Managing Teams in Secondary Schools

Les Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134968626
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

The Education Reform Act of 1988 had enormous implications for the management of secondary schools. In particular, the Act brought about changes for those responsible for departmental, year or cross-curricular teams. Managing Teams in Secondary Schools gives practical guidance to teachers who carry out such responsibilities. Based on the premise that all teachers in secondary schools have direct and developing part to play in the management of the school at some level, the book examines the changes the Act entails, and locates the work of team leaders and their colleagues within that framework. it provides an accessible and detailed discussion boyh of the nature of teamwork, underlying the role of planning and the need for effective communication, and of the skills required of the succesful team leader. Les Bell looks in particular at team-building in the context of planning, decision-making and problem-solving as part of the process of change management, and at staff development and appraisal programmes. The key focus is on the management of staff and relationships within staff and the relationships within staff groups. Primarily directed at those in middle management positions in secondary schools, the book's emphasis on teamwork means that it will be of interest to anybody involved in secondary school teaching.

Chapter 1
The context of secondary school management

This book is for those teachers who have management responsibility in secondary schools. It provides an analysis of those responsibilities and, at the same time, offers a wide range of practical guidelines for the development of effective strategies to enable the manager in the secondary school to cope with the changes and challenges that now confront all of us in education. The first basic premise of the book is that all teachers in secondary schools have a direct and developing part to play in the management of the school at some level. This may be as a member of a subject department or a faculty, a pastoral team, or a cross-curricular group such as that which is responsible for the Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI) and its extension. It may be as a leader of such a group at the middle management level in the school or it may be as a member of the senior management of the school at deputy or headteacher level.

Clearly the responsibility for the overall management and administration of every school rests with the headteacher and the senior management team working with and through the governing body. This is immutable and will remain so in spite of the recent changes contained in the 1986 and 1988 Education Acts. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that the whole staff of the school is expected to exercise greater collective responsibility for the content of the curriculum, the forms of assessment, the deployment and utilisation of resources, the routine decisions which are taken about children and the ways in which they are to be taught. This is a logical extension of the movement towards greater accountability in schools which began with the Great Debate on Education and the green paper, Education in Schools: A Consultative Document (HMSO 1977a). It is also a theme developed at length by HMI and summed up in their publication, Education Observed 3: Good Teachers, where it is argued that:

teachers need to work together collectively to produce an atmosphere in the school which encourages children to respond in a positive and responsible fashion…. Reference to the importance of professional team work appears frequently in school reports. Typical is the comment… ‘The members of staff work as a team so that they can offer leadership and guidance in areas of the curriculum that might present difficulties to individual teachers. In this way weaknesses and omissions are assessed and, as far as is possible, remedied. These comments emphasise the importance of professional teamwork for maximum curricular strength and mutual support.

(DES 1985b: paras. 13–30)

The need for effective school management to be based on teamwork within schools is the second basic premise of this book. Schools are not made up of a large number of autonomous individuals acting independently of each other. Pupils are grouped in classes, sets, streams, year groups, houses, teams and in many other ways. They are expected to act as a group rather than as individuals when they are thus organised. The same is true of teachers who may belong to departments, teams or a variety of other units within which they are expected to act, to a greater or lesser degree, in concert with colleagues. The effective management of these groups of teachers is vital to the well-being of the school and for the education of the children within the school. The responsibility for this task falls to all teachers.

The Education (School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions) Order (DES 1987a) reminds us that the main professional grade (now standard grade) teacher will be responsible for:

• advising and co-operating with the headteacher and other teachers…on the preparation and development of courses of study, teaching materials, teaching programmes, methods of teaching and assessment and pastoral arrangements;
• contributing to the selection for appointment and professional development of other teachers;
• co-ordinating or managing the work of other teachers;
• taking such part as may be required…in the review, development and management of activities relating to the curriculum, organisation and pastoral functions of the school.

(DES 1987a: Schedule 3, paras 3.1–3.12, p. 5)

The conditions of employment for headteachers contain even more specific managerial elements. These include:

• representing the school in its formal relationships with the local education authority (LEA) and governors;
• formulating the overall aims of the school;
• participating in the selection and appointment of staff;
• organising the implementation of the national curriculum;
• reviewing the work and organisation of the school;
• evaluating standards of teaching and learning;
• ensuring that all staff have access to advice and training appropriate to their needs.

(DES 1987a: Schedule 1, paras 4.1–4.23, pp. 2–3)

These statements about the responsibilities of both headteachers and standard grade teachers echo those descriptions of good practice which were identified by HMI in Good Teachers (DES 1985b). The essential features are almost identical, stressing as they do, the nature of the wider responsibilities within schools that go far beyond work in classrooms. Such wider responsibilities involve working with colleagues and accepting some measure of accountability for that work. They also involve most teachers in the general management and organisation of the school in which they work. As Marland suggests:

In England and Wales, despite some recent centralist tendencies, a significant proportion of the key decisions are made within the schools, often by teachers who hold posts of responsibility. This elevates the management skills of the teachers, as opposed to their pedagogical skills, into very great importance.

(Marland 1986:1)

In spite of the reference to posts of responsibility which now no longer exist, the fundamental message is clear. Teachers at all levels in schools have management responsibilities as part of their everyday duties. These responsibilities are not carried out in isolation but involve working with and through colleagues. The management of this process, the management of teams of teachers in schools, is crucial to the provision of a good education for our children. As Styan has stated:

Teachers have the right to expect well-managed schools which provide the conditions for good teaching and learning. Heads and senior staff have the major responsibility for creating these conditions.

(Styan 1989a)

The creation of these conditions, however, is a shared responsibility at all levels of the school.

SECONDARY SCHOOL MANAGEMENT IN A NEW ERA

It is clear to any teacher in any school in the last decade of the twentieth century that education is entering a new era. It has been suggested that the combined effects of economy, demography and ideology have produced a situation in which the management of schools requires new sets of under-standings and skills (Simkins and Thomas 1987). The worldwide recession caused by the oil crisis in the early 1970s exacerbated problems of low economic growth and rising unemployment in the United Kingdom. As a result all public sector activities faced increasing demands for greater economies, improved efficiency and better value for money.

Education was no exception to this. Indeed the pressures for all educational institutions to examine their own internal efficiency were made even greater by the decline in pupil numbers coinciding with a growing concern about the rising number of unemployed and elderly people who were placing increasing demands on health and social services. There needed to be a shift in resources away from those devoted primarily to the young, towards those from which the elderly and the unwaged were the main beneficiaries. The argument that declining pupil numbers might lead to a better pupil-teacher ratio was lost. Instead resource allocation in education became much more closely linked to notions of purpose and priority. Hence, resources were available for some developments—TVEI and in-service training for the introduction of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) for example—but not for others.

At the same time ideological shifts in the political climate related to ‘the perceived purpose of education, the autonomy of its teaching force and the perceived propriety of using certain techniques for evaluating educational activity’ (Simkins and Thomas 1987:8) have led to a situation in which education is being required to take a greater account of the needs of the industrial and commercial sectors, possibly at the expense of a more liberal approach to education. Consequently science and technology in the National Curriculum receive a greater emphasis than they did in the curriculum of most schools in the past. There is now a challenge to the traditional autonomy of the teacher over the choice of curriculum content and teaching style. Procedures are being established to measure the performance of the education system and the levels of achievement of children by setting basic national standards. These issues find expression in the National Curriculum. They also provide significant professional and managerial challenges for teachers at all levels in secondary education.

As these challenges have emerged, approaches to the management of secondary schools have changed. During the 1960s and early 1970s the general trend in secondary education was towards the creation of larger schools (Bell and Maher 1986). Prior to that, in the small schools that tended to be the norm, a relatively autocratic style of headship was expected from secondary school headteachers. With a teaching staff of about twenty and one deputy, such an autocratic style could flourish and go largely unchallenged. Such schools were small enough and the curriculum was sufficiently narrow and relatively unchanging to enable the institution to be controlled by one individual. As schools became larger and the curriculum became more complex and less static, such an approach to the management of secondary schools was inappropriate and difficult to sustain.

New approaches to school management became necessary as pupil numbers increased and LEAs took the opportunity to seek economies of scale by creating large schools as they reorganised to cope with comprehensive secondary schooling. The new institutions were too big to be managed by any one individual acting alone. Many of the people appointed to senior positions within them had previously been headteachers in their own right. New forms of examination within the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) were being developed and teachers were coming into contact with types of pupils with whom they were not familiar. On top of all this the school leaving age was due to be raised to sixteen years, thus adding a new dimension to both organisational and curricular structures in many schools.

Schools were faced with a new range of problems. One set of solutions was to delegate responsibility to members of staff for specialist areas of subject, pastoral and organisational aspects of the school. This approach was reinforced by various pay awards which sought to differentiate between teachers at different levels within the school organisation. Headteachers tended, therefore, to create senior management teams. These often started with two deputies who had responsibility for the pastoral and the academic areas of the school’s activities. This is not to say that these two areas were either clearly understood or clearly delineated. Confusion about responsibilities often occurred, made worse when many schools found themselves with three deputies. What was the third deputy to do? A common answer to this question can be found in the growth of deputy heads who were responsible for day-to-day organisation and administration. This often meant ‘doing the cover rota’. Nevertheless, the team approach to school management began to emerge.

The second phase in the establishment of management structures in large secondary schools came with the development and extension of middle management functions. Heads of subject departments had existed for some time. Heads of pastoral teams became established with the growth of large comprehensive schools. It was a fairly simple progression, therefore, to delegate some of the senior management responsibilities to the holders of these posts. The Houghton pay award, the need to establish career routes into more senior levels of the school organisation, and subsequent pressures on schools to extend and rethink their curricular provision and to accept an even wider pastoral remit reinforced such developments.

In recent years a third phase has begun under the influence of TVEI, the growing emphasis on vocationalism, the introduction of information technology across the curriculum, and the development of new forms of pupil assessment and record keeping. This phase has seen the emergence of the role of the co-ordinator. This role has tended to be cross-curricular in nature and has often involved having general responsibility for resource management in a way that was uncommon for heads of department or pastoral teams. As headteachers and their senior staff have to accept new responsibilities and new roles, so do those in middle management positions. They may find themselves with greater subject or pastoral commitments as well as a broader, school-wide responsibility for functions such as resource management.

These changes in approaches to management inside the school are mirrored by changes in the predominant management style in the external environment of most secondary schools. As Blanchard et al. (1989) put it, there has been a shift from management by consensus to management by accountability. In the period from 1944 to the late 1980s the management of the education system was carried out by the DES, LEAs and the schools in terms of a partnership in which each partner could offer advice to the others but could operate only through influence. For example, the governing body of a school could not impose its views on the content of the curriculum or on the teaching of it within that school. The same was true of both the LEA and the Government. Advice could be given and certain courses of action such as giving a greater emphasis to science within the curriculum could be encouraged. Changes might take place only by agreement. In short:

the educational environment encouraged by the 1944 Education Act was one in which consensus was the overriding principle.

(Blanchard et al. 1989:5)

As a result of the two education acts in the late 1980s the situation is now very different. The 1986 Education Act reduced the numbers of LEA governors on school governing bodies and increased parental representation. It also gave governors the power to modify an LEA’s curriculum policy statement and exercise limited control over the school’s budget. The same act gave, for the first time, a clear indication that governors were accountable to parents for their stewardship of the school. It required them to furnish parents with an annual report dealing with the work of the governing body during the year and also to hold an annual parents’ meeting at the school to discuss the report. The 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) made even more drastic and significant changes.

This act introduced the National Curriculum with three core subjects and seven foundation subjects. It established a National Curriculum Council to advise the Secretary of State on curriculum matters and a Schools Examination and Assessment Council to oversee the assessment of pupils. Religious education has now to be provided under an agreed syllabus and a wholly or broadly Christian act of worship has to take place in schools for all children each day. Parents must be informed about the ways in which the school is approaching the National Curriculum; assessment and testing and the provision of religious education and a complaints procedure must be established to enable parents to ensure that the terms of the act are being carried out. Open enrolment has come into force to compel schools to admit all pupils whose parents wish them to attend that school provided that it is not full. Governing bodies of schools of more th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The context of secondary school management
• 2 Management for effective schools
• 3 Leadership and management in secondary schools
• 4 Staff teams and their management
• 5 Developing the school
• 6 The staff team: Its priorities and their management
• 7 Communication in schools
• 8 Curriculum profiles and job descriptions
• 9 Staff appraisal and the secondary school team
• 10 Conclusion: Development, change and stability
• Bibliography
• Index