 
Week 4 - Local School Management
|  | Local School Management: An Act of Educational Faith |
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Listing of Papers | |
MR TERRY WOOLLEY
South Australia, Australia
IN MY VIEW, public education is the responsibility of the government of the day, irrespective of the state, territory or nation. As the inexorable forces of the market place influence our society, it is both tempting and all too easy to view public education as a 'commodity' ruled by market forces.
No Place for Market Forces
It is my opinion that an ideology that genuflects to market forces as the instrument of determining quality public education is fundamentally wrong. Market forces have no place in the provision of a socially just public education system. This is not to say that school leaders should not be alert to and, where relevant, take these forces into account. Indeed, they must be critically aware of market forces and constantly assess the place of their school and its community within them. Where strategically and educationally beneficial, school leaders should use market forces to enhance the delivery of educational programs within their schools.
Two questions must always remain at the forefront of the thinking of school leader. Is enhanced local school management beneficial to the quality of student learning and (2) does it enhance and support the overall quality of the public education system, of which our school and community is a part?
Exactly What is Local School Management?
Local school management can mean different things. Its definition, even precisely stated, results in different understandings, depending on the context of the school and the system in which it is discussed. Therein often lies a major problem in the debate.
In my opinion, local school management should be viewed as a continuum. At one extreme is a totally external education system that drives, directs and dictates all procedures and decisions at the school level. At the other end of the continuum is a totally independent system of education, where funding, decisions and directions are in the hands of the local community, an individual or a proprietary group. Put in simple local terms, these extremes equate to the stereotype of the public schools of the 50s and 60s, at one end, and the independent schooling sector at the other.
Schools and their communities currently in an environment of 'enhanced' local management are usually able to be located as somewhere between these two extremes, possessing at various times some characteristics of each. Local descriptions, however, often with media flair and political motivation, (e.g., 'Charter Schools', devolved decision-making, 'Schools of the 3rd Millennium', 'Schools of the Future', and even 'Tomorrow's Schools') all make consistent definition and informed debate even more difficult.
Constant State of Change
However, some basic characteristics of a locally managed school can be described. Even so, it must be understood that even these basic characteristics are in a constant state of change. They are rarely independent of each other and are always shaped and limited by geography, socio-economic factors, as well as cultural and historical values. The characteristics below not a complete list but a start nevertheless to describing the essential elements of a locally managed school.
- The local community, parents and others in that community have representation on decision-making bodies in the school. Those decisions have an increasing importance in the life and direction of the school.
- The relationship between the school, and the educational system to which it belongs, leans more and more to the school taking increased responsibility for its operations and outcomes.
- Complex accountability frameworks increasingly characterise the relationship between the school and the system of which it is a member. Accountability mechanisms are usually not trusting of the locally managed site.
- The school and its community have increasing discretion in matters financial and physical, although the central system remains the chief source of funds.
- Schools and their communities argue for increased opportunity to select and appoint staff.
Why is There a Movement Towards Increased Local School Management?
Again, this is a situation loaded with context and timing. There are a number of reasons held by different groups within any educational community. Government schooling systems, in varying degrees, see local school management as a good thing, especially from a financial and political point of view. System bureaucracies can be reduced, central administrative costs diminished and communities given a sense of increased participation and control of their schools. As well, a mechanism for school improvement can be operated via external accountability processes.
We have seen the extremes of this agenda in the Thatcher era in the UK. We have also seen the results: external inspections, failed schools, market forces of choice emerging as selection, competition and rejection, communities isolated and student performance used as market indicators.
Educators Easily Convinced
Educators are usually easily convinced of the perceived advantages of local management: increased control of resources; easier and faster decisions at the local level; less 'asking for permission', and some say about staffing. The increased opportunities for resources to be directed to students and programs is another powerful seduction. In some cases, this last reason has been the major motivator behind a school's decision to increase local management (albeit according to a framework dictated by a central authority). And herein lies a powerful point. Rarely indeed does the school and its community get the model it wants for local management. Rather, it is always the system which provides the rules and the framework in which it expects local school management to be conducted. One must ask: who, in fact, is driving this 'management revolution'?
School Communities Easily Convinced
School communities, to varying degrees, are attracted to local management. The opportunity to learn more about their child's school, to be an active participant in its directions and goals, to share in the success of their child's progress are powerful incentives for parent participation. These are valuable and sound reasons for enhanced local management.
There are a number of positive aspects which have emerged from communities that have taken the opportunity to enhance the management of their school at the local level. Certainly the active participation of parents and the community in the school provides an added dimension to its operation. Having authority and decision capability as close as possible to the intended outcomes is sensible management practice. When those outcomes are the success of the participant's children, local school management can be a powerful force for good. Issues of devolution of responsibility and governance can be solved with common sense and a sense of shared purpose between the staff, the school leadership and the community.
The Core Purpose of Schooling is Improved Student Learning
The question must be asked, as it was in the introduction, does local school management, in whatever form or degree, make any difference to what students learn, and how well they learn it? How do you know?
The literature and research is sadly quiet on this critical point. Most initiatives in local school management have been couched in terms of improved schools, financial flexibility, greater autonomy, staff selection, improved resources, and the like. While all stress improved schooling and better education, there has been a noticeable lack of local school management being directed specifically at improved student learning. To do so in a genuine and meaningful way would have meant evaluations and data collection protocols being established in a wide range of learning domains, including the affective areas as a fundamental part of the introduction of local school management.
Shallow Research to Date
What research that has been concluded on this fundamental question is shallow and usually fails to convince that enhanced local management makes any impact at all. Australian authors in this field who have conducted research have concluded that little or no improvement in student learning outcomes has been noted over the five years of the Victorian (Australia) Schools of the Future initiative.
No Established Standard for Comparison
This broad conclusion rests against other papers that show improvement in narrow performance and achievement areas, such as literacy levels on some national comparative data. What is striking is that there are no established standards or norms for comparisons. Myriads of other factors, such as time, context, staff changes, increased funding, school leadership, geography and many others are simply impossible to ignore as factors potentially influencing the results.
What is particularly striking is the heavy hand of educational and government politics in the debate on student learning improvement and local management. Jurisdictions are always keen to claim that improvement in student learning is directly related to enhanced local school management. What quality research that does exist is clearly divided and mildly critical of this conclusion.
An Act of Educational Faith
Nonetheless, given the potential for 'educational good' to come from well-implemented local school management practices, the opportunities for student learning to be enhanced are present. All other things being equal (a rare circumstance for many of our struggling school communities), a locally managed school, with properly selected staff, enjoying a close relationship with the community and creative and sensitive school leadership in a school with agreed directions rooted in improving student learning will, no doubt, have successful outcomes.
At this stage, exactly what those outcomes are, how broad ranging the learning improvements are, and what affective areas are being influenced positively, remains in my view, an act of educational faith.
My confidence in schooling systems to make serious inroads into the learning improvement question will be enhanced when quality independent research is commissioned at the same time as a local school management initiative is implemented. Further, and perhaps more fundamentally, I look for increased local school management championed by our educational and political leaders for the prime and sole purpose of improving the learning opportunities and outcomes of all of our students. I think that is what schools are for, anyway.
Future School Leadership Skills and Competencies
On the heady assumption that local school management has been introduced to improve student learning, what specialised and unique skills and competencies will our school leaders and teachers of the future require? My guess is that it will be very same set currently required by all committed educators. Even if the school is not locally managed, a leader must remain critically aware of the factors which impinge on the school and be able to gain advantage and improvement for all learners.
Aspects of competitive advantage, flexibility, school choice, autonomy, specialisation, accountability, the application of information technologies to student learning and school management all apply to a school of today. Any school leader or teacher who cannot ground these principles and issues in the context of their practice and responsibility is disadvantaging the school, the students and its wider community. It is these skills and attitudes that have to be at the forefront when choosing a school leader.
Public authorities responsible for the selection and appointment of a school leader should define and demand requisite skills, attitudes and competencies as part of the selection process. The other aspect of selection is the close and active participation of the school community whom the leader is destined to serve. The matter of local context and school governance within the framework of a responsible state or public jurisdiction for education is also important.
Local school management at its most simple level demands the active participation of the community in the selection process of the leader of that school community. This, in turn, demands an informed and capable school community and, in my view, it is the responsibility of an education system to ensure structures and resources are directed to this end. A measure of the extent of the commitment of an educational system to effective local school management is the effort it applies to jointly developed structures surrounding the appointment of the school leader with the community.
And the Vision Thing for the New Millennium?
The school reform agenda does not belong to a single person. Given the ideal circumstances of the selection of a school principal, the matter of the future of the school will have been canvassed with the community, and with consideration of the range of factors already discussed as impinging on schools of today.
Creating a Framework for Change
The reform and improvement agenda belongs to the school community but there is little doubt it is the school leader that must create a framework in which that agenda can be developed, articulated, planned and resourced. A measure of school leadership skill is the extent to which the community, which includes the teaching staff, are active participants in developments for the future.
A further measure of that leadership is the quality evident in the pursuit of that reform and improvement agenda and the maintenance of the focus of the school on its future under the pressure of daily operations. These are very high level skills; keeping it simple, focused and moving forward under the pressure on schools of today is an enormous task, the distractions numerous and the time needed, seemingly endless.
Partnerships 21
A shared vision for the future, and for the active support for all the learners in the school, was a fundamental principle in the local school management framework developed in South Australia in 1998. Its 1999-2000 implementation plan, Partnerships 21, holds to those principles, as well as making clear reference to improved student learning outcomes.
The Partnerships 21 plan still has the rhetoric but the current dominance of organisational, industrial, financial and political factors have seen these goals relegated to a lower order of importance.
Conclusion
Local school management is an educational imperative. It is my belief that, for the reasons already described, it will continue in various forms and rates of implementation over the next five years.
It remains a vexed issue because of the constant mix of systemic, political and funding issues which surround it. Local school management has been introduced in a variety of ways in different places around the world, and it is more often the manner of its introduction and implementation that has captured the agenda, rather than its purpose. The UK, New Zealand, Victoria (Australia) and the US have all seen versions of local school management implemented over the last decade, many have been scrutinised closely by other education systems.
One Size Does Not Fit All
It is absolutely clear that no one system of local management fits all. Local school management remains ill-defined and its success remains absolutely dependent on the local context of socio-economic, geographic and cultural factors.
Its place as a permanent and modern day educational innovation will depend on its ability to work within those contextual forces, and for schools to maintain a focus on their prime purpose, that of creating an environment where all students have the best opportunity to succeed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Terry Woolley is Principal of Unley High School, a large coeducational secondary school of 1,200 students in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia. He has taught Chemistry, Science and Mathematics for many years in South Australian country and city schools, and for one year in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has been a principal since 1989 and is active in a range of professional associations. Terry was President of the South Australian Secondary Principals Association from 1995-1999 and currently holds the position of National President of the Australian Secondary Principals Association (ASPA).
Terry was a principal representative on the Ministerial Task Force charged with developing the framework for local school management in South Australia in 1998. In his capacity as state president, he was closely involved in the debate surrounding the implementation of the 'Partnerships 21' local school management process in SA schools. He has been an active supporter, in principle, of local school management but has been critical of various aspects of its implementation. As a representative of state and national principal associations, he has taken the opportunity to attend numerous state, national and international conferences and enjoys a reputation as a speaker on a variety of topics relevant to secondary education.
Terry Woolley can be contacted by email at:
twoolley@camtech.net.au
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