooling, and established mechanisms for close monitoring of progress towards these outcomes.

In government, Labour progressively marshalled the entire education system around this reform agenda. The Secretary of State was not immune from the drive for reform: his task now was ‘not to tinker in Whitehall’, but to lead a newly activist and interventionist Department ‘to promote successful change in every classroom in the country’ (Barber, 1996). Civil servants were urged by the then Permanent Secretary at the DfEE to acknowledge histories of the failure of ‘educational and social reform at the implementation stage’, and to recognise the need to ‘become more focus[ed] on the issues of the day’ (Bichard, 1998). School leadership was to be overhauled, with prime ministerial recognition for leading headteachers and a national college for school leadership. Whilst the Prime Minister described teachers as often ‘excellent … and dedicated’ (Blair, 1999), the Green Paper has observed that the culture of the profession had too often been defensive and reluctant to change (DfEE, 1998). Where previous reform efforts had been abandoned ‘by governments without the courage or the strategic sense to see them through to impact on pupil performance’, the task of root and branch reform and restructuring would this time be seen through (Barber, 2000 p.23).

The Green Paper on the reform of the teaching profession, which emerged after eighteen months of the new government (DfEE, 1998), provided a clearer framework for the management of national, local and school targets through the restructuring and reculturing of the teaching profession. The introduction of programmes for performance management, linking teacher performance to promotion above a national threshold, with further financial rewards for high performing schools – which was trailed in the 1998 Green Paper on the teaching profession, but which has not appeared in pre-election statements and policy papers (Labour Party, 1997) – provided the final, connecting link in the chain. The mechanisms through which performance management would reshape schools and school management were outlined in a series of technical and procedural papers for headteachers, teachers and governors published through 2000. They suggest both a clinically straightforward series of assumptions about the ways in which performance might be managed, and a wide ranging sense of its potential impact on the whole culture and practice of school management. Performance management is intended to focus headteacher and governor attention on ‘what, with encouragement, support and high expectations … pupils can achieve’, based on ‘the integration of performance management with the overall approach to managing the school’ (DfEE, 2000a p.l). Thus, performance management redirected the focus of school management around a deceptively simple proposition: ‘where schools and individual teachers are clear about what they expect pupils to achieve, standards rise’ (DfEE, 2000b p.3). Targets are to be set annually in the performance management cycle for both headteachers and teachers who have successfully passed a performance threshold. Under the DfEE’s performance management regulations, governors are required to set at least two ‘clear, concise and measurable objectives’ for headteachers each year, one of which must relate to pupil progress and one to leadership and management (DfEE, 2000c). In order to pass successfully through salary thresholds, teachers must adduce a range of evidence about their professional competence, including evidence that their pupils ‘achieve well in relation to their prior attainment making progress as good or better than similar pupils nationally’ (DfEE, 2000b).

English schools, and particularly English secondary schools, have always been concerned – rightly – with pupil achievement in external examinations. What is new here is not the emphasis on pupils’ cognitive outcomes, but the sharpness of the focus on performance management, the range and depth of statistical and comparative data on which analyses might be based and, as an over-arching issue, the centralisation of the management of school, teacher and pupil achievement. What is imposed is simultaneously limited and expansive. It is limited in the extent to which performance management focuses school leadership onto the core tasks of enhancing pupil progress against measurable criteria; but expansive in the extent to which the language and assumptions of performance management describe a cultural refocusing of schooling. The DfEE’s guidance on performance management polices, and its training materials for external advisers, insist – though the language can in the year 2000 only be aspirational – that ‘performance management works best when it is an integral part of a school’s culture … based on a shared commitment to continuous improvement’ (DfEE, 2000a p.4).

English schools, as a result, stand at a critical policy and developmental cusp. Charged with spearheading the government drive for improvement in pupils’ life chances as a key element in the strategy to combat social exclusion, they must sharply focus their efforts as never before on the management of teacher performance in order to improve measured pupil performance There are three direct connections: first, teachers’ central focus is pupils’ (test and examination) performance. Second, headteachers must focus on the management, deployment and development of teacher performance in order to enhance pupil performance. And third, governors must set targets for pupils’ performance based on prior attainment data and national attainment targets. School targets can be derived from national targets; and teacher and pupil targets from school targets. In the short term, it is almost certain that the sharper focus and defined targets brought by performance management systems will deliver higher levels of attainment in external tests and examinations, of which there are now a plethora: one study by the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) suggests that the typical English pupil now takes some seventy-five tests between entry to school and the age of eighteen (PAT, 2000). In these tests and examinations, the marshalling of institutional effort, the focus on defined short-term targets and the management of time, resources and curriculum around maximising short-term performance will, in the majority of schools, demonstrate the ‘success’ of performance management. It is less clear that the structures of performance management will in the medium term produce a ‘nation equipped for the challenges and opportunities of the new millennium’. In the third section of this chapter I want to explore some of the ways in which performance management, as a policy translation of Labour’s aspirations, is likely to impact on what we know about the behaviours of institutions, and especially schools, under regulation.

Managing performance under regulation

The regulatory framework within which schools operate tightened in the late 1980s through the introduction of the national curriculum, tightened again in the 1990s through the publication of examination results; and with the introduction of regular OfSTED (Office for Standards in Education) inspections has been more sharply tightened than ever. One way to interrogate the impact of performance management is to consider the ways in which institutions respond to regulatory frameworks. Any assessment or evaluation framework impacts on the behaviours it is intended to measure. For policy-makers, therefore, the key task is to design assessment and evaluation tools which impact virtuously on behaviour and which do not have negative unintended consequences. There is little doubt that much of the DfEE guidance quoted already assumes that performance management can only impact virtuously on schools’ behaviour: teachers will ‘have a proper opportunity for professional discussion with their team leader … best practice is characterised by a commitment to attainment and welfare of pupils … an appreciation of the crucial role that teachers can play [and] an atmosphere of trust between teacher and team leader which allows them to evaluate strengths and identify areas for development (DfEE, 2000a p. 3). It is in fact difficult to find any evidence of the direct virtuous impact of centrally planned change (Fullan, 1991, 1994; Finnan and Levin, 2000; Elliott, 1998).

There are a number of reasons for this. Of course, pupil outcomes are of enormous individual significance and schools have a social and perhaps moral obligation to maximise individual student attainments, raise aspirations and enhance employment and educational opportunities. However, translated from measures of individual attainment to institutional indices of success on which careers and institutional fates depend, pupil outcome measures begin to serve quite different purposes. Performance management is ‘high stakes’ policy-making for schools: on it depends not only institutional reputation and reward, but also teacher career development, and headteacher and teacher remuneration. Campbell’s Law suggests that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor’ (Campbell, 1977).

Throughout the 1990s, external performance measures of pupil attainment at school level have become increasingly public. Headline indicators have emerged: the average A-level points score at age eighteen, the percentage of pupils scoring five or more GCSE grades at A*–C as the key indicator at age sixteen, the percentage of pupils scoring level 4 or above at age eleven, and so on. Such indicators increasingly shape the allocation of resources and time in schools. In primary schools, attention during year six can most productively be focused on techniques which will support level 3 pupils in securing a level 4; in secondary schools the application of mentoring and revision techniques particularly to pupils predicted to score a grade D. For those pupils in receipt of additional attention and support, such techniques are almost certainly helpful and beneficial, but the point is that in these cases school effort is shaped by pressure of the social indicator, and, in many cases, attention is directed away from other pupils: those already likely to secure a level 4, who might with additional extended support realise further potential; those who have no realistic chance of securing a grade C however much support they receive. Less laudably, anecdotal evidence suggests that in some competitive settings, expectations of outcomes may influence admission decisions at primary, secondary, and particularly sixth-form level; or that in some settings the focus on testing itself – as opposed to the study and personal skills which equip learners to manage their learning – may narrow the curriculum. Different measurement techniques – alternative ways of calculating GCSE scores – or different measures, for example holding schools to account for the proportion of their pupils who begin and persevere with a musical instrument, would produce different measures and dictate different management actions. The more an indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures.

In managing performance against any external targets, managers can only focus on those margins of organisational performance which are likely to engender enhanced institutional performance. A multinational company cannot reduce its overall environmental impact other than through a careful process of audit and the setting of short-term, measurable targets which will contribute to enhanced overall organisational performance. Schools must respond in individual ways, and successful management strategies involve the sequencing of marginal management strategies which enhance overall institutional success against medium-term targets. This approach to school improvement is now entrenched in statutory targets and buttressed by non-statutory guidance: targets for school improvement should be SMART (i.e. specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-framed); they should be focused on institutional prioriti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: The performing school: Managing teaching and learning in a performance culture
• Part I: Liontamers and jugglers?: Challenges and opportunities in managing the performing school
• Part II: Highwire artists and acrobats?: Professional cultures and school contexts
• Part III: Ringmasters and big tops?: Performance and performativity in policy frameworks
• Conclusion: An agenda for action and evidence-related policy