I watch year 10 on their careers interview practice day, coping with the formal clothes they’ve opted to wear, unusual for us. Two boys have added a tie to their polo shirts and I mildly observe that this might seem eccentric to an interviewer. One is affronted: ‘it’s my rugby club tie’. Some girls are discussing others’ choices: ‘a school skirt with a white shirt is sensible. Smart and economical, you can’t go wrong’, although none of them are garbed thus.
Things we roll with at Tallis that bring other schools out in a rash include blue hair, nose rings, trainers, a very broad curriculum, student activism, noisy corridors, staff in shorts and skirt length. Things we grit our teeth about and smile through include Progress 8, SEND funding and financial terrors. Things we’re really fussy about include inclusion and respect for everyone. We look and feel different from a lot of other schools. We have our own vision and our own ways of working.
Readers from other schools will be foaming at the gills and shouting at their machinery. All schools are different. We all make our own weather. The silly old bat’s making a fuss about nothing. Who’s rattled her cage?
At a lunch bidding farewell to a colleague more experienced than I, she put down her cuttles, looked me in the eye and bowled a poser. ‘Whatever happened to the self-managing school?’ Struth, a distant echo. Gorn, I said. But when? and why?
My co-eater’s to blame for this blog, about a memory of an idea that turned itself inside out and ended back where it started.
Everyone talked heartily about self-managing schools between the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 and the domination of deliverance from the early 2000s. I was prancing off to conferences at that time the better to claw my way up the greasy pole and heard a lot of chaps called David. Reynolds of Exeter, for example. He opined
Experience of past top-down change programmes or improvement schemes was one of dismal failure….it is also clear from the various school improvement programmes that commitment to personal and institutional change is greatest where the individual school is in charge of its own schemes.
The belief was that schools’ capacity and vision had been let down by sclerotic structures, notably the Local Education Authorities (LEAs). The ERA had introduced Local Management of Schools, which largely and radically meant schools managing their own budgets. From then onwards, the push to manage more was obvious, inevitable and righteous. Why wouldn’t Heads, long experienced in curriculum design and management, free to spend their own budgets, want to shape the entire direction of their schools, including their core purpose, teaching and learning?
Initially, expertise developed and was shared across and between the LEAs who still ran (almost) all the schools. Self-managing schools became part of the ‘self-improving school’ system. Enterprising Heads joined forces in broader groups such as the Specialist Schools Trust, perhaps lured by the cash premiums attached to Specialist School Status and the quasi-business language of entrepreneurship which became common parlance. The National College for School Leadership was the flagship of the self-improving system and another David, Hargreaves of the SST, wrote for them on ‘Creating a self-improving school system’ in 2010.
It has long been known that the most powerful influences on teachers are other teachers, but policies have rarely built on the fact. The best way of exploiting this phenomenon is through regular, face-to-face encounters among professionals that focus on the improvement of teaching and learning…… In a self-improving school system, more control and responsibility passes to the local level in a spirit of mutual aid between school leaders and their colleagues, who are morally committed to imaginative and sustainable ways of achieving more ambitious and better outcomes. England is part way there. Will it now decide to travel the rest of the journey?
Well, yes. Vocal self-managers were highly influential with New Labour and the development of academies. That single policy snowplough cleared the path for the doctrinaire demolition of the Local Authorities from 2010 onwards under a government of an entirely different kind. The self-improvers became ‘system leaders’. Collaboration laid the foundations for the MATs, whose self-managing blueprints became the orthodoxies of their schools and the drivers of the current system.
So do we now have self-managing schools? Was I wrong to say they had vanished like eight-track cartridges Hargreaves’ vision, of a system led by school leaders, by teachers for teachers, is where we, apparently, nearly, are. Academies and MATs are run by the leaders and teachers who seized the day (along with some former civil servants and LEA folk, and some very rich people linked to governments). Has it worked? Yes and no, perhaps - but I speak from a particular vantage point and I may be wrong.
The MATs committed themselves, as good public servants, to the deliverance of public sector targets for the good of all our children. They found particular ways that worked in particular contexts which were shared and copied. Trends developed. None of this is new and none of it is wrong. But if funding collapses while accountability measures are keenly sought and assessed by high-stakes inspection, cost-effective models becomes accepted or recommended models. Many schools teach a more limited curriculum for exactly these reasons and a terrifying 60% MORE intend to reduce their curriculum.
Perhaps this is a principled response to the prevailing circumstances? We can only do what we can afford, and we must fulfil expectations. The children need to pass exams in the subjects apparently valued by the nation, so this is what schools are for, and here’s how to do it. it’s a national scandal as well as a tragedy. But, returning to my question, I have to observe that some leaders in the dominant MATs appear to have significantly less freedom to self-manage than I’ve enjoyed as the servant of three Local Authorities. What self-management became seems to have led to greater control.
I don’t quote a lot of Eliot, but I can’t avoid Little Gidding.
Things we roll with at Tallis that bring other schools out in a rash include blue hair, nose rings, trainers, a very broad curriculum, student activism, noisy corridors, staff in shorts and skirt length. Things we grit our teeth about and smile through include Progress 8, SEND funding and financial terrors. Things we’re really fussy about include inclusion and respect for everyone. We look and feel different from a lot of other schools. We have our own vision and our own ways of working.
Readers from other schools will be foaming at the gills and shouting at their machinery. All schools are different. We all make our own weather. The silly old bat’s making a fuss about nothing. Who’s rattled her cage?
At a lunch bidding farewell to a colleague more experienced than I, she put down her cuttles, looked me in the eye and bowled a poser. ‘Whatever happened to the self-managing school?’ Struth, a distant echo. Gorn, I said. But when? and why?
My co-eater’s to blame for this blog, about a memory of an idea that turned itself inside out and ended back where it started.
Everyone talked heartily about self-managing schools between the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 and the domination of deliverance from the early 2000s. I was prancing off to conferences at that time the better to claw my way up the greasy pole and heard a lot of chaps called David. Reynolds of Exeter, for example. He opined
Experience of past top-down change programmes or improvement schemes was one of dismal failure….it is also clear from the various school improvement programmes that commitment to personal and institutional change is greatest where the individual school is in charge of its own schemes.
The belief was that schools’ capacity and vision had been let down by sclerotic structures, notably the Local Education Authorities (LEAs). The ERA had introduced Local Management of Schools, which largely and radically meant schools managing their own budgets. From then onwards, the push to manage more was obvious, inevitable and righteous. Why wouldn’t Heads, long experienced in curriculum design and management, free to spend their own budgets, want to shape the entire direction of their schools, including their core purpose, teaching and learning?
Initially, expertise developed and was shared across and between the LEAs who still ran (almost) all the schools. Self-managing schools became part of the ‘self-improving school’ system. Enterprising Heads joined forces in broader groups such as the Specialist Schools Trust, perhaps lured by the cash premiums attached to Specialist School Status and the quasi-business language of entrepreneurship which became common parlance. The National College for School Leadership was the flagship of the self-improving system and another David, Hargreaves of the SST, wrote for them on ‘Creating a self-improving school system’ in 2010.
It has long been known that the most powerful influences on teachers are other teachers, but policies have rarely built on the fact. The best way of exploiting this phenomenon is through regular, face-to-face encounters among professionals that focus on the improvement of teaching and learning…… In a self-improving school system, more control and responsibility passes to the local level in a spirit of mutual aid between school leaders and their colleagues, who are morally committed to imaginative and sustainable ways of achieving more ambitious and better outcomes. England is part way there. Will it now decide to travel the rest of the journey?
Well, yes. Vocal self-managers were highly influential with New Labour and the development of academies. That single policy snowplough cleared the path for the doctrinaire demolition of the Local Authorities from 2010 onwards under a government of an entirely different kind. The self-improvers became ‘system leaders’. Collaboration laid the foundations for the MATs, whose self-managing blueprints became the orthodoxies of their schools and the drivers of the current system.
So do we now have self-managing schools? Was I wrong to say they had vanished like eight-track cartridges Hargreaves’ vision, of a system led by school leaders, by teachers for teachers, is where we, apparently, nearly, are. Academies and MATs are run by the leaders and teachers who seized the day (along with some former civil servants and LEA folk, and some very rich people linked to governments). Has it worked? Yes and no, perhaps - but I speak from a particular vantage point and I may be wrong.
The MATs committed themselves, as good public servants, to the deliverance of public sector targets for the good of all our children. They found particular ways that worked in particular contexts which were shared and copied. Trends developed. None of this is new and none of it is wrong. But if funding collapses while accountability measures are keenly sought and assessed by high-stakes inspection, cost-effective models becomes accepted or recommended models. Many schools teach a more limited curriculum for exactly these reasons and a terrifying 60% MORE intend to reduce their curriculum.
Perhaps this is a principled response to the prevailing circumstances? We can only do what we can afford, and we must fulfil expectations. The children need to pass exams in the subjects apparently valued by the nation, so this is what schools are for, and here’s how to do it. it’s a national scandal as well as a tragedy. But, returning to my question, I have to observe that some leaders in the dominant MATs appear to have significantly less freedom to self-manage than I’ve enjoyed as the servant of three Local Authorities. What self-management became seems to have led to greater control.
I don’t quote a lot of Eliot, but I can’t avoid Little Gidding.
| We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. |
I’m not sure that self-managing or self-improving schools were ever the complete answer. There’s not enough service to the common good for me in such formularies, and the risk of becoming solely task-driven was likely, and has proved, to be overwhelming. Emerging with difficulty from this circular tunnel we should scrutinise the landscape closely. What about an education service that looks outward, rather than inward? What about a big and healthy curriculum, bringing national improvement for the common good, and future citizens with the knowledge and the nous to understand the world and change it for the better?
CR 19.6.24
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