Vital Connections
NZEI Principals group, Nelson
Cathy Wylie
21 November 2013
Genesis of the book
• What difference did Tomorrow’s Schools
make? – 24 years long enough to test a
new system
• Why hasn’t it led to more progress on the
issues it was expected to solve?
• What needs to change if we are to more
successfully tackle these issues?
Expectations
• “It will lead to improved learning
opportunities for the children of this
country. The reformed administration will
be sufficiently flexible and responsive to
meet the particular needs of Maori
education”
– David Lange,
• foreword to Tomorrow’s Schools
In 2012
• “This will require lifting achievement
across the education system and in
particular, addressing system failure of
learners who are Māori, Pasifika, have
special education needs, and/or are from
low socio-economic backgrounds”
• Hon Hekia Parata, Minister of Education
A Cautionary tale
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School self-management began in 1989
No gains in student performance
No reduction in inequality of outcomes
Increased competition between schools
Increased fragmentation
Challenges for today’s schools
• Greater than at any time in NZ education
• Expectations of:
– Engagement of all students
– Qualification and pathway success for
almost all
• Schools as key to economic & social
development
• Schools as separate institutions more
open to query
Before 1989
• Latitude at the school level
• Latitude in the classroom
– Schools often not operating as single
system
• Intertwining of support, knowledge
circulation & building & ‘bureaucracy’
• Inspectorate as catalyst and connector
• ‘Education family’
OECD Examiners’ report
1983- primary
NZ sophisticated approach to learning not
matched by
– In-service training
– Support for teachers to base practice on
evidence (e.g., for Maori students)
– Standards for recruitment of primary
teachers
– Teacher:student ratio
1983 OECD examiners’ report
– secondary
 NZ comprehensive school ideal undermined by
academic examinations
 General acknowledgement of issues caused by
examination backwash
 No consensus or urgency
 Fragmentation of examination boards & syllabus
development
 Insufficient professional development
 Changes needed to be at the political level
The issues leading up to
Tomorrow’s Schools
• Secondary schooling – qualifications,
growing expectations
• Māori underachievement & provision
• Relationship of school & ‘community’
• Insufficient funding of professional
development
• Generic public service & Treasury rules
for approval of everyday school decisions
Tomorrow’s (& Today’s)
Schools
• Diagnosed core issue around education as:
– Lack of school flexibility & accountability
• Capability waiting to be freed
– Separating policy & operations would ensure
schools became properly independent
– Choice would improve accountability
• Parental choice of school
• School choice of its support
What was lost
• Interconnections
– Circulated knowledge & confidence
– Built new knowledge & resources
– Identified & nurtured talent
– Policy informed by operational
understanding
• Work on school development
• Joined-up work on secondary qualifications &
curriculum
• Curriculum review etc
1990s – the lost decade
• New framework for school self-management takes the
attention & energy
– Sir John Anderson’s advice to government:
• proper resourcing and support for the new curriculum and
qualifications framework is more important than the drive for bulk
funding – putting all of a school’s staffing & operational funding into
one grant
• Capacity for school self-government not universal
• New Zealand unique in the OECD countries in having no
intermediary structures between schools and centre
Ignored.
• Lack of coherence among government agencies
– Lean staffing
– Minimal role for regional Ministry offices
– Education Review Office focuses on compliance
The 1990s
• Schools were on their own
• Sense of competition undercut expectations of
clustering or sharing
• ERO the watchdog and scold
- ‘accountability’ learnt as compliance
• Entrenched the ‘self’ of self-management
• Showed powerlessness of policy Ministry in
relation to improving school capability
Steering at a distance – the
2000s
• Welcome
– focus on capability development & joint
work
– focus on more evidence-based approaches
and inquiry
– provision of useful assessments – including
assessment in learning
– A more ‘evaluative turn’
– Investigation of ‘personalised’ learning
Also important
• Professional development – national
coherence but focused on individual schools
& practice
• NZ Curriculum
– Manner of its development
– Inclusion of pedagogy
– Better initial support
– Asks schools to work as collective cultures
More collective cultures
• Use of student ‘data’ as currency of teacher conversations
• Sense of progression across years
But still difficult to:
–
have time to work productively with colleagues
• Only 57% of primary teachers & 28 % of secondary teachers have
sufficient time to work together to plan teaching & discuss student work
–
–
observe colleagues
learn from teachers in other schools
Unevenness in extent to which schools are learning cultures
Riding the challenges
• Far better base for teaching & learning development than
had 25 years ago
• Most of this has come from joint work
– NZ Curriculum, practice+research knowledge & networks
• It is still unevenly experienced & shared
• Development needs persistence
– It needs to be well-founded so that encouraging results are
likely
– It needs collective inquiring cultures.
But – no real changes to the
‘building blocks’ of the system
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•
•
•
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Sense of competition sharpens
Funding & property remain pre-occupations
Voluntary school clusters are unreliable
Still too easy for schools to deteriorate
Uneven gains – too reliant on individuals & school
situations
• Insufficient use of knowledge
– Reinvention of wheels
– Limited bridges for operational-policy work
Benchmarking Educational Leadership
Practices survey results
20
Quality of school leadership
• School scores reflect school context –
lower where ask is greater
• School scores unrelated to years of
principal experience
– Essential to have ongoing principal and
school leaders support & development
Fragmentation
• Increasingly clear that some issues beyond
ability and authority of individual schools to
resolve
• Recent loss of schools-government trust
– Danger of return to 1990s defensiveness
• Need collective frameworks and shared
responsibility
Self- management = selfhandicapping
• Cumulative cost of
– stand-alone schools
– thinning of schools-government relations
– thinning of infrastructure to support
educational & school development
• Increasingly harder to address deep issues &
ensure public funding can be well spent
Where to from here?
• How do we reconnect schools with the
support and challenge they need to keep
developing?
• How do we develop more sharing and
building of knowledge that improves learning?
• How does government work with schools to
address the problems schools cannot solve
on their own?
Learning from other systems
& research on change
• Productive roles of:
– ongoing relationships
– formative accountability (based on sharing
of knowledge, focused on inquiry)
– shared responsibilities
– joint work
– something more than sum of parts
Reframing the system
• Connection rather than separation
• Coherence
• Principles would be:
– Knowledge building & sharing
– Capability development
– Relationships of challenge & support
– Shared responsibility for student learning
opportunities & outcomes
New relationships for a true
learning system
• Self-management within a collective
– Porous rather than fenced (off)
• Reframe school-government-community relationships through
– creation of districts
• Work framed within underlying principles
• Role for larger community
• Reframe policy-operations relationships through
– Real evaluative inquiry at national level
– Take shared responsibility seriously
Reflective questions
• If you were designing our education
system now, how would you ensure that
No school was left behind?
• What would the Ministry of Education do
and how would it work to ensure schools
had equal amounts of challenge &
support?
What can you do to build a more
collaborative way of working?