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Rule 1
Recruit staff for their personality not their qualifications
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Things that succeed have a personality behind them.
(Pat Brown, chief executive of Central London Partnership)
Summary
⢠Super-catalysts are people who are brilliant at dealing with other people. Their relative absence in our public services is one explanation of why they are sometimes so intractable.
⢠Working imaginatively with people who can make a difference is exciting in a way that watching over processes is not.
⢠The important thing to remember about human catalysts is that we were all born with the necessary skills.
You can always recognize a failing school. The mini-class of naughty pupils doing their work in the headteacherâs study. The coats all over the floor. The bored faces of the children sitting at their desks with the sun outside. I went into one primary school recently where the headteacher said: âYou feel like weeping at the end of the day.â If ever there was a sign of something not working, the abject misery of the person in charge is probably it. So when anyone can turn round a failing school, it has to be a clue about making other systems work too.
So take a journey with me for a moment to one school which turned around: Mitchell High School, right in the middle of an impoverished but energetic housing estate on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent. Back in 2001, one senior member of staff faced down a furious local parent, who was waving a pair of muddy shorts at him, and was smacked around the face with them. Three years on, an amazing transformation had taken place. The angry parent was a member of staff, as were many of her friends, and â hereâs the strange bit â they were paid partly in chocolate coins.
This unusual approach to turning round a big secondary school came at a time when other schools were putting in extra cameras and security gates just to avoid violent confrontations like that. The fact that Mitchell went a different way, and became such a success story â as it did â was largely down to the new headteacher, Debbie Morrison (called Debbie Sanderson in those days). A closer look at the way she works reveals a great deal about the human element and why it is so important. Because if you hang around successes for a long time, you realize that one of the things they have in common is the people, like her, who are at the heart of it and who seem to be able to make a difference when everything else seems to point the other way. I call them super-catalysts, and it doesnât have anything to do with qualifications.
When Debbie Morrison took over, immediately after the shorts incident, a fifth of 16-year-olds left Mitchell High School without any qualifications. A few years later, that figure was down to four per cent and two thirds of the school were getting five or more GCSEs at grades AâC. You might think that the basis for this success was some kind of innovative government programme that could be rolled out anywhere. There were government programmes, of course â there always are â but the truth is that this didnât really apply to Mitchell High School. The key to Mitchellâs success was partly the very human skills of the headteacher, but taken to a whole new level. In was, in fact, a dramatic demonstration of how people have skills that go some way beyond government programmes, and it had knock-on effects in the local community too.
Debbie Morrison may have been a born teacher, but she actually trained as a chartered accountant. In a disaffected moment, she saw an advertisement for a teaching job in a local school in Derbyshire and applied for it. She rose quickly through the ranks until she arrived at Mitchell, thrilled by what she describes as âthe life and dynamismâ there. But behind that buzz, the neighbourhood was not exactly going places. âIt was a highly depressed neighbourhood with a self-limiting belief system,â she says. âThey really didnât believe it could be any better, across the whole community. It had become self-fulfilling. There was real aggression and real disaffection there, and a kind of acceptance that they had no influence over their own futures. Everything was always done to them.â
Worse, when she arrived at the school for the first time, Debbie was warned not to walk along the corridors on her own. Local parents told her that she had no chance of sorting things out, because two strapping men had failed before her and she was just a young woman. Nor were the parents just apathetic about learning â some of them were downright hostile. Only a week into her job, as she locked the school gates, one parent holding a spade threatened to kick her âfucking head offâ.
Her strategy was to engage with the most vociferous local mothers, not just to listen to them but to ask them for help. She pursued one of the loudest from the local estate, a mother of two particularly challenging twin boys. âWe kept phoning her up,â she says. âWe kept asking her to come in, and I thought, if I could get Donna on board, I could get the whole community.â Some people might not have the human skills to engage in this way, possibly even most people. But within a few months, Donna had enrolled alongside the children in the health and social care course. This was a major success in itself. Her mere presence in the classroom gave a message to the other children that learning was respectable, and she was also able to tell them some first-hand stories about childcare too.
The next step was to employ Donna for an hour a day during the lunch break to stand at the school gate and take the names of any children leaving for the afternoon wandering round the shops. Some of the staff were nervous about rubbing shoulders with a parent in the staff room, especially such a difficult one â even sharing the staff toilets with them. But Debbie knew the strategy was working when one of the other local mothers took her aside and said: âI want to do what Donnaâs done.â
âYouâve given me a bite of the apple,â said another one later. âNow I want the whole apple.â
Others came in as classroom assistants, but Debbie refused to accept the usual boundaries between the school and the outside neighbourhood. There were self-esteem classes for adults and courses on basic literacy. Other local parents were employed in various outreach work. There were lots of award ceremonies, prizes and awards afternoons. There were grants to take over empty buildings near the school. âI tried to find something that somebody was good at and build on it,â says Debbie. âWhen I managed to find space at a minimal rent, I had somebody in mind and said to them: âIf we put ten computers up there, can you manage that house in the afternoons?ââ
In her new school, Coundon Court in Coventry, she has launched an ambitious project to train pupils, teachers and parents in life-coaching skills, beginning with an intensive course in the summer holidays for 350 children, chosen â not because they were the brightest and best â but because they most wanted to take part and give something back. Fourteen went on for a four-day training course, covering everything from emotional intelligence to ethics. Even before the end of the course, it was clear that 12-year-olds could be brilliant coaches of 50-year-olds. One of the pupils is now coaching Debbie to organize a better work-life balance, go to the gym and drink enough water, and is sending emails to remind her of the goals sheâs set herself.
The chocolate coins began as a thank you gesture at Mitchell, and they are a clue to the meaning of this story. âOK, it was cheesy but it worked in that context,â she says. But how did it work? They are not exactly a payment: you canât put them in the bank and they tend to melt if you keep them in your pocket. They have no value, and yet Donna valued them so much that she still keeps some of hers, locked away in a cupboard. They are a delicate balance as well. You can hardly imagine government guidelines for payments with chocolate coins. Anybody else shelling out chocolate coins might just irritate people, or worse. But Debbie managed to pull it off. The chocolate coins worked, not just because they were an informal, human touch, but because they were very personal.
What seems to me to be amazing about Debbieâs success at Mitchell High School is that she had no obvious plan in mind when she set out. âI had a vision of self-supporting communities and a sense of how it could feel, but I didnât really know how I was going to get there,â she says. âIt was like lottery balls flying in the air. It was about jumping from ball to ball, riding on the energy.â
Much of the success came from talking up the school and the community, helping pupils and parents realize they could achieve things if they set out to. But by itself, thatâs just spin. The point is that Debbie Morrison is a brilliant example of someone using their human skills to dramatic effect, cajoling, challenging, comforting, imagining. You could never boil down how she works into some kind of computer programme, still less deliver it virtually. She knows instinctively how people work, and forges relationships with them to make the change happen.
Of course, there are lots of people like her, though they are rarely given the credit they deserve. They succeed because they can look at other people and see potential in them that officials and institutions donât see. They donât just re-categorize them, they engage in such a way that change takes place. This isnât just a matter of leadership â there are leaders out there who donât know where to start when someone is in front of them. General Montgomery was a disaster on a one-to-one basis. These are people who make things happen instinctively, often in tiny ways, and do so brilliantly. That is what makes them super-catalysts.
When I first ran across Debbie Morrison, it was at a government conference about âextended schoolsâ, for which Mitchell provided a blueprint. She gave the keynote address, packed with inspiring stories, which made you believe that anything might be possible. The next speaker was the civil servant charged with rolling out extended schools across one of the English regions and, within a minute or so of him beginning to speak, it was pretty obvious that he would fail. He was revealing the besetting sin of officials, which is to boil down successful examples to universal principles which they believe can be applied anywhere.
This is how the process goes. First, they take an intractable problem about neighbourhoods, communities and places, then they remove all of what they see as the dull and mundane but essentially human details.
Second, they formulate some abstract maxims that can apply to any situation or any community.
Third, they appoint somebody who can be trusted to put those maxims into effect without taking any notice of local peculiarities.
Fourth, they assign a narrow measure to every aspect of the task, and convince themselves that you can somehow capture and pin down the progress by measuring it.
The trouble is that you canât actually separate the general from the specific. It is the little things that matter most â the looks exchanged between neighbours, the small repairs to minor pieces of vandalism â that will make the difference between success and failure in a neighbourhood, the human encounters that make such a difference in the school. Rolling it out like this pretends that the people arenât crucial. It imagines that it can all work fine if individual relationships arenât forged. The thing about super-catalysts is that they turn their visions into reality in their own way, not according to the boiled down maxims preferred by those who employ them, but using their human skills in the way they know best. This can make them the objects of suspicion in hierarchies which have become too divorced from the way people actually behave.
Debbie Morrison revealed that the head of the coaching programme they brought into Coventry called her a âdeviantâ, in an admiring kind of way. She smiles at this. âUnless you have a perception of the norm, you canât really deviate from it,â she says. But there is no doubt that others like her, particularly in public services, are seen as exactly that by the authorities, especially when they dealing directly with the public.
If care staff help disabled people back into wheelchairs when they fall out, and they are not insured to do so, they often get reprimanded. One local government officer told The Guardian in 2008 about a boy with learning difficulties who loved swimming, especially with his brother. But the brother didnât have learning difficulties and the swimming group was only for those who did, so he was barred for âhealth and safety reasonsâ. You have to be a deviant, at least a bit of a dissident, to break rules like that and stay a little bit human. It may even be this very ability to break rules which makes all the difference between success and failure.
A decade on, Mitchell is facing closure again. But what is most important about its renaissance under Debbie Morrison is that, if the human element had been removed, in case staff didnât follow the correct procedure or because the risks to children were too high â or maybe because a computer programme was considered more efficient â then Debbie could never have done her job. This matters enormously because it is at least a clue to the key question: why do things go wrong so often? Why, after huge investment in systems and the latest management consultancy, are so many schools still failing? One answer is that the super-catalysts are either missing or their skills have been deliberately frustrated.
It is rather an urgent question. Businesses call people like that âentrepreneursâ. There are even âsocial entrepreneursâ in the voluntary sector, but there is no equivalent word in the public sector. In fact, people who work imaginatively or emotionally are occasionally objects of suspicion in public services, especially when they are manning the phones or looking after children. Even in business, there are moments when magnetic entrepreneurs are not quite as welcome as you might expect, especially when they are in a hierarchical system that tries to control their script and reaction.
No, being an entrepreneur is usually about generating money. That is a related but different skill. Super-catalysts are people who are brilliant at dealing with other people. They are often leaders, but they are not just leaders. Of course, they are often entrepreneurs, but they are not just entrepreneurs either. And their absence in our public services is at one explanation of why they are sometimes so intractable.
It has taken a long time for policy-makers to re-discover the crucial importance of human relationships in education, but they have done so faster than most other areas. The US teaching consultant Doug Lemov had been a big advocate of data-driven programmes and standard tests to improve schools, but he changed his mind after a particularly depressing visit to a failing school in Syracuse in New York state.
They seemed to be doing all the right things. They had caring teachers and small classes, and sophisticated software to analyse every pupilâs test results, but the classrooms were a disaster. Lemov watched while a teacher launched into a long debate with a pupil about why he didnât have a pencil. Driving home afterwards, Lemov reflected that â despite his battery of techniques, software and analysis â he had little idea how to help schools actually teach.
His confusion coincided with a series of studies in the USA into the success of President George W. Bushâs No Child Left Behind programme. When they looked at the statistics regarding the huge number of factors that schools have some kind of power over, all the usual ones showed just a tiny impact. What really made the difference was which teacher the pupil had been given. There were huge gaps between the achievements of pupils when everything was exactly the same â the same curriculum, same school, same background â but different teachers. Parents obsess about the right school to send their children to, but the latest research suggests that actually the school is only important because it houses the teachers.
It is only common sense that individual teachers make a difference, but these findings were a shock to the teaching establishment, largely because it implied there was something indefinable about individual teachers that couldnât be measured. One leading education policy analysts told the New York Times magazine that it was âvoodooâ.
The accepted solution now, at least in the USA, is to give teachers performance-related pay, as if somehow low standards was the result of them not trying hard enough. Lemov didnât think that was the best way forward and set out to define what made a good teacher, travelling around the country filming the most successful teachers at work. The result was a set of techniques that came to be known informally as âLemovâs Taxonomyâ. They are little things, such as standing still when you give instructions, that Lemov believes can turn ordinary people into brilliant teachers.
The charity Teach for America was also puzzled about their research findings. Their teachers were doing good work, but a handful of them were succeeding way above the others. They asked a philosophy graduate called Steven Farr, their head of research, to find out why. Starting in 2002, he tracked down teachers that were making a big difference and found they had a number of things in common: they constantly re-evaluated what they were doing, they obsessively recruited the families of their pupils into the process and they battled bureaucracies that were getting in their way â they were âdeviantsâ, like Debbie Morrison, in that respect. But by the end of the research, two things stood out above all others as a measure of successful teachers â and it wasnât background or academic accomplishments. It was perseverance and determination, but it was also satisfaction with their own lives. These were secure people, at ease with themselves. Teach for America now tries to identify people who can show a track record of continuing to try when they recruit them.
The implication of this â and of the work done by academics in the same field, on both sides of the Atlantic â is that you can learn to be a super-catalyst â at least in the classroom. The sum total of all Lemovâs 49 techniques would be a great teacher. That is why philanthropists such as Bill Gates have got involved in finding out what makes teachers brilliant. It is w...
