Effective Change in Schools

Una Connolly, Chris James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134717521
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on the Improving Schools Project in South Wales, Effective Change in Schools explores the process of successful and substantial educational change. The 32 schools which took part in the project all made significant changes in their practice in order to improve pupil achievement. This book describes and analyses the central features of that educational transformation process.
The authors include:
*information about the project, its aims and purposes
*fresh and innovative perspective on the change process in schools and the leadership and management of change
*examination of the key aspects of school effectiveness and improvement
*description of the strategies adopted by the schools to initiate change and an outline of the issues that the schools faced as they attempted to move forward
*consideration of the role of leadership in educational transformation and the essence of the successful leader.
This is an invaluable guide to anyone endeavouring to bring about change in their own school or who has an interest in educational management and leadership.

1 Introduction

Some background and context

In 1976 the Prime Minister of the time, James Callaghan, made a now famous speech in which he questioned the value for money of the British education system. He set in motion what was called 'The Great Debate' in which the contribution of the education system to national well-being was opened up to scrutiny. Callaghan initiated an era of accountability for education, and since that time Britain has demanded more from its schools. Although this increased accountability has been lived out in a number of ways and taken on a number of different guises in the last twenty-five years, there is no doubt that it has placed an imperative on schools continually to change in order to improve. As a result, change management has become almost axiomatic in the leadership and management of educational organisations. The management of educational change is, in essence, what this book is about.

In the contemporary setting, the management of educational institutions exposes schools to the three sharp prongs of the so-called 'new public management'. The first of these is the establishment of a quasi-market in education which exposes schools to 'market type mechanisms'. In this increasingly diverse market, parental choice (or perhaps more appropriately, parental preference), open enrolment, age-weighted pupil funding, and a mixture of different kinds of schools in any locality are all intended to engender a climate of competition. In this competitive arena, there is a pressure on schools to be effective and to improve their effectiveness so that they maintain their competitive advantage.

The second element of new public management for schools is the decentralisation of power and control, and the creation of institutional autonomy where individual schools are encouraged and enabled to function on their own and manage their own budgets. Within this institutional and financial autonomy, and the freedom it creates – albeit a freedom constrained by some fairly tight central controls and parameters – schools are expected to optimise the use of their own resources, to flourish and to improve.

The third element of the new public management for schools is performance management, where the work of schools is monitored and made public. This scrutiny of performance is achieved through inspection by central government agencies, for example OFSTED in England and ESTYN in Wales, and the publication of output measures of effectiveness in 'league tables' of the pupils' examination results. These purport to give a measure of schools' performance, albeit a very simple and somewhat unsophisticated one, in the context of a standardised 'national' curriculum.

The final piece of this policy jigsaw is about to be implemented at the time of writing. That is the performance management of teachers, where individual teachers are rewarded for their (and their pupils') performance.

It has to be said that in the early days of this era of educational accountability, some schools needed to change. Over time, there is no doubt that some schools, for a variety of reasons, were not giving their pupils the kind of educational experience that many other (often neighbouring) schools were able to provide. Also some schools were under-performing and needed to change quite substantially and very quickly. There is also a very good case for arguing that the whole process of teaching and learning in schools had become hidden and impenetrable. By and large it had become known and understood only by the teaching profession itself. Opening up the work of schools to greater public scrutiny has forced many schools to improve the quality of many aspects of their activities. Also, schools have been exposed to other trends in the non-educational world, such as quality management and the growing importance of communicating with and responding to the needs of the customer.

In parallel with and closely related to the development of increased accountability, there has been a greater interest in the whole notion of improving schools. The so-called school improvement movement is a wide grouping which embraces a number of different strands. These include school effectiveness, the management of change, and educational leadership. More recently, the focus has shifted towards the processes of teaching and learning in schools, and the creation of internal conditions which enable continual change and improvement. One of the particular strengths of the school improvement movement is that it has provided a vehicle for exploring what schools do and identifying ways of improving practice. It is also an international movement, and although there are difficulties in transferring practices from one cultural context to another, there is no doubt that alternative perspectives can be helpful in considering the most appropriate ways of changing practice in order to improve pupil achievement.

Another pressure on schools to change lies in the complex interplay between the nature of society and the work of schools. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we appear to be living in times of unprecedented change, and schools must change rapidly in response. Of course, some may argue that the pace of change always appears to be rapid for any generation or in any time period. There is always a problem with judging the pace of change. The difficulty lies in the fact that the extent of change and its pace are largely subjectively and individually experienced. Reliable and valid objective indicators of the pace of social change are difficult to come by. However, there can be little doubt that many aspects of life are changing radically. These changes are driven in large measure by the new information and communication technologies which have integrated and increased data storage, retrieval and display capacity, miniaturisation, portability and ease of communication. But these new technologies are not the only factor. There have been changes in the structure of society, in the working lives of women and in the nature of work generally. The globalisation of economies is also changing the nature of the business and commercial world. And all of these changes, are taking place in the wider context of the impact of human activity on the environment. All these changes and the pace of change, have placed an imperative on schools to change what they do and how they do it.

Perhaps unfortunately for schools, the requirement to undertake educational change has coincided with a realisation of the complexity and hence the problematic nature of educational change. Change in schools is mostly difficult and complicated. It is not often easy and simple. There is a good case for arguing that the leadership and management of change in schools require a sophisticated approach, considerable skill and, in many cases, resolute determination. None the less, successful change does take place all the time in schools, and many schools have the capacity to change to improve the educational achievements and subsequent life chances of their pupils. It was to explore these successful change processes in schools, to analyse the factors that influence them, and to disseminate to a wider audience some of these lessons of change, that the research that underpins the substance of this book was started.

The Improving Schools Project was undertaken in South Wales in the area formerly known as Mid Glamorgan, which now comprises the local education authorities of Bridgend, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda-Cynon-Taff. These are the neighbouring authorities of the University of Glamorgan where the project was based. The project was supported financially and also in purpose and practice by the university, the local authorities and ESIS, the Education Support and Inspection Service. ESIS is the former Mid Glamorgan Advisory Service, which was retained intact after local government reorganisation in March 1996. Essential and important partners in the project were of course the thirty-two schools involved. They were invited to join the project on the basis that they had changed their practices in order to bring about improved pupil achievement, or were attempting to do so.

The contents of the book

In this book we have attempted to explore the process of successful and substantial educational change. It has become clear to us that much of the educational process, and therefore the process of changing it, is not always understandable or explainable in a rational way. Although there may be a surface rationality to it all, there are often very powerful non-rational, emotional forces at work. It is from that perspective that we have attempted to make sense of, and to theorise about, the educational change process.

Following this introductory chapter, the second chapter gives some additional information about the project, and in particular its aims and purposes. Chapter 2 also gives some outline information on the schools that participated in the project and the areas in which they are situated. It outlines the preliminary findings of the first part of the project's work, which explored the ways in which the schools considered that they had changed. This data collection was for us an important first stage in making contact with the schools and establishing working relationships with them. As we explain in the chapter, this preliminary exploration also gave us a basis on which to choose schools for further in-depth study. The ways in which the schools considered that they had changed ranged from process measures to output indicators of improved pupil achievement.

Chapter 3 gives a brief overview of organisational change and in particular the nature of change in educational organisations. The literature on change is complex and inter-connected, and this brief overview is structured in the following way. The first section outlines why change in educational institutions is so complex. The next section continues this theme and considers some aspects of the management of change in general terms. There are then two sections, the first of which explores some frameworks and guidelines for managing organisational change, while the second describes some models for understanding change. Because leadership and change are so inextricably linked there is next a section that explores different aspects of leadership. A final section to the chapter briefly explores the key themes in school effectiveness and improvement.

One of the particular challenges of exploring change is to create a framework within which to make sense of all the various events, happenings, responses, actions and reactions to the change process. We have deliberately chosen to view the findings from the point of view of what we are calling 'institutional transformation'. We outline this institutional transformation perspective in Chapter 4. There are two main themes in this perspective which, importantly, are linked. The first theme essentially embraces the non-rational emotional responses of individuals and institutions. This psychodynamic perspective therefore includes the influence of the unconscious, the defences of individuals and institutions against emotional pain, and the ways in which groups behave (group relations). The second major theme is open systems theory, which provides a useful way of thinking about individuals and groups and their roles in institutions. These two perspectives link together in the particular challenge that taking up and enacting a role has for individuals and institutions. (In this book, we argue that it is the particular role of leadership to enable individuals and institutions to take up and enact their roles.) The combination of these two perspectives is crucial, since the open systems theory perspective helps the understanding and resolution of the issues revealed by the psychodynamic perspective.

In order to make overall sense of the changes that the schools have undergone, we have modelled the changes into three phases: a pre-acceleration phase, an acceleration phase and a post-acceleration phase. Chapter 5 describes the characteristics of the schools in the pre-acceleration phase and outlines some of the challenges that the schools faced as they started their school improvement journeys. Many of these will have a familiar ring to them, and taken together they are a formidable list. Thankfully, none of the schools suffered from all of the problems (although, of course, many of the difficulties were linked and therefore came together), and importantly all of the schools in the project were overcoming the problems, or had overcome the problems and moved on.

Chapter 6 describes the strategies adopted by the schools to initiate change, and outlines some of the issues that the schools faced as they attempted to move forward. Chapter 7 describes the nature of the schools and the leadership of the schools as changes were implemented. We have called this stage the acceleration phase because of the climate created within the schools as changes, which were often multifarious in nature and widespread in scope, were initiated. Chapter 8 is the last in this group, and describes the change processes in the schools. Schools successfully entering this post-acceleration stage appear to take on a more strategic approach to the change process, where their actions are more long-term, considered and deliberate. This chapter, which has as its main title 'Going strategic', describes some of the main themes in the management and organisation of the schools in this stage of their improvement journey.

A dominant theme in the change literature and in the literature on good schools is that of leadership. Generally, the literature on leadership implicitly accepts that leadership is an essential requirement for a fully functioning institution (although it has to be said that there is a countervailing view). The importance of leadership emerged in this study too, and for that reason we have chosen to devote Chapter 9 to a consideration of leadership. The chapter first discusses the preliminary ideas about leadership that emerged from the study. The following part seeks to analyse these further into a set of leadership principles that outline the essence of leadership as it has emerged for us in the literature and in the findings of the research. The principles, with the helpful acronym of 'LEADER', provide a framework for consideration of the different aspects of leadership. The key principles of ensuring Effectiveness, optimising Reflectivity and optimising Adaptability also have a useful acronym in this era of leadership in which we are apparently living, especially in the world of education.

In the final chapter, Chapter 10, we briefly re-examine the institutional transformation perspective and consider the implications for its use in understanding educational institutions and for supporting the effective management of change in schools. We also set out some important characteristics of leadership, which perhaps go further than the list of the attributes of leaders and leadership that we identified in the project in Chapter 9, and which add to the leadership principles. These aspects include the central role of emotion in organising; the special nature of the leadership role in organisations; the leadership role in the containment of individual and institutional anxiety; and leadership as organisational integration. It also includes an exploration of what may underpin the vision apparently possessed by so many of the leaders of educational change in our study, and the determination with which we found they pursued their leadership task. The text section of the book ends with an appendix that gives details of the work of the project in promoting collaboration.

In this book, we have kept the number of cited texts and journal articles to a minimum. This action has been deliberate. Of course we want the book to be credible to an academic audience, and referencing those sources where assertions have their grounding and where the evidence for them is to be found is an important way of achieving that. However, we want most of all for the book to be useful and helpful to all those who work to change and improve schools. To that end – and on the advice of colleagues in schools – we have attempted to avoid the use of references except where we thought they were particularly important, and where they refer to a particular idea, theory or finding. To explain the origins of the ideas in this book and to suggest useful further reading, there is an annotated bibliography at the end of the text. This bibliography lists and outlines the content of a number of texts which have influenced our thinking, and which readers of this book will almost certainly find useful.

2 The Improving Schools Project

Introduction

The findings on which this book is based resulted from a research project located in South Wales at the University of Glamorgan. The project, which had the title of the Improving Schools Project, began in October 1996 and ended (its first phase at least) in September 1998. In that time the project researched the changes that thirty-two local schools had implemented to improve pupil achievement. This chapter describes the work of the project.

The chapter begins by describing the overall context of the project, outlining the project's aims and describing those schools, authorities and other institutions that contributed to the work. The section that follows describes the methodology, research design, and the data collection and analysis methods. The work was broadly in two phases. The first stage, which was largely exploratory, is described in this chapter and the findings outlined. The research process of the second more substantial phase is then described. The findings of this second phase are detailed in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8. This chapter ends with an outline of the dissemination work of the project.

The project

The Improving Schools Project was launched in October 1996 following an initial planning and preparation phase which began during the late spring of 1996. The project was a collaboration between the University of Glamorgan, the education authorities of Bridgend, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda-Cynon-Taff, and ESIS, the Education, Support and Inspection Service for the four authorities. The Welsh Secondary Schools Association (WSSA) gave advice which was valuable in setting up and subsequently supporting the project. The early planning established the project's overall aims, which were to research the changes that had been implemented in local schools in order to improve the educational achievement of pupils, and to contribute to the development and dissemination of good practice.

Una Connolly, the project Research Fellow, carried out the bulk of the data collection and analysis, assisted in the second stage by Jean Williams and Nesta James. Professor Chris James was responsible for the overall direction of the project's research work. The project's work was guided and supported by an advisory committee which comprised representatives of the university, the local education authorities, the WSSA, and three former members of the Office of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Improving Schools Project
• 3 Educational change
• 4 The institutional transformation perspective
• 5 The challenge: the schools in the pre-acceleration stage
• 6 Initiating change: moving into the acceleration stage
• 7 Living with change: the acceleration stage
• 8 Going strategic: the post-acceleration stage
• 9 The leadership of educational transformation
• 10 Some final considerations
• Appendix: the work undertaken by the project to enhance collaboration
• Annotated bibliography
• References
• Index