Restructural Engineering: Functional change required in SLT?
By Alan Robinson @RobinsonAlan
Let’s rewind first: what is the honest aim of your school? You might be trying to achieve an outstanding rating from the inspectorate, develop students' holistic growth or a spot on the spectrum in between. Congrats if you're at a school that is sitting outside the norm, I'd love to engage with you further.
External validation is a valuable marketing tool. The more 'edge' your school has over the competition, the more stable your base due to high enrolments and oversubscription from those families who see academic success through the prism of Ofsted (or ADEK/KHDA in the UAE). These customers rarely look at the pastoral ratings given as part of the report but instead rely on the curriculum and teaching quality scores. This increases the importance given to curriculum development and teaching and learning within the school at the expense of pastoral, which can become behaviour management instead.
If your SLT machine is broken down into areas of responsibility where each deputy has a little set of titles in parentheses after his or her name, the person with pastoral will have a huge job to ensure that the other (dare I say more glamorous?) roles shine that bit brighter. After all, who deals with behavioural issues: Mr or Mrs Pastoral or the Teaching and Learning leader? Who then is likely to get ahead: the firefighter hitting the wall or the glam-rocker scaling the ladder? The OECD ‘Improving School Leadership’ project of 2008 advocated reducing the burden on principals through distributed leadership but did not foresee the disjointed approaches that would spring up as responsibilities in SLTs were defined, ringfenced and extra cogs were added.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are schools that have been able to build an alternative purpose of student development through ecology, sporting excellence or creative enrichment. These are the schools that are positioning themselves differently, either through choice or necessity based on those education providers around them. Their focus on wellbeing and holistic development is more than lip service - school counsellors and psychologists are represented on SLT while PE directors are included in their own right alongside the creative departments' head, rather than to also look after some titled area of responsibility.
So that leads me to my point: what if we can totally adjust how we look at senior leaders' roles? Restructural engineering will happen based on an honest appraisal of what the school leadership wants, including over the long term (Fidler, 2002). That's not to say every school will need or want to change, or that it's a case of sacking people holding those positions in SLT that will disappear.
Let's tease it out a bit further: inspectors around the world are looking for student achievement, quality of leadership, teaching, assessment and curriculum, student personal development and wellbeing, all in an innovative environment. You’ll notice I’ve arranged these in a particular order, as the student outcomes wrap around the part that adults are responsible for in an allegory for feeding the core to shine at the surface. After all, how do schools show that they have a high-quality curriculum and so on, if not through the ways that students perform – academically and socially – for the observers? Of course, we could actually mean what we say and consider Wiliam’s work; improve ourselves as leaders in order to allow teachers to flourish.
Curriculum coherence across phases and with assessment closely linked to demonstrate progress and celebrate achievement (plus the obvious building towards requirements at GCSE and A-Level) will allow staff to buy into the restructural engineering – Kotter would be proud. This ownership and intimate subject knowledge should increase teacher quality alongside meaningful and relevant CPD. Tying it all together emphasizes the quality of leadership. The leadership again affects the standards set for pupil development and wellbeing, which reflect back into student achievement as a successful outcome that can be easily measured.
Of course, this is an overly simplistic way of thinking about how elements of schools interact with each other and doesn’t take account of the external factors that affect students. However, I hope it shows that all moving parts are connected; to try to package leadership into small fiefdoms does a disservice to pupils, teachers and even those who have the titles. How can future executive leaders see strategy if they have only been accustomed to tactics? How can those cogs see the other part of the machine? Restructural engineering of SLT to be more than just areas of responsibility will bring effective change if we look at student and parental engagement, wellbeing and success as important drivers and make sure all our leaders are responsible for interacting with the elements: make them our clockwork angels rather than bricks in a wall.
Alan Robinson is an Assistant Headteacher at a large all-through school in Abu Dhabi. Initially trained as a primary teacher at Stranmillis University College in Northern Ireland many moons ago, he has now experienced the joys of teaching English to amazing students from around the world. A former political researcher, Alan also teaches A Level UK Government and Politics. Follow him @RobinsonAlan