Schooling for tomorrow: some implications for leadership

Professor Bill Mulford The University of Tasmania Tasmania, Australia

The OECD Schooling for Tomorrow project (OECD, 2001) developed six scenarios describing future schooling. As the following summary indicates, each scenario has clear and different implications for school leadership.

Scenario 1. Maintaining the status quo

• Bureaucratic system: the continuation of powerfully bureaucratic systems, strong pressures towards uniformity and resistance to change. Priority is given to administration and capacity to handle accountability pressures, with strong emphasis on efficiency.
• Meltdown: a major crisis of teacher shortages triggered by a rapidly ageing profession and exacerbated by low teacher morale and buoyant opportunities in more attractive jobs. Crisis management predominates and a fortress mentality prevails.

Scenario 2. Re-schooling

• Social centres: a strong social agenda, with schools acting as a bulwark against social, family and community fragmentation. Extensive shared responsibilities between schools and other community bodies but a strong core of high-status teaching professionals. Management is complex, leadership is distributed and often collective, local decision making is strong, and there is wide use of networks.
• Learning organisations: schools revitalised around strong knowledge rather than social agenda in a culture of high quality experimentation, diversity and innovation. With knowledge moving to the fore, management is characterised by flat hierarchy structures, using teams, networks, diverse sources of expertise, the use of evidence, and continuous professional development. Decision-making is rooted within schools and the profession.

Scenario 3. De-schooling

• Network: dissatisfaction with institutional provision and diversified demand leads to an abandonment of schools in favour of a multitude of learning networks provisioned by powerful, inexpensive ICT. Authority becomes widely diffused, there is a substantial reduction in public facilities and institutional premises and the demarcations between teacher and student and parent break down.
• Market: existing market features in education are significantly extended. Many new providers are stimulated to come into the learning market. Indicators, measures and accreditation arrangements start to displace direct public monitoring and curriculum regulation. There is a substantially reduced role for public education authorities. Entrepreneurial management modes are prominent.

How likely and how desirable?

What do current and prospective school leaders think are the likelihood and desirability of each of these scenarios in the next five to 10 years? The following chart plots the answers to these questions from over 100 Tasmanian and 15 British Columbian summer school postgraduate educational leadership students in recent times. Note needs to be taken of the high scores and close match between the likelihood and desirability of social centre and learning organisation scenarios but the huge gap between the likelihood (very high) and desirability (very low) of the bureaucratic system scenario. I believe these results continue the confused current ‘golden age’ of, but ‘new public management’ accountability press on, leadership of our schools and should be of great concern (Mulford, 2003a & b).

[The] debate is pitched into a chasm between the way public institutions work and how users experience them.A major debate taking place in UK about the future shape of public services picks up on this confused situation for school leaders. This debate is pitched into a chasm between the way public institutions work and how users experience them. For example, in the education sector it has been argued by Charles Leadbeater, (2004a, pp. 81, 83 & 90) that efficiency measures based on new public management as reflected in:

‘[t]argets, league tables and inspection regimes may have improved aspects of performance in public services. Yet the cost has been to make public services seem more machine-like, more like a production line producing standardised goods. [And, I would add, increasingly create dependence on the system.] … It is … clear that the state cannot deliver collective solutions from on high. It is too cumbersome and distant. The state can only help create public goods – such as better education – by encouraging them to emerge from within society … That is, to shift from a model in which the centre controls, initiates, plans, instructs and serves, to one in which the centre governs through promoting collaborative, critical and honest self-evaluation and self-improvement’.

It is further argued (Leadbeater, 2004a & b) that public services can be improved by focusing on what is called ‘personalisation through participation’. The ‘pay off’ of personalisation is believed to be increased knowledge, participation, commitment, responsibility, and productivity. Thus, personalisation can be seen to be both a process and an outcome of effective public organisations, including schools.

A personalised public services is seen as having four different meanings:

• providing people with a more customer-friendly interface with existing services
• giving users more say in navigating their way through services once they have access to them
• giving users more direct say over how the money is spent
• users are not just consumers but co-designers and co-producers of a service.

As we move through these four meanings, dependent users become consumers and commissioners, then co-designers, co-producers and solution assemblers. In schools, learners (students and staff) become actively and continually engaged in setting their own targets, devising their own learning plan and goals, choosing among a range of different ways to learn. As we move through these four meanings, the professional’s role also changes from providing solutions for dependent users to designing environments, networks and platforms through which people can together devise their own independent and interdependent solutions.

Leadbeater (2005, p. 6) argues that personalised learning ‘will only become reality when schools become much more networked, collaborating not only with other schools, but with families, community groups and other public agencies’. The links to the OECD scenarios for the future of schooling, especially schools as social centres and learning organisations, should be noted.

Arguably one of the best funded and continuous school networks, The Network Learning Group (NLG), with its hub at the UK’s NCSL, summarises learning about the advantages of networks in comparison to traditional hierarchically designed organisations (NCSL, 2005b, p. 4) as greater sharing, diversity, flexibility, creativity, risk-taking, broadening of teacher expertise and learning opportunities available to pupils, and improved teaching and pupil attainment.

The NLG did point out that, while there is no blueprint for an effective network, it is possible to identify factors that successful networks have in common. All of these factors have clear implications for school leadership. Effective networks:

• design around a compelling idea or aspirational purpose and an appropriate form and structure
• focus on pupil learning;
• create new opportunities for adult learning
• plan and have dedicated leadership and management.

But Leadbeater (2005) warns that the collaboration needed for effective networks ‘can be held back by regulation, inspection and funding regimes that encourage schools to think of themselves as autonomous, stand alone units’. Ben Levin (NCSL, 2005b) agrees, pointing out that there ‘are inevitable tensions between the idea of learning networks, which are based on ideas of capacity building as a key to reform, and …  reform through central policy mandate’. Edith Rusch (2005), in fact, concludes that networks cannot be controlled by the formal system. She questions the role of the district in effective school networks, identifying competing institutional scripts between what is likely to be required by networks as opposed to the district:

1. Structures are seen as malleable in networks but fixed and hierarchical in districts.
2. Conflict is open and valued in networks while it tends to be hidden and feared in districts.
3. Communication is open and unbounded in networks but controlled and closed in districts.
4. Leadership tends to be fluid in networks while it is hierarchical and assigned in districts.
5. Relationships are egalitarian in networks but meritocratic in districts.
6. And, finally, knowledge and power is based on inquiry and learning is valued in networks while expertise and knowing is valued in district.

The current situation would seem to be one, as Levin (NCSL, 2005) suggests, in which there remains a need to reconcile networks and central policy and that ‘central policy and learning networks could actually compliment each other by bringing together different and equally necessary strengths while curbing each other’s excesses’. Networks need to guard against ‘whining or self-congratulations rather than action’ by demonstrating publicly that their work is connected to the key objectives of central policy and that they are making a meaningful difference through evidence-based student outcomes (in their broadest sense). On the other hand, central policy managers need to work with networks ‘as a way of generating local capacity and commitment to educational improvement’ and ‘to provide a sufficient degree of local autonomy and flexibility in policy implementation to allow learning networks to become important allies on key priorities’. In brief, networks ‘need to be able to be critical of central policy directions’.

Leading schooling for tomorrow through networks, personalisation through participation, social centres or learning organisation will … require schools and their leaders to radically rethink how they operate.Leading schooling for tomorrow through networks, personalisation through participation, social centres or learning organisation will not be for the faint of heart (Leadbeater, 2005). It will require schools and their leaders to radically rethink how they operate. Many of the basic building blocks of traditional education, the school, the year group, the class, the lesson, the blackboard and the teacher standing in front of a class of 30 children could be seen as obstacles to personalised learning. All the resources available for learning – teachers, parents, assistants, peers, technology, time and buildings – will have to be deployed more flexibly than in the past. But, as Leadbeater points out, current schools and their leaders may not be best placed to meet these new demands:

Last great Fordist institutions

Our vast secondary schools are among the last great Fordist institutions, where people in large numbers go at the same time, to work in the same place, to a centrally devised schedule announced by the sound of a bell. In most of the rest of the economy, people work at different times, in different places, often remotely and through networked organisations. In the last two decades, private sector organisations have become more porous, management hierarchies have flattened, working practices have become more flexible, job descriptions more open and relationships between organisations, as suppliers and partners, more intense. The bounded, stand-alone school, as a factory of learning, will become a glaring anomaly in this organisational landscape.

References

Leadbeater, C. (2004a) Learning about personalisation: how can we put the learning at the heart of the education system? London: UK Department for Education and Skills. www.standards.dfes.gov.uk
Leadbeater, C. (2004b) Personalisation through participation. London: Demos. www.demos.co.uk
Leadbeater, C. (2005). The shape of things to come. London: DfES Innovation Unit. www.standards.dfes.gov.uk
Mulford, B. (2003). School leaders: challenging roles and impact on teacher and school effectiveness. Paris: Commissioned Paper by the Education and Training Policy Division, OECD, for the activity ‘Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers’. www.oecd.org
Mulford, B. (2003b). The role of school leadership in attracting and retaining teachers and promoting innovative schools and students. Commissioned paper by the Commonwealth Department of Education Science and Training for their ‘Review of Teaching and Teacher Education’. www.dest.gov.au
Mulford, B. (2006). ‘Some international developments in school leadership’. British Columbia. Educational researcher. 5, May. E-journal, www.slc.edu.ubc.ca
NCSL. (2005). International perspectives on networked learning. www.ncsl.org.uk
OECD, (2001). What schools for the future? Paris: OECD. www.oecd.org
Rusch, E. (2005). ‘Institutional barriers to organisational learning in school systems: the power of silence’. Educational administration quarterly, 41(1), pp. 83-120.