Why top-down initiatives in education sometimes fail…

[Jaye Richards]

An interesting letter in a recent edition of the Herald (Tuesday 23rd June) provides a much more objective view of the recent graduation of Scotland’s first teachers qualified to teach Mandarin, and the Confucius classroom ‘hub’ schools set up to further the teaching of Mandarin. In the letter, Prof. Stuart Picken argues that if Scotland had been serious about its desire to develop trade and cultural links with China, the opportunities have existed for many years, and in fact, it’s really Japan which is far more important to our economy that China anyway, through inward investment into infrastructure and trade. He further argues that when one compares Scotland’s education system (underpinned as it is by a philosophy of non-competitive group and social collaboration) to that of China which rigidly pushes an extremely competitive agenda for life, Scotland is doomed to be an economic backwater by comparison.

Now I’m not sure I agree with Professor Picken’s analysis here, but it opens up a wider point for me, anyway, about the nature of the Scottish educational establishment, which is characterised by top-down management and hierarchies which promulgate a system of expensive white elephants, under-funded initiatives and vast sums of money being poured into the pet favourites of the prevalent political colour. How many teaching posts could be funded if these combined initiatives and events were either slimmed down, properly managed or axed ? and how much more of an impact would this have on learning and teaching ?

Sheila Lawlor, writing in the Guardian is advocating this as a way of paying teachers higher salaries in return for better qualifications…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/22/teachers-social-mobility

I think the time is approaching when we need to take a long hard look at how the total education slice of the financial pie is spent, especially on non frontline services which don’t have a regulatory or statutory function. The same test could also be applied to other sectors in our society such as the health service, social work, and the uniformed services. Michael Lipsky coined the phrase, “street level bureaucrats” to describe what he felt were the ordinary folk on the ground, walking the streets, on whom successful policy change and adoption was, in his view dependent. Those who actually implement and carry out the changes. He was arguing (translated to education), as was Terry Wrigley (2008) that without the consent and acquiescence of teachers, top-down policy is bound to fail, or at least struggle to gain acceptance. Good leadership is vital if we are to achieve consensus and acceptance of the need for change in our schools. Michael Fullan rightly, in my view stresses the importance of emotional leadership setting the tone in which change can take place, particularly if one agrees with his assertion that behaviours change before beliefs.

The following quote is one of those I’ve harvested from somewhere but forgotten to reference (So if its yours, I apologise for using it without acknowledgement). It says more about our education establishment and its pet projects and national bodies than I ever could, and much more surgically too..

“Government projects in education fail because they are conceived ‘top down’ by bureaucrats who forget that they have to be made to work by humans on the ground. When you set systems against the grain of human nature you fall into totalitarianism – consequently failure at some point in the future is all but guaranteed”.





References



Fullan, M. (2007) The New Meaning of Educational Change. Routledge, London.

Wrigley, T. (2008) School Improvement in a neo-liberal world. Journal of Educational Administration and History 40, 2. 129- 148