From pillar to post
Nanny State? Or Big Society? I suspect that, when it comes to schooling, we need a bit of both. (Whatever we mean by those terms.)
I say this because I’ve recently been affected – as a parent of children at school and as a friend to a teacher who looks set to lose his job – by the increasing power of the role of the Head.
The government’s mantra is to let the Head manage the school. To ‘set them free’ to do that. It all seems to make sense. At least it does to them.
But, in practice, what does this look like? Well, it means that the human drive to make a mark, to do things differently, to define oneself over against others, results in schools being thrown from pillar to post. Especially when a new Head arrives.
I blogged a few weeks’ back about my unease at the wielding of the New Broom. At that stage I had an mild, detached concern about the way new rules and regs seemed to accompany the arrival of a new Head. My concerns have only grown less detached and deepened over the term.
But my parochial concerns they are not nearly as troubling as the situation a teacher friend of mine faces. He is a specialist practitioner and community educator in the particular specialism that his secondary school has proudly built up over recent years. A new Head has come in (with his very own business accountant sidekick) and has decided, after a bit of a look around, that the school will no longer pursue this specialism but will switch focus to become a school with a completely different specialism. Overnight. As a result, my friend’s post won’t exist any more.
But this isn’t really about my friend. Frustrated though I am about what he’s had to face. And change is fine, too. And, of course, those in charge of institutions have a responsibility to lead those institutions in the directions they see fit. But why is it so very, very rare to find a manager new in post who is prepared to manage continuity, to develop what’s already happening that is good? Why is it that, in order to feel as if they are managing, lots of managers (Heads included) feel it necessary to take things in a completely new direction? To be so other to that which went before?
It makes me realise (I’m politically a bit slow) that at least with some level of central government involvement and control there is some chance of stability when there is a change in Headship. There is some core of visionary, principled, policy-driven shape to the thing. Rather than the lives and welfare of large swathes of children and teachers being at the mercy of the predilections of the personalities of those ‘in charge’ – capable though they may be.
Estelle Morris accused the government’s hell-bent Head-empowering ideology in an article in the Guardian (30.11.10), writing that: ’they [the government] have become dismantlers rather than devolutionists.’ That’s certainly what it feels like from where I’m standing.
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For more on how the Big Society idea might play out alongside unfettered school leadership, go to the Institute for Government’s website to see a summary of a seminar they hosted to look at this back in the summer – with NESTA and the design Council.
