Malcolm Groves - Leadership for Tomorrow: Beyond the school improvement horizon

This book is about and for school leaders who understand that they must live and lead in overlapping, often conflicting, and frequently ambiguous and uncertain worlds which we broadly choose to characterise as the worlds of today and tomorrow and who want to be better able to do that. It is also for anyone who in any way holds school leaders to account, as well as those who may look to lead the schools of tomorrow.

It is the result of nearly a decade of thinking, research, and observation of leadership practice which we have undertaken in a range of settings. We have written up some of this experience previously in a series of pamphlets called The Beauchamp Papers, developed for those school leaders who were involved in establishing a new research and development network of schools in England under the name Schools of Tomorrow. We have drawn on their work in writing this book. Whilst the book is focused on changes within the English educational system, we hope that the lessons derived from this will be of interest to leaders in other school systems.

The five leaders featured in this book have been the subject of intensive study over a number of years. Each has been the subject of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with at least one of the authors on more than one occasion over a three-year period (20132016), as have members of their leadership teams. School documentation has also been examined. In some cases, the views of other stakeholders, including students, have been sought. In addition, the work of two of the leaders has been the subject of more intensive study and research over a longer period as part of a doctoral thesis completed by Malcolm Groves at the University of Warwick.

What we have attempted to do here, however, is to draw all this thinking and practical experience together into a coherent whole. We have sought to project the meaning and implications forward into a new phase of school improvement, in the hope that this will assist others, both in the UK and internationally, engaged in leading or wishing to lead their schools beyond todays limited school improvement horizon.

All school information is correct as of December 2016.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, leaders of schools in England have been caught up in an almost bewildering vortex of swirling cross-currents and riptides as national policy has veered first in one direction, then in another. The forces which have given rise to this instability are, though, not unique to one country. They are better understood as part of a much wider phenomenon, even though some responses may be peculiar to English politics. In general, we cannot seem to agree on the purpose and rationale of our education provision.

Education is a significant example of an essentially contested concept. These, according to Gallies definition of the phrase, inevitably involve endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users (1955: 169). For Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas (2015), this dispute in education is characterised as being between three groups. The romantics (roms) are so defined because of their belief in the innate goodness of children, who, by virtue of this innate quality, have no need for didactic teaching or adult authority. The traditionalists (trads), on the other hand, are so called due to their view of teachers as respected sources of culturally important tried and tested factual knowledge which they pass on to children and then test receipt of through formal examination. A third group, the moderates (mods), Claxton and Lucas suggest, reject this simplistic duality, understand complexity, do not believe in quick fixes or appeals to nostalgia, and so think, tinker, and explore so as to better understand the nature of learning. This book is essentially written from a mod viewpoint.

Educational discourse abounds with polarising spectrums traditional or progressive, academic or vocational, skills or knowledge, and many more. This often contested theoretical space is also inevitably the territory in which school leaders exist and live, and through which they must move, having the direct responsibility to chart a course in the best interests of the young people in their care.

We believe, though, that there is now something more fundamental happening to education than suggested by these long-held, strongly argued debates. We think the present upheavals are in fact symptoms of a more terminal problem with our present concept of schooling, designed as it was to serve the purposes of different times and often reflecting the mindset of an analogue, pre-digital age.

A good analogy to help understand this can be borrowed from the energy industry. According to Curry and Hodgson (2008), the challenge of achieving a sustainable energy supply can be conceptualised using the lens of three different horizons (see energy needs. These might include, for example, solar and wind power, hydrogen cells, biofuels, and changing consumption patterns. Such solutions are currently still experimental, are not yet proven, may be contradictory, and none are yet to scale or fully tested. However, at some point in the future, a new way forward will emerge from this experimental cauldron to supersede the unsustainable status quo.

Between these points lies another conceptual horizon, termed the second horizon, falling as it does between now and the future. This is the space in which leaders try to make sense of and navigate between the failing, unsustainable present and the as yet uncertain future, in order to create a meaningful future for their organisation, and, in the case of schools, for those in their care. For one big difference between running a school and a running an energy business lies in the fact that what school leaders do and how they do it directly shapes individual lives now, as well as impacting on the futures those individuals are able to create for themselves.

Figure 1: The three-horizon model (Curry and Hodgson, 2008: 2) Reproduced with kind permission of the Journal of Futures Studies

The parallel of the original model for education leadership is uncanny. As Claxton and Lucas (2015) show, there is a strong body of opinion which recognises that our present concept of schooling in terms of its purpose and our understanding of quality are reaching the end of their useful life. There is, as well, a range of alternative thinking going on, frequently small scale, unproven, and often on the basis of individual enthusiasms. Think perhaps of studio schools, some free schools, or project-based learning (PBL) amongst many other initiatives.

But for a school leader, there is never going to be a completely clean slate from which to start, a day in the future when everything can begin afresh and be wholly reconstituted from the ground up. There are always real children to be educated today, who have a single best shot at their own future. There will always, legitimately, be government expectations to meet, although these may be more or less helpful. So leaders of change have no choice but to build their future plane in the sky as they fly it, rather than work on it in its hangar.

For these leaders, the role of leadership is therefore not confined simply to responding to the short-term demands of today, driven by government accountability alone. Leadership must mesh this with a clear vision of what is needed for tomorrow and a determination to find practical and effective ways to start moving towards that within the constraints of today.