Restructuring

The Key to Effective School Management

Cyril Poster, Sonia Blandford, John Welton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415202183
• eBook ISBN: 9781134633531
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book provides an introduction to and analysis of the concept of the restructuring of schools. It includes detailed case-study material, which analyses the theory, considers the real people involved, and offers practical solutions to the problems of understanding and managing restructuring. Cyril Poster retired from teaching to become deputy director of the National Development Centre for School and Management Training at Bristol University, and then a freelance trainer and consultant. He was the previous series editor of the Routledge Educational Management series. Sonia Blandford is a member of the Oxford Centre for Education Management and Services, Oxford Brookes University. She is a consultant, author and lecturer. John Welton is currently Professor of Education, Oxford Brookes University. As a consultant, researcher and author he has worked extensively in Britain and overseas.

1
ORGANISATION AND MANAGEMENT IN POST-WAR SCHOOLS

Introduction

This chapter examines the major changes in educational practice from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. Without an understanding of the nature of organisation and management practices in schools in this period, it is unlikely that the impact of the school-improvement and school-effectiveness movements (see Chapter 2) and the concept of restructuring which they generated will be understood.

Grammar schools and early comprehensives

The grammar school attended by the author provided what would then have been regarded as a good education, albeit one concerned with stasis, not change. The curriculum led inexorably, year by year, to the examination goals essential to future academic careers. Those pupils deemed ‘not of examination calibre’ disappeared quietly at the end of a school year.

The role of parents was strictly circumscribed. They received and countersigned the termly report on which appeared our rank order in class, examination marks and brief phrases of the order of ‘satisfactory’ and, more frequently, ‘can do better’. Speech Day and the annual school play or orchestral concert were the sole occasions when parents set foot in the school, unless sent for by the headteachers.

The headteacher’s professional leadership of his or her staff was directed mainly to maintaining and increasing the prestige of the school. All else followed from that. The only explicit aspect of school administration appears to have been organisational and delegated to the senior master or mistress: absence cover, room changes, examination arrangements, the detention list, as announced at the end of morning assembly or by notes to the classroom. The published accounts of pre-war grammar and public schools, for example in the two symposia published in 1936 and entitled The Headmaster Speaks and The Headmistress Speaks—long out of print but cited by Baron (1968:1–2)—suggest that there is nothing exceptional in this account. The influence of Thomas Arnold of Rugby was pervasive. ‘His conception of headship was inherited and realised by devoted disciples from his staff’ (Rée 1968:112). His son Matthew was responsible, through his position in the newly established corps of HMI, for translating the ethos of the public school to the new state-subsidised grammar schools by the appointment of many headteachers cast in the Arnold mould.

Almost all headteachers and senior staff of the 350 or so comprehensive schools that had opened in the two decades to 1965 (Benn and Simon 1972:336) had been educated in grammar schools and would have had their entire teaching experience in grammar schools. The route to seniority from those with comprehensive experience was, before the rapid expansion that followed Circular 10/65 (DES 1965), understandably rare.

Few colleges and university departments as yet played any part in preparing their education students for the experience of working in comprehensive schools. In 1965 the National Union of Students surveyed the three-year secondary course in colleges of education and discovered that fewer than one-third of final-year students had even visited a comprehensive school, let alone been prepared for the possibility of teaching in one.

College and university lecturers rarely had first-hand knowledge of comprehensive schools. Some were, by political conviction, advocates of comprehensive education; others were, almost certainly, indifferent to and unaware of the demands that this educational and social revolution was already beginning to make; and there were a few highly vocal critics. For example, Cox and Dyson (1969) were beginning what was to be a lengthy and often vituperative rearguard action against what they saw as egalitarianism, social engineering and the destruction of a tried and tested educational system.

Organisation in the early comprehensives

The cornerstone of social organisation in the first two decades of comprehensive schooling was undoubtedly the ‘house’ system, taken over from the grammar schools, which in their turn had adopted it from the public schools. For the latter the houses were, of course, the places of residence of boarders, a subset of the school, concerning themselves with all that lay outside the academic role of the institution, and replicating in their strata of staff, house captain and prefects, and house members the pyramidal structure of the school itself. The responsibilities of the housemaster during term, as both carer and disciplinarian, were of paramount importance.

The adoption of the house system by the grammar school sought to achieve parity with the public school, but this was largely symbolic. Heads of house, house captains and house prefects had limited powers compared with their public school counterparts; discipline was almost invariably the responsibility of the form master/mistress or subject teacher, not the concern of the house.

It began to be perceived that, to counter the academic multilateralism of the early comprehensive schools, there was need of a mixed-ability grouping to demonstrate the school’s concern for all its pupils. This the house structure appeared initially to offer. However, by 1968, as the research by Benn and Simon (1972:219) on the internal organisation of British comprehensive schools demonstrates, the house system was in decline in favour of a year or house-year system.

The school as an organisation

The use within educational circles of the term ‘organisation’ was confined largely to that of means to an end: the headteacher could no longer be personally involved in the control of the manifold activities of the large and complex school.

In the organisational structure of most schools there were major inequalities in what is now regarded as a peer group. The curriculum leaders were regarded as having higher status than those with pastoral responsibility. There is no doubt that this caused organisational stress. Yet was there any alternative to an organisational structure that was potentially both divisive and dysfunctional?

The development of organisational theory and practice

There was a growing awareness among senior staff, particularly those who had advanced their knowledge through higher degrees or diplomas, that schools would be more effective if they took account of organisational theory, particularly as it was being applied to schools by leading thinkers such as Musgrave:

For an organisation to reach its goal, coordination is essential and therefore to anyone analysing organisations a major emphasis must be on the problem of who has power and how it is used. Under contemporary conditions a very common mode of coordinating activity and regulating power is to establish a bureaucracy. For sociologists this term has a definite meaning. It refers to a hierarchy of positions each of which is governed by known rules and to which incumbents are recruited in a more or less regulated way. By this very rational method the organisation is able to continue for the purpose for which it was set up despite changes in its personnel.

(Musgrave 1968:7)

Nevertheless many headteachers continued to prize their autonomy and were not readily affected by what they regarded as influences from outside the profession. Few headteachers had taken it upon themselves to analyse their role. Musgrave follows Etzioni (1964) in pointing out that their role has two dimensions: the instrumental and the expressive. The former includes ‘decisions relating to the curriculum, the timetable, external examinations and streaming’ (1968:42).

Some headteachers would, at this point in the development of comprehensive education, have considered the adoption of the expressive role an indication that they were too near the permissive end of the spectrum. For them the key decisions lay in the instrumental dimension. There was now in most comprehensive schools a wide range of ways of structuring classes in the core subjects: by streaming in some subjects, banding or setting in others. This, not to mention the increasing complexity of the curriculum, with the introduction of subjects or variants of existing subjects, to meet the needs of the full range of ability, was making the construction of the timetable a millstone around the neck of the member of staff responsible, usually the curriculum deputy headteacher.

It was clear that a far more scientific-mathematical approach to the implications for timetabling of decisions on curriculum and teaching group organisation was needed. In 1967 the DES set up a team of HMI and others called the Committee on the Organisation, Staffing and Management of Schools (COSMOS). The task assigned to the team was

to mount a quick series of short courses [in management], to consider longer-term solutions of the problem and to collect or create material and devise methods through which new skills might be developed.

(Murray White 1974)

The main objective of the courses was perhaps more limited than had originally been conceived, which was an examination in depth of the use of resources, particularly those of teaching power and time. The team evolved a technique known as curriculum analysis. Using simple analytical tools, a school was now able to create guidelines for the use of non-teaching periods at the various levels of management within the school structure. The greater openness of organisational decision making that this aspect of the COSMOS courses brought about was an early indication of the movement towards the corporate management that evolved over the next two decades.

Leadership style was now becoming a major preoccupation of educational writers and researchers, for example Fiedler (1967), Greenfield (1975), Hoyle (1976), but the extent to which headteachers were influenced to examine the implications of the way they performed is a matter of some doubt. In a significant research project Hughes (1976) studied the responses of headteachers and staff members from a stratified random sample of maintained secondary schools to two role models of headship: the head as chief executive and the head as leading professional. For each role Hughes (ibid.: 51) posited pairs of polarities: an internal and an external sector in the case of the chief executive role, and a relationship between an innovating and traditional dimension for the leading professional role.

For the leading professional role the findings were less easy to anticipate. The two dimensions of innovation and tradition were ‘largely independent of each other, rather than antithetical aspects of the head’s role’ (ibid.: 53). As might be expected there was a significant interpenetration of the two role models.

Nevertheless, while Hughes’ research promoted the concept of differential aspects of the headteacher’s role, it did not attempt any indication of how she/he might manage them. Maintaining the health of the organisation in the context of changing internal and external circumstances calls for a high level of management skills.

Where might the headteacher look, then, for some overarching concept which would enable the creation of a structure that would both cope with change and be able to maintain organisational health? The answer, some realised, lay in the definition of two ‘ideal’ types of organisation defined by the sociologists Burns and Stalker (1968):

[The mechanistic type is] suitable to stable conditions, to a hierarchical management structure in which there is a clear definition of assigned roles, formal and mainly vertical communication, and a built-in system of

checks and supervision. In such a system, because the overall strategy is known only at the top, innovation from the grass roots is unlikely. Advancement with such an organisation tends to depend not on merit, but on long service.

The organic type of organisation, on the other hand, is designed to adapt to a rapid rate of change, to situations in which new and unfamiliar problems continually arise which cannot be broken down and distributed among the existing specialist roles. Relationships are therefore lateral rather than vertical, and form and reform according to the demands of the particular problem. Innovation may occur at any level, and will be a product of the greater commitment to and understanding of the overall aims of the organisation.

(Poster 1976:4–5)

However advantageous might be an organisational structure capable of utilising the management skills of more teachers within the school, thus giving them a sense of ownership of the process, existing mechanistic structures could not become organic by decree. Indeed, change had to begin at the top and demonstrate its effectiveness to the staff as a whole before it became acceptable. There was insufficient recognition at this early stage of the warning that any organisation is

the simultaneous working of at least three social systems. The first of these is the formal authority system derived from the aims of the organisation…. But organisations are also cooperative systems of people who have career ambitions and a career structure…. [Finally] every organisation is the scene of ‘political’ activity in which individuals and departments compete and cooperate for power.

(Burns and Stalker 1968:46–7)

Those few headteachers opening new comprehensive schools and able to hand-pick many of their teachers were better placed to set up structures that leaned towards the organic. Others, attempting to impose radical change on existing structures and practices, learnt the hard way that haste must be made slowly.

The curriculum explosion

The distinction, in Hughes’ typology, between the traditionalist and the innovator was by the 1970s no longer wholly within the headteacher’s control. In England and Wales the newly established Schools Council was promoting widespread curricular innovation. Interestingly, in view of the future centralisation of the primary and secondary curriculum, the Council’s ‘projects and reports were largely permissive [rather] than prescriptive, reflecting a view that curriculum innovation should be based on individual schools and led by teachers’ (Holmes and McLean 1989:44).

Why did schools engage so readily in curricular innovation? First, there was often start-up money available, for books, materials, equipment and additional staff. That the time would inevitably come when there was to be no further pump-priming was rarely considered. Second, there were external pressures. District boards and LEAs keen to be seen in the forefront of change invited schools, often those already successfully involved in innovation in other fields, to participate. Within the school the head of a successful faculty or department, influenced by career prospects in an expanding market, might well be a powerful advocate of change in his or her specialism. Principals and headteachers were often ill-placed to evaluate the merits of a proposal. Alternatively, they might ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Why Restructuring?
• 1. Organisation and Management In Post-War Schools
• 2. School Improvement and School Effectiveness
• 3. Transforming Schools Through Restructuring
• 4. Choosing the Appropriate Research Methodology
• 5. West Town Lane Infants School
• 6. Kates Hill School
• 7. Risca Primary School
• 8. Peers School
• 9. Risca Comprehensive School
• 10. Assessing the Case Studies
• 11. Restructuring: Conclusions from the Case Studies
• Bibliography