Over the past 30 or so years, I have been incredibly lucky to have been able to see educational systems in many parts of the world. Not only have I held tenured positions in Australia, the United States and Scotland, but I have also had shorter periods of being a visiting professor in other countries, such as Canada, Ireland, Macau, Malaysia, Oman and South Africa, as well as presenting, either at conferences or in professional workshops, in more than 50 countries. One of the things that I have found in these travels is that education is very different, whilst having the same underlying aims. How different parts of the world see things differently can be shown in many ways, but one simple way is to describe how I was identified when being introduced. In Australia, I was usually introduced as Tony Townsend, but in the Middle East and Asia I was Prof Tony, in the United Kingdom I was Professor Townsend, in the United States I was Dr Townsend and in some European countries I was Professor Dr Townsend. In each case, I was being treated with respect, but each of these introductions signified a slight difference in local perceptions of the importance of various qualifications or positions. In the United States, most people who work in universities are professors, whether assistant, associate or full, so having a doctorate was a higher symbol of recognition, to the point where I had great difficulty in even getting my colleagues to call me Tony. In the United Kingdom, most people who work in universities have doctorates, but only about 5% of those in universities become full professors (with maybe 20% associate professors), so professor becomes the term of respect. In Europe (especially Germany), both the doctorate and the professorship are considered as a mark of excellence, so both are used, and in the Middle East and Asia, there is an endearing respectful friendliness of the shortened âProfâ and the use of oneâs first name. But in Australia, I was just me. None of these is more or less respectful than the others, they just happen to have their own histories attached.
We need to be just as respectful when it comes to looking at education systems and what they are trying to do. Underlying every education system is the ultimate aim of providing for students within their care the best possible start to their adult life. But when it comes to seeing how they do this, once again difference becomes the norm. We have some systems of education that span more than 800 years and others that are less than 50 years. The three universities that I worked for over an extended period of time demonstrate this. The University of Glasgow was formed in 1451, but both Monash University in Australia and Florida Atlantic University in the United States had their first students more than 500 years later, in 1961. Some countries in the Middle East and Asia did not have any university until the 1990s.
Many school systems, especially the religious ones, date back to the middle ages, many government school systems came about in the mid- to late-1800s and some countries did not really have a system of education (just a few schools here and there) until the 1970s. We have some countries that are well resourced, where every child gets to go to school, and we have others that struggle to ensure an education for every child. By 2030, there may be up to 50 million children (with, unfortunately, girls being in a strong majority) that will never step foot inside a school. In the past 30 years, we have talked about school, classroom and system effectiveness and what that might mean, but can a system ever be effective if some of its students never go to school and a substantial proportion leave school without the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to become a successful adult, as a worker, parent or citizen?
The school effectiveness and improvement research that really started to take shape in the 1980s has been very influential and many countries have drawn on the research from these two areas of study to shape the education systems of today. One of the things that can be confirmed is the important role that school leadership plays in the process of improving individual schools and, ultimately, educational systems. However, the concept of school leadership is a comparatively recent one. Until the 1980s, the term commonly used was âschool management and administrationâ. Schools in the 1800s had a headmaster or a principal, but the oversight of the management and administration of the school emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in 1837 when in the United Kingdom, two inspectors were appointed by the British Government to oversee grants made to religious schools, and in the United States, the Buffalo Common Council appointed the first superintendent of schools as the Chief School Administrator. These systems of inspection in the United Kingdom and superintendency in the United States remain intact even today, although the roles have changed substantially.
However, after the Second World War, history tells us that school education moved into the modern age. A substantial and rapid growth in the size of educational systems in many parts of the world in the early 1960s was brought about by a post-war baby boom, coupled with an increasing demand for more schooling by societies around the world, during a time of economic strength. Subsequent to this period of rapid growth, a downturn in birth rates in many parts of the Western world enabled some countries to turn their attention from expanding education towards assessing the quality of what was being offered.
In the United Kingdom, works such as The Home and the School (Douglas, 1964), Children and Their Primary Schools (the Plowden Report, 1967) and Parents and Teachers: Partners or Rivals (Green, 1968) had considered the relationship between family background and success at school. When these were followed up by such documents as The Crisis in Education (Boyson, 1975) and The Black Papers (Cox & Boyson, 1977), the standard of studentsâ academic performance in the United Kingdom became a critical issue. The British Governmentâs response to these concerns was the establishment of the Assessment of Performance Unit within the Department of Education and Science in 1974.
In the United States, formal reports such as A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), Education and Economic Progress (Carnegie Corporation, 1983), Investing in Our Children (Committee on Economic Development, 1985) and Who Will Teach Our Children? (Commons, 1985) indicated a similar level of government and public concern about the outcomes of the schooling system and this created a climate in which the relationship between education and competitiveness on the international market became inextricably linked, leading to a situation where schools were charged with turning out, in the most cost-effective way, the maximum number of graduates with the ârightâ skills and knowledge as possible.
Concerns for the effectiveness of schools in the United Kingdom (Rutter, Maughan, Mortimore, & Ouston, 1979) and the United States (Edmonds, 1979) were exacerbated in the 1980s by these countries having a seemingly diminished status as the economic superpowers of the world, when other countries such as Japan and Germany attracted increased economic and political status in world affairs.
Concerns for the efficiency of education, related to the cost of education, became associated, as in business, with outputs. Given that a large proportion of government spending was directed towards education, governments were asked to account for their spending in terms similar to those used in business. The issue of the effectiveness of schools became related to the number of students who completed school successfully and the qualities those graduates had, ones that would enable graduates of schooling systems either to become employed or to enter higher education. Thus, the twin concerns of quality and quantity merged and the concept of market-driven education was born.
The notion of the market upturned the previous concept of school systems, where individual educational systems oversaw the operations of the schools within them, to one where each school was charged with doing what was required to ensure that the students within the school achieved the levels reflected by all students in the system. More pressure was applied on individual head teachers and principals to ensure that âtheirâ school was one that could be considered effective.
This movement of responsibility from the system level to school level in many school systems around the world changed the way in which the administration of schools was undertaken. Concepts such as school-based decision-making or self-managing schools (Caldwell & Spinks, 1988) emerged in government systems in England and Wales, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, all in the 1980s, and with them came the understanding that school leaders would require a range of new skills and knowledge to be able to undertake the tasks as required. However, in each case the relationship between governments, education systems and individual schools was slightly different. In England and Wales, from 1988, some schools were able to opt out of the Local Education Authority (LEA) system to become Grant-Maintained schools, and received funding directly from the government, while others stayed within the LEA. Edmonton, Canada, pioneered site-based decision-making in 1976 and expanded it to all its schools in 1980 while Victoria, Australia introduced Schools of the Future, where schools became self-managing, in the early 1990s. In New Zealand, from 1988, the government funded the schools directly and there was no education system in between. On the other hand, the United States maintained the relationship between the school district and individual schools until the first charter schools, semi-autonomous public schools that received public funding, were established in Minnesota in 1991. With the support of the Bush Government, which promoted them as a viable alternative to the public school system, more than 5000 (and growing) charter schools now operate across the country, many of them being for profit, which makes them very different from other forms of self-management.
Government funding of schools also varies substantially in different parts of the world: some countries such as the United States only fund public education (but with increasing under-the-table funding for non-government education, through voucher systems); some countries such as Australia have mixed funding, with states mostly funding government schools and partially funding non-government schools, while the Commonwealth government provides the majority of funding to non-government schools with some funding for government schools; some governments pay for teachersâ salaries if the local community is able to finance the building of the school; and yet other countries in Asia and Europe fund both government and non-government schools in equal measures, to make all schools âpublicâ schools.
What this brief overview provides is a short analysis of just some of the ways that education, although it may have the same underlying purpose globally, has very different approaches locally to actually fulfilling that purpose. One area that has changed over the three decades that have passed since many of the changes described briefly above were introduced is the nature and responsibility of school leadership.
If we think back to the 1970s, leadership (or management) of schools was systematic and hierarchical. Ministers of Education made decisions that were implemented by Education Departments. The fidelity of the implementations was ensured by i...