Improving the Quality of Education for All

A Handbook of Staff Development Activities

David Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138153721
• eBook ISBN: 9781134117130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The "Improving the Quality of Education for All" (IQEA) school improvement project has, over the last ten years, reduced and evaluated a model of development that strengthens the school's ability to provide high quality education for all its pupils by building on existing good practice. The schools within the IQEA network have also provided the setting for a long-term investigation into the processes of school change and the enhancement of student achievement.

This book provides many practical staff development activities and gives examples of specific changes which have taken place in IQEA schools, relating both to the progress of students and the professional development of their teachers. These training activities and examples demonstrate that improving the quality of education has many facets, not all of which can be measured and translated into league tables.

CHAPTER 1

Improving the Quality of Education for All

As we work with schools within the framework of a national reform agenda we are committed to an approach to educational change that focuses on student achievement and the schools’ ability to cope with change. We refer to this particular approach as school improvement. We regard school improvement as a distinct approach to educational change that enhances student outcomes as well as strengthening the school’s capacity for managing improvement initiatives. In this sense school improvement is about raising student achievement through focusing on the teaching-learning process and those conditions which support it.

The Improving the Quality of Education for All (IQEA) school improvement programme works from an assumption that schools are most likely to strengthen their ability to provide enhanced outcomes for all pupils when they adopt ways of working that are consistent both with their own aspirations as a school community and the current reform agenda. Indeed, to an extent, the schools we are working with are using the impetus of external reform for internal purpose as they navigate the systemic changes of recent years.

At the outset of IQEA, we attempted to outline our own vision of school improvement by articulating a set of principles that provided us with a philosophical and practical starting point. These principles were offered to schools as the basis for collaboration in the IQEA programme. In short, we were inviting the schools to identify and to work on their own projects and priorities, but to do so in a way which embodied a set of ‘core’ values about school improvement. These principles represent the expectations we have of the way IQEA schools pursue school improvement. They serve as an aide-mémoire to the schools and to ourselves.

The five principles of IQEA are:

• School improvement is a process that focuses on enhancing the quality of students’ learning.

• The vision of the school should be one that embraces all members of the school community as both learners and contributors.

• The school will see in external pressures for change important opportunities to secure its internal priorities.

• The school will seek to develop structures and create conditions which encourage collaboration and lead to the empowerment of individuals and groups.

• The school will seek to promote the view that enquiry, and the monitoring and evaluation of quality, is a responsibility which all members of staff share.

Though we feel that the operation of these principles can create synergy around change (together they are greater than the sum of their parts), they characterise an overall approach rather than prescribe a course of action. The intention is that they should inform the thinking and actions of teachers during school improvement efforts, and provide a touchstone for the strategies they devise and the behaviours they adopt.

We underpin our school improvement work with a contract between the partners in the programme – the school and its teachers, and in some cases, the LEA or sponsoring agency, and ourselves. The contract defines the parameters of the project, and the obligations those involved owe to each other. It is intended to clarify expectations and ensure the conditions necessary for success. In particular, the contract emphasises that all staff be consulted, that a school improvement group or ‘cadre’ is identified to carry the work forward, that a ‘critical mass’ of teachers are actively involved in development work, and that sufficient time is made available for appropriate classroom and staff development activities.

The detail of the contract expresses what we take to be the minimum conditions necessary for a successful partnership with the school:

• The decision to participate in the programme is made as a result of consultation amongst all staff in the school.

• Each school designates a minimum of four members of staff as programme coordinators (one of whom is the headteacher) who attend training and the support meetings (this group is often called the ‘IQEA cadre’).

• The whole school will allocate substantial staff development time to activities related to the programme.

• At least half of the staff (representing a cross-section of colleagues) will take part in specified staff development activities in their own classrooms. Each participating teacher will be regularly ‘released’ from teaching to participate in these classroom-based aspects of the programme.

• Each school will participate in the evaluation of the programme and share findings with other participants in the programme.

From the beginning of IQEA we were determined that we would attempt to affect all ‘levels’ of the school. A major purpose of the contract is to ensure that this happens. One of the things that we have learned from research and previous work is that change will not be successful unless it impacts all levels of the school organisation. Specifically our focus is on the three levels outlined in Figure 1.1, and the ways in which these levels interrelate. The school level is to do with overall management and the establishment of policies, particularly with respect to how resources and strategies for staff development can be mobilised to support school improvement efforts. At the level of working groups the concern is with the details of and arrangements for supporting improvement activities. Finally, at the individual teacher level the focus is on developing classroom practice.

Figure 1.1 Integrating the levels

Our feeling is that in effective schools these three levels of activity are mutually supportive. Consequently a specific aim of the IQEA programme has to be to devise and establish positive conditions at each level and to coordinate support across these levels. It is in this connection that we require the establishment of a school improvement group in each school whose task includes the integration of activities across the various levels. We often refer to these colleagues as the cadre group. They are responsible for the day-to-day running of the project in their own schools and for creating links between the principles and ideas of the IQEA approach and practical action. In many schools members of the cadre establish an extended cadre group which serves to extend involvement in the programme in a more formal way within the school.

Typically, the cadre group is a cross-hierarchical team which could be as small as three or four to six in comparatively small schools, to between six and ten in large schools. Though one of these is likely to be the head-teacher, it is important to establish groups that are genuinely representative of the range of perspectives and ideas available in the school – it should, ideally, then, be cross-hierarchical, cross-institutional, have a mix of ages, experience, gender, length of time at the school, and so on. Cadre group members should also not come together in any already existing group within the school, such as the senior management team or a heads of department group, so that the problem of pooled rationalisations is minimised. The cadre group is responsible for identifying the programme focus (through a consensus-building process involving the rest of the staff), and for managing efforts on a day-to-day basis within the school. External consultancy support and facilitation support them through a core training programme, through networking with cadre groups from other schools, and through other agencies such as a university or the LEA.

In organisational terms, the reason a cadre group is required is because of the tensions in schools caused by the conflicting demands of maintenance and development (Hopkins 2001: Chapter 7). One of the underpinning characteristics of authentic school improvement is the separation of maintenance activities from development work. Structurally, the formal roles and responsibilities, the committee structures and the decision-making processes of schools have evolved in relation to structural hierarchies designed to support efficiency, stability and functional effectiveness. Put another way, staff are appointed to roles which involve the management of structural units that tend to incorporate a standard set of functions, which often provide perpetual membership of committee structures, all of which relate predominantly to management and maintenance aspects of the school. Schools then tend to overburden this system by asking it also to take on development roles for which it was never designed. As an aside, the same structures create vertical communication systems, but virtually prevent lateral communication or lateral learning. Sadly, different organisational units within a school rarely exchange practices or learn from one another: in some schools they rarely even talk to one another!

The cadre or school improvement group is essentially a temporary membership system focused specifically upon enquiry and development. This temporary membership system brings together teachers (and support staff) from a variety of departments within the school, with a range of ages or experience and from a cross-section of roles to work together in a status-free collaborative learning context. Jackson (2000) developed the model in Figure 1.2 that illustrates this separate (yet integrated) structural construct. One teacher has described it as the educational equivalent of a research and development group, and the traditional school as analogous to a company in which everyone works on the production line, without any research and development function. The result is stagnation, and that is how schools have been. The establishment of a school improvement group creates the research and development capacity, whilst retaining the existing structures required also for organisational stability and efficiency. It also unlocks staff potential often stifled within formal structures, and opens up new collaborations.

This description of cadre group functioning, although based both on our original conceptualisation of the role and the experience in a number of schools, is in many ways ideotypical. Despite best efforts, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Improving the Quality of Education For All
• Chapter 2 A Framework for School Improvement
• Chapter 3 Powerful Learning and Powerful Teaching
• Chapter 4 Conditions for School Development
• Chapter 5 Conditions for Classroom Development
• Chapter 6 The Three Phases of School Improvement
• Chapter 7 The School Improvement Cycle
• Chapter 8 Mapping the Process of Change in Schools
• Coda The Journey of School Improvement
• Appendix 1 Staff Development and Peer Coaching
• Appendix 2 Development Planning
• Appendix 3 IQEA Presentation
• Appendix 4 Cooperative Group Work
• Appendix 5 The Conditions of School Survey
• Appendix 6 Classroom Conditions
• Appendix 7 Student Conditions
• Appendix 8 Gathering Data on Teaching and Learning
• References
• Index