How does a poor school system become good or a good school system become excellent? Those are the questions asked in a recently published McKinsey review of twenty school systems around the world, including both developed and developing countries.
In school systems where there have been significant improvements in performance, McKinsey found that these were often achieved in six years or less from the start of the changes. In other words it is possible for a government to bring about improvements in time for the public to see the benefits before the next election. However, continuity amongst key educational officials (including politicians) is frequently beneficial, with improving systems usually having their educational leaders in place for long periods of time.
Many of those improvements were, according to the McKinsey analysis, brought about without significant changes in the structure of education systems or in the resources put in.
Although both these structural and resourcing factors are important, “we find that the vast majority of interventions made by the improving systems in our sample are ‘process’ in nature … [i.e.] modifying curriculum and improving the way that teachers instruct and principals lead”.
However, what works best depends on what stage of improvement the education system is – going from poor to ok and going from ok to good often required different policies, with the resulting warning that, “systems cannot continue to improve by simply doing more of what brought them past success”.
In particular, as schools get better the importance of local autonomy increases in the McKinsey analysis:
These systems achieve improvement by the center increasing the responsibilities and flexibilities of schools and teachers to shape instructional practice – one-third of the systems in the ‘good to great’ journey and just less than two-thirds of the systems in the ‘great to excellent’ journey decentralize pedagogical rights to the middle layer (e.g. districts) or schools. However, in parallel, the center mitigates the risk of these freedoms resulting in wide and uncontrolled performance variations across schools by establishing mechanisms that make teachers responsible to each other as professionals for both their own performance and that of their colleagues. For example, these systems establish teacher career paths whereby higher skill teachers increasingly take on responsibility for supporting their juniors to achieve instructional excellence first within the school, then across the system. These systems also establish collaborative practices between teachers within and across schools that emphasize making practice public – such as weekly lesson-planning for all teachers in the same subject, required lesson observations, and joint-teaching – that serve to perpetuate and further develop the established pedagogy.
The emphasis on process in the McKinsey analysis, placing more weight on it than on structure and resourcing, is a mirror image of current debates about the school system in the UK where all three factors are much discussed, but it is structure (e.g. free schools) and resourcing (e.g. pupil premium) which are getting the bulk of attention whilst process issues, such as Michael Gove’s views on the curriculum, get much less attention.
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7 Comments
I am sure there are plenty of “pedagogical” points can be picked out here for comment, Mark, but my eye was struck by one “process issue” which, I don’t think can be other than a mistake on the writers’ and McKinsey’s part. The text suggests that “excellent” is a higher rating than “great”. This is all very well if you live in celebrity la-la land, or I suppose, in the US (? the same thing?), but for most of us we only encounter truly “great’ people or institutions very occasionally, whereas we can find “excellent” institutions and people reasonably often.
system is the problem. too rigid a system. Also too much attention to the heirachy of university and getting degrees. the spurious social mobility argument. All skills/inteligences need to be valued. Why have the same standards for the class of pupils who are never going to get qualifications but need life skills? why not have an alternative to school for particularly boys aged 13 -16 who get nothing from school and disrupt for others, by the time they are older they might return to “formal” education. when all skills are recognised in the workplace – and rewarded accordingly – the person who works in the bank has the same pay as the carer who comes out to help the old sick and dying get up – then maybe the way people who are not academic are valued from primary school to secondary school will change. maybe pupil behaviour will change. maybe more self worth will come into being.
I have worked in many schools in cardiff as an artist, just one city and a huge difference between schools. it can be heartbreaking.
trouble is with devolution some specifics of discussion not possible as different policies (i live in wales but am currently for the first time in my life studying in england).
Schools get better when class sizes get smaller. (And when more money is spent on sport.) Of course those who do not wish to say too much about structure and resourcing, for obvious reasons, will focus instead on process, which, while important, can become a distraction from more fundamental problems.
We are long overdue for a virtuous instead of a vicious circle, both in structure and in resourcing, in state compared with private education. Remove the charitable status of private schools and put VAT on expenditure on private education in order to help fund smaller classes in State schools. This will encourage more people to opt in to State education and so be more ready to pay the necessary taxes to reduce state school classes to the same size or smaller than private schools. (And to improve state school sports facilities in relation to private school sports facilities).
Presumably we will have to wait for this until after the Coalition has collapsed and a genuine New Social Liberal Left emerges to call for genuinely greater equality of opportunity in education, health and the inheritance of wealth, vast inequalities of which reinforce private at the expense of state education (and health). In the meantime, prepare to hear more about process!.
@Dane Clouston: Schools get better when class sizes get smaller. (And when more money is spent on sport.)
Umm, do you have evidence for those statements?
The evidence I have seen suggests that smaller class sizes do benefit pupils, but only at primary school level. And having “more adults per child” (a Swedish obsession which may explain why there schools have been coasting downwards for years) is not helpful unless those adults are trained teachers.
For secondary level it seems that it is better to have fewer higher quality teachers (i.e. larger classes) than more teachers (i.e. smaller classes).
I think we should all be pleased that the Schools White Paper puts so much emphasis on improving teachers’ professional development and working conditions. It seems that Michael Gove listens to the evidence, unlike a succession of Labour Education Secretaries.
Niklas Smith
I was not proposing a trade off between more teachers or better trained teachers. Just more well trained teachers, which costs more money.
I would have thought that a priori it was likely to be true that smaller class sizes benefit pupils. I would be very suprised if, other things being equal, there were any evidence to the contrary.
@Dane
Surely when you make statement like : ‘Schools get better when class sizes get smaller. (And when more money is spent on sport.) ‘
It is reasomable to ask you what evidence you have to support it?
Class sizes are a bit smaller in private schools (although I suspect not as much as you think). But there are many other differences as well such as the ability to expel dispruptive pupils and the need to attract pupils through good results. Might these have an influence as well on their better results?
“SMcG”
As I said, it is a priori very likely that schools get better when class sizes get smaller, other things being equal – ceteris paribus! I don’t need evidence for that.
How do you know how much smaller I think class sizes are in private schools than in state schools? I do have some knowledge of this. My – now adult – children have experience of state schools up till sixth form, and then private schools. And we were all particularly struck by the difference in sporting facilities between state and private.
Of course the ability to expel disruptive pupils helps. So the class sizes ought to be smaller in the state schools to achieve the same results.
And the need to attract pupils through good results is presumably part of the pressure to have smaller class sizes in private schools. So classes are smaller in private schools as a result. Q E D.