Here is a true story about the primary schools in two neighbouring villages. It was told to me a while ago by a long-term resident of one of the villages.
To protect identities I will call the villages simply A and B and say only that they are in the north of England and five or six miles apart.
In village A the head was everything a head should be. He gave inspired leadership for the staff, treated each child as an individual, enthused and motivated them and took care to provide an education that went far beyond the narrow confines of the curriculum. He was, needless to say, greatly admired by the parents.
By contrast, staff and parents in village B were all agreed that the head of their school was weak. Although well qualified on paper, he lacked both the leadership ability and the passion to motivate the children. He was a fish out of water and, as time went on minor maladies – widely attributed to his evident unhappiness and unsuitability for the job – further sapped his energy.
The inevitable happened. Each year numbers dwindled at school B and twice a day the road to the next village experienced a rural rush hour. Before long school A was crowded while at B falling numbers got to the point where there was open speculation about how long it could survive.
Fortunately, before it got to this the head at school B retired and the new appointment proved to be a great success providing the leadership that had been lacking for so long and rapidly building up pupil numbers. Meanwhile over at school A the head was offered a big promotion and left. A new head was soon appointed but proved to lack the talent of his predecessor.
Now the term-time rush hour is back but this time it goes the other way.
Quite apart from the obvious environmental issues, this little story seems to me to encapsulate much of what’s been wrong with education policy over many years. Good schools are about people and leadership – not buildings, central control and targets as Labour seems to believe. Even if hundreds of new schools were built at a cost of billions of pounds most children would not benefit. In short, ‘new schools’ is a policy that is bound to fail whatever fancy name is applied to it.
By contrast, all the evidence I have seen points to the quality of the head as being the most important single factor in the success of a school. Even the smallest improvement in the average quality would make a big difference overall and moreover do so very fast and very cheaply. It would also benefit all children and not just a lucky few.
So here’s a simple plan. Let the staff and parents elect the head-teacher for a limited (but renewable) term of office – say three years. After all, they’re the people who really know if he/she is any good and they (and their children) are the people affected. It would be democratic, empowering and cost-effective.
* Gordon Frankland is a lifelong Liberal and was a Hertfordshire activist for several years. He now lives in Newcastle.
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16 Comments
Given how little teachers are paid, how poorly they are protected and supported in doing their job, I feel there are only two types of people that are teachers.
1. Idealists, willing to sacrifice much to do what they think is right and important.
2. Those that can’t get a different job, and would rather be doing something else.
Anyone that just wants a good wage and a fun job they can do well at and get decent rewards will not go into teaching.
Eventually group 1 moves on because they’re fed up of the poor conditions and need to feed their family. The only people left, the only ones with experience are from group 2, who’d rather not be there anyway.
Because we always need teachers we’ll eventually just end up with an abundance of group 2 teachers we can never get rid of.
That’s where we fail.
As a serving Deputy Headteacher, I agree the sentiments of this article, that good leadership is the tool in helping to raise standards in schools.
I also think the building is very important. Having helped improve the current school building and seeing the effect this had in inspiring teachers, children and parents as well as contributing to improving standards I know that a good head most not only show the qualities expressed in this article but must also be aware of the factors that can really help improve the standard of education
“By contrast, all the evidence I have seen points to the quality of the head as being the most important single factor in the success of a school”
What is that evidence? Do you have a study that you could point us to?
All the evidence that I’ve seen suggests that it’s about parental education/income, their contribution to the school, peer effects within classes and the like.
Of course having a solid management team is vital in any organisation, but I’m not sure this article has a grounding in fact.
MartingSGill @ 1:
Teachers have pretty good protection.
They are paid too little however, which is another consequence of central control (the way pay structures are managed centrally has resulted in absurd pay scales and the evolution of these is even worse with effective demotions very common).
Giving too much job security has some very negative effects though, you only need to look at parts of the US where schools keep employees who are no longer doing anything because they cannot fire them.
In some places the only thing which can get you removed from your position seems to be child abuse – that means that there is zero incentive to do a good job (of course, many teachers do their job out of love for it, but their efforts are destroyed by those who don’t work).
@Tristan
I have a friend who was a teacher for 20 years before finally giving up and doing something else; he’s now retired.
He was an idealist, he loved teaching, he wanted to help kids, he enjoyed seeing them grow and succeed.
The problems he had was that of the group 2 teachers were in the majority. He might have had loads of “protection” but no one enforced it. The group 2 people were too cowardly/apathetic to back him up. The need for teachers was so great that the group 2 people were never sacked even though they were useless. He worked at a number of schools and it was the same everywhere. In some of the more difficult classes it was the teachers that took a devil-may-care attitude, screaming at kids and throwing things at them that actually had the only classes that behaved themselves; a deplorable situation.
At one point a colleague was accused of having sexually assaulted a pupil. It was easy enough to prove his innocence, he was gay and would have had no interest in the girl. He refused to say this though as it would have destroyed him as a teacher if the pupils (and some colleagues) found out.
In the end my friend just lost heart and went to do something else.
They elect the management of school districts in the States. Does anyone know any good papers on the effects of that accountability?
Sorry, I forgot to say, an interesting opinion piece too. Articles like this are always worth publishing, as being radical on education will take a lot of convincing of some activists (if the forums are any guide).
“Let the staff and parents elect the head-teacher for a limited (but renewable) term of office – say three years.”…
O.k… how is this better than a governing body simply dismissing a duff headteacher and replacing them… 3 years is a very long time to leave someone who isn’t up to the job to damage children’s life chances.
Neil Woollcott @ 2
I did not mean to imply that buildings are unimportant – only that they are less important than good leadership and any policy that forgets that basic point is likely to fail.
I have always believed that those at the coal face – or chalk face – should be given the best tools that are available and affordable whether that is buildings, playing fields, books or whatever. My experience is that this is one (but only one) of the factors needed to boost morale.
MartinSGill
I too have a friend with a very comparable experience to yours except that he got out when still young leaving many of his older colleagues green with envy that he still had the opportunity to escape. Basically it came down to unbelievably bad man management that no-one – teachers included – should have to put up with.
This is a management problem which politicians have to solve.
I am not enamoured of the concept of choice between schools as being the main driver of this (although choice has a place). Rather my proposal is aimed at clarifying who the school reports to. Is it some government agency (LEA or other) or is it the parents? If any confusion is allowed to creep in then the remorseless bureaucracy of government will usually win. Conversely if the parents have a big say in the key decision on who gets the top job then the school is likely to be much more customer-focussed and that in time will ripple down through the ranks.
Peter Bancroft @ 3
Parental income and the like will no doubt be good predictors of exam grades but good results do NOT make a school good. Rather it is about value added and all sorts of intangibles that are easy to recognise but hard if not impossible to measure.
Other things being equal, getting better leadership into schools has to be a winning strategy but unfortunately it’s impossible to say who will be good in advance. Hence this plan: make sure that an unsuccessful appointee can be evicted before he/she does too much damage.
For evidence of a really good school (albeit with poor results) look at today’s piece in BBC online news about Morton Community School.
Andy Mayer @ 8
For a governing body to act is a very big step and probably rather rare. I’m more concerned with cases that are ‘bubbling under’ and never quite trigger action by the governors (who should retain their existing powers for extreme cases).
I can immediately think of one school in particular that falls into this group yet the head has been there for years. Multiply this around the country and it a big issue.
Andy @ 8 – most people who sit on governing bodies ARE parents and staff – there are only about 2 of us who aren’t in one of these categories where I’m governor? Perhaps we need to look at getting more people with a wider perspective onto governing bodies…
“For a governing body to act is a very big step and probably rather rare. I’m more concerned with cases that are ‘bubbling under’ and never quite trigger action by the governor”
O.k… but unfortunately this is also a problem faced by boards across many organisations, not just schools. In those cases, in extremis they might opt to choose chief executives only on the basis of a 3 year contract, which is really what your proposal amounts to. I’m not against schools offering flexible contracts rather than jobs for life, I believe schools should set their own contract terms for teachers not national governments, but that’s a different proposition to mandating that they must only offer a three year contract. Let the schools decide how they are run… surely the liberal way
11: Yes you’re correct, it would helpful in that regard if the government didn’t treat governing bodies as vehicles for monitoring and executing an ever expanding raft of policies and standards. Who wants to sit on a committee just to discuss the government’s latest 5-a-day implementation mandate, like that has much to do with education.
“Who wants to sit on a committee just to discuss the government’s latest 5-a-day implementation mandate, like that has much to do with education?”
No, it’s true Andy, sitting on committees don’t often have anything to do with the subject in hand or the issues raised in the meetings. Aren’t all committees like that?
To understand the issues you have to sit with the children in a class and talk to them. To talk to the parents and understand the issues they face such as school bullying in the school playground. To walk around the school and see why the garden pond still hasn’t been fixed. Which is what most good school governors do in addition to meetings Andy.
Gordon,
I agree completely with your hypothesis. The infrastructure actually required to teach / learn effectively is extremely limited. However, the quality of the people doing the teaching is extremely important.
I will add a couple of suggestions though, if I may. I think that a great number of teachers start out in your class one and then, over the years, move into something closer to your class two. I have seen it so many times; they get worn down by the system, by the fact that the process of teaching becomes more important than the subject they are teaching. So I think that teachers should be actively encouraged to go on sabbaticals once every five or six years, to catch a breath and to reengage with their subject.
Are teachers underpaid? I don’t think looking at this in terms of hard cash is the best solution. Many of the rewards for teaching are not cash-based, and so by reducing the problem to one of funding you risk finding the wrong solutions.
Indeed, it seems to me that what NewLabour have done is to increase the pay for teachers while managing to make teaching a less appealing career. For instance, there is a strong (often government-led) emphasis on teaching certain issues in certain ways. I think it would be far better for there to be a stronger emphasis on individual teachers approaching issues in their own way so that children get to see a range of different thought processes (and allowing teachers to just be themselves, rather than treating them as machines, teaching in an “approved” manner.)
A lot of effort also goes in to comparing the progress of children. But of course, these tests measure just a very small part of what education is supposed to be about; there is a very real danger that such procedures actually distort the educational process by exaggerating the (mostly academic) elements of education that are easiest to measure. Teachers can generally assess the overall progress of a child reasonably accurately and we should maybe prefer such assessments to complex external testing (as much as possible; I am not suggesting getting rid of GCSE / A levels)
13: I think you’ve misunderstood the point I was making. I was agreeing with your point 11 that we need wider perspectives and more diversity amongst governors. One of the barriers to that is the raft of ever expanding rules and duties placed on governors under Labour that turns the role from one where your primary concern is for the things you mention to endless commmittee meetings and box-ticking exercises for the government.
http://andymayer.blogspot.com/2007/05/ofstedocracy.html
15 – Am shocked I agree with you.
Yes, there do seem to be plenty of committees. I’m already on three of them and have only been a governor for two main meetings!
:@)