The Self-Transforming School

Brian J. Caldwell, Jim M. Spinks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415660594
• eBook ISBN: 9781135072094
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Self-Transforming School combines an insightful meta-analysis of factors contributing to the success of schools, and an examination of powerful mega-trends that are shaping developments in education, to offer the first mega-analysis in education policy and practice. The book spans fifty years, beginning with Caldwell and Spinks' ground-breaking work The Self-Managing School which advocated innovative approaches that are now accepted as preferred practice, before offering a prognosis and plan for the future.

The book argues that all schools in all settings can secure success for all students in an era where society and the economy are changing constantly and dramatically. Although schools find some support in local and global networks, externally designed re-structuring, re-staffing, or command-and-control direction isn't sufficient to achieve transformation. Instead of replicating particular approaches to achieve modest improvement, leadership of the highest quality needs to be deeply embedded in schools and their systems. Caldwell and Spinks propose three important points that need to be taken into consideration:

-schools are often at different stages of self-transformation
-self-transformation requires a high level of professionalism, and must include teacher education and on-going professional development
-funding is critically important, and efforts to build a capacity for self-transformation are constrained by what is available.

The book gives particular attention to developments in Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Finland, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Shanghai, Singapore and the United States. It will be of key interest to school leaders, policy makers, and academics and postgraduate students engaged in research on equity, student performance in highly disadvantaged settings and education policy.

1 Narratives in self-management

There is a crisis in education in many nations around the world. Nations that have been proud of their systems of education for more than a century are now struggling to keep pace with others that are performing at the highest levels in international tests of student achievement and whose economies, in some instances, are almost certain to dominate in the twenty-first century. The former include Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States and the chief concern, apart from the overall quality of schooling, is the disparity in achievement between low- and high-performing students. Moreover, the performance of the best students is declining while the gap is growing wider. The latter include Canada, Hong Kong, Finland, Shanghai, Singapore and South Korea, where the gap between low- and high-performing students is relatively narrow and the best students in several instances are a year or more ahead of their counterparts in the former.

Some governments appear to be at their wits’ end over how to improve. A major theme of this book is that they must go beyond improvement; they will never catch up by persisting with current strategies. They must plan for the transformation of their schools. They will not achieve this outcome by trying harder to do the same things that have been done for years during the period of decline. Unrelenting pressure on schools to do better is not resulting in improvement, let alone transformation.

The seriousness of the situation in England was conveyed in an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Economics Department Working Paper entitled Reforming Education in England (Braconier, 2012). Henrik Braconier is Senior Economist on the United Kingdom/Finland desk in the Economics Department of the OECD. He concluded from a deep analysis of school performance in England that ‘despite significant increases in spending on child care and education during the last decade, PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] scores suggest that educational performance remains static, uneven, and strongly related to parents’ income and background’ (ibid.: 2).

Media comment on the OECD study was illustrated in a graphic newspaper headline. Referring to indicators of decline in England’s performance as reported by Braconier, the Mail Online (Harris, 2012) declared: ‘Failed, failed, failed: Blair said his priorities were education, education, education. But Labour billions did nothing to raise standards, says report’. Yet there is a more positive view of what occurred in England and what might lie ahead (Adonis, 2012).

Australia was embarrassed when results for 2011 in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were released in December 2012. No one was prepared for results that revealed Australia was ranked twenty-seventh out of 48 countries for Year 4 in PIRLS, or eighteenth out of 52 countries for Year 4 Mathematics in TIMSS (Thomson et al ., 2012). Australia finished behind England, Canada, Chinese Taipei, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United States in all rankings. One headline read ‘Australia’s Disaster in Education’ (Topsfield, 2012: 1).

This is an astonishing state of affairs given that knowledge about improvement and transformation is richer and more dependable than ever. There have been tens of thousands of impressive studies around the world. What stands out is the quality of the different meta-analyses, that is the increasing number of reports that bring together the findings of these studies to provide general patterns to guide the efforts of policymakers and practitioners. These include many studies under the auspices of the OECD, based on outcomes in PISA; the several robust international comparative reports of McKinsey & Company (especially Barber and Mourshed, 2007; Mourshed et al ., 2010); the extraordinary work of John Hattie (2009), who drew on the findings of more than 800 separate meta-analyses; the narrative of ‘the fourth way’ provided by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley (A. Hargeaves and Shirley, 2011); the Oceans of Innovation report (Barber et al ., 2012); and the comprehensive study by the Grattan Institute in Australia (Jensen et al., 2012) that has gone a long way to explaining why students are doing so well in Asia.

There are paradoxes in these studies. One is the intriguing finding (Zhao, 2012: Chapter 4) that there appears to be a negative relationship between a nation’s score in PISA, which focuses on literacy and numeracy, and entrepreneurship, at a time when the latter is considered an important indicator of a nation’s social and economic success in the twenty-first century. Especially noteworthy is the willingness of the best-performing nations to dramatically change their approaches, as illustrated in statements by Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong (The Economist, 2012a: 31), who decried the excessive coaching of three- and four-year-olds in favour of more play-based learning. Excessive coaching is a stereotype, if not the reality, of approaches to learning in his country. Underpinning his concern is the need for citizens to be more innovative and inventive.

Another paradox is that, despite the broad national decline summarised above, there are exceptions in the performance of different schools. Some of the most impressive examples of leadership and governance, accompanied by ground-breaking developments in curriculum and pedagogy, may be found in schools in Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States. Although these schools work within a centrally determined framework, they are characterised by high-quality teaching and a capacity to tailor their programmes to local priorities for the needs, interests, aptitudes, ambitions and passions of their students. That is, these schools are self-managing and, because they have achieved significant, systematic and sustained change that secures success for their students regardless of their settings, they have used their capacities for self-management to also become self-transforming, even though they have drawn in varying degrees on support from within and beyond the school and school system. Noteworthy among these examples are the academies (England) and charter schools (United States) described in more detail in Chapter 4.

Although the 2012 edition of OECD’s Education at a Glance found a decline in the proportion of decisions made at the school level since its previous survey in 2007, there has been a general trend over several decades to provide schools with higher levels of autonomy – or, to use a preferable term, a higher level of self-management – and a purpose of this book is to review the outcomes and to outline possible directions for further change as schools use their capacities for self-management to achieve transformation. It is not possible or appropriate to predict the particular practices that may emerge in schools over the next 25 years but it is possible to offer a ‘mega-analysis’ of developments now under way.

There is solid evidence that a capacity for self-management, or a relatively high level of autonomy, is associated with higher levels of student achievement, provided it is accompanied by accountability, and that self-managing schools use their capacities to transform learning. However, it is apparent that self-management in countries such as Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States has been overwhelmed by more centralised arrangements in what may be described as a powerful and excessive command-and-control approach. Sahlberg (2011) referred to these and some other countries as being ‘infected’ by the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) in contrast to the ‘Finnish Way’.

This is the fifth book by the authors, and the publication of The Self-Transforming School marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first, entitled The Self-Managing School (Caldwell and Spinks, 1988). It is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1988 Education Reform Act in England, in which a capacity for self-management, or local management as it was called at the time, was one of several major changes in education. The Self-Managing School was an important resource for schools in England, as it was in Hong Kong, New Zealand and Victoria, Australia, shortly thereafter. It is timely to review developments in the intervening years and to document some of the examples of outstanding transforming practices in schools in these and other countries at the same time that command-and-control approaches have tended to characterise the effort to improve all schools in contrast with what has occurred in high-performing nations.

After providing some important definitions, Chapter 1 is organised into five parts. The first briefly summarises the work of the authors over the aforementioned 25 years. The second provides more information from a sample of the meta-analyses that have been conducted in recent years. The third refers to a first effort at mega-analysis in 1992, when the concept of the ‘mega-trend’ was adopted to describe powerful forces and associated developments that were emerging towards the end of the twentieth century. Subsequent developments are summarised. The fourth describes the pitfalls of forecasting what may occur in the next 25 years but summarises in broad terms some of the expected mega-trends in the years ahead. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book, in which most chapters are devoted to describing and illustrating capacities for self-transformation. Implications for policymakers and practitioners are highlighted in a final statement that concludes the chapter.

Definitions and related concepts

A self-managing school is one to which there has been decentralised a significant amount of authority and responsibility to make decisions on the allocation of resources within a centrally determined framework of goals, policies, curriculum, standards and accountabilities. Resources are defined broadly to include staff, services and infrastructure, each of which will typically entail the allocation of funds to reflect local priorities. A self-managing school has a high level of autonomy, though not complete autonomy given the centrally determined framework.

Whereas a capacity for self-management is chiefly concerned with process, self-transformation is intended to shift the focus to outcomes. A self-transforming school achieves, or is well on its way to achieving, significant, systematic and sustained change that secures success for all of its students regardless of the setting.

The self-transforming school includes but goes beyond the concept of the self-improving school. David Hargreaves has written a series of ‘think pieces’ for the National College for School Leadership in England organised around the idea of a self-improving school system (SISS). He described how school improvement has ‘come to be defined in terms of the processes of intervention in schools that are deemed, by whatever measure, to be underperforming’ (D. Hargreaves, 2010: 4). He captured an argument in the current book that an SISS, once established,

reduces the need for extensive, top-down systems of monitoring to check on school quality, the imposition of improvement strategies that are relatively insensitive to local context, with out-of-school courses not tailored to individual professional needs, and external, last-ditch interventions to remedy schools in difficulties, all of which are very costly and often only partially successful.

(ibid.: 23)

Hargreaves considers a capacity for self-management to be a prerequisite for self-improvement. However, limiting the approach to improvement does not address the need for transformation when one considers what is occurring in many nations. Improvement occurs within current approaches to schooling; transformation seeks success for all in what are certain to be dramatically different approaches to schooling in the years ahead.

In the statement cited above, Hargreaves captured some important features of what may be defined as command-and-control (‘extensive, top-down systems of monitoring to check on school quality, the imposition of improvement strategies that are relatively insensitive to local context’). A related practice is when schools are provided with inducements for accepting funds to implement programmes determined at a system level in what is basically a carrot-and-stick approach. Carrot-and-stick is also an apt descriptor of practice when a higher level of government, with more resources, provides funds to a lower level of government, with fewer resources, and requires acceptance by the latter of strict terms and conditions that are not necessarily those that would have been accepted if there was no such dependence.

Those involved in Catholic education often refer to the principle of subsidiarity in describing the distribution of authority and responsibility. Pope Pius XI is often cited:

Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

(Pope Pius XI, 1931: paragraph 79)

Such a view in no way detracts from a commitment to a system of schools that share the same values and mission or that develop mechanisms for mutual support. In addition to education departments in systems of public education, or the Catholic Education Office in a diocese or archdiocese, even independent schools establish such mechanisms. For example, the Association of Independent Schools (AIS) in New South Wales employs a staff of 82 people, most of whom provide support to member schools.

Dennis Higgins, former Director of Education in the Catholic Education Office, Sandhurst (Australia), shifted the focus from self-management to self-leadership in a powerful reflection on his career in Catholic education:

No system should talk of ‘self-managed’ schools. The notion is to have ‘self-led’ schools, and the system can do its schools its greatest favours by encouraging and enabling local schools/settings to take responsibility for all of the big decisions, and to help out by providing the resources and support for that to happen.

(Higgins, 2011: 32)

Higgins went on to observe that ‘schools become dependent on the system, and this is a weakness. Schools can become independent of the system and this is also a weakness’. His reflections and observations are consistent with the principle of subsidiarity and a major theme in this book.

An author narrative

The Self-Transforming School has been published 25 years after The Self-Managing School. In the intervening period, the authors have been continuously engaged in research and consultancy in dozens of countries and this has provided them with an opportunity to shape policy and practice in several instances but, especially, to learn about what has been achieved. The following is a brief summary of their work.

The foundation for Caldwell’s work was laid in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Alberta, Canada, in the mid-1970s, which examined the objectives, adoption, operation and perceived outcomes of decentralised school budgeting in seven school systems in Alberta, including the pilot project in the Edmonton Public School District (Caldwell, 1977). What was accomplished in Edmonton became a landmark reform that continues to this day; indeed, it has been institutionalised to the extent that it is now accepted as the way things are done in that system.

In 1983, he was chief investigator in a Project of National Significance (PNS) in Australia, known as the Effective Resource Allocation in Schools Project, which was conducted in South Australia and Tasmania with a focus on resource allocation at the school level under the limited decentralisation in place at the time. A model was developed from practice at Rosebery District High School in Tasmania, where Spinks was principal, which had received the most nominations from knowledgeable people for effectiveness, both in a general sense and in the manner in which resources were allocated. This model shaped the design and delivery of a professional development programme for school councils, principals, teachers and students in Victoria, where the Cain Labor government had adopted a policy of school-based policymaking, planning and budgeting. Fifty-two workshops were conducted from 1984 to 1986 for approximately 5,000 people from 1,200 schools. The workshop materials were incorporated into a book, initially published for a limited market in Australia, but updated as The Self-Managing School (Caldwell and Spinks, 1988) and released to an international audience at about the time of the 1988 Education Reform Act in England, and shortly before the Tomorrow’s Schools initiative in New Zealand and the School Management Initiative (SMI) in Hong Kong. These were historic init...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Narratives in self-management
• 2. Expectations and impact of self-management
• 3. Unchaining the self-managing school
• 4. A study of contrasts in the West
• 5. Can the West catch up?
• 6. Possibilities for the powerhouses
• 7. Contours of change
• 8. Innovation everywhere
• 9. The transformation of learning
• 10. Financial capital and transformation
• 11. Funding models and their fitness for purpose
• 12. Rediscovering social and spiritual capital
• 13. The knowledge
• 14. Governance ethos leadership policy
• 15. Narratives in self-transformation
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Index