Don Ledingham’s Learning Log

Over the last few weeks I’ve been continuing to exploring the concept of school based management.

Some authorities in Scotland have implemented the concept of Learning Communities based around the secondary school  and the local primary schools, Glasgow runs New Learning Communities, Falkirk has Integrated learning communities and South Lanarkshire has Learning Communities.

Each of these schemes has very positive features, most notably in relation to the integration of other services to support vulnerable children and to co-ordinate developments across local schools.

However, there would appear to be scope to develop these schemes by exploring further devolution of budgetary control and employment of staff within the community of schools.

I haven’t been able to find many international examples of such a development aside from on in Madagascar which might suggest that such a idea is not that practical but in the interests promoting a dialectic of possible worlds I thought I might take the Learning Community concept and extend it to community-based management of schools.

Would it be possible for a local authority to establish a concordat with a group of local primary schools and their associated secondary school and devolve all budgets to a Learning Community Board of Management? 

A Head Teacher from the schools would take on the position of Chief Operating Officer.  The Board of Management would have representatives from the parents, staff, local community, elected members, health service, police, community learning and social services.

The biggest problem I see with this idea is the fear from some schools that they get subsumed within a larger community and lose their identity.  Yet the potential for every member of staff being employed by the Learning Community and the possibility of using the collective resources in much more coherent manner than at present might allow real progresss to made on promoting education as a true progression from 3-18 and the associated ownership of the school and the wider educational agenda by the local community.

This morning I met with colleagues from our Cultural Services Department to discuss how we might promote the East Lothian Council’s commitment to:

“Embed Scottish history, culture and heritage throughout school life and make every effort to support Scotland’s languages - both Gaelic and Scots.”

The associated outcome that schools have to work towards is:

“All children and young people will be able to demonstrate an appropriate knowledge of Scottish culture, history and heritage at key stages in their school careers.”

Obviously such an outcome still triggers further questions about what might constitute “appropriate knowledge” and what do we mean by “key stages” but over the next year we will be fleshing this out with the help of staff in schools.

Nevertheless, it does provide a stimulus for schools to begin to try to explore these areas for themselves.

Our discussion this morning focused upon the huge amount of work already going on in schools, which would link, to Scottish culture, history and heritage. The challenge for us is to find a way of tying this together into a coherent set of experiences that will fulfil our desire to give children a robust knowledge of their cultural heritage - without adding yet another layer of the curriculum to schools at a time when we are trying to declutter.

It was during this discussion that I recalled something that one of our quality Improvement Officers had brought back from a study visit to Oslo last year. On her return Valerie Irving had described a wide range of interesting elements of what’s going on in Norwegian education but the item which caught everyone’s imagination was the concept of the “Cultural Rucksack”. This metaphorical construct is used to ensure that children are acquainted with Norwegian Art and Culture and as they go through the education system they collect these experiences and place them in their rucksack.

We wondered this morning of we could establish a Scottish Cultural, History and Heritage “Rucksack” where young people would be entitled to have a number of personal experiences throughout their school career which provided them with a framework upon which they can develop their understanding of their country.

So what might go into such a rucksack? Here are some ideas for starters:

I have visited a Scottish Castle.
I can dance five Scottish dances.
I have attended a Burns Supper.
I can speak some Gaelic.
I have visited a Pictish fort.
I can recite a Scottish poem from memory.
I can cook oatcakes.
I can describe a famous Scottish battle.
I have a favourite Scottish historical character and can tell you all about them.
I can tell you about a former Scottish industry and why it has declined.

These are just a few examples but you can begin to how see we could establish a wider range of learning experiences - in an inter-disciplinary manner - which could help promote a true awareness and appreciation  of their country’s culture, history and heritage. The exciting thing about this approach is that it allows schools to make best use of their local  environment.

Would it work?

Every educational leader, regardless of position, has to wrestle with the powerful temptation to intervene or to meddle in the business of those whom they manage. The logic is fairly simple - “I’m being paid to manage and to be accountable for the work of others - so it’s reasonable that I take action in order to ensure that the desired outcome is achieved.” Maybe it’s something to do with the Scottish work ethic that we feel there’s a need, in the inimitable words of Billy Connolly, to “dae sumthin”.

It’s perhaps one of the most addictive elements of management - “I can fix this” - as the manager learns to solve the problem through direct action. Unfortunately the hidden cost of such behaviour is that it helps to create a dependency culture as everyone comes to know that any problem belongs to the manager - and that the manager will “sort it”.

The ironic consequence of such a relationship is that it leads to dissatisfaction from both sides, i.e. the manager complains that people don’t accept the responsibility which goes with being a professional; and the managed complain that the manager is always interfering with solutions, policies and structures which run directly counter to their ability to do their job.

Yet to challenge such orthodoxy is much more difficult than one might imagine. The pressure to conform to the traditional role of the manager is almost overwhelming. Not to take action, is to be seen to be indecisive, lazy, cowardly, unimaginative or simply not being up to the job. In a similar vein the manager’s own boss has expectations about effective management behaviour and in many cases is expecting the manager to come up with a plan of action that is, most probably proactive, innovative and definitive. It’s this latter adjective which is the most telling in terms of the relationship between the manager and the managed. The definition of the word “definitive” in this sense is “final and unable to be questioned or altered”. In a sense this form of manager’s plan is the Holy Grail, that is something that can be passed on to others and is implemented without question.

Of course, things are never as simple as that for as we know others must carry out the manager’s plan and there exists “many a slip twixt lip and cup”, especially if the “managed” do not fully subscribe to the manager’s solution. It’s into this educational Middle-earth that the manager’s initiatives and centralised plans are launched only to be subverted, modified or ignored. And so it goes on with managers having to conform to their role by taking action, to which they are probably addicted anyway, and the managed expecting the action, criticising if no action is taken, but being free to criticise the action as they have played no part in it’s development.

So how might we help managers escape from the tyranny of the need to always “dae sumthin” in the face of a perceived problem? Perhaps a starting point might be for local authorities to shift from being action focused, i.e. we will implement, act, do; to becoming outcome focused and supporting and enabling the schools to work out the most appropriate action for themselves.  The reality is that what works well in one school is not necessarily the best solution in another school. Yet the pressure to work out the universal solution and to implement it across an entire council is difficult to resist – particularly for those of us who have been addicted to taking action throughout our careers. That’s not to say that local authorities should never seek to implement an action across all schools but at the very least there should be a loop where we ask ourselves if our preferred course of action empowers or disempowers our colleagues in schools.

Nevertheless, Scottish education does appear to be thirled to the idea of “daen things”.  It would be a brave person who wouldn’t back a highly technical, carefully managed and comprehensive plan to implement a course of action across every school in an authority, against a strategy which placed the decision about what type of action to take in the hands of the individual school.

Having to make difficult decisions is a key part of my job. Some of these decisions can often be unpopular - but I suppose that’s what I get paid for.

Every decision is usually associated with a variety of options which will usually have a number of distinct features, namely:

1. Consequences - each option will have positive and negative consequences directly associated with that course of action;
2. Emotional attachment - there are usually people who will have an positive emotional response to one of the options and a negative emotional response to another.
3. Evidence - most options will have associated evidence which can be used to either support or counter their effectiveness
4. Familiarity - options which have proved successful in the past.

My own decision making process tries to take account of the above but there is one other question which I ask myself whenever I have to make a decision: How does this choice of option relate to other features of our practice?

In this regard I was deeply influenced in the mid 90’s by systems thinking as described by Peter Senge which transformed my personal practice.

Prior to that time I tended to make decisions based on a rough amalgam of the four factors mentioned earlier but where I looked at individual decisions as discrete entities. The lesson I learned from Senge was to see “things” as being part of a system, or part of a whole and that no one decision is ever disconnected from another - particularly if you are trying to achieve an overall goal.

Lastly, there needs to be a moral/ethical filter associated with the decision making process and reference to my own personal integrity and honesty.

However, all other things being equal it’s the connectedness to other factors and their relationship to the overall goal which will have decisive effect on which option will be selected.

I met this morning with Chris Mullender, a games developer from Dunbar,  Ollie Bray, Graham Sales (a student of gaming technology at Abertay University) and David Gilmour to explore how we might make better use of gaming technology within the East Lothian education system.

I was intrigued to find out that schools would be much better making use of gaming technology - both hardware and software - than the expensive education specific alternative. Chris made a very powerful point that gaming technology has been tested to the nth degree and is designed to meet the needs of children in a manner which is beyond the smaller educational bespoke companies. We should be seeking to make use of this knowledge - particularly in times of financial pressure.

We explored two separate dimensions in our conversation:

1. Using gaming technology as a learning tool; and
2. Engaging students in the development of gaming software.

Musselburgh Grammar School  and some of  our primaries are doing some great things in relation to the first theme but very little is being done in the relation to the second. We wondered if there might be some potential to organise a competition for primary pupils in the first instance to receive some specific tuition in games development before they tried to create their own games and then submit them for judging by their peers.  Each team would have a combination of skills such as programmers, artists, producers, writers, etc - a real collective approach.  We wondered of there was a potential sponsor out there who would like to help us begin to stimulate an East Lothian gaming culture which might in the longer term have economic spin-offs for the county. 

Apparently many of the games developers which have given Dundee such an enviable reputation in this field initally developed their skills and interest at a school computer club.

Last observation - and new one on me - one of the big challenges facing the gaming industry is to link up developers with artists.  We have fantastic artists in our schools - why couldn’t we link up senior student programmers and artists in our schools and create real companies in our secondary schools?

I recently bumped into a former colleague and briefly chatted about “A Curriculum for Excellence”.  My friend has responsibility for developing learning and teaching at his school and was telling me that the school are going to give every pupil comprehensive course support materials for each of their certificated subjects - once the course has been completed.  The teachers didn’t want to put it out before they taught the course as they wanted to “remain in control”.

For me it was a timely reminder about how much work is still to be done in terms of changing our approach to learning.

If we are going to change the way in which we work then perhaps we need to destabilise the status quo thereby freeing teachers to adopt different roles and engage learners in learning as opposed to absorbing information.

Keeping this in mind I wonder if David Eaglesham, the general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association, perhaps provides the catalyst when he said he doubted whether ACfE  could live up to its aims without financial input.

“It is almost inevitable to say it is the worst-resourced initiative we have ever had, because there is nothing there in the way of resources,” he said.
“It is not that people don’t want to do it, but if they don’t know what they are doing or have the resources to implement it, it could be disastrous.”

I agree that there is a need to provide resources but I wouldn’t provide them in the form that they have come in the past.  My alternative approach would be to create a virtual learning environment for every certificated course provided by the SQA.  This course could be accessed by students at a place and time of their choosing - I’d like to think GLOW could play an important role here.

I’ve been speaking to a number of my son’s friends who have just finished school and without exception they all said they would have welcomed the chance to access their entire course on-line.  That’s not to say that they didn’t want a teacher but that they wanted the teacher to work in a different way.

So what would be the outcome of such a step - surely it will replace one form of spoon-feeding with another? Well not according to my son’s friends who are now at university - the teacher would take on much more of a tutor’s role where they have use their tutor to expand and deepen their knowledge.  In so many ways this ties in with what Jerome Bruner was talking about yesterday when he said that educational systems were “too easily routinised” and that there were too few opportunities for students “share hypotheses”, ”reflect upon alternatives ” or “reflect upon controversy”.

Bruner wants teachers to seek out “inter-subjectivity” (I think I prefer this term to inter-disciplinary) by contextualising their subject within the wider world - but how often do teachers manage to do this in the pressure to get through the content of a course.

Put it this way - there appears to be an appetite amongst young people for such a change.

In the spirit of provoking a dialectic of possible worlds I came across an interesting model of football club ownership this weekend when I read about Ebbsfleet  United Football Club:

Fans’ community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United.

The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have each paid £35 to provide a £700,000 takeover pot and they will all own an equal share in the club.

In a landmark for English football, members will vote on player selection, transfers and all major decisions. BBC November 2007

 It’s interesting to reflect upon David Sullivan’s reservations about the scheme:

 ”My heart says it’s marvellous that fans can own a club and vote on any decision of consequence, but in reality it won’t work.

 Contrast that with the fact the team recently won the FA Trophy Final and appear to be going from strength to strength.

And my point? - would it work for schools???

I felt enormously privileged today to be able to attend the Tapestry Conference in Glasgow to hear Jerome Bruner give a spellbinding performance.

For a man born in 1915 (93 years ago) he displayed humour, warmth and humility which would bely most men half his age - quite aside from his iconic intellect. In what was a wide ranging personal perspective on “A Curriculum for Excellence” he flitted through the decades, continents and historical fugures which whom he has engaged.

The strand to which he kept returning throughout his 50 minutes was the need for teachers to engage children in real thought by encouraging them to challenge and ask the tough questions - not just those which are part of the agreed syllabus.

He urged us to reflect upon controversy through a dialectic:

Dialectic (Greek) is controversy: the exchange of arguments and counter-arguments respectively advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses). The outcome of the exercise might not simply be the refutation of one of the relevant points of view, but a synthesis or combination of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue.

In contrast to Piaget, Bruner has always fought shy of the stages of development and believes that children of any age can participate in such dialogue to make meaning of their world.

However, it was his phrase “The dialectic of the possible worlds” which struck such a chord with me.  I suppose in my own small way I am trying through this Learning Log to explore opposite worlds.  Through the power of the web it can become a dialectic which leads - at the very least - to a transformation in the direction of my own dialogue.

Given my last post about the Dark Forces - I think it’s vitally important that we encourage and support teachers to explore opposite worlds in terms of their own practice and the nature of the curriculum and then participate in a professional dialogue about these possibilities. Without such a dialogue we are trapped by dependency culture created by centralised teaching programmes of study and curricular materials.

The challenge of providing a high quality education service at a time when expenditure is growing faster than the available budget means that change, in some form, must take place.

There is a tendency in education to always reflect upon such an issue from the moral high-ground and simply state that more money must be forthcoming! As the person who is charged with responsibility for a budget of nearly £85 million to deliver education and children’s services for 15,000 children in East Lothian it’s a topic which is constantly at the forefront of my mind.

One of the key factors in managing such a budget is to ensure that everything is absolutely transparent. In East Lothian we have spent a huge amount of time and effort in “opening up” our books - there are no black holes, no smoke or mirrors, no hidden funds. What you see is what we get. When such information is treated as confidential it only goes to feed the suspicion that some groups are being treated more favourably than others.  When everyone can see the entire “pot” it becomes very clear that an increase in one area in education must be subsidised from another area within education.

It was with this in mind that we had our first meeting of a Strategic Finance Group for Education. The group has union representatives from  the EIS, HAS, AHDS, Unison, SSSTA; three parent representatives from East Lothian Parents’ Councils; three senior elected members; three members of the Education Department management team (including me); and a Finance Department Representative. I had hoped to get a couple of pupil representatives - but perhaps next time.

The group spent all morning reviewing the available budget for the coming two years (2009-2010/2010-2011); identifying and discussing possible areas where savings could be made; and planning for our next meeting.  The traditional approach to this process is for management to sit in a darkened room - consider the options, present these options to the administration and then implement them across the authority. This alternative approach turns this on its head by involving the stakeholders at the outset of the process and ensuring that there are no sacred cows such as central services which cannot be offered up for savings. The meeting was exceptionally enlightening as we approached each suggestion with true professionalism and objectivity. As stated earlier we have to make savings if we are to work within our available budget - the challenge is where these savings might be made. By involving those who are closest to the “chalk-face” we begin to build up a picture of how we might work together to ensure that any negative impact upon children is minimised.

The ideas which flowed from the meeting will be followed up over the next three months by firstly identifying the amount of money that can be saved by each option and an associated impact assessment for each option.  When we reconvene after the summer we will have produced a list with quantitative and qualitative impacts - this list will then be further considered by the group to identify preferences and recommendations which can then be considered by the administration. The bottom-line -as I reinforced yesterday - is that nothing is off the table in terms of making savings.

One of the key points to emerge was that the process is not as simple as it might seem.  Although some areas seem ripe for savings the knock-on impact they have beyond the immediately obvious makes it all the more important that the stakeholders present on the group have an opportunity to have their say.

I’m attending the Association of Directors of Social Work conference in Crieff.

One the key themes emerging is that of personalisation of services to users. The social work field is light years ahead of education in terms of using a mixed economy system for delivering services, by commissioning others from the private and voluntary sector to provide a wide range of short and laong term requirements.

As I was listening to the presentations my mind turned to how education might develop such a model.  It’s been something I’ve been considering for a while but the cogs seemed to click together this morning.

The starting point for this is how do we really devolve services to our communities?

What follows is definitely “blue sky” and might be disconcerting for some but I’ve found that sometimes we need to start from the extreme perspective if we are to shift our ground.

The local authority would set the local outcomes which schools would have to work towards.

Each child would carry an educational value credit which directly related to money which would go to the school. All other current budgets would be rolled together and added to the educational value credit.

If a child left the school the money would follow them - even part way through a year.

The school would deliver - though a contract - the educational service for the local authority in that community.  If the outcomes were not achieved in a given period of time then another service deliverer would have to be employed.

The school would purchase services from the local authority - or other providers e.g. finance support, personnel, staff development and even quality improvement and assurance.

The authority would maintain responsibility for strategic estate planning, such a new school buildings but all other items would be devolved.

Schools in a community could combine their resources to purchase a service from elsewhere.

The pupil support function could also be delivered by a independent unit commissioned by the authority and underpinned by a contract arrangement.

Parents would have a significant role in the strategic direction and monitoring of the school and would be involved in the review of outcomes at the end of a contract period. 

I know one of the major concerns would be the fragmentation of the current system which is building very vibrant learning communities where schools work together. However, if we believe that partnership working improves outcomes - and outcomes will be used to judge the effectiveness of a school - then the leverage for it to happen will be even greater than it currently is. In a similar way the need to engage with other agencies would be built into the outcome agreement.