One of the problems with the education debate in England is the tendency
to focus on the merits of individual policies - “should we decouple A-levels?”;
“are free schools working?” – rather than thinking strategically about what
we’d like the system to look like and then using that template for making
policy decisions.
My big regret about the 2010 White Paper is that it reads too much like
a laundry list of policies rather than a set of design principles for system
reform. The vision of a school-led system is explicit but there’s too little
about what that means. Having a clearer set of design principles would have
made it much easier to explain how various policies fitted into the overall
picture and would have provided a firebreak against Ministers/No. 10 inserting
their own random or contradictory policies into the mix.
So what would the core building blocks for a genuinely school-led system
look be? I think there are three keys elements: school autonomy; accountability
and capacity-building.
Autonomy is important because it leads to: faster
decision-making as you don’t have to wait for a request to go up the
chain; innovation because not everyone is following the same model; accuracy
because decisions are based on local information rather than aggregated
information at the national or regional level.
Accountability is important because transparent information leads
to: the ability to uphold minimum standards; schools being able to benchmark
their performance against others and identify areas for improvement; parents
being able to more accurately assess their options.
But autonomy and accountability aren’t enough. The latter creates
incentives to perform well (along, of course, with teachers’ typically high
intrinsic motivation) and the former gives the agency to perform well but
neither give them the capacity to perform well if they don’t know how. This is
why my third building block is capacity-building.
A school-led system needs the institutional infrastructure to broker support
between strong and weaker schools without impeding their autonomy.
At the moment we have all the elements of this system but the balance is
not yet right. Autonomy is impeded by an accountability system that is too
punitive and the infrastructure for capacity-building is under-resourced and
patchy. The links between the accountability system and capacity-building are
too weak leaving struggling schools unclear what they need to do to improve
(though the introduction of Regional Schools Commissioners has mitigated this
to some extent).
So what might a set of principles based on these elements, which would
allow us to realign the system, look like?
Autonomy:
1)
Schools should have authority over all their functions
apart from those that require co-ordination between schools (e.g. exclusions;
admissions; place planning).
2)
Where functions need to be carried out above the
school level they should – where possible – be done through collective
agreement at the local level.
3)
Schools should be funded consistently regardless
of where they are in the country so they have the necessary resources to fulfil
their functions.
Accountability:
1)
Accountability should be based on outputs (e.g.
test results; destination data) and not inputs (e.g. whether a particular form
of pedagogy is being practised).
2)
The consequences of accountability should be
proportionate and in particular should not disadvantage schools with lower-attaining
intakes.
3)
Accountability systems should reward
collaborative behaviour where it leads to improvements.
4)
All data/information should be published (unless
doing so would break data protection law).
Capacity-building:
1)
Where schools are considered to be below a
minimum standard there should be immediate intervention.
2)
For all schools the accountability system should
be linked to means of getting support for areas requiring improvement.
3)
Support should be available to all schools
regardless of where they are in the country.
I’ve come up with these suggestions by myself and in a hurry
so they’re unlikely to be right and certainly aren’t exhaustive. My aim is to
illustrate the sort of discussion we should be having. Are these the right
principles? If not why and what should we have instead? If they are right what
would have to change in the system to ensure they were kept?
