_ L __ ._.. . ..__ ..-_. ._

.

t

INDEX

PART I - A SYSTEMS VIEW OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND ORGANISATION Page

Objectives 1

. Summary 1

e SECTION A: THE SYSTEMS APPROACH 2

. -!

; .

SECTION B: INPUTS 8

SECTION C: THROUGHPUTS 11

SECTION D: OUTPUTS a5

SECTION E: THE FEEDBACK LOOP: THE INSTITUTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT 21

RECAPITULATION 24

SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS 24

GLOSSARY OF TERMS 29

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES 30

PART II - THE PROCESS OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

SECTION A: INTRODUCTION

SECTION B: THE.PROCESS OF PLANNING

SECTION 'C: THE PROCESS OF ORGANISING

SECTION D: THE PROCESS OF STAFFING

SECTION E: THE PROCESS OF DIRECTING

SECTION F: THE PROCESS OF CONTROLLING

SECTION G: THE PROCESS OF EVALUATING

RECAPITULATION

FURTHER READING

PART III - THE AREAS OF MANAGEMENT CONCERN

Objectives

31

32

35

37

42

44

46

48

49 -

.._

50

51

51

Summary

* Introduction

Pag

SECTION A: THE MANAGEMENT OF NON-HUMAN RESOURCES

SECTION B: STAFFING: THE MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES

SECTION C: THE MANAGEMENT OF THE LEARNING PROCESS

SECTION D: HEADTEACHER: EXTERNALLY-ORIENTED ROLES

RECAPITULATION

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

52

58

64

67

73

75

76

PART IV - MANAGERIAL ROLES AND SKILLS OF EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP

SECTION A: DECISION-MAKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING

SECTION B: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT STYLE

SECTION C: MANAGING CHANGE

SECTION D: MANAGING CONFLICT

SECTION E: EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT

SECTION F: INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

SECTION G: EFFICIENT COMMUNICATION

SECTION H: PUBLIC PRESENTATION

78

88

101

110

117

124

136

140

REFERENCES

P A R T I •

A SYSTEMS VIEW OP SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND ORGANISATION

PART I - A SYSTEMS VIEW OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION

Objectives

When you have completed Part I you should be able to:

(i) understand the use of open systems theory in depicting the relationships between an individual school and the local and national environments of which it forms a part ; .

(ii) conceptualise the internal management of the school in terms of

- resource inputs

- throughput processes

- output analysis

- client feedback.

(iii) apply (i) and (ii) above to an analysis of your own school or to a group of schools for which you have administrative responsibility;

(iv) distinguish among those areas of school management/administration over which, as a head teacher/principal or an administrator, you have no funda­mental control or for which you share control with external individuals/ bodies/agfencies, and those areas over which you have significant and funda­mental control, with a view to

- considering how effectively you are currently managing these areas

- to what extent, and how, you might significantly improve the school's performance in these areas.

Summary

This Part starts with the assumption that a school' is not freestanding institution or a closed community which can function entirely independently of its surroundings. You are introduced to Systems Theory which is then used to con­ceptualise the relationship in terms of resourcing inputs; organisation management of those resources; outcomes, their effectiveness and consequences; institutional efficiency; and the school's accountability to the community.

You are then asked to use the analytical concepts provided to gain a fuller understanding of how your own school or administrative unit functions and to consi­der to what extent you have significant control over its functioning and how and in what areas you might make genuine improvements in its effectiveness. and effi­ciency.

SECTION A:\ THE SYSTEMS APPROACH

In most countries, schools do not often exist in isolation as completely self-contained organisations. Rather, a school is likely to be found in a local commu­nity from which it draws its students. That community will often be part of a larger region or district with a regional or district administrative centre which oversees the running of a number of schools. In turn, the regions or districts will generally come under the oversight of a national or central organisation which is responsible for running the nation's educational provision. The whole arrangement - individual schools, regional and central administration - is often referred to as a system, in dictionary terms 'a set or assemblage of things connected, associated, or interdependent, so as to form a complex unity'.

Systems Theory is an attempt to conceptualise the ways in which the system's 'things' are 'connected, associated or interdependent'.- A systems perspective of an educational system rests on a number of assumptions:

1. Any organisation - a school, an administrative office, a factory or a shop-can be compared to a living being, drawing upon that environment in order to survive and in turn affecting the environment itself. The relationship between the organisation and its environment constitutes a system.

2. Because the organisation interacts with its environment, the system can be described as open.

3. The system is composed of a number of sub-systems, or components, parts which have an open relationship with one another and with the total environ­ment which forms the system. See Figure I.

FIGURE I: The system, its sub-system and its environment.

2

The concept is movable , backwards and forwards, because each component has a boundary and you may conceptually move the boundary to comply with your own perspective. For example, if you are a regional or district administrator responsible for overseeing the running of a large number of schools, your perspective would probably be the one depicted in Figure II , with regional administration as the system, the school as a sub-system, and national educa­tional provision as the environment, or supra-system.

FIGURE II: A regional administrator's perspective of educational provision.

If, however, you are employed as the headteacher or principal of a secondary school which is in turn organized into academic subject departments or student year groups, then your perspective might well be that depicted in Figure III, with your own school as the system, its administrative units as sub­systems, and regional administration as your environment, or supra-system.

3

FIGURE III: A school headteacher1s/principal's perspective of educational provision.

Another way of viewing the basic systems relationship can be expressed by a simple black box structure, as depicted in Figure IV.

N INPUT : \

1 V 1 1

1

The Environment

BLACK BOX

THROUGHPUT: Processes, Regulations, Procedures

FEEDBACK LOOP

OUTPUT : * * > ^ Learning ^ "»«v Development -^"^ Exam Passes -- '

1 ^ * * 1

1

1

FIGURE IV: Systems activity as expressed by a black box structure.

4

The environment provides the system with INPUT in the form of resources , i.e. anything which is useful and/or necessary to get -the job done. In the case of a school , INPUT would have to be thought of as including teachers , students, funds, books and materials, equipment, buildings, heating and light­ing (if necessary), etc.

THROUGHPUT is the term used to describe what happens to the INPUT in the system, the processes, regulations and procedures through which the INPUT passes. The system is often described as a 'black box' because some people argue that what happens in the system is largely invisible, like the contents of a black box.

The system produces OUTPUT -or, some educationists would claim, OUTCOMES-which in the case of a school can be thought of as learning, qualifications, personal relationships, and so on.

However, OUTPUT does not pass into the environment without effect. If students are being prepared for examinations and they do particularly badly, the reput­ation of the school may suffer, and the headteacher or principal may be challenged to offer some kind of explanation. There will tend to be a general fear that the THROUGHPUT process is itself inadequate or inappropriate, that students have not been properly taught and prepared. We can be fairly certain that there will also be some kind of formal or informal scrutiny of the INPUT. The students and their parents may well complain about the teaching received, and there may be claims that the teacher INPUTS jyere unsatisfactory. The teachers may insist that the pupil INPUTS were particularly poor and that this year's group of examinees were very much less able than their prede­cessors. On the other hand, if the OUTPUT involves a considerable improvement of examination results, the school may well gain in esteem and parents may come to regard it as an institution in which they would consider their child­ren especially well provided for. The consequences of OUTPUT, and the ways in which those consequences impact on the environment and possibly on sub­sequent INPUT we call FEEDBACK.

The kind of negative or positive OUTPUT discussed above- thus goes out into the environment and creates some kind of impact. If the educational provision allows parental choice, poor feedback may well reduce parental -support, and vice versa. Therefore any organization needs to be sensitive to its OUTPUT and to the kind of FEEDBACK which results. In very simple terras, one might say that a school as an open system exists to provide " opportunities for students to acquire the skills and knowledge they seek in order to fulfil their own needs and wants as members of the community.

Another assumption of systems theory is that what actually happens in any system is primarily a function of forces existing in the environment, rather than the other way round. Therefore, while the school subject department or year group may influence the school as a whole to some extent, it is the school, and the policies advocated by the headteacher or principal, which determines what happens in the subject department or year group. Similarly, the school itself is influenced primarily by regional administration, and regional administration by national educational provision. The system is primarily reactive, rather than proactive, and most initiatives in any orga­nization or sub-system come from outside that organization or sub-system. The comparison in systems theory is, I think, less to a machine than to a living organism: a plant, an animal, or a human being. Some systems theorists go even further and suggest that an open system such as a school is not only very much at the mercy of its environment, whether it is hostile or suppor­tive , but that like any living organism the school has a tendency towards its own eventual destruction, i.e. ths system, like all living- creatures,

5

is moving ever closer towards death. In many national systems, of course, schools are from time to time closed, either because student demand has fallen or because there is" general disquiet about the school's performance. Alternatively, a school or a group of schools may be reorganised or merged.

Systems theory suggests than open systems survive, when they actually do survive, by responding to environmental demands. Of course, some environments are more turbulent than other environments, so that system survival is easier in a stable, placid environment. Moreover, not all environmental demands actually emerge as output, but the open system which totally ignores environmental demands will event­ually become extinct.

Figure V provides a dynamic response model of a national education system. It suggests that an education system is embedded in a total environment which involves:

1. The intra-societal , or national, environment: all of the individuals, organiz­ations, enterprises who make demands on the system: examination boards, government agencies, students, resource providers, employers, regional admi­nistrators , etc .

2. The extra-societal, or international, environment, the larger political, economic and social systems within which we function, as well as those organ­izations, suctr as OECD or UNESCO, which seek the influence the development of education' around the globe.

Demands, accompanied by support, converge along the input path of the system. Of course, inputs have to be converted into outputs, and not all inputs will actually make it through the system: all have to win support from authorities, the decision-makers in the system, and they also have to run the gauntlet alon the demand channel, and the channel itself consists of gateways at which gate­keepers are placed. Gatekeepers are positioned so as to prevent the system from becoming overloaded with demands, and to reject those demands which might be inju­rious and detrimental to the system itself. Upon occasion the headteacher may act as gatekeeper; or a senior teacher or teachers' union may do likewise.

What this kind of conceptualisation provides is a vision of the way in which each of us is embedded in a vast system within which we are under repeated pressure to meet the expectations of often contradictory groups and invidividuals. For example, the headteacher of a school may be under pressure from teachers -as well as their professional organizations,if they are so organized- to reduce class sizes, and under pressure from regional administrators to increase class, sizes. There may be encouragement from central government to improve the extent and quality of technological education, but insufficient resources available (including teachers and hardware) to effect real change. Indeed conflicting demands and inadequate resources are likely to beset the administrator at all levels of the system.

Also, of course, the conceptualisation depicted in Figure V demonstrates the influence which an international recession or a currency crisis can have on the headteacher of a small primary school serving the educational needs' of a farming community. We are all of us part of a vast global system in which our particular responsibilities are affected by larger forces and pressures , and in which we in turn are likely to affect the lives of individuals we scarcely know or have never met.

6

m

f C

O

CD

o

a

<o e

I O

«

OC

u

-^ «**

» e

e ^

^^

11 >

••

9

*"

s u >

O

_¡ C

z u

en

z »

ta) S

^

ï en

a >• -« «5

> O

Z

S

o

s. M

«

H-

Cd

< O

Z

S

— 3

Z O

<

'Si

X

ta) (d

S

W

Z H

en

> en

> fr--1 < Z O

•S

i s ta) a. en

s O fr-U

U

a. 'S

i z

en ION

< »—» « en

en

< < z o

en

en

ta) ii.

o

s a

\j

• u

H

tal » fr-Z ta) Z Z e ta] > O

U

o

* >

•

f «

\JL**

\>C

D«

** 1 •»—

c C

\ O

CD

V

o

B

V3

C

1 O

ca c

c«»-^

» »

x e

UJU

J

fr ;S

< u

en

-

z 5-

tal «- e

--:

en o

>

c en

_! < Z O

*-6-Z B

ta) e-z

Ü

*"4

Z o

z o u

ta) J < Z o *-4

fr-< z ce ta) fr-Z t-4

en

Z ta) fr­en > en

en

z ta) fr­en > en

< —

u o en

j < z o I--fr» < z s ta) fr-z

• u fr-tal m

O

en

ta) Z

' 3 • O

U

ta) O

FIGURE V: A Dynamic Response Model of a National Education System

7

A systems perspective thus attempts to make us aware of how we fit into the larger picture. It also makes clear the need for what we may call- across-the-boundary , or boundary management. As a headteacher, principal or local administrator you will almost certainly have to manage downwards, i.e. to supervise and direct the activities of your subordinates. However, because you work in an" open system which is bounded by its environment, you will also need to manage outwards across that boundary and to take account of the pressures and demands which converge upon your system. This means not merely managing your superordinate, or boss, but also managing the demands of those individuals who do not fit into the same professional hierarchy but who use your system and can therefore be expected to urge their needs upon you. These are such people as the employers . who receive the output of your school: are they satisfied that your institution has prepared its students for the jobs they will eventually undertake? And parents: to what extent are they satisfied with your assistance in helping their children to fulfil their ambitions? And higher level educational establishments which enroll the products of your school: do receiving colleges and universities consider your students fully trained in terms of knowledge and skills? And so on. No manager or administrator can afford to ignore the demands directed to him from across the boundary, or to fail to manage those demands adequately, without encountering serious difficulties.

At the same time, we need to remember that the boundary concept is itself movable, and that where we conceive the boundary is a matter of personal perspective. For a classroom teacher the boundary may be his regular teaching space; for a principal, the school as a whole. On the other hand, the boundary concept can change from day to day for a single individual. On Tuesday the principal may feel compelled to defend his school against the negative criticisms of parents , and so think of the boundary as the institution itself. However, on Wednesday, the principal may attend a regional meeting run by regional administrators for the principals of all regional schools, and here the same principal may side with fellow principals from local schools to argue the needs of their area against those of other areas within the region, so that the boundary will encircle the area consisting of several schools rather than his own school.

What the above kind of boundary adjustment indicates is that the whole systems concept is essentially a metaphor, a comparison which enables us to conceptualise the structure within which we work. If taken too literally, like most comparisons, it can lead to something approaching absurdity. Yet, it has become deeply embedded within most professional teaching cultures. Even people who are not particularly aware of systems theory are likely to refer these days to inputs and outputs , or to talk about student or employer feedback. Increasingly, the systems approach is being seen by many as useful in helping us to conceptualise our working worlds and the ways in which, within those worlds, each part relates to every other part and to the totality of all the parts.

Up to now, I have been dealing largely with descriptive theory, and it might now be helpful if we look more closely at some of the implications of that theory and use it to analyse the school system along four dimensions: inputs, throughput, output and the feedback loop.

SECTION B: INPUTS

Most people would argue that what one puts into any system determines to some extent what eventually emerges as output. I noted above that poor examination results would be seen by some in terms of poor students and by others in terms of poor teaching (or possibly even both), but in any event all of these instances might be viewed as poor input.

8

Therefore, most education systems are organized so that those responsible for the system seek to establish guidelines for controlling inputs, with reference to both quantity and quality. The major inputs may be seen as:

1. Buildings and equipment. The system may be organized so that there are form­ulae for determining the extent and range of provision for learners in different kinds of learning situations at different levels of learning: so much space per-^student for general science, but possibly a different provision for advanced chemistry students. Or different levels of provision for science learning in general and for ordinary classroom activities. In a centrally organized system, such arrangements may be uniform across the country, but in systems where there is a strong degree of regional autonomy there may be striking variations across the country.

2. Teaching staff. Most systems will define formal qualifications required by teachers upon entry to the profession. At later career stages further kinds of qualifications and/or experience may be considered essential. There is also likely to be a specified level of teacher resourcing; one teacher per X students in Y subject at Z level.

3. Non-teaching staff. In addition to teachers, many school organizations will also employ other kinds of workers: administrative and clerical staff; cleaners and caretakers; library personnel; catering staff; technicians; etc. These kinds of post are less likely to specify qualifications and/or experience, but, again, the level of resourcing is likely to be controlled.

4. Students. Apart from initial entry to primary school, for which any ooten-tial learner may be eligible, advanced schools and colleges are almost certain to specify some kind of qualifications: almost always a minimum age, and frequently the completion of a course of study or the passing of examinations in particular subjects with particular grades, or some kind of competition.

5. Funding. Since schools are also likely to require some funds for additional expenses, there is likely to be a formula for determining financial resourc­ing , usually on a capitation (per head) basis and with some variation f-or older and more advanced students.

All of the above five kinds of inputs may be defined as formal inputs, usually organized and administered bureaucratically from outside the school and represent­ing a series of control devices operated by the providing agency, either central government or a regional body to which responsibility has been devolved. Teachers are likely to argue that increased resourcing inputs will lead to improved output, while administrators accountable to their overseers and under pressure to keep resourcing levels down are likely to take an essentially different view. Still another focus of disagreement is likely to be the availability of particular resources: both teaching and non-teaching staff can be expected to have established conditions of service, so that staff will be available for so many hours for so many .days for so many weeks.

However, apart from formal inputs, schools will also be constrained and affected by informal inputs.' For example, anyone employing a subject specialist teacher in a full-time post can calculate the effect of the input in terms of available teaching hours and cost, but the quality and nature of that input cannot be gauged from a piece of paper or a list of qualifications. Is the teacher lively or dull? Is the teacher effective? Does the teacher have class control problems? Is the teacher reliable, efficient and conscientious? What kinds of attitudes does the teacher bring to his task? Is he traditionalist in his approach?

9

Is he up-to-date in knowledge and techniques? Does he get on well with students of the age group he will be teaching? Does he get on well with peers and superiors? •Is he troublesome or helpful?

Inevitably, what we often designate as personality -the sum-total of the indiv­idual's personal impact- is also both a resource and an input. Unfortunately, while it may be easy__tp calculate the level of teacher resourcing and to establish guidelines for qualifications and/or experience, no one has yet devised a generally accepted formuia or procedure for predicting human behaviour with any accuracy. This is true not only for teachers, but for non-teaching staff and students as well. In the face of such difficulties, many educational systems simply give up any attempt at controlling human resourcing inputs and admit individuals in order of application, by lottery or through some kind of formal posting arrangement, possibly supplemented by inspectorial and/or informal assessments. Other systems place great importance on ensuring that the fight person is put into the right slot and have recourse to other procedures. The British system, for example, commits a great many of its resources to elaborate interview arrangements in which professionals spend many scores of hours talking to short-listed groups of poten­tial staff and students. There is considerable disagreement as to whether resources (staff time and effort) so employed actually lead to more effective input controls.

Still another form of input control involves self-generated resources, an arrange­ment whereby the institution seeks to raise additional resources, often with the aid of revenue-generating activities. Parent groups or community activities may lend unpaid support to increasing and/or extending resourcing provision, and some would argue that this is beneficial activity for both the students and the community.

Of course, all of the above examples are derived from a stance which is centred on the boundary as located at the point where the school and the larger environment meet. However, within the school itself, the headteacher or principal is also likely to be concerned with input control in determining which teachers take which classes in which rooms and at whi'ch times, as well as which subjects are taught to which students.

When difficulties are detected, the manager -whether within or without the school-will almost certainly seek to remedy things at an early stage by altering inputs: replacing or retraining staff, expelling students, seeking better funding, more space and/or equipment, increasing staff, etc. Much of management activity is thus concerned with controlling and/or increasing inputs, so that in systems terms inputs become a major focus for headteachers/principals and administrators. When teachers strike and/or work to rule, the argument from the one side is usually that the resourcing levels are inadequate and from the other that resource avail­ability has been exhausted.

One of the major problems is that there is really no evidence to show that increas­ing the levels of resourcing inputs necessarily leads to improved or more satisfac­tory output. The best teachers are not always the best paid teachers. Classes which learn best are not always the smallest classes. Better equipment and more spacious rooms do not always result in improved student performance. Consequently, from an administrator's point of view, input control may well be about getting the most out of the least, while from the (teaching or non-teaching) employee's point of view increasing resourcing levels may be desirable for a whole range of personal reasons. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that inputs should so frequently be the point at which contention surfaces in education among those involved at the professional end of the learning process.

10

SECTION B: THROUGHPUTS \

Output, however, while it may be affected by input, must also be to some extent influenced by throughput. Many would argue that human beings act and interact quite differently in different kinds of organizational structures. There is certainly a growing body of research evidence which suggests that people do respond differently in différent physical settings. For example, in a one-to-one relationship and seated at an angle of 90*, interview applicants are most likely to respond openly and honestly to their questioners. On the other hand, in a formal arrangement where he is being seen by an appointing panel of 10 to 15 people, the-" same individual may respond quite differently. Similarly, whether an. administrator chooses to speak to a visitor from behind his desk or to seat himself next to the visitor in an informal arrangement will also influence the conduct of their meeting. Many would make similar claims about the invisible structures in an organization: the system of command and control, organizational arrangements, job descriptions -the internal management structures. Such advocates would say: if you want to change the way your staff work and interact, change the management structure. Therefore, we need not be surprised that in recent years a great deal of debate has been focussed on institutional throughput arrangements , generally along the following lines:

1. Management structure and organization. In some educational systems, the headteacher or principal may be be expected to duplicate a standard and common management structure, eg. a deputy, a number of subject specialists, several teachers with defined pastoral responsibilities. Such arrangements may be consistent across the entire region or even the whole country. In other systems, the head of institution may have considerable leeway as to how he organizes his staff internally, and he may even try one system for several years and then modify it two or three times in the light of exper­ience and changing demands. Probably the most common - form or educational organization tends .to be hierarchical and bureaucratic, with decreasing numbers of individuals at ascending levels of status and responsibility, and with function (responsibility for a particular subject or group of students) as the organizing principle.. n recent years, some schools have shown an interest in alternative forms of internal organization, such as

-the so-called matrix structure, where below top management level responsib­ility is shared and is organized partly in terms of project (eg. courses) and partly in terms of resources. There are also many hybrid arrangements which reveal characteristics of both approaches, and in so doing indicate the continuing interest of educators in internal institutional organization and the conviction that such organization is itself an important element in determining output.

2. Learner organization. For more than the past two decades, much controversy has centred on how the students in a school ought to be organized. The most popular approaches have been:

a. Streaming, where an attempt is made to identify the student's general learning ability and to group students in terms of such ability. Some have claimed that there is no such thing as general learning ability and that the same student may have high learning ability in language and how learning ability in mathematics, or vice versa.

b. The latter point has led in some instances to setting, in which learners are grouped according to ability in particular subjects on a subject by subject basis, so that the same student may be in the top set in mathe­matics and the bottom set in language.

\

c. The difficulty of organizing sets- in subjects with small numbers of learners Í and teachers) has sometimes led- to banding as a compromise measure in which, having organized learners into (say) six groups accord­ing to general ability, one then mixes learners from the first two (or three) groups, etc. Banding is thus a rougher kind of streaming arrange­ment .

d. Other teachers have argued that any kind of streaming, setting or banding is both artificial and potentially discouraging to the learner, for which reason they have suggested mixed-ability group, i.e. simply grouping learners randomly with no pretence at determining their general or spec­ific abilities.

e. Yet another group of advocates, particularly concerned with groups of young children at primary school level, has argued for replicating the domestic family scene by means of family grouping, whereby groups of children varying in age by two, three or more years are all taught toge­ther, with the older learners assisting in the learning of their younger brethren.

f. Still others have insisted that the fundamental organizing principle for learners should be neither ability nor age but social group origins , for- which reason bussing has sometimes been advocated, so that children who normally reside some distance from each other in extremely varied (often rich and poor) neighbourhoods are (when necessary) transported (eg. by bus) to a school some distance from where they live so that they can mix and learn with individuals from different backgrounds.

All of the above can be seen as examples of a belief that internal organiza­tional arrangement, what we have here called throughput , play a central role in determining the nature of output. Some educationists and politicians have gone even further and argued that internal school organisation can play an effective part in social engineering, i.e. in the long term it can change social attitudes and alter the nature of society, as students emerging from the 'system come to occupy adult positions and roles. Certiinly such attitudes have tended to underlie the advocacy of mixed-ability grouping, family grouping and bussing. Others, however, have taken the argument still further and suggested that' students learn not only from formal structured classroom arrangements, but also from the school environment and from pro­fessional managerial arrangements. Therefore, feminists have tended to argue that it is essential that women should be seen by students in positions of considerable responsibility and high status in order to counteract the generally subservient role of women in most societies. Similar arguments have been advanced by members of racial , ethnic and sexual-preference mino­rities. All of these groups rest their arguments on the belief that through­put arrangements are a major determinant in output quality. Some would claim, quite legitimately, that there is no research evidence to substantiate any of these claims authoritatively, while others would argue that altered throughput arrangements have surfaced too infrequently and over too short a period of time for firm conclusions to be drawn.

Timetabling. It might be argued that management structures and classroom composition are not the only determinants of output. Hence the stress laid by many teachers on timetabling as a major factor influencing the outcomes of institutional activity. Are there some times in the week or the day when students are more susceptible to learning? When their energy levels are higher? tyhen they are most likely to be motivated to work? Some teachers would certainly claim that in teaching, who and what may be important, but when cannot be ignored entirely. For example, some primary school teachers

\

would certainly claim that in teaching, who and what may be important, but when cannot be ignored entirely. For example, some primary school teachers reserve mornings for basic skills and afternoons for craft/creative/physical activities. Many teachers might insist that the final afternoon of the school week represents a period when most students are thinking of home rather than school: hence the importance attached by some to timetabling. In some educational systems, the timetable is left entirely to the organizational skills of the headteacher or principal, or some other individual designated to undertake timetabling. Other systems, however, establish regional regional or national timetables which are adhered to uniformly across the system and which are intended, particularly in examination competition, to give all candidates the same set of advantages and/or liabilities.

Monitoring. Throughput activity is not solely the consequence of organiza­tional and procedural arrangements. Management structure, learner organization and timetabling may be fully established by the beginning of the annual academic session, but what happens within the structure, organization and timetabling is equally important: hence monitoring, an activity that goes by a whole range of titles -performance appraisal, staff evaluation, teacher assessment- but is essentially involved with measuring the effectiveness of those who are paid to do their jobs (sometimes including non-teaching staff, as well). The idea is that just as students are from time to time tested/appraised/evaluated to determine what they have achieved and/or failed to achieve, and how best to help them over the latter, so the same process ought to be applied to all non-students in the organization. In some systems, monitoring and appraisal are even extended beyond teachers arid non-teaching staff to include the principal and his/her deputy.

The entire business of monitoring has proved most contentious in some educ­ational systems. Some teachers would insist that the essence of their pro-fessionalism lies in their not being monitored, and that just as doctors and lawyers deal in a one-to-one basis with their clients , so the teacher-should not be subject to scrutiny from outside individuals and/or agencies. Others would insist that such exemption from scrutiny is inappropriate to teachers paid from the public purse and hence very much in the role of public servants. In actual fact, all teachers are, at one level or other, subject to a degree of- monitoring. The major devices may be summarised as:

a. Formal inspection. Some educational systems employ teams of general and specialist inspectors whose function is to observe teacher performance and to evaluate what they perceive. Inspectors may appear without warning or may make an appointment; they may come in of their choice, or they may be called in by headteachers or principals. The inspectors' verdicts may be kept confidential , delivered to the head of institution and/or teacher; they may be used purely in the interests of judgement and in determining future postings, or they may (also) from the basis of some kind of assistance programme designed to enable the teacher to overcome his deficiencies. The nature of formal inspection means that it is possible for teachers to be monitored during the throughput process, so that any deficiencies in that process are capable of adjustment and modification.

b. Peer-group appraisal. Inspectors often encounter considerable disapproval - from teachers, and for reasons varied, and complex. Some teachers would claim that any inspector is by definition cut off from classroom activity, and thus unsuited to judging the teaching of others. If inspectors appear without warning, it can be argued that they have witnessed an untypically poor lesson; if they appear by prior arrangement, it may be claimed that they have witnessed an untypically good lesson. In any event, the problems and difficulties of one institution may differ from those of another. In consequence, some systems have developed a peer-group approach.

13

A typical example might involve the teacher nominating an observer of his choice, with the teacher's immediate superior nominating a second observer of his own choice; both observers might then be expected to witness the teacher's performance in one or more lessons, to draw their several/collective conclusions and to put their findings to the teacher and his immediate superior.

Student evaluation. Other observers have claimed that both inspectorial and peer-group appraisal are inadequate when it comes to teaching. The argument is that teaching itself constitutes a service-industry, and that in any service industry -whether it be catering, hairdressing or tailoring- the only real judge is the client. Therefore, since students are the teachers' clients, it is students who ought to pass judgement on their teachers. To this end, a wide variety of approaches have been evolved:

i) Summative evaluation. This occurs at the end of a course, session, term or semester and enables the student to summarise his feelings. The student may be asked to do so in a formal, face-to-face group arrangement, either confronting the teacher or not; or he may be given a questionnaire to fill in, with opportunities to comment on the teacher's preparation, speed in returning marked work, promptness in attending lessons, willingness to explain difficult material, availability outside normal teaching times, ability to meet course objectives, etc. The questionnaire may require student identification, or it may be anonymous.

ii) Formative evaluation. Alternatively, .or additionally, the student may be asked to provide evaluation as described above (in i) at regular periods throughout the course, so as to enable the teacher to modify his presentation/activities in the light of student res­ponse .

Management evaluation. Apart from employing internal inspectors, peers or students to assist in appraisal, the system may alternatively (or also) leave appraisal to the teacher's immediate superior.

External moderating. Where a course of learning results in a formal examination similar to that undertaken in other schools, an arrangement involving external moderators may be employed. Under this approach, the moderator visits a number of institutions to observe similar/ident­ical activity so as to establish uniform assessment of students. In so doing he is more than likely to uncover evidence about teachers , which can then be incorporated in either formal and/or informal reports made available to the teacher and/or his superior(s).

Informal appraisal. All of the above (a to e) arrangements involve some measure of formal organization. Whether they occur or not, it is inevit­able that some kind of informal appraisal will result among teachers themselves, the headteacher or principal, students, and non-teaching staff. Such appraisal will almost certainly circulate by word-of-mouth and anecdote and may from time to time result in delegations/letters/ personal complaints. Whether such evidence is valid has been much debated. Nevertheless, one suspects that every headteacher or principal would claim to know who the good/mediocre/bad teachers are.

Some combination of all or some of a to f may be employed.

14

Monitoring activity is an attempt to modify throughput in the direction of improvement, either during the throughput sequence itself and/or upon its repetition. Whether such improvement occurs is problematical. It is highly unlikely that merely alerting teachers to their deficiencies will result in improvements , unless it is idleness or carelessness alone which underlies those deficiencies. Where, as is perhaps more often likely, the teacher lacks the appropriate skills , a support system and a programme of staff development may be required if any change is to occur. This means, of course, additional resource inputs -eg. time-, money, the assistance of others- are probably essential. Some systems link anticipated improvement to incremental pay increases and/or professional advancement. Some national systems also employ teachers on a trial basis with the teacher being required to remedy inadequacies before going onto a permanent contract.

However, monitoring is not only about marginal or unsatisfactory performance, but additionally about exceptional and excellent performance. One of the difficulties associated with formal monitoring systems is that those who are shown to possess exceptional and above-the-average abilities may well come to expect that their achievements merit some kind of recognition, either enhanced remuneration and/or professional advancement. In some systems, regular monitoring is linked to periodic evaluation sessions (often known as staff development interviews) where the teacher and his superiors ronfront his professional achievements.

In many ways, monitoring activity is something which exists in varying states of development across world systems. An upturn in the birthrate, a national development programme and/or greater social expectation of more education may well find any system confronting demands greater thajn it is able to satisfy entirely, so that the pressure for monitoring may well either subside or not surface. At the other extreme -as the birthrate falls and/or when provision is greater than demand- there may emerge a growing feeling that monitoring is essential, and a consequent upsurge in monitoring activ­ities.

In systems terms, monitoring is not something which can be plucked out of the air. Monitoring demands additional resources. Inspectors have generally to be paid. Peer-group appraisal involves time and effort. Student evaluation necessitates the collection, analysis and consideration of the data itself. At the same time, monitoring is a way of signalling to the environment itself that the organization is concerned about its clients and values their satis­faction. On the other hand, the organization needs to avoid expensive navel contemplation, while at the same time accepting that he who passes judgment (such as a teacher) on others (such as students) cannot hope to escape altogether a similar kind of judgment.

SECTION D: OUTPUTS

Inputs and throughputs represent areas of activity which the system and its managers/administrators may well seek to control, or at least to influence, with a view to improving outputs*. Outputs, on the other hand, are not really susceptible to control , but to analysis. If the input tells us what you had to start with, and the throughput what you did, the output tells us what you achieved, or what you failed to achieve. Outputs suggest measurement.

To start with, we have to confess that the term output is somewhat contentious in education. The problem is that output itself calls to mind manufacturing products. An automobile plant takes machinery, raw materials and people; employs them in a manufacturing process; and produces, as output, cars. What, however, does education produce?

15

Some members of the general public might well argue that schools at least produce examination passes. However, not all students in all schools actually take public examinations , and among those who do take such examinations , not all achieve passes Some teachers would say that it is possible for a very idle student to do little throughout the year and yet still pass an examination because of his native abil­ity, while a much less able student struggles throughout the same period of time, improves his knowledge/skills dramatically, but still falls below the standard required for an examination pass: which learner has achieved more? One student may struggle with a foreign language while another, with a parent whose native language it is, learnt the second language 'in the cradle', so to speak. Other teachers would say that much of what students learn cannot be examined anyway, or that the real value of what they have learnt will reveal-itself only with the passage of much time. How can one examine improved' ability' to relate to other people, self-confidence, maturity, sensitivity, 'compassion for others? And so on. Is the output of education really measurable?

There is no single or simple ans'.ver to the above question. In some educational systems, particularly those dealing with the field of post-compulsory education, the argument is advanced that too much time is actually spent in measuring the wrong things. If, so the claim is made, education is not really a manufacturing industry, but a service industry, then what we need to do is to measure client satisfaction: hence student evaluation. If, the argument goes, you are running a restaurant, you cannot actually measure whether the food is good, but you can measure the reactions of your diners: are they satisfied with the food? did they have enough to eat? was the quality acceptable? the price right?

There is clearly an area of unresolved conflict here. Not everyone in education is willing to .accept that client- satisfaction is sufficient, that student eval­uation tells the whole story. Equally, not everyone is prepared to allow teachers to argue that what they have achieved is invisible, immeasurable, unquantifiable and incapable of being judged: that is too much of a blank cheque. Therefore the argument continues.

Some systems analysts of the educational scene have suggested that we should talk not of outputs but of outcomes , not of results but of consequences. Nevertheless, very few educational organizations which provide award-bearing courses are able to escape scrutiny of their examination results for very long.. If the pass rate suddenly plummets, there is concern and consternation: if it rises as dramatically, there is elation. Few schools can avoid trumpet-blowing when their examination successes are spectacular, and probably most members of the general public are interested in the kind of quantifiable results which exam pass rates provide. After all , such pass rates are closely linked to the individual life chances of the students themselves and can lead to secure, well-rewarded employment, or the reverse. Therefore, like it or not, most schools need to scrutinise their own results, despite private and individual objections. And such scrutiny leads, inev­itably, to comparisons; and comparisons lead to league tables; and league tables to gr_oss simplifications.

It is clear that the quality of inputs make a considerable difference to outputs. The student from a stable home background with financial security and parental support obviously starts with advantages unknown to the student who has an unstable background, lives in poverty and has to endure uninterested parents. Good teachers also make a difference. So does the.ability to deploy teachers effectively within the school and to organize the teaching and learning advantageously. Some schools are better.resourced than others. And so on ...

16

The problem is that it becomes difficult to determine where a disadvantage is used as an excuse. Both students and teachers, as well as schools, with very obvious disadvantages nonetheless sometimes make spectacular achievements. How does one distinguish among inadequate input and inappropriate throughput arrange­ments and the capacity to overcome both?

Of course, one can do so only informally. At a formal level, schools are increas­ingly subject to output analysis and to the kinds of comparisons which follow. More recently, there has been a growing interest in relating inputs to outputs, and in some particular ways:

1. Unit costs. One area of interest involves establishing the cost of—putting a single student through a particular course, and then comparing that cost with costs for similar courses elsewhere. When one does this, it becomes apparent, for example, that some schools are much more economical than others, so that the need for an explanation arises. That explanation can rest on a large number of factors. Table I attempts to analyse unit cost differences among eight regional areas in England and to take into account the kinds of disadvantages learners may suffer from: being the children of immigrants, and hence very likely experiencing English language diff­iculties; deriving from family backgrounds with low incomes, poor housing, split families, large families, etc. What this Table demonstrates is that increasing resource inputs does not lead to simple output improvement.

2. Student-teacher ratios. Unit costs are a somewhat contentious area of compa­rison for other reasons. A school located in a cold part of the country and hence requiring much more energy to heat may well be more expensive to run per unit than one located in a warm, semi-tropical area-, old buildings may be less efficient and more costly in terms of energy conservation; old buildings may also require frequent repairs; and so on ... However, since most of the cost of teaching centres on staffing, and teaching staff in particular, one convenient shorthand device is to talk in terms of the student-teacher ratio, or the average number of students per each member of the teaching staff (usually not counting the headteacher or principalK Table I reveals, for example, that in district A, there were 1 .3 students for each secondary school teacher, whereas in district F there were IS. 3 students. Such differences in the English situation arise because -each district has some autonomy at present to deploy as many teachers as it wishes and/or can afford.

However, both unit costs and ^student-teacher ratios are concerned primarily with inputs, and one needs to go somewhat further if one is going to attempt a real input-output analysis. Figure VI depicts a systems conceptualisation of an Eng-ish college as devised by its principal. In this instance, the Principal believes that his responsibility is to use public monies effectively and, in his view, this means using them in the service of good examination results.

Table II sets out an analysis of '0' Level examination courses, establishing the number of people who enrolled during the previous and the present years, the per­centage who passed and the number who entered (which suggests that some left before the course was completed), the national average pass rate, the total number of teaching hours required by the course, and (finally) the number of teaching hours per pass. What this reveals is that for. most subjects between 1U and 31 teaching hours were necessary: German ns_eded 59, and art 178. Over the next two years, both of the latter two subjects disappeared from the curriculum. The Princi­pal's argument was that with scarce resources his institution could not really afford to mount such 'costly' courses, and that the well being of a few individuals could not be allowed to take precedence over the needs of the majority.

17

er daprivatioi Ê

e

e

? e

%

m

a Factors s

2 esul

<r=

.

nation 19

E

m

VU condary

s ing par 1

A"

ce

II "5

=

s

a

5»

otal ail actor«

K —

il«M

M

VH

PU! in

iii Ä

¡S

c

O U

.S

u

•• -ff

fit ÜI1 ¿

2S le

g

§£

2*2

5 2

z*

| l Ä«

"25

2

-SÏ

Z es

•

»» e

o

"

<-

oS

«

"M

° »A

-

Mm

snji Itig

l ¿

Jf]

•= ñ

£ S 3

u

. -ï

-o

e

c

«

s

" Q

Q

«.S

5

•w

u

¿ CO

a

ï«

5«

Ï«

s«

s«

* .

Si«

o

* s*

s«

s«

* W4

601

! n

"1

«o !

2 o

a

2

es

_ (N

^ •"

V

V

en

n

S)

A

o

p<. CN

•"

^*

* <

116

S;

1 |

A

' A :

ÍS

<S (M

O "1

k

A

wo

^ f»

«s

es

«N S

,5 A

l i

A

O

' —

; «s :

O

A

en

e T

o f»»

es

»

"! t

(S

A

es

»•

• -es

: •

1

«

, n

j a

; e

¡ «s

i A

i

va

es

S)

*r

es

«s

* ve

, A

' «s

: v>

^ ^

i

«»

(N

: es

i r>»

i es

»

•>

<e

»

es

es

en

»-„. es

o

^

^ ^ es

O i •

• ir«»

: r»

i «

n : P

»

<o

¡<o

<o

A

n

!i* te

(S

—

eo

f*

ea

! (fi ! —

es

es

f»»

> A

;io

i—

i—

¡

m

¡o

, A

!(»

, (N

A

iC

N ! A

.e

n

,C

B ;C

P ir»

i

r- A

'I

1 M

1

!

1

II

r>» i •

- i m

•"

i

a

o

«s

(A

: (O

(s

, a

«s

»

! !

'

i i

i 1

1

1

û|

a

il c CS ' r«.

ts

es <

* 1

1

O i r»

I

- '1

»

va

A

*

va ie

1

I A

A

«n

«s

•»

~°

en

va

*•

ta

! en

es

es

n

j va

T

en

! es

r»

r«.

• es

; va

: £5

, es

, es

i (0

1

1 1

en

i <c

A

i A

l = i "* 3 es

<9

A

A

e

A

(S

•"

A

en

es

es

A

A

a

A

en

A

r«.

^ en

rn

~— n

<

-3

SA

S." 3

2.2

> c

.<u

, j

TABLE I: Analysis of unit costs, examination results and factors of

socio-economic deprivation among nine English Local Districts

18

a - =

-z

—

i >>

c —

> —

1K1 A

i) 3]

•-< *J

a —

a Q

, -i

"3 •¡-¡3

3

3 3

-J

o o- en

c

o a

—

3 m

•o

a

•;

< >

<

03 O

C

— c

.a •*->

¿a s !

->

-

I-*-

I 3°

a 5

c en

o

s

>-

-,

>-

s Í. a

.o 3

en

H>

-

-4 (D

-

(0 J

J

•H

« C

3 U

3

O

o o» a "a

E*J

: 3

(0 i-H

-P

£ en

FIGURE VI: A Systems Depiction of a College as a Processing Plant

19

Teaching lloura per I'aas

Total Course Teaching Hours

National Average Pass Rate %

Course Success Rate %/Number entered

Enrolments

80/81 79/80

Year of Course

Course Title »i M

;\ •<

« -

f« r«

rj >"i

.1 (u

\ rt

>

ci

CM

ec

sn

cB

OO

oo

os

rio

oc

no

io^

'B

&

¡r¡

¡ >

> s

c

CM í

> o

r» >

J", -i n

r»

—

—

»n

.<

«n

^f

lH

n-

»n

ní

-(

CM

C

M

r^O

NtO

sflfiG

niM

ifliniflin

cn

— CD

CM

U

I

o rj »

N «

a o

e í

o »

i á Ï

í Î

v

c

iflCM

ifiairiœ

en

ifiino

—

o>

o

eo

o

n

7;»

< n

n o

n -( ^

H

n

ií) r»

CM

—

r

(\in

»ia

3if

li')c

in>

oii)

03

)^

o

(0

o

NN

N«

na

n«

fi

H

« CM

in •

*

CM

—

^•

^^

^«

HN

i-

t-

fM

HH

^M

-^

M

**

—

'0* Levels

IH o logy Chemistry Commerce Economic History Sociology English Language English Literature French Geography Geometrical Drawing German Human Biology Physics Mathematics Art Additional Mutha

(Pure and Further Pure)

Additionnl Maths (Theoretical Mechanics)

TABLE II: analysis of Ordinary CO') Level Examination Activity in terms o

Enrolments, Class Completion Rates and Examination Passes.

20

It is worth noting that the percentage pass rate in German was higher than the national average, but the number of students in the class was low;-while in art, there were both a modest number of students and a pass rate significantly lower than the national average.

There is little doubt that many teachers would find this kind of simple input-output analysis presented in purely numerical terms deeply offensive, and many such individuals might wish to make out a case for minority subjects and for the educational needs of people with minority interests. Nevertheless, in many count­ries there is also a growing interest in looking at the story told by the figures , particularly bearing in mind the kind of economic constraints many countries now have to face. Moreover, so long as teachers continue to fail to reach a consensus about what it is they conceive as output or outcomes, and how to detect either instance, we may anticipate continued interest in the simpler, though cruder, methods presented here.

SECTION E: THE FEEDBACK LOOP: THE INSTITUTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

In the above discussions of inputs, throughputs and outputs, the underlying concern may be said to exist in the first place because institutions such as schools are accountable to the environment which fosters and sustains them; or, in systems terms, which provides them with resourcing inputs and receives their outputs.

In fact, the relationship of inputs to outputs is a frequent de'finition of effi­ciency, and without an environment there is no necessary reason why a school -or any other organization- should be concerned to be efficient. At a domestic-level, many of us spend our leisure time in activities where our performances are decidedly inefficient , but we do so because our concern is primarily to satisfy our own needs rather than to demonstrate our efficiency. Schools of the publicly funded variety are not able to enjoy such luxury. In a state education system, schools are accountable because their resource inputs are provided by others , and in order to exist such schools must demonstrate that they have used their resources in ways conducive to public satisfaction.

A major problem which you might wish to consider under the general heading cf feedback is who are the school's clients? Different national education systems might offer as answers some or all of the following:

1. Parents. Since parents often make considerable sacrifices to facilitate the education of their children, and may be expected to show a continuing interest in their children's development, it might be argued that parents are the essential users of the school. In systems which allow parents some choice as to which school they send their children, both attracting the interest and holding the support of parents might be very important.

2. Students. Clearly students are alone in having direct experience of the whole educational process, whereas the groups listed in 1 above and 3 and 4 below merely encounter the consequences of that process. It would also •be difficult to argue that education was not intended for the benefit of students , in which case one might raise questions about how far students should themselv'es be actively involved in determining some or all of the educational experience. If the learner has choices to make among subjects, courses, assignments, should the student have some say in those choices, or should others make them for him?

21

3. Employers. Where most school leavers go into the world of adult work, those who eventually employ them (parents, industrialists,\ businessmen and -women 1 may well come to see the school in terms of its effectiveness in training their own future workforce. If ëx-students arrive at the workplace without the requisite knowledge/skills, employers may well become severely critical of the school's performance.

4. Other teachers . Where students leave one school either to go on to another school or to a different kind of educational establishment, the receiving teachers may well raise questions similar to those encountered from employers: is the student sufficiently well prepared to enter this instit­ution? Once he has arrived, is he able to perform as effectively as fellow learners from other schools? Often it is teachers themselves wo are most critical of colleagues involved in education and training at a prior level.

So long as a school's outputs of the human variety are themselves satisfied and manage to satisfy their parents and those institutions/employers who receive them, the school may be relatively indifferent to issues such as efficiency. However, once negative output begins to emerge, the situation may change radically. Some­thing will indeed have to be done: if the primary school leavers are judged by their receiving secondary schools as having been inadequately prepared in the fundamentals; if employers feel that new recruits represent a much lower standard of attainment; if there is general public disquiet about the behaviour of students and school leavers; if further and higher education institutions reject increasing proportions of a school's leavers. Such events may well lead to a general loss of confidence. Taxpayers and voters may express concern; so may elected officials, civil servants, public administrators, inspectors and journalists. A school cannot help but impact on the community; what it has to endeavour to avoid is negative impact.

There may well be instances in which those who castigate the school are themselves inadequate or simply guilty of mis judgment. Nonetheless the school will have to take responsibility for putting wrongs right. It cannot afford to ignore its detractors entirely. The school may well choose to make a distinction between efficiency, the relationship between outputs and inputs, the actual cost of an achievement, and effectiveness , the extent or quality of an achievement. Thus a school being criticised for poor results in examinations may insist that it is under-resourced, efficient in that it is economical, but deprived of the means of performing more effectively. A well resourced institution under threat of resource cuts may claim that its effectiveness is likely to be sacrificed in the interests of efficiency if> the threats materialise. One way or another, the school will from time to time need to confront its critics and take a defensive stance.

In some educational systems attempts.to involve lay members (sometimes even inclu­ding students) of the community with no educational training or professional qualifications have resulted in the inclusion of such individuals on formal boards , bodies, committees or councils which meet at regular intervals, often at the school itself, and which are charged -sometimes under the headteacher/principal's direc­tion, but in other instances with oversight of the headteacher/principal- with running the school to some extent. That extent may include involvement in the selection of staff, curriculum control, supervision or inspection, rendering of advice, and so on. Upon occasion such groups may play leading roles in the life of the school; in other instances, they may simply serve to ratify policy decisions taken elsewhere. In any event, the presence of such lay members is intended (in systems terms) to provide the school with community feedback and to alert the school to changing community needs and expectations.

22

The wish to be viewed positively by the community on whom it depends for support may increasingly lead the school to consider ways in which it can influence its public image before the needs for defense arises. In systems terms, the school may well try to impact on the environment, not merely to receive demands, but to anticipate them by making its own demands:

1. Where a secondary school receives the products of a number of primary schools , the secondary school may seek to establish formal arrangements with its 'feeder' schools: visiting primary schools to talk to pupils and their parents; providing tours of the secondary school for the same pupils and parents; offering open evenings or open days when parents can visit the secondary school and see it work.

2. The secondary school may well establish some form of careers education, offering advice to students about the sorts of job opportunities which exist, the kinds of qualifications needed, and the longer-term prospects of any kind of employment. The school may organize visits by local employers to talk with students and parents , trying to establish closer links and to ensure that the right kinds of educational and training opportunities exist.

3. Schools may themselves seek links with the kinds of institutions (other schools, colleges, universities) for which they are themselves feeders.

4. Schools or individual teachers may seek advice from representatives of validating agencies or government departments so as to clarify uncertain­ties, establish some kind of rapport and gain information.

5. Where the school identifies deficiencies within its non-human provision, it may press for additional resource inputs , or undertake fund-raising activities, encouraging support from parents and local community leaders.

6. Where the school detects deficiencies in its human provision, it may well initiate a varied range of staff development activities:

i) sending staff (including non-teaching staff) on both short, non-award-bearing, and longer, award-bearing courses;

ii) arranging exchange visits with other institutions and agencies;

iii) organizing 'in-house' training activities in the school, including reporting sessions from those who have benefited from the kinds of activities described in i) above.

7. The school may seek to advertise its own achievements, getting groups cf students to perform at local fetes, organising school entertainments to which parents and general public are invited, and even seeking the support of local journalists who might recount in their papers some of the school's more notable triumphs, such as exceptional levels of examination passes, sporting attainments, or the career and educational progress of departed students .

In all of the above ways, as well as many others, the school may well decide not to be passive about its output, but to try to influence the way in which the larger environment views that output, and to do so actively and purposefully. The systems analyst may well remind us that what happens in the school is largely the consequence of pressures and demands from the larger community, but .few schools will necessarily choose to be passive in the face of such pressures and demands. Once again, the systems view stresses the inter-relationship of

23

the system's components: no one can survive in isolation from others, and each of us requires support and sustenance.

RECAPITULATION

This Part has been concerned with developing a conceptual framework for viewing the individual school as part of a large, inter-related and complex system, and in demonstrating the relationships existing between the parts and the relation­ship of each part to the whole. The conceptualisation is intended to assist you in understanding how your own activities relate to those of all the other indiv­iduals who impact upon your work and/or upon whose own activity you impact. Such a conceptualisation is intended to offer you a kind of internal map upon which to 'locate' any particular destination about which you are currently concerned.

The Self-Assessment Questions which follow are intended to reinforce your under­standing of this conceptual framework by directing it towards an analysis of your own national/local system, your own school(s) and your own role in relation to that system and the school(s).

SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS

Perhaps the best way of assimilating the conceptualisation described in the pre­ceding pages is to apply it to your own educational system. The purpose is (i) to review the material in the same order in which it was presented, and (ii) to use-the material to analyse the organisation within which you work.

A SYSTEMS APPROACH

(For headteachers and principals)

1. Who, beside yourself, is involved in deciding what happens in your school?

2. What (if any) regional or district bodies are concerned with oversight of your school?

3. What (if any 1 national or central bodies are concerned with activity in your school?

4. To what extent (if at all) do you feel that the work of your school is determined by those described in 2 and 3 above?

5. To what extent (if at all) are you or your colleagues able to influence the involvement of those described in 2 and 3 above?

(For educational administrators)

1. Who, beside those in your organisation, is involved in deciding v.-hat happens in schools?

2. To what extent (if at all) are headteachers and principals able to determine school policy?

3. What (if any) national or central bodies are also involved with your own activity and the activities of schools?

24

^. To what extent (if at all) do you feel that the work of your schools is determined by those described in 2 and 3 above?

5. To what extent (if at all) are you or your colleagues able to influence the involvement of those described in 2 and 3 above?

(For both headteachers/principals and educational administrators)

1. What is meant by the .concept of a movable boundary?

2. In the course of your normal duties, where do you generally conceptualise your own work boundary as lying?

3. To what extent (if at all) do you consciously involve yourself in moving the boundary? Are you able to put yourself mentally, in the position of a subordinate or superior and see the system from that person's boundary perception?

4. What demands are currently being made of your school(s)?

(i) From whom do those demands come?

(ii) To what extent are you likely to be able to meet those demands?

5. Within your school(s), who are the gatekeepers in systems terms, those designated to prevent the schcol(s) from becoming overloaded with demands and from needing to confront potentially harmful demands?

SYSTEM INPUTS (For all trainees)

1. In your educational system, who determines, and on what basis , for each school:

(i) the sire, nature and range of buildings

(ii) the kind and amount of equipment

(iii) the provision of books and materials

(iv) funding

(v) the size and nature of the teacher workforce

(vi) the size and nature of the non-teaching workforce

(vii) the entry of students?

At a more informal level, how (if at all) does your educational system attempt . to control inputs centred on personality, professional attitudes and values, work habits, personal and political commitments, ethnic back­ground, sex, age, religion, etc. - i.e. all of those personal characteristics which distinguish one human being from another?

3. If there is any attempt at controlling the inputs described in 2 above, does it also extend beyond the workforce to the student body?

25

SYSTEM THROUGHPUTS (For ail trainees)

1. How is (are) ycur school(s) organised managerially? and administratively?

2. To what extent (if at all) is it possible for the headteacher/'principal to modify the management/administrative structure?

3. How are students organised within your school(s)?

(i) Who has determined that organisation?

(ii) To what extent (if at all) is it possible for that organisation to be modified, and, (if at all), by whom)?

A. Who determines the ' timetable in the school(s)? —

5. What monitoring is undertaken (if any) in your school(s) with regard to the efficiency and effectiveness of:

(i) the management/administrative structure;

(ii) the organisation of students in learning groups/situations;

(iii) timetabling arrangements (including distribution of teaching groups, teaching spaces, teaching times)?

6. If the arrangements referred to in 5 above prove inadequate or inappropriate, how, in what ways, and tc what extent can you modify such arrangements?

7. What monitoring of teacher effectiveness takes place in your school(s)?

(i) Are the present monitoring arrangements adequate and appropriate?

(ii) If not, how might they be improved?

8. Where deficiencies in teaching performance are detected, what arrangements exist for overcoming such deficiencies?

(i) Are such arrangements adequate/appropriate?

(ii) If not, what alternative approaches might be undertaken?

(iii) Does your schools) have a staff development policy?

(a) If so, is that policy effective? If not, how might it be approp­riately modified?

(b) If not, what steps might you take to develop a clear and consistent staff development policy?

SYSTEM OUTPUTS (For all trainees)

1. What do you personally consider to be the outputs (or outcomes) of your school(s) throughput?

2. To what extent is the answer you have given to 1 above shared by colleagues throughout the system?

26

3. What kind of oucput analysis (if any» occurs in your schooiis)? If any,

(i) To what extent (if at all) is that analysis appropriate and adequate"

(ii) If not fully, how light that analysis be n-.cdified/improved? How approp-• riate would any of the techniques described in the text be?

4. What kind of input/output analysis (if any) is undertaken in your school's i"

(i) To what extent (if at all) is that analysis appropriate and adequate?

(ii) If not fully, how might that analysis be modified/improved? Hew approp­riate would any of the techniques described in the text be?

5. If no analysis of the kind referred to in 3 and *t above is undertaken in your school(s), to what extent (if at all) do you consider such analysis would be appropriate or useful?

THE FEEDBACK LOOP: THE INSTITUTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT (For all trainees)

1. In what way(s) does the output of your school(s) impact on the larger environment?

2. Which of the following groups do you consider the clients of your school(s)?

(i) • Parents

(ii) Students

(iii) Employers

(iv) Other teachers?

3. To what extent (if at all) are the group(s) identified in 3 above representee, in the running of your school(s)?

(i) If such arrangements exist, are they satisfactory? If not fully, how might they be modified?

(ii) If none of these groups is involved, would it be appropriate to involve one or more*?

4. What, if any, steps are taken in your schooiis) to impact on the environnent deliberately?

(i) If at all, are such arrangements adequate and appropriate? If not, how might they be modified?

(ii) If not at all, would such steps be appropriate?

The above questions are intended to help you to lock at your own schooiis) Lp. the context of the conceptual framework developed in this Part. The implication, of course, is that inputs , throughputs, outputs and feedback are areas of system activity which ought to be kept under constant review by managers and adminis­trators, since they represent sources of information about how the system is functioning or malfunctioning.

\ 27

It may well be that in your national system, control over such areas is vested in individuals or groups remote from your immediate work place. Nonetheless, as an administrator or manager, it will be in both your own, your superiors' and your subordinates' interests that such areas be scrutinised regularly and that responsible individuals/bodies be kept alerted to the current situation.

With the conceptual framework here developed as a background, later Parts in this series will look in greater detail and depth at the kinds of managerial/adminis­trative activities here touched upon by necessity only briefly.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

The following ternis are commonly used throughout this Part as here defined:

demand pressure directed from the environment and/or fror?. within the system itself to obtain system modification (in input, throughput, and/or output)

effectiveness outputs or outcomes; or the extent or quality of an achievement

efficiency the relationship of outputs to inputs; or the cost of an achievement

feedback information about and/or reaction to the output of the system

gatekeeper someone whose role is to prevent the system from becoming overloaded with demands and/or to obstruct potentially damaging demands

input resources fed into the system

output the product of the system

resources system input, defined here as anything which is necessary and/or useful for enabling the system to function and to produce output, eg. teachers, students, non-teaching staff, buildings, heating, lighting, finances, books, materials, equipment, etc.

Staff development the process by which teaching and/or non-teaching staff are enabled to develop their knowledge/skills in relation to their work roles

system a set of" assemblage of things connected, associated or interdependent

throughput the processes, procedures, structures and regulations employed within the system to convert input to output.

2 9.

î

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

In relative terms , little has been written specifically for the educational manager compared to the volume of work produced for other management fields. Additionally, in educational management many of the basic ideas derive from work done -in quite different subject areas, so that the reader is frequently required to make adaptations to his own areas of interest.

With reference to systems theory generally, I have drawn upon the work of

Easton, D, A Systems analysis of political life, New York, Wiley and Sons, 1965.

Interested readers may also wish to read selectively through the anthology

Emery, F.E. (ed), Systems Thinking., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969.

and to consider,two books which provide very detailed analytical discussions of organisational systems approaches , and which are presented by the author as 'companion volumes':

Beer, Stafford, Brain of the Firm, Second Edition, John Wiley L Sons, New York, I98I.

Beer, Stafford, The Heart of Enterprise, John Wiley L Sons, New York, 1979.

Those seeking an alternative view to, and a critical argument against, systems theory might wish to look at

Silverman, David, Theory of Organisations, He.-.ne mann, 1970.

It must be said of all of the above works that they are not concerned with schools per se, but rather .with organisations in general.

Anyone wishing to concentrate solely on literature directed at teachers as managers might wish to consider:

Bennett", Stephen J., The School: an organisational analysis, Blackie , London, 197*.

which has particularly useful chapters on the environment and on school structure. A helpful general reader is

Bush, T. et al., Approaches to School Management, Harper L Row, London, 19S0.

which includes sections on the environment , the school as an organisation and the management of staff development.

30

P A R T II

THE PROCESS OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

PART II THE PROCESS OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

SECTION A: INTRODUCTION'

In this Part we look at the functions of the manager. At the end ' of the Part you will be able to list the major functions of management and apply them to your own work.

What we are discussing here is net what matters the school manager has to deal with - that is dealt with in Part III. Neither are we analysing the skills that the school manager needs to carry out his task - that is dealt with in Part IV.

What concerns us here is the nature of the management. What is it that the manager does which we can describe as the process of management and which is distinguished from all the other activities in which he may involve himself. We must remember that many activities of the school manager, during a typical day may be nothing to do with managing the school. Many head teachers spend time teaching, they may have to act as their own secretary opening the mail and writing letters, they may have to receive visiters and show them around the building and they may find themselves responsible for locking up the building or even, in an emerg­ency, cleaning the rooms and moving the furniture. All of this may be the only one who can do it, but is not management activity.

What are the Processes of Management?

Different writers have produced different lists but they are all talking about the same processes. We will us'e the following list and discuss each process in turn.

31

These processes do not necessarily follow in exact order in the practical cay-to-day business of rr.ar.agi.ng, hut there is a logical sequence to the process from the initial rnar.age.-r.ent process of planning to the final process of evaluating. All the processes, however, feed back on each other and affect subsequent actions. Thus problems that arise in. controlling activities might cause you to modify your plans, or information that emerges from evaluation might cause changes in staffing.

SECTION B: THE PROCESS OF PLANNING

Many people would see this as the management process par excellence, at the heart of the manager's work. In any organisation many people will be carrying out all sorts of tasks, both routine and complex, but someone has to be responsible for planning it all, and this is a key management function. Planning determines where the organisation is going and the general approaches it will use to get there. It is the coordination of activities towards specified objectives. The alternative would be the chaos of random behaviour. It brings order into what otherwise would be the disorder of individuals and departments fighting for their own separate ends. One of the problems with organisations that spend little time on planning is that the managers spend their time reacting to problems and situations as they arise. With planning, the manager can act with initiative, and create or develop situations as he wants them to be. Many head teachers and school adminis­trators never get out of the vicious circle of being constantly involved with immediate crises. Planning helps the manager shape the future. Planning is concer­ned with the future - not with the present.

1. The time Span of Planning

Plans involve commitments to various courses of action to reach specified goals. It is important therefore to plan only so far ahead as can be foreseen (as far as you can estimate ï and as is required by the planning objective. For example, planning a change of text books may require only a few weeks or months planning, the introduction of a new course in technology might require two or three years, and the building of a large new technical school would probably require several years to complete.

2. The Flexibility of Plans

The future can never be accurately forecast. Unexpected events always cause problems in the planning process. A change of government, a sudden shortage of finance, difficulty in obtaining materials, unexpected incompetence in key workers are among the things that might make the original plan unworkable without modifi­cation. In planning one is aiming at a moving target and can never be quir:e sure which way it is going to move. Thus planning nearly always involves adaptation along the way, and the longer the time span covered by the plan the more likely it is that adaptation will be needed. A key guideline in planning therefore is flexibility.

3. Levels of Planning

The higher the management level, the more time is likely to be spent in planning. The head teacher will be planning more -than his senior teacher, the area education officer more than .the head teacher, the national education officials more than the area officers. Lower level plans are more concerned with detailed immediate actions, and higher level plans will be more concerned with overall policies and general strategies. It is important therefore that lower level plans

32

(for example these of a Head of Department of Science- are dérivée from higher level plans 'for example of the head teacher or area education officer).

-i. Types of Plans

We are going to classify plans in two different ways. Firstly, we -.•••ill divide plans in standing plans and single-use plans. Secondly, we will divide plans into strategic and administrative.

n.1 Standing Plans

These are plans which are used over and over again and are only occasionally • modified. They include policies, procedures and rules.

Policies are general statements that guide decisions. For example, the school might have a policy of recruiting staff in such a way that there is always a wide age spread among them, or of recruiting roughly the same number of staff from the different ethnic races in the area. These policies would be derived from the goals or objectives of the school.

Procedures are guides to actions providing a high degree of regularity for a regu­larly occurring event. It is more specific than a policy. For example, a policy might be to save money wherever possible over the next three years. A procedure might be to check book and paper stock for unexplained losses every month, and to lock up valuable technical equipment when not in use. Procedures are used in the process of hiring staff. If the policies have been made to recruit an ethnic­ally balanced staff, then the hiring procedure will lay down how it is to be done.

Pules are specific statements of what can be and cannot be done. The only discre­tion is whether to apply the rule or not. An example of a rule might be that all. staff sign for equipment when it is taken out of store, and are personally respon­sible for it until it is returned.

'•i. 2 Single Use Plans

These are designed to accomplish a specific objective generally within a .relatively short space of time. An example of such a plan is a budget, which is generally planned, for expected expenditure over one year. The position of head teachers in different countries varied in their involvement with budgeting. They may be involved in drawing up the budget , or in managing it over the year , or they may hare nothing to do with it, and all planning of expenditure may be dealt with by the area education office. Single purpose projects may be set up - for example to make an inventory of the equipment of the school, or to plan, a series of staff-training days to cope with a change in the curriculum.

Plans can also be divided into strategic and administrative plans.

4.3 Strategic Plans

These are concerned with broad matters vitally affecting the development of the organisation. Good strategic planning takes account of external and environ­mental factors and has to make predictions about fairly uncertain events. Fore­casting always has built-in error so it is necessary to have very flexible plans and make frequent adaptations. Examples of strategic plans might be concerned with increases or decreases in the size of the school, large-scale changes in the curriculum, or in level and standard of work, changes in the policy for recruitment of pupils.

33

-.H Administrative Plans

This planning is concerned with malting the be s t.-3 ob you can, using your resources within the general strategic objectives. It is about detailed planning within the school so that goals are turned into action. There have developed a number of planning techniques in industry , some of which may be applied to the school , and all of which it would be useful for you to study if ycu have the opportunity because of the discipline it will give to your thinking about planning.

" One common system is known as PERT (Programme Evaluation and Review Technique) which is derived from another technique known as Network Analysis. To use PERT you follow these steps:

1. Define exactly the objective of the particular project..

2. List all the activities required to complete the project.

3. Work out the relationship between the required activities including critical sequencing (that is, what activities must be completed before another can be started).

4. Estimate the time required to complete each activity.

PERT has generally been used for large-scale complex activities such as rebuilding large railway stations while keeping them in use, but the principles can be used for any one-off event such as organising a sports day or a staff training programme.

Another system used in a number of schools and colleges is MBO (Management by Objectives). In this each member of staff agrees with his supervisor the objectives he will achieve over the next 12 months. Each objective is very specific, and in the view of the staff member is attainable. The time to be taken, the resources required., and if it can be quantified the level to be reached is established, and at the end of the year a review is undertaken to check on whether objectives have been reached and to set new objectives for the coming year. We could take as an example, a teacher who needs to develop the ability to speak in another language or dialect. This is set as one of his objectives for the year. The level he is expected to reach in his first 12 months is set, checks are made as to whether he has the time, and at the end of 12 months his progress is reviewed.

One of the most common types of administrative planning in schools is the timetable which is normally worked out before the start of the school year and gives to every teacher and pupil their programme of work. It incorporates a lot of planning decisions - how much time for each subject a pupil has, hew many hours a teacher works in the classroom, what subjects have lessons end-cn (often science for labo­ratory work), what subjects have shorter lessons scattered through the week (gene­rally favoured by language teachers). These planning decisions may originate with­in the school, the district or even nationally, but in most cases some detailed planning has to take place in the school; if only to decide which rooms a class has .

5. Exercise

To check that you have understood this section, answer the following questions:

1. What is the difference between planning and reacting? Give examples from your own school of each.

2. What is the general principle in deciding how far ahead to plan?

3*

Give an example fron your own school of a short-term plan and a long-t^rm plan. ~ \

3. Why should plans be flexible?

4. Explain the difference between standing plans and single use plans. Give examples of each from your own school .

5. Explain the difference between a policy and a rule.

ó. What kind of activity in your school might PERT or MBO be useful for as a planning, technique.

7. Explain the difference between strategic planning and administrative planning. Give an example of administrative planning in your school.

SECTION C: THE PROCESS OF ORGANISING

"Organising defines the part which each member of an enterprise is expected to perform and the relations between such members , to the end that their collective endeavour shall be most effective for the purpose of the enterprise."

(Alvin Brown, "Organisation: a Formulation of Principle")

We now look at the second process of management - that of organising. The manager as organiser is concerned with the following processes:

1. Determining the specific activities needed to accomplish the planned goals.

2. Grouping the activities into a logical pattern or structure.

3. Assigning activities to specific positions and specific people.

To put it another way, the# school manager has to decide what has to be done and who is going to do it. In nearly all organisations, including schools, the manager does not want to make a fresh decision every time a new task comes up. What he wants is a fairly permanent structure where staff knew what their job is and know that it is not likely to change much. So most teachers are assigned to positions - for example, Head of Mathematics Department, or Assistant Teacher in Geography, , and the activities he is responsible for flow naturally from that. Nevertheless, the head teacher or some other higher person will need to set up the organisation structure, and may need to make adaptations to it as circumstances change. There are two functions of the organisational structure.

Firstly, associated activities are grouped together in sections or departments, so that by breaking down the large staff into small units it becomes easier to manage. Just as an industrial firm will have divisions into production department, marketing department, personnel department, research and development department, so the large school will divide into the science department, engineering department, language department , etc.

Secondly, a hierarchy of responsibility is constructed so to whom he is responsible and what other staff he is in everybody will know what they should be doing and if they will be checked by their immediate superior.

35

that everyone is clear charge of. In this v.-ay-are net doing it, they

If you work in a large school or. in an education office, you should now try to draw an organisational chart showing its sections and lines of authority.

1. Problems with Organisation

It should be obvious that this is not the end of the affair for the organ­ising manager, and indeed such structuring is not even appropriate to all schools. T.ve can make the following points:

1.1 In the small school, it will not be possible or desirable to set up sections and levels of hierarchy. It is still necessary however to decide on what has to be done, allocate the tasks to staff and make clear their accountability to the head teacher. This i-s true even in a staff or two. With a small staff, the head teacher may well decide the best system of organising is by weekly or even daily meetings, of working things out round the table in either formal or informal meet­ings according to- his style. This is not possible in the large organisation.

2. Even when tasks have been allocated to positions and staff have been appointed to these positions, there will be a number of activities that need attention every so often which do not fall within the grouped activities of the various positions in the school. In this situation, the head teacher has to allocate tasks extra to the normal activities of the teacher. It might be to take charge of an Open Day for parents at the school, or to deputise for a sick member of sta.f f, or organ­ise the examinations. In doing-this, the head teacher has to exercise judgement in finding the most suitable member of staff, but not overloading the able staff with too much work.

3. If the school has set up departments or sections, then staff normally become very attached to these departments and have more to do with people inside them and less to do with staff outside. This may create a rather divided schcol that lacks cohesion, and indeed a department may even begin to develop its own goals which are different from those of the school. The problem really arises when some new development in curriculum or teaching method cuts across the departments. For example, special programmes for the slow-learning or a curriculum based on industrial needs rather than traditional subject divisions. The obvious way to deal with such innovations would be by a project or task team, but this is often difficult to superimpose onto a departmental system. This problem does not arise in the small school which is why they can be very innovative and flexible.

4. The head teacher needs to decide what kind of authority to give to his deputy (if he has one) and senior teachers. Although he retains overall authority he may delegate responsibility for various aspects of school organisation to others (delegation skills are discussed in Part IV). One development in recent years has been to treat the senior teachers as a management team which makes collective decisions at regular meetings rather like the Board of Management in an industry.

36

'SECTION" D: 7KE PFOCESS OF STAFFING

Managers do net so much do things themselves as make sure other people d*o them. The manager of a factory does not himself make the product, and in schools all or most of the teaching is done by others except in the very small schools.

A key management task therefore is staffing the school so that the work gets done. We can refer to this as the personnel function of management. In all organisations much time is spent in trying to maximise the use of staff to obtain the optimal results. Because people are not like books or machines but have their own responses and behaviour based on their individual feelings and thoughts , they do not always fit in readily with the wishes of management or the needs of the task. Personnel management requires tact and patience as well as skill. In Part III you will read much more about the stages of hiring of staff and in Part IV some of the techniques available for managing staff. Here we will briefly out­line the processes of management involved. We can consider three stages.

1. Recruiting Staff

The process of recruiting staff has one purpose only - to provide a means of getting work done satisfactorily. The starting point is always therefore to define the task that needs to be done, then the qualities needed by an income •to accomplish the task. From that one can use whatever system of recruitment exists in a particular county to match an applicant to the job and the personal qualities needed I the job-specification and person-specification).

2. Retaining Staff

•Once they are hired, a manager's main attention may be given to planning how staff fit into the timetable each year, what classes they are allocated, hov. much work they are given. In fact they can easily be treated simply as units to fit into various places to solve particular problems. However, teachers are free agents. Unless they turn out to be unsatisfactory, we will want to keep them, and if they decide to leave that' will cause us extra bother and maybe some quite difficult problems. (For example, if the pupil numbers are declining, a departing teacher may not be replaced). So a head teacher should pay attention to the commit­ment and motivation of his staff which at the very least keeps them from leaving. There has been a great deal written about motivation and many theories advanced. You are advised to read some of these for yourself and decide what is the respons­ibility of the head teacher for retaining his staff and how he can motivate them sufficiently so that his school functions efficiently.

2.1 Exercise

Firstly, answer the following question:

What guidelines do you use when making decisions about which staff to allocate to which activities? (For example, do the most senior or longest-serving staff teach the most senior classes?)

Then fill in the following motivational check-lists for any of your staff whoa you feel are not giving of their best. The list was drawn up by a group of teachers and reflects their own experience of what reduces their effectiveness. Tick one of the five points on the scale for each of the factors. The scale moves from Highly Significant on the left to No Significance or Not Relevant on the right.

37

Motivational Check List

Highly Significant

Personal

No new goals or challenges set

Personal problems outside school life

Feeling of being personally criticised

Loss of self-confidence

High level .of stress

Poor personal relations with colleagues

Awareness of nearing retirement _____ ______

Inability to organise work satisfactorily _______ _____

Lack of energy , drive and/or good health _____ _____

Inability to handle generation gap ,

Fear of exposure of own inadequacies _____ _

Over-commitment of time in other activities , _____

Lack of job satisfaction

Feeling of lack of appreciation

Feelings of envy or jealousy of others ______

Feeling of being trapped in the.- job _____

Professional

Lack of genuine interest in subject ;—

Lack of appropriate knowledge of subject ""~~~~"~ •

Uncertainty or disagreement over subject objectives .

Inability to cope with new professional roles

Loss of belief in the task

Lack of confidence in leaders

Poor class control ______ _____

Overload of roles and responsibilities ______

Lack of help for problems

Unsuitability for post

Poor working conditions ______

Inequitable distribution of resources

Lack of relevance of system to students' needs •

Lack of parental support

38

Highly No Significant Significance

Organisational

Isolation of staff

Lack of pronotion prospects —

Ideas blocked by senior staff

Critical attitude of senior staff

Lack of consensus over rules and procedures

Lack of consensus over educational goals and values

Poor communications

Lack of consultation

Lack of machinery for participation

Alienation of junior staff from Head and Deputies

Poor leadership by Head and Deputies

Poor staff development system

System

Threat of closure or reorganisation

Poor appointments

Inadequate advisory service

Lack of physical resources

Lack of extra provision for student groups with special needs

Poor communication between District Authority and School/College

Society

Uncertainty about purposes of education

Isolation of school from wider community

Public criticism of education and/or schools

Extreme behavioural or social problem of young people

Lack of parental support

Difference of teachers values to those of young people

Difference of teachers values to perceived values of society

39

When you have completed the exercise and studied the results you should te in a better position to decide whether managerial acción is required to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of staffing.

3. Developing Staff

No professional teacher stays th-e-same year after year. He changes for better or worse, and it is an important management process to aid the development of staff capacity by planned policies.

Not only do staff change as individuals: so • 1ro do the tasks that have to be performed. Few teachers find that their work at the end of their career is the same as when they started. New curriculum, new methods of teaching, new examin­ations, new demands from parents, employers and pupils all mean the work of the school is changing over the years. So if a teacher does not match these changes, the school manager will have more and more difficulty in allocating staff to activ­ities in an effective way.

Staff development can be approached from the point of view of the teacher or the manager.

H . The Teacher's Point of View

He is likely to be concerned over three issues and be following courses of action over each to help optimise his position:

Firstly, he may be interested in improving his skill and knowledge.

Secondly, he may be interested in obtaining promotion in the school to posi­tions of greater authority or influence.

Thirdly, he may be interested in obtaining promotion to a position outside the school.

5. The Head Teacher's or School Manager's-Point of View

He is likely to be concerned over three issues for which he will be instigat­ing management action to help optimise the effectiveness and efficiency of the school :

Firstly, he may want to improve the skill and knowledge of teachers to fit in with developing demands of the curriculum.

Secondly, he may want ro improve the capacity of teachers to take various posts of responsibility within the school.

Thirdly, he may feel it is time a particular teacher moved on to another school and some fresh blood was brought in.

In an ideal world, the development wishes of the teacher would coincide with the needs of the organisation as defined by the head teacher, but the likeli­hood is that some ¿x£. the teachers' wishes are antagonistic cr irrelevant to the school. For example, a teacher might wish to pursue a higher degree at a university and ask for leave to do that, but the school may really need him to follow a short retraining course in a new method of teaching.

40

The process of development is therefore a complex and delicate matter for the head teacher because he is dealing with the ambitions and desires of his staff as well as the needs of his organisation, and his skill is in creating staff devel­opment programmes for each of his staff which at least minimally satisfy the tea­chers own personal ambitions but also enable him to relate staff to activities in the most productive way.

5. • Methods of Staff Development

All head teachers should assess regularly the potential of their teachers and check on their development. They may do this informally or through formal staff development interviews, but in either case careful notes should be kept. Staff development can be divided by two separate measures: formal and informal, and internal and external. This can then give us four-boxes as follows:

FORMAL INFORMAL

INTERNAL

EXTERNAL

Formal development consists of such techniques as in-service training courses Informal development consists of such techniques as giving a member of staff :_ new job to do or moving him to another area of teaching - what we could call lear­ning on the job. Internal development consists of that which happens in the school. External development is that which happens outside the school.

The school manager therefore has a number of choices open to him in setting up development programmes for his staff.

In Box Number One he could consider a day's training session for staff to be introduced to a new change in the curriculum.

In Box Number Two he could appoint a staff member to a 'working party to investigate some educational or administrative problem in the school.

In Box Number Three he could send a staff member on a course of study or to a.conference at a university or college.

In Box- Number Fourche could encourage a staff member -to join a scientific or cultural society, or sit on some educational committees in the district.

What you can do for your staff will depend on your local circumstances , but two general points are worth making. Firstly, it is likely that much more useful development of staff takes place in informal processes than formal ones. The value of formal courses and training is always questionable. Secondly, it is much cheaper and more cost-effective to concentrate en internal than external provision. '"

You are now in a position to make a list in the four boxes of all the deve­lopment techniques available to you in your school .

ill

1 2

3 4

When ycu have done that-, you can draw up development strategies for your staff based or. the known needs of the organisation and the strengths and v;easi­nesses of the staff.

SECTION E: THE PROCESS OF DIRECTING

The educational manager is the director of his institution. Kis is the res­ponsibility for what gees on there. Ke is accountable for the state of the school, its smooth and efficient running and the achievement of its goals. As director of the school , the head teacher can be seen as comparable to the conductor of the orchestra. He gives the lead, he determines the tempo, and decides what happens when, though he is constrained by and has to work with the musical score and the capabilities of his players. So the head teacher is orchestrating what is happening in the school. In particular he is responsible for the following activities:

1. Deciding v.t.at is to be done

He will be the major decision-maker in the school. Each day he will order things to happen on his own initiative because that is how he judges the situation of the moment should be tackled. Occasionally these decisions will support a major initiative, a new departure for the school, but generally they will te more mun­dane, concerned with the day-to-day running of the school. Strictly speaking, when the head teacher is directing, he will be issuing instructions, but he may also have a strong indirect influence by advising teachers what they should do, or even giving information so that the decision, while not his, will almost cer­tainly go the way he wants. The skills required in decision making, and a further analysis of its nature is given in Part IV.

2 . Arbitrating between competir.; claims

One of the points made in the first part is that there is a variety of sub­systems operating within the general system of the school - for example , that concerned with the teaching process, that concerned with the maintenance of plant, that concerned with routine administration. Each of these aim to achieve their own particular goals as fully- as possible but they will sometimes be incompatible with each other. The smooth bureaucratic running of the school dependent on tea­chers filling in forms and keeping records will at times clash with proposed pro­grammes of -teaching activity. It is the head teacher as director who will decide between competing claims. It depends on his management style whether he simpi"-issues an instruction or whether he brings the disagreeing parties together to discuss and try and reach an agreed solution. Competing claims will also arise over resources , particularly financial resources though also space and time resources. This happens in the richest as well as the poorest school. There is never enough money to go around for all the competing claims, and the process of arbitrating, of issuing a decision, is part of the process of directing. There is a third area of competing claims - those that come from outside the system. The head teacher may have to decide between the demands of parents , local emplo­yers and education officials. These outside sources of influence we c?ll in sys­tems-theory contingent system - i.e. systems in their own right but which touch and interact with the school system.

3. Formulating the Ethos and Philosophy of the School

This is a less tangible process but no-one who has visited many schools can doubt the influence the head teacher has en the unique ethos of his school > and this is constructed from all of his actions-, behaviour and decisions.

42 \

Head teachers with very powerful personalities are likely to find the school reflection, of their own beliefs and philosophy.

-1. Décidiez on Lone-Terr. Development

Much of the directing activity of the head teacher is likely to be concerned v;ith immediate every-day issues , hut a head teacher .-night well also be directing his school towards new roles and new activities. V.'hether he does this by stealth or whether by highly publicised programmes of action will depend partly upon the powers he has (.which vary from country to country) and partly on his own tempe­rament .

5. Developing Creativity

The process of directing invariably involves initiating via activity of the manager; Very often the instruction relates to fairly routine activity, but there is a necessity in all organisations for the operation of creative thinking and it is a function of the education manager to direct this activity in the school. The word 'direct' may not be entirely appropriate in relation to creativity, out what the head teacher does, or should do, is to direct the. means or processes by which creativity is encouraged. Everyone has the capacity for creativity but each person may be particularly strong in seme area of creative process. One may­be strong on logical thinking, another may be good at linking disparate ideas , a third may be a good problem solver, while a fourth may operate best by free association - i.e. allowing ideas to freely flow in the mind even though they seem unconnected and often bizarre or ridiculous.

There are four types of creativity that are particularly relevant to t::~ school :

Innovation - this is the generation cf something new: a new idea, or hypothesis, or style of teaching, or method of managing the organisation.

Synthesis - this is bringing together ideas from several sources and amalgamating them into a useable form. 'An example could be the use cf mathematical con­cepts to manage the space allocation and control in schools. The director cf an institution is likely to spend a lot of his time synthesizing the various ideas cf his staff and the potential of his resources of equipment . materials and money.

Extension - this occurs when someone takes a basic existing innovation and increa­ses its usefulness by expanding its boundaries. For example, the work :: two teachers cf history and geography in integrating their syllabuses '..-ith one class:, of pupils may be extended across several classes and include other subjects such as economics and science.

Duplication. - In one fense, copying the innovation cf another person cannot be creative - that is a contradiction in terms. And yet, it is brought into the school for the first time, even though it is copied from elsewhere, it provides something new for that organisation. In its new environment it will in any case never be quite the same. Small adaptations will have to be made.

Very often a particular development in the school seems to incorporate all or at least more than one cf these types of creativity.

It is the head teacher who can encourage a creative environment cy. his actions. He can stimulate creativity partly by encouraging the more creative r :" his staff and partly 'oy setting up programmes which develop the technique cf

3

creativity. There are a r.unber of such programmes described in management litera­ture to which you are referred for further expansion of this topic.

6. Leadership

You may have felt that much of this discussion about the directing process is really better described as leadership. We have not used that word because it has so many meanings and is capable of infinite extension, whereas to talk about directing focusses the discussion much more specifically on the activity of making decisions or getting things done. Nevertheless, it is difficult to dispute that effective leadership is very often about how a person runs his institution, and we will therefore discuss the skills of leadership in Part IV of this document.

7. Exercise

For this exercise you must consider your own scheel (or other institution over which you have control). You will concentrate on your role as the Director who is responsible for making sure everything is working adequately and the instit­ution is progressing forward. Under each of the following headings describe at least one of your directing activities taken from the last two or three weeks.

1. Deciding what is to be done by issuing instructions

2. Arbitrating between competing claims

a. between different sections of the school

b. between demands for resources

c. from outside bodies

3. Reinforcing the ethos or the philosophy of the school

A. Facilitating a long term development

5. Developing creativity in the institution

Then give examples taken from your school of the various types of creativity.

1. Innovation

2. Synthesis

3. Extension

^. Duplication.

SECTION' F: THE PROCESS OF CONTROLLING

The school manager will be involved in the process of controlling the acti­vities that take place in the school. As the person who is ultimately accountable for what takes place in the school, he will need to satisfy himself that s_ch activity is of the type and quality he deems to be satisfactory. It it is net he will take measures tc bring the quality up to standard, or to change the type of activity from one which is not acceptable to one that is.

¿U

Exercising such a control function is an integral part- of every manager's role. In order to check on how control systems work in your school you will need to work through the following three questions:

1. Do I know what I want?

Unless the work that staff are expected to do has been defined and laid down, you can hardly monitor or control the activity because you do hot knew what-ycu want or expect. One of the major causes of conflict and staff difficulty in organi­sations originates from vague, and sometimes contradictory job descriptions. Staff are simply unsure what is expected of them, and are understandably annoyed if they are then criticised for what they do. When discussing the process of staffing we suggested that a full job description should exist for all staff so that they knew what they were contracted to do. But this must apply not simply to the staff, individually, but also to groups of staff working together as a team or committee, and total activities which may involve more than one staff member, such as the management of the annual round of examinations, or the arrange­ments for introduction of new pupils on the first day of the term. The value of spelling out clearly what you expect to be done is as important for the small school as the large. Indeed, it is in the small school that the member of staff is sometimes overwhelmed and confused by the number of activities for which he is responsible. The first step in controlling the activities of the school is therefore to know what you want and make sure that everyone else is aware of that.

2. How will I know what is happening?

However carefully you have laid down what you want , this is of no help to your controlling function unless you have some way of. knowing what is happening. For this you need adequate information systems. Many head teachers rely on very inadequate information systems , assuming that they will pick up informally all the information they need by listening very carefully and keeping their eyes shar-.. ply open. Certainly you can pick up a great deal informally and casually this way but it is no substitute for hard information systematically collected. At. the opposite extreme, some managers get so fascinated by information systems that they set up far too complex mechanisms and collect much more information than they really need. The golden rule is: decide on exactly what information you want and then collect it in the simplest possible way.

If you work in a very large institution then you might use a computerised system. If you work in a very small school you nay collect all the information you need via the class register and timetable. The one information system that is almost universal is the classroom attendance register which monitors the attendance of pupils. In Part III of this document you will read more about the various kinds of information system for monitoring pupil attendance, attainment, roc: utilisation, usage of equipment, stock control, library usage, etc. At this moment, however, it might be useful for you to m'ae a list of all the information you need in your own school effectively to control.

3. How useful will be the information I have?

This depends on three things:

Firstly, are you asking for the right kind of information. That is something you can only discover by trial and error, or constant critical review.

Secondly, is the gathering of information being done properly. Staff are often very clever at perverting- the intentions of the manager and so you must check

¿iq

*

to see if, for example, lesson plans were written\ after the lesson was given, the register filled in the day after the event by guess work, the utilisation chart of the film projector filled in for the whole of the last term the day before it is given to you. Staff have to be convinced of the importance of giving accurate information.

Thirdly, good information in itself does very little. .The benefit only comes when you take action. If your system reveals some idiosyncratic patterns in staff absence or unexplained low performance from one set of pupils, then this is of no value unless it informs your subsequent actions - and you will probably move into another mode of the management process to do that; for example, into Directing or Planning.

4. How much do I want to control?

This is a very important question. You have to decide whether you want a very tightly controlled school where you check on everything you possibly can, or a loosely controlled school where you check only on the most vital aspects , or some control system lying between the two extremes. No doubt your choice will partly depend on your particular situation, and in some countries the head teacher may have laid down for him regulations requiring him to collect a lot of informa­tion. It will also, however, partly depend on the character and style-of the head teacher - some will be of the type who want to control everything as tightly as they can, others work more happily in a more relaxed and trusting manner.

There has been a long debate which is still in process over the value of tight as against loose control in various kinds of organisations. The argument many make is that too much monitoring and control, too careful job specification, too much time spent on information retrieval and presentation, leads to a rigid organisation, too bureaucratical and full of red tape. The alternative some theo­rists suggest is to have the most flexible organisation possible, giving a great deal of freedom and autonomy to the staff members to deal with situations as they think fit, and encouraging staff to take some risks and experiment with innova­tions. Different circumstances no doubt require different levels of control, but you should raise the question with yourself: just how much do I really want to know, and how far does my demand for information reduce the value and quality-of the work being done by the staff?

SECTION G: THE PROCESS OF EVALUATION

All managers are concerned not only to know whether a job is being done, but whether it is being done to an adequate standard. For an organisation that produces goods or services to sell this is a critical process, because clearly if the standard is not good enough for the potential buyers, then the firm will go bankrupt. That is also the case for those private school which exist as free-enterprise bodies charging fees to students to cover their costs. Most schools, however, are partially or wholly supported out of public money, and there is not the sheer survival need to have effective quality control or evaluation.

Nevertheless, evaluation is a process taking place in all schools. To some extent or other, every head teacher will spend time considering how well or badly various activities have been carried out. The important distinguishing characteris­tic between schools is how far evaluation is built in as a planned and conscious management process. We can examine this issue by a series of questions.

46

1. How far is Evaluation of Formal Process rather than an Informal Process

All members of the school will evaluate what they do and what they see others doing. That is a natural process and it is difficult to prevent. If one wants to provide good quality evaluation that will be of use, however, it has to be systematic and planned, and seen as an integral part of the management of the school. If this is the case and staff accept that the necessary final process of any cycle of activities is an evaluation of what they have done, it still leaves open the question whether it is done in a very formal manner by, for example, course review committees, or whether it is done informally, for example, by dis­cussions between the head teacher and a member of staff. Either way can be effec­tive provided a written record is made of the results of evaluation so that correc­ting action can be taken for the future but there is a danger that informal evalua­tion is not taken as seriously by the participants and is not followed up so effec­tively. In nearly all cases in schools some evaluation will be formal and other will be informal. The head teacher needs to decide which approach will be applied to which activities in his school.

2. What is the Motive for Evaluation?

Staff do not engage in activities for no reason, and this is particularly so when the activity can involve criticism of their work. So why will schools provide an evaluation system of their work? There are three main sources of school evaluation.

Firstly, the doctrine of accountability. If the school is held accountable by the State or Local Government for the finance it is given, then it must have a means of demonstrating to its paymasters that the money is being well spent, and to do this must evaluate its work. ,

Secondly, the principle of moral responsibility. The staff of the school may well hold the view that they are morally responsible to the young people in their care to provide them with reasonably good schooling. To take charge of young people and then to subject them to poor quality teaching in a badly-run organisa­tion would be an indefensible act. The contract undertaken in taking charge of young people's development is to provide them with the best quality education possible, and if this principle is followed the school will constantly be evalua­ting what it is doing.

Thirdly, the principle of prof essionality. By this we mean the desire of teachers to set standards for their own performance as members of a profession which is concerned to provide quality and expertise as a hallmark of its pro­fessional identity. The teacher feels himself answerable to his own image as a professional member and is acutely aware of the judgements of his fellow teachers on his work.

Each of these bases for evaluation processes has its own quality. Evaluation via accountability can emphasise too much those parts of activities that can be measured in financial terms and ignore the less tangible developments that take place in the education process. There is often an undue concentration on examina­tion results as a measure of evaluating a school. Evaluation via professionality can over-emphasise the mutual interest of teachers as a professional body, and the standards they set might be more to do with their own prestige and status than the service provided to the State and its young people. Evaluation via moral responsibility can ignore the pressure of financial and other practical problems. A mixture of all three factors is no doubt ideal for a school, and you should check your own school against the three measures of Accountability, Moral Responsibility and Professionality.

47

3. Do you Focus on the Individual or the Institution?

Much evaluation has been concerned with checking the competence of the tea­cher or the ability of the pupil via a personal test of capacity. Inspections of staff are common in most countries, and inspection of pupils by tests and exa­minations is universal. However, such evaluation by concentrating on the individual can often miss the evaluation of the activities or projects of the institution. Institutional evaluation considers what is happening in the school, how effective it is and how it can be improved, and only secondarily does it consider the successes and failures of individuals. The methods of institutional evaluation are being developed in a number of places, and though each area will need to deve­lop its own plan, a study of some existing plans might be of help. (For example, "Keeping the College under Review" published by the Inner London Education Autho­rity, 1983).

4. What is Evaluated?

The answer to this might be - everything in the school? In practice, however, evaluation has very often been confined to the teaching and learning process., and has ignored management processes, the curriculum, and support services such as building care. An effective evaluation of a school needs to consider the quality of management leadership, supervision, communication plus curriculum and course review which are as vital to the eventual outcomes from the school as the quality of the specific lesson by a specific teacher.

5. Who Evaluates?

In the informal sense, no doubt everyone is evaluating everyone else all the time, but in terms of a formal process, evaluation can be by the following:

Self : Individuals can be.- encouraged to evaluate themselves , both as teachers and managers by using questionnaires or other similar devices. These can be used for self-study or for discussion with others.

Internal : Groups or specially nominated persons within the organisation can investigate and report on aspects of the school work. A course review body might for example evaluate a particular course at the end of the year, or a senior member of staff study the effectiveness of a new method of timetabling.

External : Outside consultants or advisers can provide a detached view of the school's activities. The advantage of using external evaluators is that they have no self-interest in the school, no positions to defend or actions to justify. The disadvantage is that the staff may be sus­picious of them and be non-cooperative, they may cost money - and, of course, there may be none of sufficient skill in evaluating who are available.

RECAPITULATION

After you have worked through this part you should:

1. be able to list and define the six processes of management

2. be aware of the importance of time-scale and flexibility in planning

3. be able to differentiate between standing plans and single-use plans and give examples of each

48

4. be able to differentiate between strategic plans and single-use plans and give examples of each

5. be able to list the principles or policies which underlie the staffing of your institution

6. be able to construct a staff policy which relates staff to tasks via hiring, motivating and developing

7. be able to list the categories of directing behaviour and give an example of eaetf

8. be aware of the function of creativity in your institution, and be able to list the means by which it can be encouraged

9„ be able to distinguish between innovation, synthesis, extension and dupli­cation as creative processes

10. be aware of the need to exercise adequate control while understanding the danger of over-controlling

11. be able to spell out clearly what you expect from each of your staff

12. be able to set up information systems that give you the information you need to control the institution

13. be able to distinguish between formal and informal evaluation and apply each to different parts of your institution

Ik. be able to define the three reasons for undertaking institutional evaluation

15. be able to distinguish between individual evaluation and institutional evaluation

16. be able to list comprehensively the activities in your school that could be evaluated

17. be able to make informed decisions about who evaluates.

FURTHER READING

Most introductory books on management will use a division into management processes similar to that used in this part. You will find the following two books useful, but there are many others you might consult with profit.

Hicks H.G. The Management of Organisations: A Systems and Human Resource Approach. 2nd Edition. McGraw Hill. 1972.

Dale E. and Michelon L.C. Modern Management Methods. Pelican Library of Business and Management. Penguin 1969.

A shorter but most valuable book is the following:

Stewart R. The Reality of Management. Pan Books 1967 (particularly Part Two).

49

P A R T III

THE AREAS OF MANAGEMENT CONCERN

PART III - THE AREAS OF MANAGEMENT CONCERN

Objectives

When you have completed this Part you should be able to:

(i) devise a management information system for gathering data about the use of

- non-teaching resources, i.e. buildings, equipment and stock, finance, time;

- staffing, organised around the basic events concerned with the arrival, employment and departure of a member of staff: recruitment, selection, induction, deployment, performance appraisal (including staff develop­ment ) , advancement and departure ;

- the management of the learning process, with reference to:' curriculum content; curriculum planning models; the organisation of learning; monitoring;

(ii) use the data gathered in (i) above in order to analyse the effectiveness/ efficiency with which your school operates and to employ such information towards improving that effectiveness/efficiency;

(iii) explore the extent of your ability to affect/influence/control

- outside bodies;

- the role of your institution;

institutional planning;

(iv) consider strategies, with reference to the areas referred to in (iii) above, for

- gaining fuller information about those areas ;

- impacting more successfully on the perceptions of your school held by others ;

- using that information to influence your own planning.

50

Summary

This Part is organised around areas of managerial concern which are central to the headteacher's role as school leader: the management of non-human and human resources; the management of the learning process; the management of outside bodies and institutional role; and organisational planning with reference to the fore­going management activities. The emphasis throughout is on the development of a sound data base (management information system) and on a consideration on how the headteacher can actively influence/impact on the activity of others around him with a view to increasing the effectiveness/efficiency of his school. The exercises associated with these areas of concern appear in the main text and are used both for exploring the material in a personalised context and for illuminating that material.

The point of view throughout is based on the systems view developed in the first Part in this document and is centred on the perspective of the headteacher, although thé school administrator responsible for the oversight of a number of schools may use the material as a conceptual tool for understanding those schools and as a basis for promoting effective/efficient managerial activity within the schools.

Introduction

By entitling this Part The Areas of Management Concern, it is intended to focus primarily on the word concern in two dictionary (OED) senses: 'a business or practical relationship1 and 'solicitous regard, anxiety'. The areas represent aspects of organisational activity for which the headteacher, as manager, is likely to be held to some extent accountable by others, while at the same time experien­cing a degree of personal and professional responsibility: the deployment of resources (including staff); the learning process which represents the work of the school; relationships with external bodies/agencies; the role of the institu­tion in the community of which it forms a part; and planning.

Of course it would be absurd to suggest that a single headteacher can on his/her own be omnipresent throughout the institution and on both sides of its :

boundary. A school is a community, and communities involve scores of individuals in complex and interlocking relationships over which no one can have complete control. Given a large enough group of people, there are inevitably surprises and disappointments. Nevertheless, the headteacher can be said to be 'responsible' for such areas of management concern in that he will be expected to have a fairly accurate idea of which is going on and not going on, what is proceeding well and where difficulties are emerging, with the necessity of directing his attention to problems, even if he cannot solve them wholly- or- instantly. Concern implies continual (repeated) if not continuous (uninterrupted) involvement.

Moreover, even when such areas as those mentioned above involve considerable external control and direction, as from government agencies or ministries, the headteacher will almost always have some degree of discretion in which he chooses to do/not do. In both personal and professional relationships while one side may most often be in the dominant and leading position, the other is not without oppor­tunities to influence, assist, avoid, block, resist or help: hence, power is shared, even if the sharing is fundamentally unequal.

51

Looked at more positively, the areas of management concern which we shall be examining in this Part are \also aspects of school management where the effective headteacher will be seeking opportunities to impact by raising the level of insti­tutional achievement: using resources more effectively and efficiently; improving the quality of the learning process; liaising with outside bodies/agencies to mutual disadvantage; and modifying the institution's role in the direction of greater community satisfaction. The headteacher's 'concern' will therefore be not merely to meet the expectations of those who oversee his work, but also to motivate those teachers and students whose work he oversees to attain their full educational potential. The effective headteacher will, as a consequence, seek to be something more than an administrator implementing the directives of others: he will also be a manager, actively and purposefully seeking to raise the level of institutional attainment.

On the other hand, all activity is not necessarily useful. Movement without direction or purpose is insufficient. A headteacher needs to know what he is doing, why he is doing it and what he hopes to achieve, as well as understanding the most effective means of achieving whatever it is he has set out to do. Decisions are only as appropriate as the information on which they are based, for which reason the headteacher will need to establish procedures and practices for obtai­ning the best and fullest possible information. In a very small village school he may well be at the centre of most activity. In a large, school, with dozens of teachers and hundreds of students, he will most certainly have to delegate responsibilities and to rely on others for information, for which reason he will need to train others to provide the kind of information he requires and to assess critically the validity of the information he receives. If the school is parti­cularly large, he may have to establish a formal management information system, with routine bureaucratic procedures for collecting data, and for analysing/co­ordinating the information.

Although the he'adteacher is unlikely to spend much of his time in classroom teachir?, his overall responsibility is for organising, directing and reviewing the classroom activities of others, so that his 'areas of management concern' will be those aspects of institutional activity which most directly influence w..?t actually happens in the classroom. The most effective headteacher/manager will be cne one who is able to contribute most effectively to successful classroom teaching and '.earning by 'concerning' himself with those 'areas' over which he has some control/influence and which, managed properly, raise the level of class­room performance. In broad, general terms, the headteacher as manager can be said to have an enabling or facilitating function, the means by which others can perform more effectively and efficiently.

SECTION A: THE MANAGEMENT OF NON-HUMAN RESOURCES

1. Buildings

Although most of us tend to think of buildings in terms of walls, floors and ceilings, from a manager's" point of view it is perhaps most useful to consider buildings as a collection of spaces. To be sure, managers are often required to look after the physical aspects of buildings, and to ensure that the fabric remains in reasonable repair and that damage is reported. Equally, the manager of a one-r-nm school is unlikely to consider it as anything other than the space. However, in larger buildings, the allocation and use of space becomes a major management problem. Kenny and Foster (1983) suggest, that it is

52

... simplest to consider a building asa set of discrete spaces... It is essential to distinguish between those characteristics of a space which are built in and (in the medium term) unchan­geable (such as area and location), and those characteristics which are local and variable (furniture and equipment).

They argue further for the need for data—collection about such spaces, lis­ting more than two dozen features of any space which need to be identified; and for precise information about the extent to which that space is used during each period of the working day/week.

The underlying idea is that without very detailed information about the buil­ding's spaces it is virtually impossible to determine whether those- spaces are being most appropriately utilised. The whole issue of space utilisation is compli­cated by competition (often among teachers) for the more desirable spaces and some­times by historical precedent: the senior class have always been taught mathematics in room 9, etc.

In a broader sense, the manager has also to be concerned with the utilisation of space in other ways: where there are large numbers of classes and teachers, do classes stay put and teachers move from class to class, or the reverse? Or a mixture? Are there quiet spaces and social spaces? Reading spaces? Dining spaces? Is there a space for teachers? A separate space for non-teaching staff? A space for visitors? Etc. And is the distribution of all of these spaces appropriate? Or is the present arrangement inherited from a time when school requirements were considerably different? Those responsible for administration of a number of schools are likely to argue that the many requests they receive for additional and diffe­rent school spaces need never have surfaced if headteachers had concentrated not on what is missing but on how what is available might be more effectively used. In some countries critics of the educational system have pointed out that most school spaces are inefficiently utilised in that schools tend to close both early in the day and for long holiday periods throughout the year.

2. Equipment and Stock

Like buildings, equipment and stock can be viewed as part of the physical resources of the educational establishment, and since resources of all kinds are generally scarce in schools, the issue of utilisation also surfaces in this area. Some equipment is of clearly sectional concern: bunsen burners are of little use in sports lessons, or footballs in science lessons. Other equipment - eg. compu­ters, word processors, audio-visual machines, film projectors - has a wider appli­cation. However, all such equipment raises a number of managerial questions:

a) Who decides what is to be acquired?

b) How is the equipment obtained?

c) Who is responsible for its safety, repair and use?

d) How is competition for the use of the same equipment resolved?

e) Who monitors whether the acquisition of the equipment was justified, and, if it was not, how is this information used to modify similar demands at a later date?

f) How is defunct equipment disposed of?

g) What security arrangements exist?

53

The above questions apply not only to what it may be termed 'hardware1, but also to consumable materials: eg. food, wood, metal, chemicals, paper, laboratory specimens, etc. And, of course, textbooks and library books, which some may see as 'consumables' in that they sometimes either become unusable or disappear.

Equipment and stock may generally represent only a small part of the cost of running a school (apart, of course, from specialist establishments such as agri­cultural colleges), but they raise a number of interesting managerial issues. The dividing line between what is necessary and what is desirable may be imperceptible to the headteacher without sufficient specialist knowledge of the subject area. Ostensibly, equipment and stock should lead to improved learning: what evidence is there that it does so? Moreover, in a large community, some pilfering is almost always likely to occur (and not only among students), and the manager needs to consider where to draw (yet another) line between security and use. By locking up all the library books, we may well preserve them for posterity, but they are presumably intended to be read by students; without appropriate supervision, the books may be used by only a small proportion of the school population.

Such problems are those discussed above have led some school systems to invest rather heavily in non-teaching staff, technicians and librarians, clerks and storekeepers, whose function is to oversee the use of equipment and stock, in the same way that the school caretaker or janitor may be ultimately responsible for the buildings. With the advent of new technology, the supervision and moni­toring of equipment and stock is likely to become an increasing focus of managerial concern. In many schools, up to the present, teachers have often simply taken on additional duties with respect to equipment and stock, but the whole issue may well require more formal approaches to its resolution.

3. Finance

Many schools have some kind of budget for use on equipment and stock, or for other kinds of school activities: outings, transport, bringing in visiting teachers or speakers, paying for decorations, etc. Often the amount is established on a student (per capita) basis with more for older students. However obtained, and whatever the amount, the school budget will raise questions similar to those discussed above: who? how? when? where? why? The likelihood is that the demands for cash will exceed its availability, for which reason the manager will have to determine how the budget is to be drawn up, how expenditure is to be monitored, and how overspending is to be confronted.

An issue which is perhaps peculiar to finance is the extent to which the whole community (some/all staff? some/all students?) should be aware of what the school finances are and how the money is actually been spent. An open, deliberative approach might be said to represent one kind of management model, while another, and perhaps more traditional, might involve sectional bids coming forward to the headteacher to be either trimmed, accepted or inflated.

Generally, however the school organises its expenditure, external accountants will be brought in to 'go over the books' to ensure that no misappropriation has occured. However, even if it has not, it does not then follow that the money has been well spent. The manager may therefore wish to institute some kind of review proceedings to consider good and poor spending over the last year or two and to reflect on ways in which future purchases can benefit from past errors.

4. Time

Like the above resources, time is limited, so the concerned manager might well wish to address himself to the question of how much time is actually being wasted. The question of how to use spaces, discussed in 1 above, of whether to move teachers and/or students among rooms, has a time dimension in that in some buildings one or the other might involve more time wasting. Equally, ensuring that teachers and students get to teaching spaces promptly and get down to work immedia­tely might be seen as a means of promoting a more economical use of time. So, too, might careful classroom preparation and effective classroom organisation. However, such issues are probably endemic to all enterprises, including business, industry and schools. Like his peers elsewhere, the school manager may need to exhort from time to time, and even to chastise and confront, but he would be naive if he did not accept that (as in most areas) some losses are inescapable and that the problem is one of degree rather than kind: how much time wasting is tolerable and how much not?

At a somewhat deeper level, however, time has two other dimensions for the school manager: how much? and which? Unless the timetable is externally imposed, which is indeed the case in some countries, the headteacher may expect to be able to influence how much time is actually spent on all, or at least some, of the lear­ning activities which occur in the school. The amount of time devoted to various activities is likely to affect not only the amount of learning which takes place, but the actual esteem with which the activity is regarded. With the growth of knowledge, the demands on the learner's time are almost unlimited: selection is inevitable. Some activities will be curtailed, others dropped. Still others will be compulsory. In many respects, the -nature and intention of the curriculum can be viewed in terms of the times allocated to the various kinds of activities: from the student's point of view, time is a crude device for weighing the importance of what he is/is not doing.

Equally with which? Some teachers would argue that one part of the day is more useful/effective for learning than another; and similarly with the week. So, too, with age: at what age should foreign languages be commenced? At what point should they be dropped? How many years should mathematics be studied as a compul­sory subject? Science? Composition? Geography? And so on. One of the most interes­ting features of comparative education resides in precisely such differences in time: the time when something is begun/ended, and the length of time for which it continues.

5. Exercises

The non-human resources discussed in 1 to 4 above - buildings; equipment and stock; finance; and time - all represent, in systems terms, resource inputs into your school and, as such, may be seen as appropriate point for beginning the development of your own management information system, that is a systematic gathe­ring of information which you can begin to analyse and use as the basis for for­mulating decisions about how your school might better organise its resource deploy­ment. With regard to such a system:

(i) It might be useful to select one or two of the following areas (a to d, below) as a starting point.

(ii) It is possible that, within your national system, one or more of the areas is controlled externally, in which case you might wish to choose another area over which you have greater discretion, or alternatively to undertake some data collection for your own purposes, or even possibly to present a case to your superiors for modifying existing practices.

(iii) If you work within a small school, it may be both necessary and appropriate for you to undertake your research on your own; however, in a larger school, one or more of the following activities might form the basis for a team activity.

(iv) When you have completed your activity, either independently or with others, you might wish to consider the usefulness of discussing the findings with appropriate colleagues-. Any kinds of conclusions you reach are likely to require the support of others in an implementation phase, and it might be as well to enlist their interest and commitment at an early stage.

a) Buildings. Kenny and Poster (1983) provide recommendations for fairly sophisticated analysis of space: you might wish to use their work as a basis for your own space utilisation exercise. Alternatively, at a more funda-mental level you might wish to confine yourself (and others) to obtaining information about the following in each of your school's spaces:

1. Location

2. Floor (if appropriate)

3. Area

4. Height

5. Shape

6. Maximum loading

7. Primary room use

8. Secondary (and other) room use

9. Amenities (electricity, gas, heating, lighting, water)

10. Special equipment

11. Outlook

12. Daylight

13. Noise

14. Special Equipment

15. Ventilation

16. Use for each period of the working week

b) Equipment and stock. You should at least possess some written record of the equipment/stock at present existing in the school; if you do not, that is at least a starting point. Subsequently, you may wish to:

1. Log the use of the equipment over an appropriate period of time (week/ month/term, etc.), so that you have for each item a clear idea, for each occasion, of who (including students) used it, when, for how long and for what purpose. You ought also (possibly by introducing a written

56

\

request procedure) to determine who was unable to use it, when, for how long and for what purpose.

2. Having obtained the information in 1 above, you ought to investigate from among the users the extent to which the equipment was deemed satisfactory/unsatisfactory.

3. You ought to determine (on each occasion of use, if possible) from whoever is responsible for supervising the equipment (providing this person is different from the user) the condition in which the equipment was returned. You ought also to seek information about any damage, losses and/or repairs.

In addition (or in place of) the above, you might wish to turn your atten­tion to three other areas:

1. Consumables. This would almost certainly require logging by whoever was responsible for issuing materials, etc. On each occasion you ought to determine on whose authority the issue was made, for what purpose and for whose use and (if possible) to what end.

2. Library. This is almost certainly an annual task which should lead to information about: the number of borrowings; the number (and identi­fication) of book losses; and (if possible) the titles and number of books which were not borrowed. The latter may be irrelevant if you have more shelf space than books, but if the reverse is the case, then a reserve location for seldom used books might be appropriate. This task, it should be noted, will almost certainly have to be delegated to whoever is responsible for the library.

3. Textbooks. Like the library task above, this will require the assistance of teaching staff, and should (again) concentrate on similar data: use/non-use, losses, damage.

Finance. It is assumed that you possess accounts of how your school budget has been/is being spent. Beyond scrutinising that expenditure, with the possibility of finding anomalies/discrepancies, it might be most useful to augment such analysis with information gleaned from any of the activities in b) above. The point at issue here is usage and satisfaction: if the money has been spent on equipment, stock and books which have been used to the approval of the users, then it is likely to have been spent well: if it has been ignored, or found no more satisfactory than less costly alter­natives, then you might wish to think again. In the end, you may still find that your non-human resources are inadequate to meet your school's needs. However, if you have gathered your facts and are able to demonstrate that what you have obtained is well used, your case for additional resources may be more sympathetically received. _

Time. This seems absolutely essential information about every student in your school which should be readily to hand:

1. What proportion of time each student spends on each subject each week/ term/year.

2. What proportion of time each student must compulsorily spend on each subject during the course of his whole stay in your school.

57

3. What proportion of his time (if any) is available to the student in the form of options (ie. work which he can to some extent control).

Such information should be fairly easily obtainable from timetables. More sophisticated analysis might involve use of different teaching times in the day/week and whether they can be shown to have any significant impact on learning outcomes (the difficulty here will be in allowing for other variables, such as teachers, other students and spaces).

About all of the above exercises you might additionally wish to consider the following: ~~

(i) In a perfect world, the manager would have all (and more) of the information referred to above. We do not live in a perfect world. As managers, it is likely that we know far less than we ought to know. Nonetheless, some infor­mation is likely to prove more useful than no information.

(ii) The kinds of information to be gathered in the above exercises represent what we might describe as an audit. By its nature, the audit gives us a snapshot at a moment in time. Therefore, to learn what the situation is one/six/twelve months later requires further audit(s).

(iii) Information can form the basis for complaints, but it can also allow others to help: to what extent is information shared among colleagues' in your school? Problems need to be identified and confronted if they are to be solved. Secrecy often hides problems.

(iv) The gathering of such information is difficult because it is time-consuming. To the extent that computer-assisted administration enters our schools in the coming years, much of this information may be more easily (and almost painlessly) obtained. However, the necessity of analysing that information and using it to lead to management decisions will still remain a management task.

SECTION B: STAFFING: THE MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES

Although there is sometimes a tendency in educational establishments to think of 'resources' in terms of non-human contributions to the teaching/learning process, staff, too, may be considered resources. Indeed, staff (both teaching and non-teaching) can be seen as the most valuable and important of a school's resources. They are certainly likely to be the most costly and the most difficult to manage. Buildings, equipment, books and paper are at least passive and suscep­tible to human direction, whereas people are active and capable of resistance, error and inadequacy. Nor are they as easily replaced as non-teaching resources. One might therefore regard staff as not only the most difficult managerial focus for the headteacher, but also the most important.

If we think in terms of a staff 'life cycle' - the sequence of events con­cerned with the arrival, employment and departure of a member of staff - it can be pointed to the following managerial tasks with which the headteacher is likely "to be fully or partially concerned:

58

Recruitment. If the headteacher is responsible for obtaining his own staff, he will certainly need to formulate a job description which identifies the skills/characteristics of the sought-after worker and organise a recruit­ment campaign to attract applicants. If the national system provides staff who are 'posted' to the school by external agencies, the headteacher may be less actively involved, but in putting forward his request for additional or replacement staff, he will certainly wish to formulate in his own mind precisely what he is seeking and to convey that information to the appro­priate authorities. In any event, before drawing his own conclusions, the headteacher will be wise to consult with involved colleagues to ensure that his own perceptions encompass all aspects of the situation, and that he is aware of likely difficulties.

Selection. Where the school is involved in choosing new staff, either by directly offering an appointment or by some involvement in the selection process, there will be the need for skills in drawing up a short list of applicants and in devising some kind of selection procedure, possibly inclu­ding interviewing and/or a range of 'tasks' set to applicants. If the successful applicant has to complete a 'trial period' before being given permanent employment, it may be possible to rectify an initial mistake; but where the new staff becomes tenured from the first day of work, the school may have to live with its errors in fairly uncomfortable ways. What­ever the situation, selection is a crucial activity, and very few people involved in the choosing end of the process can claim total success.

Induction. However the new member of staff comes to take up an appointment at the school, the institution must be responsible for inducting ' the new­comer: for helping him to understand the institution, its ways and means; for introducing him to individuals with whom he will be working; for advi­sing him on how best to settle into the larger community. New staff can find the business of adjusting to a new environment both perplexing and frustrating: assisting with the process in order to ease the transition represents an opportunity for the manager to inspire confidence and trust and to ensure that the newcomer reaches maximum effectiveness as soon as possible. Leaving new staff to flounder in uncertainties and confusion represents a poor way to treat a valuable new resource. Like.plants move from one. part of the garden to another, new staff may well require some additional nurturing and attention in the early days before they take root.

Deployment. New staff will require a list of duties and/or a timetable which establishes what they are required to undertake, how, when, with and for whom. How one uses new staff is likely to impact on the whole of their careers in the school. Therefore, plunging inexperienced teachers, for exam­ple, into the teaching of difficult classes is unlikely to work to anyone's long "term advantage. Staff need to be given work which they can complete to general (including their own) satisfaction, as well as having opportu­nities to extend their own range of skills and to develop new areas of expertise. The headteacher may sometimes delegate deployment to middle mana­gement, but he will certainly need to keep an eye on how the activity has been carried out, and to rectify inappropriate assignments.

Performance appraisal. In the first Part of this document it was dealt with monitoring at some length, and it might be useful at this point to refer back to earlier discussion of formal inspection, peer-group appraisal, student evaluation, management evaluation, external moderating and informal appraisal. The educational system - and in some cases the actual school itself - has a wide range of available approaches to monitoring staff effec­tiveness , although the extent to which any one can be introduced may be subject to external constraints.

59

Whatever the means of obtaining evidence about employee performance, the head teacher as manager will have to concern himself with at least two conse­quent activities:

a) He will need to find some means of rewarding particularly good work: with praise, extended responsibility and opportunities for professional deve­lopment, increased remuneration, advancement; or some or all of the fore­going. One of the chief advantages of performance appraisal is that it gives the manager valuable information about those who are doing well and provides an opportunity to use the recognition of such achievements as a stimulus for keeping the employee involved and committed.

b) Where deficiencies or inadequacies appear, the head teacher will need to organise means of helping individuals to overcome their difficulties or at least to reduce the number of problems they face. Such arrangements may be either internally provided with the help of other professionals and/or may involve the use of external individual/agencies, with staff needing help either being visited in the school and/or undertaking out­side activities themselves.

Closely linked to both a) and b) above are two additional areas of concern, both centred on the extent to which the manager can involve himself and his colleagues in helping staff to perform more effectively:

c) Motivation might be seen as a short-term attempt by the manager to get individuals to undertake immediate tasks. Upon occasion the manager may resort to argument, persuasion, coercion or even flattery; he may make promises or even 'hint' at long-term career advantages. By such devices he may solve an immediate problem. In the^sense here described, motivation might be seen as external inducement directed at the employee. Of course, it may not always succeed, or it may lead to surface agreement without effective consequences.

d) Commitment, on the other hand, may be viewed as an internal, personal stimulus, activated by vocational/ideological persuasion, professional pride, or career ambition. Also, commitment is likely to be long-term in nature and, as such, distinct from more short-term motivation. Commit­ment is also likely to be influenced by one's personal life, so that it is unlikely that the head teacher as manager can inspire genuine commit­ment in many staff. His own commitment may be the most useful example he can provide.

The head teacher may admire most fully those of his colleagues who are pro­fessionally committed, but he will almost certainly have to realise that not everyone sees life fulfilment solely, or even primarily, in terms of work, so that there is always likely to be some anxious 'concern' about what might be theoretically possible and what is likely in practical terms.

However, we ought here also to point out that both deployment (4 above) and performance appraisal are not only closely linked, with the need for the former to follow from and lead to the latter, but that both managerial acti­vities ought to be part of a larger staff development policy. As the most valuable and costly resource the school possesses, staff (to carry on the gardening metaphor used under induction) will continue to heed nurturing if they are to grow and develop. An individual who spends ten years in the same school as a member of staff is unlikely to maintain a consistent level of performance by performing identically year after year. We are here onto the difference between ten year's experience and one year's experience repeated ten times. Indeed, one year's experience repeated ten times is

60

almost certain to be less satisfactory on the tenth occasion simply because the outside world, and hence the needs of students, will have changed in that time. Staff, therefore, need to keep abreast of developments in their areas of expertise. They need updating. They need to acquire new and diffe­rent skills. As repetition blunts their enthusiasm and commitment, they need to branch out and to acquire expertise in new areas: the bored pro­fessional will almost always be equally boring to others. Staff development is therefore not merely the ultimate responsibility of the head teacher, but it ought also to be a deep and abiding concern: those who work under his direction and oversight ought to be more effective after their time with him than when they arrived. In a real sense, the head teacher is thus the 'teacher' of his staff, including non-teaching colleagues, in that he needs to structure the situations in which they are better able to learn.

Staff development may be said to occur (ideally) at a number of levels.

a) In-house staff development. The school itself ought to be a place where staff can learn through and with one another. Teachers who have attended courses elsewhere should have an opportunity of reporting to their colleagues and of distributing any materials/handouts they have collected. Internally produced teaching materials/aids should be made available to other teachers. Teachers with classroom difficulties should have opportunities for watching, teaching with (in teams), and talking with particularly able colleagues. From time to time, outsiders should be invited to act as stimulators/facilitators and as information-givers.

b) Local staff development. Opportunities ought to be made for teachers from both similar and different educational establishments to gather for the purpose of sharing their problems and helping one another to find solutions. Teachers from different primary schools, for example, are almost certain to benefit from a knowledge of what goes on/does not go on in one another's schools: experience shared by teachers from pri­mary 'feeder' and secondary 'receiver' schools is likely to help in stu­dent transition from one institution to another.

c) Regional staff development. Often schools within the same national area are confronting similar environmental conditions, or are even organised under a single regional agency, for which reasons they will almost cer­tainly have opportunities for learning from one another through attend­ance at regional courses and conferences.

d) National staff development. Most countries will have central agencies working at the implementation of government policy and concerned with modifying attitudes/developing new skills/changing directions. If natio­nal policy is to impact regionally, local staff will almost certainly require some kind of links with the centre.

e) Internal staff development. While it is unlikely that simple, transplant­able ideas will easily reveal themselves in visits to other national systems, most comparative education studies (and particularly those undertaken through visits) are extremely useful in challenging some of one's own assumptions about one's system and in making clear how much every national system operates in ways which can be explained in his­torical and social terms. Prom time to time, all national systems require realignment, adjustment or redirection.

61

What characterises the staff development modes (a to e) discussed above, is that as one moves from the first to the last, the cost tends to increase. In a perfect world, each teacher might well (at least over the whole of a career) undertake development work within each mode. In practice, financial constraints mean that in most countries most staff development is likely to take place in or close to one's place of employment, and other kinds of more geographically distant development activities may have to have their results disseminated rather than experienced directly by most individuals. Of course, since each mode is intended to serve different purposes, it is not a question of one being better or more appropriate than the others: all are potentially beneficial, even . if cost considerations make some less common than others.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that staff often have a great deal to learn from one another and that travel from the school is not necessarily the best or only way of improving professional performance. Here the head teacher has a major role to play, since his advocacy, support and personal involvement is likely to determine whether his school's staff development programme is successful or not. Through his involvement he is able to acknow­ledge both the achievements of staff whose development activities have proven successful and his concern for those who are seeking to benefit from those colleagues ' achievements. He has therefore an opportunity to be seen to be praising and encouraging simultaneously, both of which are likely to help with increasing the motivation and commitment of his staff.

Advancement. Perhaps the most powerful stimulant for improving staff perfor­mance is the possibility of advancement. The head teacher is certain to be able to influence promotion opportunities of staff, but the extent to which such opportunities exist is likely to lie outside the head teacher's control. In an expanding educational system, advancement may almost keep pace with the aspirations of the growing workforce; in a contracting system, the reverse is likely to occur. Encouragement and the 'possibility' of career-advancement may nonetheless prove powerful stimulants for improved staff performance.

On the other hand, failure to gain advancement, especially when it can be sought and/or anticipated, as well as being regarded as 'deserved', can be both a powerful demotivator and a pretext for the diminution t)f commitment. Also, eventually every member of staff (including the head teacher) come to the natural end of a career, a point where advancement is not possible, where energy often begins to flag and where the chief concern is in con­fronting a new kind of life, generally on a reduced income. Most schools will eventually have their share of such individuals. For the manager they offer the possibility of occasional short-term tactics, but the long-term view is somewhat limited since for the individuals involved there is no long-term professional dimension.

Departure. In the same way that staff arrive at the school, so they event­ually leave, most likely for one of the following reasons:

a) Career advancement. Promotion may be an internal affair, or it may involve moving to another school/job.

b) Retirement. As discussed in 6 above, staff will eventually reach the ends of their careers.

62

c) Redeployment. Where demand in one area of work has declined, it may be appropriate/necessary to direct individuals to other areas of work. This may also involve some form of retraining which can be seen as part of the kind of staff development activity discussed in 5 above. Additionally redeployment may be internal within the same school or it can involve movement to another institution.

d) Redundancy. Should it become impossible for staff whose skills are no longer required to appropriately redeployed, they may become redundant. In educational systems where redundant staff can be shed, often with com­pensation to individuals involved,_ the problem, although initially dis­turbing, may lead to some kind of institutional resolution. Where the system does not allow staff to be made redundant, the school may be faced with compulsory redeployment, or with the continuing prospect of under-employing unneeded individuals. Redundancy may arise because of contrac­tion due to declining rolls, as in many Western countries, or there may simply be a shift in client demand. For example, in the 1960s as British universities increasingly removed the requirement for Latin and/or Greek for university entrants, secondary school teachers of these subjects were required to develop other kinds of skills.

e) Dehlring. Upon occasion, the school will find itself with staff whose skills are ostensibly required but whose performance is inadequate/unsa­tisfactory. Generally there will be formal/legal procedures for dealing with such individuals. Before a member of staff loses his job, the manager will be required to gather satisfactory evidence of the individual's insufficiency (a particularly difficult and protracted task where no formal staff appraisal system operates); to be able to show that reason­able efforts were made to help the inadequate staff to overcome his defi­ciencies; and to fqllow the established procedures (which may involve verbal and/or written warnings) very carefully. The entire process is likely to involve much time and to generate considerable institutional tension. Dehiring is generally a 'last resort' activity, undertaken only after all else fails. In some national systems, the problem is shunted onto another institution through a reposting, which is often defended on the grounds that a fresh start in a new setting may help to resolve the individual's problems'.

8. Exercise. A potentially useful way of reviewing the above material on the management of human resources, and of applying it to your own school situa­tion, would be to prepare a staff manual for later distribution to your colleagues and to organise the manual around the topics discussed above. The task should enable you to clarify both for yourself and others:

a) What the rules, procedures and practices are at present in your school. Por example, under performance appraisal (5 above) you could set out both what day-to-day expectations are of staff performance (eg. time­keeping, preparation, marking, discipline, etc. for teachers; clerical duties and responsibilities for office staff; etc.) and what appraisal/ staff development activities currently exist.

b) What kinds of developments you might wish to encourage in your school. The manual might therefore be seen as both an inventory and a stimulus for further development. In compiling the material, it might be appro­priate to involve other senior colleagues to insure both accuracy and completeness; and before distribution, it might be advisable to liaise with your own superiors for similar reasons.

63

SECTION C: THE MANAGEMENT OF THE LEARNING PROCESS

In all school systems, to some extent at least, the curriculum itself is generated externally: through central agencies, examination boards, political initiatives, national development plans, employer demands, parent expectations, etc. Only private schools are likely to have broad general control over what is taught, and even within such institutions there will be a concern to convince paying customers that what is offered is appropriate and often a need to prepare students for external examinations or to get accreditation for internal activity. No school is an island, so that social forces inevitably impinge to some extent.

At the same time, even in educational systems where curriculum is organised centrally and 'received1 by the school, there is likely to.be some measure of auto­nomy, some opportunity for responding to student needs and to local conditions. Most schools enjoy some discretion in terms of emphasis and focus, at the very least, for which reason no two schools are ever exactly identical. Therefore the head teacher is at least in part responsible for curriculum provision within his his school in terms of content, and most certainly responsible for curriculum moni­toring, review and development.

The subject of the school curriculum is much too broad to be treated here as an area of knowledge within itself, but it will be useful managerially for you to consider an Exercise involving a curriculum audit in which you examine the range, variety and appropriateness of curriculum provision within your school, with a view to exploring the ways in which improvements might be introduced. It would be suggested to organise the audit along the following general headings:

1. Curriculum content

a) To what extent (across the whole of your school) is your curriculum con­cerned with intellectual knowledge and/or with knowledge derived through the senses?

b) To what extent (across the whole of your school) is your curriculum con­cerned with the development of skills? and what kinds of skills? personal/ expressive/artistic? practical? marketable? interpersonal? social?

Traditionally many schools have concerned themselves primarily with the tea­ching of knowledge-based curricula, often organised among 'subject* lines (eg. language, mathematics, science, history, etc.), but in recent years there has been concern in Western countries to shift the curriculum in the direction of a 'child-centred' approach. By 'child-centred' is meant an attempt to identify present and likely future needs of each child and to provide curriculum which reflects such needs, rather than to match children in terms of potential achievement against the requirements of the curriculum. At the same time, there has been an increasing awareness that the curriculum operates on both formal and informal levels, with the latter often referred to as the hidden curriculum, the kinds of attitudes, values and expectations with which students are being inculcated, which leads us to a number of other questions:

c) To what extent does your curriculum (hidden or otherwise) promote general cultural values? Are students being fundamentally prepared to be competi­tive? co-operative? to pursue primarily their own-or the group's needs?

d) What kinds of personal values does your curriculum promote: obedience? independence? acquiescence? creativity? Are such values promoted equally across the school, or are some groups expected to value other qualities: leadership? responsibility? power?

64

e) To what extent is your curriculum treated as separate and distinct 'sub­jects'? Or is there some attempt at integrating the content of lessons so that students are made aware of the relationship between, for example,

• mathematics and science? language and history? what they learnt on Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon? what they learnt last year and what they are learning this year?

Since curriculum is generally the means by which the new generation is pre­pared to take its place as adults in society, the issue of what curriculum content ought to be has frequently become politicised in national life, with competing groups of advocates urging their own approaches and commit­ments. This is not the place to confront such broad political issues, but as a manager the headteacher ought to be aware in some detail of precisely what the content of his school curriculum consists, and by 'aware' I do not mean purely what is written down on the syllabus, but also what is actually taught and of the different kinds of emphases and departures which individual teachers promote. The extent to which teacher autonomy exists varies from culture to culture, as does the degree of control which a manager can exer­cise over such autonomy. Nevertheless, at a basic level the manager needs to keep informed of what actually does go on in the classroom. Some of this information may be gathered by those to whom responsibility has been dele­gated, which may involve attending lessons on some occasions, reviewing classwork, scrutinising lesson plans, analysing test/examination results, etc.

2. Curriculum planning models. At some remove from the issue of the hidden curriculum has been the problem of determining what it is the teacher is conscious­ly attempting to do in learning situations. One of the major attempts at definition has been the objectives approach (used in these Parts) which encourages the teacher to specify intended behavioural outcomes. A starting point is to distinguish bet­ween aims (very general statements of goals and purposes) and objectives (more precise statements of goals),' with the latter sometimes further divided into three domains: the cognitive, the affective and the psychomotor - or, rather more simply, the head, the heart and the hands as the focus of the objectives. Still other curriculum theoreticians have argued that the objectives approach may be appro­priate to some, subject areas (particularly linear subjects such as mathematics and science, where a clear step-by-step progression may be discerned.) but not in others (such as the humanities where the intended outcomes cannot be accurately predicted; the term 'expressive objectives' is sometimes used). Still others have argued that it is not the ends, but the means (or process) of reaching those ends where learning transpires. If you wish to follow up any of these ideas further, Kelly (1982) is a good starting point for reviewing the literature.

Again, your audit needs to concern itself here with the range of curriculum planning models employed in your school. There may be national guidelines for the construction and presentation of curricula in your system, in which case a single model may be more or less in evidence. Where this is not the case, the differences you encounter may bear some relation to the various ages of the teachers concerned, or to the institutions in which they were trained. Promoting discussion about diff­erent curriculum planning models may well be a good starting point for in-house staff-development activities.

3. The organisation of learning. Since most schools tend to be conservative in their approaches, it is likely that the overwhelming majority of institutions operate along the lines of traditional classroom teaching, with a single teacher confronting a group of students. However, in recent decades there have been many attempts to break away from the more conventional approaches. Some of the most important have been:

65

a) Different approaches to organising the learning groups, such as banding, setting, family grouping, etc., discussed in the first Part of this docu­ment .

b) Individualised 'open' learning, with students pursuing their own assign­ments and all institutional resources (including teachers) used as points of reference.

c) Distance learning, where the student works at home or elsewhere and only occasionally makes contact with the educational institution (sometimes by telephone ).

d) Pre-structured individualised work units, such as the Parts in the docu­ment at which you are presently working.

If you are interested in exploring the full range of possibilities in this area, Davies (1980) provides useful information.

4. Monitoring. In the first Part of this document, we looked at monitoring in terms of teacher performance appraisal, and touched upon it again in this Part. Of course, it is not only teachers who are appraised, but students as well, and, as with teacher appraisal, evaluation of student performance is intended to provide opportunities for encouraging the successful and helping the less successful. Tests and examinations abound in education. Formal examinations of the kind provided by external boards may carry with them the weight of public confidence, particu­larly for successful candidates, but they are seldom of any real use to teachers, since examination scripts are not generally available for later scrutiny in schools. Therefore, while the headte'acher/manager will need to pay attention to the way in which his students perform in competition with students from other schools, at a day-to-day operational level., it is the internal monitoring which the school undertakes which is likely to provide most opportunities for diagnosing the stu­dent's difficulties..

Broadly speaking, there are two modes of assessment:

a) norm-referenced assessment, concerned with evaluating individual attain­ment with reference to comparable competitors, ie. a score or grade which has meaning only insofar as it is compared with others which make up a group.

b) criterion-referenced tests and mastery learning, where the student's attainment is measured against a given standard or performance, in much the way in which Olympic runners are measured against the clock (although their performances are also norm-referenced in that they come first, se­cond, third, etc. as well).

Still other kinds of distinctions can be made among various modes of asse­ssment:

a) They can be formal or informal, the latter, of course, being the most common and to be found both among teachers evaluating one another and among the teacher and his students.

b) They can be formative or sirnimative, ie. focusing on the activity while it is in operation or when it is completed or upon its conclusions, or both.

66

!

c) They can be continuous or terminal. The distinction between formative and continuous is that the former is concerned with using data obtained during the activity to modify its subsequent progress, while here the emphasis is on learner achievement, whether the final evaluation should include work done during the course of the activity or centre on a final evaluation; or both.

d) They can include course work or examinations, or both.

e) They can include some or all of a), b), c) and d) above.

Headteachers wishing to explore the topic of assessment in schools somewhat further are directed to Satterly (1981). Additionally, the subject may prove appro­priate for in-house staff development activities. An audit of the varying moni­toring devices used to evaluate student learning programmes may well reveal only some of the above approaches as being in operation, so that the possibility of looking at alternatives may present itself as the basis for some experiment. Again, the headteacher and his staff are unlikely to be able to modify system monitoring arrangements unilaterally, but they should be able to initiate some developmental work (often with the support and interest of superiors). We need also to note here that monitoring staff performance and student performance are not two discrete and unrelated activities: each may present a particular focus and concern, but either will also supply valuable evidence about the other.

If you undertake this curriculum audit with the thoroughness it surely deser­ves , you will not only learn a great deal about what your school does/does not achieve, but you will have a solid data base from which to identify those areas of school work where development/help would prove beneficial. The problems you encounter ought subsequently not merely to form the basis for in-house activities, but a pretext for making contact with colleagues in other schools and with local and regional administrative officials, all of whom may have the means of helping both you and your students.

SECTION D: HEADTEACHER: EXTERNALLY-ORIENTED ROLES

In the first Part of this document, A Systems View of School Management and Organisation, there was developed a systems perspective with the concept of bound­ary, the dividing line between the system or sub-system and its environment. It was suggested further that the boundary concept was movable, that it represented one ' s own personal way of viewing one's work world, and that, therefore, regional administrators and headteachers might have quite different notions of where their system boundaries lay. For our purposes here, using the perspective of the head-teacher viewing his school as the system, the boundary is clearly the point where his authority and power are significantly reduced. In simple terms, the headtea­cher' s boundary might be thought of as the point where the school's geographical setting ends.

Within the boundary, although the headteacher may come under considerable pressure from outsiders (local officials, parents, employers), .he is likely to have fairly clearly . defined powers and responsibilities. He is also likely to be the dominant partner in any kind of negotiations, since all of the staff (teaching and non-teaching) and students will be working under his direction. The responsi­bilities of others will have been delegated by him and subject to his scrutiny. Major decisions/changes will require his support, although they may also need.to be approved by external individuals/bodies. Nevertheless, within that boundary he will be in charge to an extent no other individual can match.

67

It will be seen that the areas of management concern which we have been exa­mining above - the management of non-human resources, the management of human resources, and the management of the learning process - all represent activities which are central to the headteacher's role and which involve his working within the school boundary. They represent activities over which his jurisdiction and influence are likely to be at their greatest, as is his capacity to initiate and implement considerable change. Por example, the headteacher may decide, in consul­tation with senior colleagues, to undertake an in-house sïïf f development pro­gramme. Provided he is able to secure the enthusiastic support of colleagues and he can obtain sufficient additional resources for the activity, there is almost no limit to the achievements which can be attained. The headteacher will be within the confines of his authority, within the school boundary.

However, not all activity undertaken by the headteacher will occur within the boundary. Much of his effort may involve across-the-boundary (or boundary) management, dealing with individuals who are normally to be found outside the school, but whose expectations, and even tasks, impinge directly on the school. Such individuals are likely to include parents, employers, members of the general public, shopkeepers, journalists, and officials: local and regional administrators, inspectors, representatives of national/local educational bodies, or (where the headteacher works under the direction of a council or governing body) represen­tatives of these groups who are involved in the administration of the school. What characterises these individuals/groups is that they reside normally beyond the school boundary. Often the headteacher has no real authority over them. Upon occasion (as, for example, with local-officials ) they may have authority over him. The relationships the headteacher has with such people are likely to be equivocal. Prom time to time, such outsiders may actually make conflicting and contradictory demands upon the school: inspectors, for example, may be promoting more innovative approaches and content in the school curriculum, while employers are stressing the need to get back to the fundamentals championed in their own school days. The headteacher will thus find himself in a situation where his power is not only limi­ted, but where he will have to concern himself with resolving incompatibilities while recognising that whatever he does/does not do will be sure to displease some­one to some extent.

In the kind of situation outlined above, the headteacher will also be opera­ting within a very inadequate management information system. All of the exercises that were undertaken earlier were centred on activities where the headteacher could find out fairly easily what was/was not taking place because these activities were pursued within the boundary. Beyond the boundary, the headteacher is unlikely to have the means or the authority to obtain very much information. He may well wonder upon what basis employers are making their demands, and may even feel that they are wrong in the conclusions they have drawn, but he will hardly be able to initiate an audit within their organisations as he did within his own. Whatever he decides to do finally, he will have to be discreet and diplomatic, and he will need to proceed with some caution.

Another way of looking at the kinds of action the headteacher can undertake is to draw a distinction between synoptic and incremental change. Synoptic (or, as it is sometimes called, 'big-bang.') change is charge which takes place all at once at a single moment. It-may be planned and organised in advance, but the modi­fication will occur from a given instant.

Incremental change, on the other hand, involves making small (or incremental) moves on particular problems rather than through a comprehensive reform programme. It is also endless. It takes the form of an indefinite sequence of policy moves.

68

Moreover it is exploratory in that the\goals of policy making continue to change as new experience with policy throws new light on what is possible and desirable. In this sense it is better described as moving away from known ills rather than as moving toward a known and relatively stable goal (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963). In managing across the boundary, I would suggest that the headteacher is more likely to proceed incrementally, to be responding t£ external pressures. We can see this if we examine in some detail the areas_ of boundary management with which the headteacher is most likely to be concerned.

1. The management of outside bodies

By 'outside bodies' it is meant not only formally organised groups of indi­viduals (local/regional education offices and their officials, examination agen­cies), but also informal, uncoordinated groups of individuals (industry, commerce, parents, the local community), all of whom will have expectations about how the-school ought to be meeting their needs. We can anticipate demands from any or all of these people for the school to organise itself in ways .most likely to sat­isfy external needs.

To be sure, there are some differences among the above individuals. Those whose organisation and function is formally structured are likely to have fairly clearly defined relationships with the school: officials will almost certainly have a directorial/inspectorial function and to oversee the work of the school to some extent; examination agencies are likely to influence curriculum, methodo­logy and teaching approaches. Those who are unorganised and who function inform­ally may only appear above the school horizon in times of stress or particular difficulty, and one of the school's functions will be to monitor these individuals to anticipate problems before they become major dilemmas.

The headteacher can 'manage' these individuals to a limited extent only. His school is unlikely to be the only school with whom outside bodies interact. Other schools are likely to be regarded as more or less effective, depending on the extent to which they meet outsiders' needs: the headteacher's own school will thus be continually subjected to comparison. Formally organised outside bodies who have a defined relationship with the school may well understand some of its problems, but the remainder of the bodies are almost certain to have little appreciation of the way in which the school functions and of the constraints within which it operates. Complaints are likely to be more common than compli­ments . The school's problem will therefore centre on public relations. It will need to be sensitive to shifts in attitude/expectation; to negotiate change to the extent which is possible; and to 'sell' its solutions. It will be quite point­less for the headteacher to experience deep personal offense because his school is unappreciated. Nor are retaliatory attacks likely to be genuinely effective. The school's relationship with outside bodies is very much of the provider/client, or sales person/customer, kind, and the old adage that 'the customer is always right' comes to mind.

Of course, the customer may be wrong, but insofar as the school is a service industry designed to meet the needs of outsider, the customer will expect to be able to define his own needs. In the case of both parents and employers, the image of the school and how It functions is likely to be out of date and to derive from experience of school a generation or more ago. The school may regret such inaccu­rate perceptions, but, once again, being defensive is unlikely to prove a useful course of action. Rather, the school might consider an' educative function, the need to help parents and employers to gain a fuller understanding of the school and its problems. In some countries, this has led to the establishment of formal bodies designed to bridge the boundary. Thus we may find parent-teacher associa­tions whose membership is drawn from among those whose children are being educated

69

in the school and those who teach in the school. Likewise governing bodies, school councils or boards whose membership includes representatives of parents and em­ployers. These arrangements serve a double purpose: they enable outsiders and insiders to gain a fuller appreciation of one another's problems and expectations, and they provide a basis for co-operation in dealing with other outsiders. More­over, those outsiders who have close personal contacts with the school are more than likely to take its part and represent its interests when the school comes under pressure from beyond the boundary.

2. Managing the role of the institution

The kinds of pressures we have discussed above tend to derive from expecta­tions about how students should be trained. There are, however, larger, and nece­ssarily vaguer issues which may not surface so frequently, but about which people often have deep personal feelings. What does the school stand for? Apart from offering courses and helping people to gain qualifications, what does the school represent? Is it interested only in students who attain academic distinction? What kind of social values does it attempt to inculcate? What are the priorities? Does the school see its role as promoting social mobility, as enabling the next generation to be better educated, have better jobs and gain better pay than their parents? Is it concerned to develop individual potential when it has no apparent immediate social utility: reading, listening to music, etc.

Whatever does or does not surface from the community at large, there are bound to be a varied (and often conflicting) range of attitudes to the school and what it is seen as representing. It may well be that many people expect higher standards of integrity, commitment and selflessness from the school, as they often do from their own children, than they themselves would claim to represent. Such 'issues are difficult to pinpoint, but they almost certainly underlie the way people act when they have a choice about where they will send their children. So, too, do public attitudes towards the school's discipline: are the students perceived as socially mature, responsible individuals, or are they rowdy and disruptive, likely to cause problems for local residents and shopkeepers? Part of the school's boundary management will almost certainly involve the difficult (and frequently impossible) task of trying to regulate student behaviour outside the school and beyond the sight of the teaching staff.

On the other hand, there are those who. would, argue that the school should be about something more than students in the sense of school children and young people undertaking study prior to employment. Some educationists have argued for the community school which is not concerned to isolate students from the community while they are being prepared to enter that community. Within this conception, the school might be open not merely for the duration of the student's school day, but for twelve or more hours per day, and often for most of the weeks in the year. Its facilities might be opened up to local' residents, its courses available to anyone who wishes to join full-time students, so that the school becomes a place where adults can obtain a 'second chance1 to achieve what they missed in their own youths. In some countries, community schools have also encompassed medical and dental surgeries, information services, leisure facilities, and social/interest clubs. In this kind of arrangement, the school ceases to be a kind of ' isolation ward' in which students can grow and develop apart from their families, but an extension of and a focus for the whole of community life.

The models discussed above (the isolated school and the community school) represent extreme ends of a continuum. Something between the two is also a possibi­lity. Por example, the school may concern itself with contributing to the education of its students in informal social activities and leisure interests as well." Some schools may promote 'after-school' clubs and societies, or sports or drama

70

activities. The school may organise weekend events, sports fixtures or school dances/discos (often with the help of parents). In some countries, when the formal school day ends, young children are organised in games and leisure pursuits until their parents return from work to collect them. In these kinds of arrangements, the school is clearly developing a role beyond that of formal classroom teaching and can be seen as extending its responsibility and as responding to across-the-boundary needs.

Of course, the kind of role the school will play in the larger community is never purely, and seldom even primarily, the responsibility of the head tea­cher. Opening up the school to undertake a larger community role requires addi­tional resources, and few schools can expect to generate such resources without difficulty. If parents are prepared to pay and/or help with extra activities, or if teachers feel able to undertake additional unpaid duties, the school may extend its range of offerings and modify its community role to some extent. How­ever , in order to take on a still larger role, the school will almost certainly need to approach its own resource providers, and unless those providers are parents paying for private education, this will involve local/national govern­ment funding. To an appreciable extent, the role of the school in the community therefore becomes a political issue. The head teacher can attempt to alter the 'image' of the school by clarifying its attitudes, changing its approaches or modifying the behaviour of its students. He may also seek to extend its range of activities, but there are likely to remain certain constraints which he can overcome only to the extent that he is able to persuade resource providers to remove them.

3. Planning

What 1 and 2 above will have demonstrated is that as the head teacher moves outwards from the boundary, his control over the situation diminishes. If he is king in his own castle, he will almost certainly have a less lofty role to play once the walls of his own institution are out of sight. Outside, there will be much that he does not know, and others whose own importance cannot be overlooked or ignored. At the same time, the head teacher will be expected to plan ahead. If he is to function as a leader, he will need to be leading his school somewhere, and leading by definition implies knowing where one is going.

In theory, the head teacher ought to be able to plan along three dimensions: long-term (perhaps three or more years away), middle-term (in the next few years), and short-term (often during the present academic session). In practice, long-term planning will almost certainly be difficult, if not impossible, since social/ political/economic changes at central and local levels are likely to impact .sig­nificantly and it is difficult to make accurate predictions in these areas. Middle-term planning will almost certainly follow either external thrusts (a new examin­ation system/structure, reorganisation of school admissions, a fall/rise in stu­dent population), or internal decisions (a different arrangement for allocating teaching among staff, changing science textbooks). Short-term planning on an al­most Immediate basis will probably be the most commonplace in the school and al­most certainly follow in response to perceived problems (increasing numbers of students failing to complete their homework, indiscipline among senior students, etc. ).

Planning inevitably involves prediction or expectation, and, as we have already noted, the head teacher cannot be expected to have supernatural powers in this regard. It is probably more important that he (and his school) should be flexible. There will be the necessity -to match inevitably limited resources (effort, time, finance, equipment, etc.) to emerging needs, so that, for example, shifting energies from one area of commitment to another, as national and local

71

trends reveal themselves, may represent the most common kind of planning under­taken. You will notice, to use a distinction discussed above, that the kind of activity described here is incremental rather than synoptic in that it concerns primarily responding to demands.

Of course, school planning tends to be incremental for another reason: schools are serial enterprises in which a group of newcomers enters at repeated intervals. Therefore, if you wish to change the syllabus dramatically, you do not expect to do so for those students who are already half way through that sylla­bus and preparing for examinations. The rational pointât which to make the change is as the next group of students is about to start the syllabus. There is also a commitment to continuing to meet the expectations of existing students and their parents. Consequently, changes tend to work their way up the school rather than to be imposed on it instantaneously.

The head teacher's essential planning need will therefore centre around the requirement for flexibility in responding to external pressures and in identi­fying internal problems. He will need, especially, to know where resource availa­bility exists and to keep some resources in readiness to meet unpredictable but inevitable demands. He will, in short, need a management information system. Two of the audits we discussed in the first part (centring on human/non-human resources) were intended to give the head teacher a clear overview of resource commitment/availability so as to be able to confront the kind of difficulties revealed by the third audit (curriculum monitoring). This management information system was in itself, therefore, a form of planning intended both to expose diffi~ culties and to reveal ways of dealing with those difficulties.

However, it might also be appropriate for the head teacher to implement a similar kind of management information system with regard to those areas of management concern which are less directly under his own control. To be sure, the system is unlikely to function so completely or so accurately as the one which is concerned with inside-the-boundary management, but some information is likely to prove more useful than no information. Moreover, solicited information is like­ly to be more complete than information which is filtered haphazardly across the boundary, which leads us to the following suggestion.

1. Exercise

The exercises we undertook above were very much 'paper tasks', that is they involved gathering information which could be fairly easily transferred to paper. They required researching your own school and using the information to determine what courses of action you might appropriately choose to follow in the future. Such approaches are potentially useful in boundary management as well, but they are seldom within the resource capability of the individual school. If it is necess­ary to find out what employer attitudes are, or how useful their learning has proved to be for school leavers after two years on the employment market, then1

generally outside researchers/bodies are employed to undertake such wide ranging tasks. Head teachers may be well advised to keep abreast of information as It emerges from such sources in the form of reports and studies, but they cannot often hope to contribute very significantly to its collection.

On the other hand, all schools have an individual, unique dimension in that their environmental demands are likely to some extent to reflect the feelings and needs of local people and the local circumstances are likely to have some unusual dimensions. Therefore, the head teacher needs also to keep abreast of environmental developments, since outsiders are likely not only to disagree with one another upon occasion, but also to change their own perceptions. What is'nee­ded, therefore, is not a single (or even repeated) research effort but channels of communication, structured encounters which enable interested parties to exchange views.

These channels of communication may involve everything from occasional meet­ings (as with inspectors or local officials) or formal committees with designated agendas to be considered on particular dates and attended by representatives of various interest groups. Prom a head teacher/manager's point of view, such encoun­ters can serve a variety of purposes:

a) They can enable the head teacher to gauge outside attitudes on a fairly regular basis and to detect changes in such attitudes before they surface formally. Waiting for complaints and demands is much less useful than being able to anticipate them.

b) They can allow the head teacher to 'test' reactions to solutions which he is considering.

c) Members can serve as 'allies' in providing the head teacher with support. If employers and parents are in disagreement about proposed curriculum chan­ges , the backing of local employers may be extremely helpful to the head teacher in persuading parents to alter their attitudes/expectations.

Therefore, it will be useful for you to direct your attention to the follo­wing suggestions:

a) Who are the outside groups/individuals whom impinge on your school's acti­vity in terms of providing criticism/demands?

b) With which of those outside groups/individuals does your school have regular, established channels of communication?

c) To what extent are those channels of communication effective, and if they are not fully so, how might they be improved?

d) Where there are no channels of communication, how might you set about to establish them? «

The idea here is that as a head teacher/manager it is to both your own and your school ' s advantage for you to take a proactive role in boundary management, rather than to sit back and anticipate in some dread the demands of outsiders, reacting reluctantly only under pressure. Not only is a proactive stance likely to give you the advantage of access to information at the earliest possible moment, but it is also likely to win you much more positive support from outsiders. The fact that you have taken the trouble to involve others is possibly the finest basis for co-operation. The school, after all, is a servicing agency designed to meet the community's needs, so it is appropriate that it should be seen not as defending itself against the community, but as reaching out to it in a gesture of shared responsibility.

RECAPITULATION

This Part has been concerned with developing further the conceptual frame­work established in the first Part of this document, in using that framework as a basis for gathering information about your own school (or schools, in the case of an administrator) and in using the data to consider ways in which you can impact more successfully on the effectiveness/efficiency of your own school. As a means of relating such material to your own institutional needs, the exercises have been closely integrated into the text to provide both a pretext for exploring the ideas within your own environmental context and for exposing more clearly the major areas of managerial concern and the ways in which you can operate most effectively within those areas: the use of human/non-human resources; managing

73

the learning process; managing outside bodies; institutional role within the lar­ger environment; and planning for all of the foregoing.

Those concerned with the administration of a group of schools should have been able to use the developed framework to explore the effectiveness/effi­ciency of the organisations- for which they are responsible and as a basis for initiating managerial activity within those organisations.

74

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

The following terms are commonly used throughout this Part as here defined:

boundary management - management of interaction across the divide between the school and the larger community of which it is a part; sometimes also known as across-the-boundary management.

continuous assessment - using assessment made during the course of the activity towards a final evaluation.

criterion-referenced tests and' mastery learning - measuring student attainment against a given standard or performance.

formative evaluation - assessing the activity during itsprogress with a view to possible modification of that progress.

hidden curriculum - the attitudes, values and expectations which underlie school learning but which are seldom exposed or confronted.

incremental change - modification involving small (and frequent) moves on parti­cular problems, generally in response to perceived difficulties.

management information system - procedures for gathering and analysing data to be used as the basis for management decisions.

norm-referenced assessment - evaluating individual attainment with reference to others who form a group.

staff development - the process by which staff improve and update their existing skills/knowledge and/or acquire additional skills/knowledge.

staff induction - the process of helping new staff to settle satisfactorily into a new job by introducing staff to the school and its rules and practices, and by introducing the school to the staff.

summative evaluation - assessing the activity upon its completion; similar to terminal evaluation.

synoptive change - modification which occurs completely, all at once; a compre­hensive reform programme.

terminal assessment - evaluation made at the conclusion of the activity; similar to summative evaluation.

75

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

The 'areas of concern' dealt with here represent topics about which much has been written. What follows is inevitably highly selective. I have concentrated on more recent publications, which should be easily obtainable, and on works which provide fairly accessible approaches to exploring the literature in greater depth and breadth.

A large number of books offer broad, general treatment of a wide range of topics, not all of them closely related to the focus of the Part, but at least in part especially pertinent, and hence worth pursuing. These include:

OPEN UNIVERSITY, E323, Management of the School, Open University Press: Milton Keynes, 1981. This is a distance learning course, organised into 'Blocks', of which the following are particularly relevant:

BLOCK 6: The Management of Staff, ISBN 0-335-13075-5; especially sections on: The selection and promotion of staff; Staff development; Non-teaching staff in primary and secondary schools.

BLOCK 5: Managing the Curriculum and Pastoral Care, ISBN 0-335-13074-7; sections on: Managing the curriculum; School timetabling.

BLOCK 2: School Management: The Wider Context, ISBN 0-335-13071-2; sections on: Parents ; Employers.

Thomas J. LANDERS and Judith G. MYERS, Essential of School Management, W.B. Saun­ders: Philadelphia, .1977, ISBN 0-7216-5619-6; chapters on: Administering School Business Affairs; School-Community Relations.

C.H. BARRY and P. TYE, Running a School, 2nd Edition, Temple Smith: London, 1973, ISBN 0-85117-0692; section on The Use of Resources, Treating Topics of Time, Money, Materials, Space.

T. BUSH et al., Approaches to School Management: A Reader, Haroer & Row, London, 1980, ISBN 0-06-318167-3. There are useful sections dealing with timetabling and with staff management, the latter being covered in a number of sections: The School as an Organisation (papers by C.B. Handy, J.A. Conway, andT. Packwood), Leadership in Schools, and Management of Staff Development.

Alan PAISEY, School Management - A Case Approach, Harper & Row, London, 1984, ISBN 0-06-318283-1. This is inevitably, as the title suggests, a case study approach, so that much is fairly context-bound. Nonetheless there is consi­derable material of general relevance, in particular cases on: Staff Manage­ment; Staff Development;. Management of the Curriculum; Curriculum Develop­ment; Timetabling and Uses of Buildings and Facilities; Managing Materials and Equipment; Relations with Parents; Financial Management.

Other interesting books treat specific topics in greater detail:

Those interested in organising space for learning might wish to look at Stanton LEGGETT et al., Planning Flexible Learning Spaces, McGraw-Hill: New York, 1977, ISBN O-07-O37O6O-5 and Peter SMITH, The Design of Learning Spaces, CET: London, 1974, ISBN 0-902204-47-5. Grace KENNY and Ken FOSTER, Managing Space in Colleges. Coombe Lodge: Bristol, 1984, ISBN 0-907659-20-9, referred

76 \

to in some detail in the text, is now a basic reader on room utilisation. Keith JOHNSON, Timetabling, Hutchinson: London, 1980, ISBN 0-09-141630-2 is extremely detailed and helpful, r

Also useful are Brian A.A. KNIGHT, Managing School Finance , Heinemann: London, 1983, ISBN 0-435-8O48O-4; and Judy BRADLEY et al., Inside Staff Development, NFER-Nelson: Windsor, 1983, ISBN 0-7005-1001-X, particularly the chapter on Assessing Staff Needs which contains a useful self-evaluation questionnaire as well as management information forms to be used in introducing staff development into your school.

The Management of the Learning Process is extensively treated in the curriculum literature. Particularly recommended are two books mentioned in the text: A.V. KELLY, The Curriculum: Theory and Practice, Harper and Row: London, 1982, ISBN O-O6-31821703, which summarises a vast body of literature and is particularly helpful to managers in chapters on The Social Context of Curriculum Development and The Political Context; and W.J.K. DAVIES, Alterna­tives to Class Teaching in Schools and Colleges, CET: London, 1980, ISBN 0-86184-011-9, which explores a wide range of non-traditional teaching/lear­ning approaches and gives practical advice on organisation and implementation. B. WILCOX and P.J. EUSTACE, Tooling Up for Curriculum Review, NPER: Windsor, 1980, ISBN O-85633-210O, offers a curriculum notation system for use in secondary schools as a basis for undertaking curriculum review.

The topic of assessment is comprehensively covered by David SATTERLY, Assess­ment in Schools, Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1981, ISBN 0-06-11151-4.

When it comes to the topic of across the boundary management, inevitably much material tends to become very context bound, since both local/central educa­tional organisation and parent/employer attitudes vary from country to country and reflect differences in social/political economic settings. Therefore, the mate­rial needs to be used selectively and critically by individual readers, since not all of it will be relevant:

M. CRAFT et al. , Linking Home and School: A New Review, Harper and Row: Lon­don, 1980, ISBN O-O6-318136-3, now in its third edition, explores its subject fully, going into considerable detail on a wide range of related issues. Other highly specialised perspectives are explored in: Robert P. HILLDRUP, Improving School Public Relations, Allyn and Bacon: Boston, 1982, ISBN 0-205-07738-2, and Ian JAMIESON and Martin LIGHTF00T, Schools and Industry: Derivations from the Schools Council Industry Project, Methuen Educational: London, 1982, ISBN 0-423-51070-3. On incremental change, the standard text is still D. BRAYBROOKE L C E . LIND-BLOM. A Strategy of Decisions: Political Evaluation as a Social Process, New York, The Free Press, 1963, ISBN 02-904600-9.

77

P A R T IV

MANAGERIAL ROLES AND SKILLS OP EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP

PART IV - MANAGERIAL ROLES AND SKILLS OF EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP

SECTION A: DECISION-MAKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING

One of the major management activities of the head teacher is making deci­sions. This is what he is appointed to do and the person who is a bad decision­maker will be a poor head teacher.

The decisions he faces in his day to day work can be broadly divided into two types, as suggested by Simon (Simon, H. i960).

Programmed Decisions. These are decisions which follow automatically once the situation has been explored and the facts assessed. The manager can. apply the rule from the rule book, and there is no question of judgement or dispute. Many of a head teacher's daily decisions are of this routine nature.

Non-Programmed Decisions. These are much more difficult decisions to take because there is no clear cut answer or rule in the rule book to cover them. The manager has to make some management judgement, and his decisions may be supported by some and opposed by others.

In this section we will concentrate on non-programmed decisions, but we will refer back to programmed decisions in the subsequent section on information sys­tems .

1. Types of Decision-Making

• Decisions can- be placed in one of three categories. One set of decisions are concerned with the way in which the resources of the school are obtained and allocated. Resources must be seen to include all forms of investment that go into the school - plant, finance, manpower, time, skill, equipment. Decisions in this field are frequently ones of deciding priorities between one resource or another, or between allocating a resource between two competitors. So a typical decision might be whether the school purchases an overhead projector for the Geography or a duplicating machine for the staff room; a set of encyclopaedias for the libra­ry or new text books for the sixth form mathematicians; a teacher to concentrate on remedial teaching of reading or an extra science teacher. One of the most valua­ble resources is time, as the music teacher with his two periods a week per class often must contemplate as he looks at the 5 periods the Mathematics teacher custo­marily obtains.

A second type of decision is concerned with the monitoring or checking on the standards of performance of .the organisation. Every manager must decide whether what is being done is what he wants to be done, and if not take some action to bring about what he wants. A decision on whether a staff member's record of punc­tuality is adequate enough to avoid censure, would come within his category, as would a decision to tighten up a lax system of distributing notebooks from the stock room.

A third type of decision is concerned with the policy of the school. Deci­sions which steer the school in one direction rather than another, and determine long range or short term objectives, fall within this area. These decisions are obviously of a fundamental nature, and normally are preceeded by much debate and dispute.

78

Apart from being a convenient division into categories, the point to make here is that no one is likely to be equally skilfull at making decisions in all three areas. Those who are excellent at resource decisions might be quite erratic at policy decisions and disastrous at monitoring decisions. The divisions can be presented diagramatically as follows:

Dec is ion-Making

Type of Decisions Allocation of Monitoring and Checking resources Steering

Area of Concern Organisation Direction Control

2. The Stages of Decision-Making

Making a decision is not a single action. It includes at least three sepa­rate processes and two follow-up actions. There is a logical progression in the stages which ideally should happen but in practice often does not.

The first of the processes can be labelled Recognition and consists simply in recognising that there is a problem to be dealt with. Clearly no decision can be made until there is an awareness of the problem which it is to solve, and schools will differ in their ability to recognise that problems do exist. Some managers are able to pick up at a very early stage pending problems: others only respond when things are at crisis point. To some extent this difference reflects the intuition of the manager, but much more it results from the different degrees of efficiency of signalling systems in the school which warn that something is amiss. Part of the job of a manager is to set up such early warning systems of trouble, and the apparently trouble free school is very often one in which pro­blems are dealt with at an early stage.

t

The second stage is the one most easily neglected or skimped. Once the pro­blem is recognised, then it is necessary to search around for all the alternative possible solutions. This search programme requires a fair degree of creative and ••— imaginative thinking, for the more alternatives that are available . the greater the possibility of selecting the best rather than an adequate answer. Unfortuna­tely many decision makers tend to select the first solution they think of that seems to satisfy the problem, and put that into operation without continuing to look for the optimal solution. This seems to be a universal tendency in all orga­nisations, and Herbert Simon coined the ugly but useful phrase, "the satisficing organisation", to describe it. It is at this stage that brain-storming techniques are very appropriate. '

Following the enumeration of all the possible solutions, the third stage deals with the selection of the best answer. This is the stage that requires jud­gement, wisdom, experience and perception, which are qualities that all managers believe they possess. Again, however, it must be emphasised that no one individual is going to be equally good at all three processes in making a decision. The head teacher who is excellent at recognising problems at an early stage might be disas­trous at picking the best alternative. The head teacher who has unerring judgement in choosing the best alternative, might be quite hopeless at thinking up several alternatives to the problem. Even the head teacher who is at least adequate . in all three is likely to be better at one than the others.

79

The lesson from this mubt be that decision-making must be an activity in which more than one person participates. A small team if its various talents com­plement each other is likely to make better decisions than one individual however good he is, and the team will score particularly heavily in recognising the exis­tence of more problems and in providing more alternative ways of answering those problems. There is still some debate however whether a group will generally choose a better solution than an individual of experience and judgement.

There are two other processes that should follow the choice of action. First­ly the manager must set up the necessary systems, structures or mechanics to imple­ment the action, and secondly he must get the decision fully accepted by those who are involved in its implementation. These points will be discussed further in the section on the management of change.

These stages in the making of a decision have., been put in their logical sequence, but in practice decisions are often not made this way. Indeed, one writer has suggested that most of us carry round in our minds a number of prototype deci­sions and look for situations we can apply them to (Cohen et al. 1972). Even if this seems untenable, it is certainly true that many of us think of the various alternatives available to us only after having committed ourselves. The advantages of going through the stages, shown diagramatically below, should be clear.

Stages in Decision-Making

Stage One Recognition

Stage Two Search for Decision Alternatives

Stage Three Choice of Alternatives

Stage Four Management Implementation

Stage Five Staff Acceptance

Case Study 1_

At Nutley Secondary School, the Head of Department of Science and Mathematics was in some difficulty. She had developed close rela­tions with the local chemical industry and particularly with the Per­sonnel Officer of the one large international company in the area, and also with the Managers of some of the small firms. There was some decline in employment locally but it had not reached any serious level, and there was a steady stream of leavers entering these firms. There were some majore decisions shortly to be made in the chemical indus­tries in the area, in terns of rationalisation, relocation and possibly some diversification.

Part of the work of the Department was the provision of pre-University Science and Mathematics courses, and from these students had sprung a successful college society called the Science Society. It engaged speakers to talk on various scientific developments and among these had been a speaker from the large chemical firm on the development of high technology as a means of solving society's pro­blems. However another offshoot was a concern among some of the stu­dents about the effects of science on the quality of life and ecological

80

systems. This group had been active in local environmental issues, and tended to rally behind the banner of intermediate technology and humanistic science. The members of this group were certainly more radi­cal than most of their fellow students, and though they did manage to get lecturers jLn the college or people from outside to lead their discussion meetings, these were not well attended by the student popu­lation. Among subjects of their meetings had been excessive drug treat­ment in medicine, the use of electric shock treatment in mental hospi­tals, the effects of chemical farming on the soil structure and traffic noise levels in the city centre.

The Head of Department was happy enough with this activity, and even encouraged it in a quiet way, but she was horrified when a printed illustrated pamphlet of some 15 pages landed on her desk one day. It was entitled 'The Poisoning on the River Prüm' . The Prüm was a large stream or small river that skirted the north side of Nutley, and passed through the industrial area where some of the chemical and other indus­trial firms had recently been relocated. The pamphlet claimed that excessive harmful effluent was being pumped into the river by the che­mical firms and was particularly critical of the large international company. It stated that tests carried out had shown that on most days the levels of toxic substances were within the levels allowed, but only just, and whether legal or not had destroyed much river wild life. It also claimed that on some days the levels had been much exceeded, on one occasion by a serious oil spillage, and on others by an excessive discharge of waste chemicals. This had had disastrous effects on fish and birds in the river. Furthermore the pamphlet criticised the way in which the firms had looked after the river banks - on some stret­ches turning them into rubbish dumps for unwanted boxes, scrap metal, etc. , and on others turning them into show piece streams with closely shaven grass banks with all the natural habitat removed.

As a student production, the pamphlet was not badly written, but the total presentation was crude and uncompromising and in places statements were not backed up by evidence that looked convincing. Never­theless the pamphlet did contain a lot of facts and figures, and some hard work had been put into the fieldwork. The pamphlet was stated to be the production of the Science and Society Group at Nutley School, and the Foreword described the authors and compilers as 'concerned students'.

The Head of Department quickly established that the pamphlet had been produced on the school reprographic machinery, that the paper had been brought out of the Printing Society's stock (though it was not clear if any exchange of money had really taken place), and that the science laboratories and equipment had been used, with the tole­rance of one or two of the staff in charge, for the testing of samples. Furthermore the photographs had been taken with College equipment.

Meanwhile the head teacher was reading a letter received from the managing director of one of the firms complaining in the strongest terms about the pamphlet and indicating his lack of confidence in the teaching programmes of the school if this is what it lead to. This annoyance had been sparked off less by the pamphlet itself than a

81

report in the local newspaper which was running a strong ecological line, and which had a headline - "School boys catch out the Polluters". The head teacher contemplated what he should do. What would you have done as Head teacher?

At this point spend 30-40 minutes either on your own but preferably with other head teachers discussing what you would do. If you feel this case study is not relevant to your situation then Create one of your own for mutual dis­cussion.

Comment on the Case Study

This case study exemplifies the following points.

1. It is important to define what the problems are and rank them in order of importance before beginning to think of any actions.

2. There are always likely to be more than one issue or problem to be dealt with.

3. Problems are not just about judgement of what is the most pragmatic solution. They also involve moral and professional issues.

4. A course of action which satisfies one person may further anger another-and create an additional problem.

3. Delegation

All managers work with and through people. The chief tool managers have in this work is delegation. The powers and abilities of individuals are channeled and organised by delegating,- so that the manager gets things done through others. In this sub-section you will examine how you•delegate.

Firstly:-

(i) Make a list of five or six jobs/tasks that have been given to you.

(ii) Make a list of jobs or tasks that you have delegated.

How to delegate

When we are considering delegating we should check with ourselves the follo­wing points:

82

1. Am I confident of his/her ability to do it.

2. Have I created the practical situation where it can be reasonably done.

3. Have I decided and made clear what result I want and when I want it by.

4. Have I made clear how he/she reports back on progress or final result.

5. Have I delegated the necessary authority for the result to be achieved.

Por one or two of the jobs you delegated above ask yourself the questions listed above, and write down your answers, in the table.

What other questions should be asked?

Styles of Delegating

Differences in styles of delegating spring from the degree of independence granted to the delegate. Many managers find it difficult to give to others full authority and independence to deal with issues. Delegation is probably the most difficult of the arts of a manager -and the one most frequently done badly. It is difficult for many managers to really let go of a task. They want to keep strings attached, or constant checks made, and interfere with the process of the task if they see something being done which is not exactly the way they themselves would do it. The following are common attitudes in delegation which one most typi­fies you as a manager?

1. I accept responsibility for everything that happens in my department so when I delegate I make frequent checks and I put the delegate right if I can improve what he is doing.

2. I accept responsibility for everything that happens in my department, so when I delegate I make frequent checks and advise the delegate when I think he might improve what he is doing.

3. I give very clear guidelines when I delegate and spell out what the end result must be, so I only make infrequent checks to make sure no­thing is going very badly wrong.

4. I know my staff are not always the best people to tackle a particular job, but they can only learn by experience, and if they make a mistake I don't blame them. We are all entitled to make mistakes. So when I delegate a job I leave the delegate to get on with it.

5. I assume my staff are as competent as I am, so I leave them to it once we have decided on the objectives of the task. If they want help or advice from me they are expected to come and ask for it.

83

6. I assume my staff are as competent as I am to do the job. Once they accept the delegated task, I expect them to get onwithit and not bother me.

Describe a seventh 'style' which expresses your style.

What to delegate

1. Delegate the details that recur. Recurring work elements can be detached from the manager position and delegated to employees. Things that recur can usually be handled on a routine basis and seldom require a manage­ment level of skill. Routine decision-making is a recurring work element which can be delegated to others who have had suitable training in the policies and procedures, to aid them in reaching these decisions.

2. Duties which require uninterrupted or long application make a manager's time schedule inflexible, and should be delegated whenever possible. Preparing reports and preparing for and attending meetings are possible examples of such duties.

3. Because of the wide variety of skills demanded of managers, all managers are weak in one or two essential areas. Such areas should be fully dele­gated to another member of staff.

4. Some tasks the manager might not like though he is compétent enough at them. Such tasks can be delegated if he/she can find someone else who does like doing them. Delegating such tasks will not be successful, however, if the delegate finds them equally boring or distateful.

5. Delegate tasks to staff which will develop in them new skills and under­standing. Use delegation as a tool in staff development. Pace staff with new challenges which will stretch their abilities. Use delegation as a way of stimulating staff who are in a rut, who are frustrated v or who otherwise are not happy with their work and the organisation»

What not to Delegate

Management writers have suggested five categories of activities which the manager should not normally delegate.

1. The setting of objectives for the department for which the manager is responsible.

2. Organising and developing staff into an efficient team which can operate smoothly and with little friction.

3. Keeping staff informed and involved through informal but planned face-to-face contacts.

4. Checking results and analysing them as guides to future actions.

5. Developing staff in skills and capacity to operate autonomously in many areas so that the organisation becomes self-maintaining and flexible.

Your position may not give you much power to delegate in the formal sense; perhaps you have to coax people "to give you a hand". Even so; Consider what tasks in your present job you would delegate if you could. Note the reasons you would not delegate certain tasks.

84 !

How much should you delegate?

Managers' positions exist because there are some problems that cannot be solved by most employees. The manager keeps the organisation going not by solving routine questions but by tackling the tough ones. He can delegate all other parts of his job and still have enough policy making decisions and planning left to keep him occupied.

Why Delegate

The way you delegate and what you delegate probably depends upon the purpose you have for delegating. How far is each of the following important for you?

1. I delegate because I cannot do all the work myself.

2. I delegate because I am not so good at some things than others, so I give them to people who are better at them than me.

3> I delegate because I want to train my staff in tackling more difficult tasks and taking more responsibility.

4. I delegate to encourage flexibility, innovation and creativity, in my department.

5. I delegate to increase the interest and motivation of my staff.

6.. I delegate to help staff understand the problems that are normally dealt with by other people.

Write a short paragraph summarising your reasons for delegating.

Read the following "Guidelines".

Eight Guidelines to Successful Delegation

1. Build up confidence in your staff. You cannot successfully delegate to staff who do not trust you.

2. Have clear lines of command.

3. Delegate end results, not methods of achieving them.

4. Involve staff in the process of delegation on matters of expected results, dates, methods of report back etc.

5. Agree with staff the priorities to be tackled or date by which result achieved.

6. Record what has been agreed.

7. Give the necessary authority and resources.

8. Delegate only to the people directly responsible to you. Do not by­pass heads of section by delegating to their subordinates as . this undermines their authority.

85

Add to the list of eight Guidelines one or two others you think are impor­tant .

How far do you apply the Guidelines when you delegate?

There may be one or. two jobs you now realise you could delegate and others that you have delegated in a way you now think was inadequate. Draw up a plan to put your learning and ideas into action.

4. Shared Decision-Making

It is important to separate out the process of delegating from that of con­sultation . and shared decision-making. The material in this section has a clear implication that no one person can be equally successful at all parts of decision­making and that therefore there is great advantage in the head teacher involving other people, if that is possible - However there are two important points to make about shared decision-making.

Decision-Making Load

There is one common fallacy held, that everyone wants to get as involved in decision-making as they can, feeling rebellious and deprived of power if denied such a right. A moment's reflection, however, must assure us that a number of our staff do not .want to be involved in very much management, nor to be drawn into every school decision that has to be made. It would be better to look at the staff as dividing between those who are involved in as much decision-making as they want (stability), those who have much more than they want (saturation), and those who feel they do not have enough part in decision-making (deprivation). It might be more revealing than we expect to find out from each of our staff where they would place themselves on a line from Deprivation through Stability to Satu­ration. If all the young staff feel deprived and all the senior staff saturated, there would seem to be an obvious task for the manager.

Roles in Decision-Making

Being involved in a decision can mean a number of different things.

(a) It can' mean that you are responsible for suggesting the decision, being responsible for any discussions that take place and seeing it through to implementation.

(b) It can mean that you are consulted about the decision and take part part in discussions about it.

(c) It can mean that you are the person who has to approve the decision but may take little part in the prior processes.

(d) It can mean that you are informed about the decision. (This is not as power­less as it might seem. Knowing who has to be informed about a decision can very much influence the course it takes).

So we can construct a decision-making matrix for any school on which we indicate the kind of involvement various members of the staff have in various kinds of decisions. There is a conventional lettering in use for indicating kinds of involvement :

86

Z. Initiating and carrying out

C. Consulted

A. Approving

I. Being Informed

It is useful for a school manager to construct a matrix for his organisation and see if there is anything to be__learnt from it. He might find for example that one or two people are heavily involved in one way or another, and others not invol­ved at all. He might find (though he should really know it) that nothing can be done in the school unless he approves. A typical matrix might look something like this (simplified).

Décision Points

Choosing textbooks

Selecting Staff

Organising School day :rip

Headmaster

I

Z

A

Deputies

C

I

Head of Oept.

A . C

C

I

Staff Members

Z

I

Z

Students

C

However in another school the approval of textbooks might be with the Head, the initiation of choice "on textbooks might be with the Head of Department, the approval of school trips might be part of the job of the Deputy Head. The cons­truction of such a matrix may reveal as a by-product the relative rigidity or flexibility of making decisions. The more difficult it is to decide who does what, or whether those who do it on one occasion always do it, the more flexible is the school as a decision-making body.

Using the matrix below, fill in some decision points that are relevant to your institution, write across the top the roles of the people you wish to consider then complete the matrix.

Decision Points

87

SECTION B: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT STYLE

Leadership is a complex quality. We may all think we know good leaders but defining what it is that makes a leader is not at all easy. Indeed it may take us up a false path. To test this out, write down all the qualities you think a good leader should possess and get others to do the same. When you contemplate the finished list it will be apparent that normal human beings just don't have such an amazing collection of virtues and qualities. It was the recognition of this fact that led to the demise of the trait theory of leadership, but in rejec­ting that we should nevertheless be aware that some people, and we hope this is true of all head teachers, fit easier into the leadership role than others. Lea­dership is generally seen now as a combination of specific actions associated with specific situations rather than a generalised quality, so in this section we are concerned with how the head teacher approaches his tasks rather than any inherent or charismatic qualities he may have. We are therefore talking about management style as much as anything else. We are going to approach the topic of leadership rather obliquely by means of a number of concepts on management behaviour.

1. Assumptions about People

We need to start by looking at the basic assumptions head teachers make about the people around them, and so you are asked to complete the following ques­tionnaire:

QUESTIONNAIRE

PART ONE: Assumptions about People

This questionnaire is designed to help you better understand the assump­tions you make about people and human nature. Be as honest with yourself as you can and resist the natural tendency to respond as you would "like to think things are". This instrument is not a "test". There are no right, or wrong answers. It is designed to be a stimulus for personal reflection and dis­cussion.

LEADER ATTITUDES : Part I

Follow this procedure:

Step One. Complete the questionnaire.

Step Two. Mark your assessment of your attitude on the scale as instructed in the section headed Leader Attitude Part II.

Step Three.Now score yourself on Part One (only do this when youJiave completed Steps One and Two).

Items 1 - 3 and 5 - 9 are scored like this:

88

Column A B Ç D 1 2 3 4

Items 4 and 10 are scored like this:

Column __A B Ç D 4 3 2 1 -

Step Four Place your score on the X-Y scale using the symbol A.

Directions: The following are various types of behaviour which a manager may adopt in relation to his staff. Read each item carefully and then put a tick in one of the columns to indicate what you would do.

A B C D Make a great Tend to Tend to Make a great

My approach is to: effort to do this avoid effort to avoid do this doing this doing this

1. Closely supervise my subordinates in order to get better work from them.

*

2. Set the goals and objec­tives for my subordinates-and sell tehm on the merits of my plans.

3. Set up controls to assure that my subordinates are getting the job done.

4. Encourage my subordinates to set their own goals and objectives.

5. Make sure that my subor­dinates ' work is planned out for them.

6. Check with my subordina­tes daily to see if they need any help.

7. Step in as soon as reports indicate that the job is slipping.

8. Push my people to meet schedules if necessary.

89

9. Have frequent meetings to keep in touch with what is going on.

10. Allow subordinates to make important decisions.

LEADER ATTITUDES : Part II

Read the assumptions underlying two different styles of leadership. Think about your own attitude to the team you lead. Mark on the scale where you think you are with reference to these assumptions. (Designate this point with a 'T').

THEORY X ASSUMPTIONS

1. The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can.

2. Because of this human characteristic of dislike for work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, threatened or rewarded to get them to put further adequate effort toward the achievement of organiza­tional objectives.

3. The average human being prefers to be directed., wishes to avoid respon­sibility, has relatively little- ambition, and wants security above all.

THEORY Y ASSUMPTIONS

1. The expenditure of physical and metal effort in work is as natural as play or rest.

2. External control and the threat of punishment are not the only means of bringing about effort toward organizational objectives. Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he is committed.

3. The average human being learns under proper conditions not only to accept but also to seek responsibility.

4. The capacity to exercise a high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.

X - Y Scale

Theory Y ; Theory X

10 20 30 ' 40

You may now wish to spend some time considering whether you want to modify some of the assumptions you have, particularly in light of any substantial gap between points T and A on the scale.

90

2. Leadership Style

The Range of Leadership Styles

There is a continuous stretching from the style which almost totally expresses the manager's authority, to that which almost totally expresses the subordinate's freedom.

Managers authority

Subordinates freedom

One division into styles along this continuum is:

TELLS - SELLS - TESTS - CONSULTS - JOINS

The following are the prototype responses in each style:

Tells

Sells

"I'm the Head, the problem I face is ... and you will do ... "

"I'm the Head, the problem I face is ... and I've decided you will ... and the reasons are ..."

Tests "The problem I face as Head is ... and as I see it we can resolve the problem by alternative course of action A, B, or C, but before making my choice I would like your views and any relevant information to assist my choice."

Consults "The problem we face is ... and I haven't decided yet how to tackle it: I would like you to let me know which possible courses of action you think are available, and I will select one of your alternatives."

Joins "The problem we face is ... and I'd like you to agree what is the best coucae of action - if you want any help from me I will contribute my bit. When you are agreed, I will implement your decision."

You are asked to read the following situations and decide which of the three suggested alternatives you would yourself choose.

91

Case Study 2 - Leadership

Case A

At Capital School, the Head teacher was approached by the Chief Adviser of the Education Department who proposed that the school might be used for a pilot project on in-service staff development. It would involve a government financed research worker from the University Institute of Educa­tion, who would work with the staff to establish their development needs in the light of the expected development of the school. Out of this, it was intended that a programme of in-service work would be developed. The Chief Adviser watj not insisting that the school should take part in the pilot project. It was up to the school to decide. The head teacher listened to the proposals and implications, and then said:

1. Yes, I think that is a good idea. We need some shaking up. I will tell the staff what it is we are going to do, then the university worker can come down and talk to them at length and deal with any questions.

2. Yes we will do that. You must give me a week to meet the staff indivi­dually and collectively and explain to them why it is good for the school and for their own prospects.

3. 1*11 put it to my staff. If they go along with it I'm happy about it.

Case B ,

At Central Technical School (850 roll), the Head teacher was meeting the Health and Safety at Work inspector at the end oí his tour of the school. He was faced by an unexpected problem. "It will be in my report that I will prepare straight away", he said "but I recommend you close down the main assembly hall at once. The electrical installations are dangerous and the steps at the rear have no rail nor a warning sign." There was a performance of a play by the students the following evening for parents, and there was no alternative hall on the site. The head teacher could:

1. Issue a directive to staff and pupils that the hall was not to be used forthwith, and instruct the caretaker to lock it. Then they could ring the Education office asking for priority for immediate repairs.

2. Call the staff together at break time and say to them that he saw three alternatives; to close the hall at once and postpone the school play, or to close the hall at once but find another hall as near the school as possible, or to keep the hall open until after the play with heavy supervision and then close it. Then invite their views before he made up his mind.

3. Call his staff together at break time, and present them with the situa­tion. Then say "so we have a problem. I'd be grateful for your ideas on what to do. If you can give me the alternatives open to us, I will implement the one that seems to be the best. _-

92

Case C

At Hightown Secondary School, the head teacher faced an uncertain future. In the inner city area the school served, it was quite possible that rolls would fall over the next ten years, but changes in the pattern of demographic settlement made this by no means certain. There were proposals to build a Roman Catholic secondary school a mile away which would draw off some families. There was a steady flow of immigrants from rural areas, but many families long resident in the area were moving to the suburbs. Local industry seemed also to be declining. The indigenous population was an aging group and birth rates had fallen rapidly.

The Head teacher could initiate one of the following plans.

1. He could prepare a development plan for the school to cope with these and many other factors, then presenting it to the Education Authorities.

2. He could hold a day's workshop with all staff willing to attend on a non-working day in which he could present them with all the facts and ask them to work out jointly a development plan which he would then put to the authorities.

3. He could prepare alternative plans for development,-- each involving substantial changes of role for many staff, and new lines of work with new objectives. Then copies of all four plans would be sent to all staff for their written comments so that he could take their views into account before deciding which one to recommend to the autho­rities.

Case D

At Midway School circulation of pupils between lessons was a problem because of the complex and awkward arrangement of rooms and corridors. The system which had been worked out in conjuntion with her deputy and two senior staff was clearly not working, dependent as it was on staff staggering by a few minutes the time each class concluded and moved. She could therefore:

1. Call the staff together and ask them to work out a system between them which she would then implement.

2. Prepare a plan which involved a ban on anything except anti-clockwise movement; and explain this to the staff at a meeting with the aid of flow charts and detailed explanations as to why this was the only solution that would work.

3. Say to her staff "you come up with some schemes that are possible and I will look into each one and tell you which, best fits into the school organisation."

In each of the four situations in the case study, three out of the possible five styles were suggested. You may wish to create for yourself a further two to cover all the styles. Each of the cases are different. The first concerns a professional teaching matter. The second involves an emergency situation.

93

The third concerned with the future development of the school. The fourth is a technical administrative matter. The question you are faced with is:

Which style is most suitable for which situation?

There is a further point to make. Do many head teachers adopt a style because it suits their personality and the assumptions they have about the role of the head teacher, rather than because it is the most appropriate response to a parti­cular situation?

3. The Two Sides of Leadership Behaviour

Much of the work on leadership behaviour has led to a consensus that there are two major styles of operating.

One style emphasises getting the task done.

A second style emphasises a concern for people and for human relationships.

The qualities of each can be summarised as follows:

Relationship Motivated Leaders (R+)

Get their major satisfaction from good personal relationship with others-.

Depend for self-esteem on how others regard them and relate to them.

Need good relations to feel at ease.

Are sensitive to what others are feeling.

Do not get upset when things are complicated.

Encourage others to participate and offer different ideas.

Are non-punitive but worry about the welfare of the group.

May pay less attention to the task of the group or individuals need a lot of support and help.

Taak Motivated Leaders (T+)

Are strongly motivated to complete successfully any task they take on?

Work through clear standardised work procedures.

Have a no-nonsense attitude about getting down to work.

Prefer having respect rather than affection of others.

Need to have everything under control before they can give consideration to others.

94

Although no one person is likely to be all of one and none of the other, there is evidence that many leaders tend to score heavily on one side or the other, and we can check that out for ourselves by looking in this light at the leaders - whether head teachers or others - which we know. It is also clear that it is no better to be one type rather than the other. We need to get tasks done and we also need to have good work relationships and consideration for others. There will be times when one quality is called for, and times when we need the other - maybe in the space of a morning - and sometimes we have to balance both.

This is a point made by Blake. By using his questionnaires he was able to place anyone on a grid which had an axis and points on each and therefore had 81 positions. For practical purposes he uses five points to illustrate five principal management styles. (Blake, R. and Mouton, J. 1964).

9.1 Task Management

2 O M S-O 3 a o K O. CS O b. Z ce Cd

o z o o

9.9 Ideal Management (High on concern for production: low on concern for people) Efficiency in operations results from arranging conditions in such a way that human elements interfere to a minimum degree.

1.1

(High on both concern for production and concern for people) Work objectives are achieved through committed people; inter­dependence through a common stake in organisational goals.

5.5 Average Management Adequate organisational performance is possible through balancing the necessity to get out work with the maintenance of morale at a satisfactory level.

Impoverished Management (Low on concern for both production and for people). Exertion of minimum effort to get required work done is just sufficient to sustain membership of the organisation.

1.9 Country Club Management (High on concern for people: low on concern for production). Thoughtful attention to needs of staff for satisfying relations with others leads to a comfortable tempo, but no real concern to get the job done.

CONCERN POR PEOPLE

You might consider where you would place yourself on the grid. As a further check, complete the following questionnaire. It. is very brief and will only give a rough indication of what kind of style you prefer: the full battery of Blake's exercises that are used to score people on the grid would take a very long time to complete and involve exhausting group activity over a week.

95

QUESTIONNAIRE

ELEMENTS OF YOUR OWN PERSONAL MANAGERIAL STYLE

Consider each of the "Decisions" statements and select from them the one which best describes you. Do the same for all 'the other elements. Circle in each group the number which typifies you.

DECISIONS

1. I place high value on maintaining good relations.

2. I place high values on making decision that sticks.

3. I place high value on getting sound creative decisions that result in understanding and agreement.

4. I accept decisions of others.

5. I search for workable, even though not perfect, decisions.

CONVICTIONS

6. I go along with opinions, attitudes and ideas of others or avoid taking sides.

7. I listen for and seek out ideas, opinions and attitudes different from my own.

8. I stand up for my ideas, opinions, attitudes even though it sometimes results in stepping on others' toes.

9. I prefer to accept opinions, attitudes and ideas of others rather than to push my own.

»

10. When ideas, opinions or attitudes different from my own appear, I ini­tiate middle ground positions.

CONFLICT

11. When conflict arises, I try to be fair but firm and to get an equita­ble solution.

12- When conflict arises, I try to cut it off or to win my position.

13. I try to avoid generating conflict, but when it does appear I try to soothe feelings and to keep people together.

14. When conflict arises, I try to identify reasons for it and to resolve underlying causes..

, 15. When conflict arises I try to remain neutral or stay out of it.

96

EMOTION (TEMPER)

16. When things are not going right, I defend, resist or come back with counter-arguments.

17. By remaining neutral, I rarely get stirred up.

18. Under tension I feel unsure which way to turn or shift to avoid further pressure.

19. Because of the disturbance tensions can produce, I react in a warm and friendly way.

20. When aroused, I contain myself though my impatience is visible.

HUMOUR

21. My humour fits the situation and gives perspective; I retain a sense of humour even under pressure.

22. My humour aims at maintaining friendly relations; or when strains do arise it shifts attention away from the serious side.

23. My humour is seen by others as rather pointless. .

24. My humour is hard hitting.

25. My humour sells myself or a position.

«

EFFORT

26. I rarely lead but extend help.

27. I exert vigorous effort and others join in.

28. I seek to maintain a good steady pace.

29. I exert enough effort to get by.

30. I drive myself and others.

Now summarise your selection by writing down in column II the numbers you have circled.

97

I

ELEMENT

DECISIONS

CONVICTIONS

CONFLICT

EMOTION

HUMOUR

EFFORT

II

YOUR SELECTION

III

MANACERIAL STYLE

When you have written down your selección in che second column, che related management style can be found from Che cable below :

Your Selection

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Managerial Style

1.9

9.1

9.9

1.1

5.5

1.1

9.9

9.1

1.9

5.5

5.5

9.1

1.9

9.9

1.1

Your Selection

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Managerial Styl«

.9-1

1.1

5.5

1.9

9.9

9.9

1.9

1.1

9.1

5.5

1.9

9.9

5.5

1.1

9.1

98

4. Situation Control

Whatever your particular style of leadership, it can only be exercised in actual situations, and one of the ways in which these vary is the degree to which the leader has control over the situation. Fiedler has suggested there are three main factors in determining the degree of control. (Fiedler, F. 1976).

(i) Leader-Member Relations - the support and dependability you can expect from your work force ;

(ii) Task Structure - the degree to which the task is spelled out clearly, goals are known, procedures for getting the job done are laid down, and success in completing the task measurable;

(iii) Position Power - the power you have over the work force - via sanctions, rewards etc.

By measuring or estimating these three factors we can label any situation that we meet as a High, Moderate or Low Control Situation.

High Control Situations

In these situations, conditions are predictable. The task is highly struc­tured so everyone knows what to do and' how to do it. The leader has the power to back up his authority with appropriate rewards and punishments, and he has the support of the group members. He can therefore feel reasonably certain and secure that (a) his directions will be followed and (b) his decisions will have the intended outcomes.

This situation secures good performance from a T+ leader but a. poorer one from an R+ leader. The R+ leader is likely to become bored and is no longer challen­ged. He may become prickly with his staff or withdrawn. On the other hand the T+ leader will be relaxed because the task is going well and therefore develop good relations with subordinates. There is time for the pleasantries.

Moderate Control Situations

These situations present mixed problems. Leaders may be supported by the group but have an ambiguous or unstructured task and little formal authority. Or the task might be structured, and the leader have considerable power, but be unsupported by the group. The leader has therefore to enjoy situations of some ambiguity where he may not have much formal power but must spend time being diplo­matic and supportive to the group in order to get their co-operation.

This situation secures good performance from R+ leaders and poorer ones from the T+ leader. The R+ leader enjoys the challenge of dealing with uncertain group relations in situations of some task ambiguity. He eases tension, reduces conflict and handles creative decision making groups very well. The T+ leader, however, experiences considerable anxiety in this situation. He cannot easily handle group conflict and does not easily identify with the feelings of the group. He is unhappy with the uncertainties of task structure and performance, and is constantly trying to impose an order where none is possible.

Low Control Situations

There are challenging and stressful situations. The task is unclear, there are no definite procedures or methods, the group members do not appear to like or support the leader, and do not work well together among themselves, and the leader has little formal power to get things done.

\ 99

This situation secures good performance from T+ leaders but poor ones from R+ leaders. R+ leaders become obsessed with the problems of obtaining group support and developing trust relationships, at the expense of the task. If they fail to reduce anxieties or stresses they may respond by withdrawal from the situation. On the other hand the T+ leader enjoys facing up to a challenging task where by drive and hard work they can get tasks done. They can exert tight control and discipline over the group which earns them respect-if not affection for reaching the goal of task completion in difficult circumstances.

It is very important to note that because a person is R+ it does not mean he is necessarily good at dealing with people: only that his major concern is with people. He might in fact be very unskilful. Similarly a T+ leader might not be good at task achievement, but at least that is his major concern.

So if Fiedler is correct, leadership style and situational control is matched with efficiency in the following way.

High Moderate Low

T+ R+

More efficient Less efficient More efficient Less efficient More efficient Less efficient

5. Two Special Cases

(a) The New Leader. When someone takes over a leadership job then however high the situational control has been, it is automatically reduced to moderate, in the eyes of the new leader. This is because he has to get to know the group and they have to learn to trust him, he has to find out what power he has and how it can be used, and he has to learn about the rules proce­dures, systems and other aspects of task structure. This means that for the first few months, a situation of high control become- temporarily one of moderate control. It follows that at firt the R+ leader would show up much better than a T+ leader. However, as the leader gets accepted by the group, exerts his available power and gets familiar with the system, so the situation reverts to one of high control. Now the T+ leader begins to show up better and the R+ leader begins to show signs of discontent. It follows that in situations of high control (a) theT+ leader must be given time to show his ability (b) the R+ leader must be given fairly frequent moves, because it is the new situation he responds to, not the inherent nature of the job.

(b) Jobs which move from one Situation to Another. If in a low structured job a T+ leader of ability works hard and successfully to knock the team into shape and to get better systems organised, he will quite probably move the situation from one of low to one of moderate control. In those circumstances he is likely to be increasingly unhappy and ineffective. It follows that T+ leaders used for such rescue work should be moved to a new low control situation after they have achieved some success. Problems may arise over redefining jobs which change the nature of situational control for the lea­der. Thought should' be given to the consequences of such job reorganisation which takes into account Fiedler's theory.

100

It is clear that the head teacher as leader of his institution needs above all else flexibility of response. Because the demands of situations change he needs to be able to operate both in a task-related and people-related mode, and to have the perception to make the right judgement as to which is needed for any particular situation. And because no head teacher will be without his weaknesses and idiosyncracies, he will if he is a good leader know when to delegate leadership to others. Leadership is ensuring the best possible outcome from any given situa­tion and the means and management style to achieve this will inevitably vary consi­derably from event to event.

SECTION C: MANAGING CHANGE

One of the most difficult activities of the head teacher is introducing and carrying through changes in his school or college. Some of these changes may be forced on him from outside, others may be changes he himself initiates or autho­rises , but either way he will face many problems. Most organisations do not have to make changes very often, and generally they do it rather badly. Most people within organisations do not like change. They prefer to stay the way they are, doing things in a way they are accustomed to. The force resisting change from the structure of the organisation and the individuals within it is to some extent counter-balanced by the desire people have to search for new experience and conquer new ground. There is always some force for change but commonly it is not as strong as the force for inertia.

At this point, think of a situation in the past in which you have tried to introduce change or have faced a change imposed from outside. This could be a change in which you are currently involved.

Describe the situation on one side of paper.

Then list all the occasions when you observed or deduced resistance to the change from any of the staff, and the apparent reasons for the resistance. Try to classify the items on your list into clusters of factors, and find a suitable name for each cluster. Finally check out your findings with the following section. Any point you have that is not covered by that section might well be written in as an addition.

1. Individual Resistance to Change

(i) Most people are more heavily influenced by their earlier experiences and training than by subsequent experiences and retraining. We tend to think that colleges, schools, and much of society should be very much the same as when we made our first major orientations in our post-adolescent and early adult years.

(ii) We are creatures of habit, and ingrained habits are highly resistant to change.

(iii) When faced with evidence that might lead us to modify or change our reac­tions, we tend to interpret selectively such evidence so that it fits in with the kind of life we have worked out for ourselves.

(iv) We generally oppose change if it means more work with no comparable reward.

(v) We may oppose change that takes us into uncharted territory, where our short­comings and incompetence might be exposed. We all have fears of the unknown.

101

(vi) Most jobs require the individual to invest time, efforts and money into developing a set of skills and acquiring resources of books , tools , etc. We are likely to be reluctant to abandon this investment to start investing in a new set.

(vii) As we may see our identity, sense of worth, our status and reputation as related to our vocational skills in the job we do, we may resist very strong­ly any change that no longer requires those skills because it also attacks our identity.

(viiiMAdd any of your own points).

2. Organisational Resistance

(i) The organisation strengthens the individuals resistance to change in various ways. On entering an organisation the individual is incorporated into a network of values, norms, ways of behaving and thinking about his job that are held by his other colleagues. Although he has some room for flexibility, he is constrained in some ways by conformity to the norms of the organisa­tion, and he may well internalise these constraints.

(ii) An hierarchic structure also inhibits change because it makes specific indi­viduals responsible and accountable for work of others. They may well there­fore prefer to maintain a status quo which causea them no problems, rather than risk approving an innovation which might have unpredictable effects and for which they will be held accountable in the event of failure.

(iii) All organisations develop strong in-feelings against everything that lies outside. There is always likely to be • hostility towards new ideas if they originate from outside.

(iv) In all organisations, vested interests of groups and individuals develop. Such interests are primarily concerned to protect themselves against change> which may take away their advantages of their influence.

(v) Organisations that have seldom changed in the past, that try to have clear rules, regulations and goals rather than ambiguity, flexibility and uncer­tainty, will be likely to resist change because they are not used to it and therefore fear it.

(vi) Organisations may so order their financial resources and equipment that it is difficult for any innovation to be properly set up with resources it needs.

(vii) (Add any of your own points).

3. Encouragement of Change

There are factors which lead to a climate favouring change.

(i) If an organisation is used to making frequent changes, it is more likely to accept changes in the future. The techniques of change will be better understood, the more- irrational fears dispelled and those who don't like change will have moved on to more stable organisations.

102

( ii) Organisations often actively look for change if they are .in trouble. At times of crisis, enough people may accept that the traditional ways will not do.

(iii) Changes originating outside the school or college may be mandatory. People know they have no choice but to accept them. There are other innovations which while not mandatory generate enough pressure to encourage acceptance. This is true for example of many developments in audio-visual equipment or new approaches to the curriculum.

(iv) There are in most places staff who are relatively uncommitted to the orga­nisation and who have probably recently joined it. The migrants or marginal men are the ones with new ideas, uncommitted to the norms and values of the organisation, who have everything to gain by making a name for them­selves as rapidly as possible. It is from this source that innovative ideas can be accepted,

(v) Those who are looking for prestige and high reputations are more likely to favour innovation than those who are not. This may be labelled as 'clim­bing on bandwaggons' but it is clearly true that many educationalists, colleges and schools have gained considerable renown by publicising some particular innovation.

(vi) When a new head teacher takes over a school he may play if safe, but it is as common for him to strike out in a new direction and establish the uniqueness of his position as against his predecessor. -

4. Strategies of Managing Innovation

How can the head teacher manage innovation? One method is to work through the- following stages :

ESTABLISHING THE INITIAL STANCE

CHECKING POR ORGANISATIONAL WEAKNESSES

ESTABLISHING A STAFF DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

SETTING UP AN INFORMATION SYSTEM.

ENSURING STAFF ACCEPTANCE

EVALUATING THE CHANGE

The Initial Stance

The manager contemplating the introduction of an innovation might well start with the following beliefs.

103

The proposed change cannot be regarded as an objective thing in itself, the advantages of which can be demonstrated by rational criteria. Change is a social process involving the perceptions of all the people concerned, and each of them will see it in a different light. It is with the meaning they each and all give to the change that is the reality, not with the change as an objective fact that the manager has to deal. Change is advantageous only so far as it can be shown to be so within these meanings. It is not enough to show that in abstract it benefits the organisation.

It follows that the manager must not assume that opposition to his propo­sal is pig-headed simply because he can see the advantages to the organisation. At the very least, opposition makes those who are in favour look much more criti­cally at the proposal, and it must frequently happen that opposition can demons­trate that the change would bring no advantage.

Any change of significance must be given time. This can either be given in careful preparation, discussion, pilot projects, monitoring and checking so that full implementation takes 18 months or more, or it can be given after a very rapid implementation in dealing with the inevitable snags, staff dissatisfactions, and rectification of mistakes. Either way it takes time and the manager must cal­culate the cost of this in deciding whether the change is worth while.

The manager must also accept that change in one part of the organisation has effects, some which cannot be foreseen, in other parts. One cannot think of a once-for-all change insulated from everything around it. Por example, the move towards individualised learning with students controlling their own programmes will have effects on power and authority relations between students and staff in other areas. Once change is under way it creates its own dynamic for many other changes. *

Finally, the manager should accept that change works best when it is done through the agency of groups rather than individuals. If a group can be persuaded of the usefulness of change, then various group processes will handle and contain individual opposition. If only individuals are persuaded of change, then they are in a straight fight with other individuals or in an unequal fight against-opposing groups.

The Process of Change

"The change can now follow five sequential steps.

Step One. Check the state of the organisation. Change always creates stress, tension and conflict, and unless the organisation is in good health, a head tea­cher would be asking for trouble if he introduced change. A careful examination of the school is a prerequisite of change, and it has been suggested that such a review of the health of the organisation should pay particular attention to the following. (Miles M., 1969).

(a) Is there general agreement on the aims and purposes of the institution?

(b) Are people clear as to what their duties and responsibilities are in terms of delegated authority for decision-making?

(c) Does the communication system work with reasonable efficiency?

(d) Is the morale and social cohesiveness of the staff generally good?

(e) Are the staff either over-loaded or under-used?

104

i

(f) Is it generally accepted that power is fairly distributed?

If on any of these points there is a serious weakness , then it must be dealt with before any innovations are made.

Step Two. The manager must work on a staff development programme related to the proposed change. If there is not any programme in existence, this is the time to introduce one. The questions that need to be asked are:

(a) What are the demands on staff skill that this innovation will require over the next 12 months/2 years/5 years?

(b) Has the college available at the moment this required skill?

(c) If so, are those the teachers we want to take over the innovation?

(d) If not, who do we train and how, and at what cost?

(e) What will be the gain (or loss) to the teachers concerned in individual or career terms?

(f) How far can the innovation be used to help solve existing staff development problems - for example by using those staff who are in a rut rather than the naturally enthusiastic?

(g) How will the use of staff on this innovation affect other possible develop­ments or existing commitments?

» (h) How far will the deployment of resources on staff training for this innova­

tion take away resources from courses or activities individual staff wish to pursue for their own development?

(i) Of what value will be the acquired skills and experience of the staff to themselves and the organisation if the innovation is withdrawn after four or five years?

Step Three. The manager must work out carefully what information he will need for the many decisions he will have to make as the innovation is implemented. In doing this he may find that he needs to reorganise his information system so that what he requires can be produced easily and quickly.

Step Pour. It cannot be overstressed that change can only be carried through successfully if it is accepted by most of the staff. Without that acceptance, one might just as well forget the whole thing. There are three sides to staff acceptance.

(a) Participation

Those who are affected by implementation of an innovation should be invol­ved from the beginning in the planning. Whoever makes the final decision, the staff must feel that they were consulted as a group as well as indi­viduals, and that their opinions have had some influence on the final deci­sion. Only so will they become committed to the success of the innovation.

(b) Recompense

No matter how it is arranged, there are often members of staff who lose out by the change, and some kind of compensation must be given. This is

105

often very difficult to do, but managers will find it easier if they do admit that the change they so much favour will hurt some people. Such peo­ple must be made to feel that the organisation will be wil-ling to spend much time and energy on their particular problem.

(c) Training

Resistance towards change can be reduced by training which aims to make staff more flexible, honest, and open with each other, and to increase the number of ideas circulating among them. Such training could include role playing, the use of case studies, simulations and gaming. It should have the effect of drawing out the individual from entrenched positions, forcing him to look at problems from several angles, and making him more receptive to change in general.

Step Five. Once a programme of change is under way, then it must be eva­luated in some way, and the method for this needs to be worked out before­hand. For this evaluation, the objectives of the change must be worked out with as much precision as possible. If we know what we are trying to do then we can set up criteria for measuring our success. If we know the criteria, then we can set up a system to provide us with the information we need at times when we want it. On the basis of feedback, change can be evaluated and changes or even abandonment made on a rational basis. This monitoring system of change must be given absolute priority. Far too many promising innovations in colleges have come to grief because managers withdraw their attention once the change is launched.

5. The Innovative Organisation

An alternative approach is to develop the school or college capacity to innovate, so that whenever it is necessary to introduce a change, the organisation is set up to cope with that. One study of curriculum innovation suggested that the following were the key characteristics of the innovative institution.

(i) Power was put behind all innovations. Whoever was carrying them out, it was understood that_ the full authority of the head teacher or principal was behind them.

(ii) Each innovation requires positive leadership from someone who has the capa­city for enthusiasm, commitment, hard work, and who can use the political system of the institution to influence and persuade and who can lay their hands on resources needed.

(iii) Innovations flourish when the school or groups within the school are wide open to new ideas, information and approaches from outside. The more people are brought into contact with other people, other ideas and other expe­riences, the more they will operate in an innovative manner.

(iv) This is particularly helped if the school deliberately brings together groups of staff from different departments or even from outside, and sets them tasks which are novel to them.

(v) To avoid the anti-innovative effect of hierarchic structures in organi­sations, the school can create posts or situations which cut across exis­ting departments or laid down procedures, for example by appointing a co­ordinator who does not belong to any department.

106

*

(vi) In order to overcome the natural suspicion that change leads to personal disadvantage rather than advantage, the head teacher needs to develop

- a climate of trust and this will depend more than anything else on his management style;

- a climate of security where staff can assume they won't be kept in the dark about issues which will affect them personally;

- a climate which values innovation and publicly encourages those who take part in it;

- a reward system which favours those who innovate, either financially or psychologically.

These characteristics of the successful -innovative organisation are taken from Blizard, P.J., MacMahon, C.M. and Magin, D.J. (1980) who studied large scale curriculum change in Indonesian Medical Schools.

6. The Management of Change Inventory

It is useful to have some means of checking out a proposed change in your own organisation, whether it is a change from outside or an innovation from within. This inventory has been produced for that purpose. It can be used equally well to check on the progress of a change in process. You may well need additional paper to complete some of the answers, but there is some value in attempting to crystalise the situation in a few words as possible.

The Situation

1. Write a brief outline of the change proposed.

2. What is the extra financial cost in non-staff terms?

3. Are the resources available to cover this?

4. If not, how do you propose to manage?

5. What is the extra financial cost in staff terms?

6. Are there resources available to cover this?

7. If not, how do you propose to manage?

8. What is the time scale for the change? Give maximum and mini­mum times. Indicate stages of pilot scheme, full implementa­tion, feedback, etc.

9. What other areas of organisation might—be affected by the change? Indicate briefly the general nature of such effects.

J 107

Opposition and Support

10. Whom do you expect to resist or oppose the change? (Give names and reasons for opposition).

(a) People whose support is essential?

(b) People whose support is desirable not essential?

(c) People whose support is not important?

11. Whom do you expect to support in general the change? (Give names and reasons for support ).

(a) People who support is essential?

(b) People whose support is desirable?

(c) People whose support is not important?

12. Have you assessed critically the arguments put forward against the change?

13. How did you arrange for and carry through such an assessment?

Processes

14. How does your college/school score on the following criteria or organisational health?

14.1 General agreement on aims and purposes of the organisa­tion.

14.2 Clear identification of the duties and responsibilities of staff in terms of delegated authority and job-speci­fication.

14.3 Communication system working with reasonable efficiency.

Í4.4 Morale and social cohesiveness generally good.

14.5 Staff neither overloaded nor under-used.

14.6 Power accepted, as equitably distributed and fairly exercised.

15. How did you check on each of the above 'criteria1?

14.1

14.2

14.3

14.4

108

14.5

14.6

16. What measures do you propose to take to remedy any important defects uncovered to these criteria?

17. What are the demands that the change will make on staff skill over the next:-

12 months

2 years

5 years

18. Has the school/college available these required skills at • the moment?

19. If so, are these the teachers we want to be involved in the change?

20. If not, who do we choose, and how do we train them?

21. What will be the gains or losses to the teachers concerned in individual or career ¡terms?

22. How far can this change be used to solve existing staff deve­lopment problems?

23. How will the use of chosen staff on this change affect other projected developments or on-going commitments?

24. How do you propose to deal with such effects?

25. Will use of resources for staff development in this area reduce other kinds of staff development activity?

26. What is the estimated staff development cost for this change?

27. What will be the value of the acquired skills and experience if the innovation is withdrawn after 5 years?

28. What information will be n«eded on easy access for the carry­ing through of the change?

29. Can this information be easily produced through existing information systems?

30. If not, how do you propose to organise a new information system?

109

31.1 Which members of staff will need to be involved in the planning of the change?

31.2 Which members of staff will need to be involved in consul­tation of the change?

31.3 Which member of staff will need to be involved in making decisions on the change?

31.4 Which member of staff will need to be involved in imple­menting the change.

32. Do you require any formal training of groups of staff to facilitate the change? If so, what form are you thin­king of?

33. Which staff will lose out in the change?

3^. How do you propose to recompense them?

35. Check all the changes you need to make. Which of them are irreversible? Will this create future difficulties?

36. What criteria do you intend to use for evaluating the change?

37. At what stages will you carry out evaluation?

38. How will it be organised?

39. And now - Is the change still worth it? If so,- Good Luck.

SECTION D: MANAGING CONFLICT

There is conflict in all organisations. The head teacher would therefore be wise not to seek to abolish all conflict but learn to manage it. Conflict has both costs and benefits.

Costs of Conflict

It may affect people psychologically

It may absorb energy and time

It may reduce support and co-operation

It may affect performance

It may affect people's career success

Benefits of Conflict

It may increase creative tension

It may challenge false assumption and complacency

It may increase competitive motivation

It may increase the need to argue a case well

110

Add to this list those costs and benefits which you have noticed in your own organisation.

1. Different Models of Conflict

It is useful to identify the sources and causes of conflict but how a mana­ger of an organisation does that will probably depend on the model he has in his mind. Some of the models of conflict are:

- The Bargaining Model in which we assume individuals or groups are commonly in competition for resources, determined to get for themselves the best possible deal and therefore in the process reduce the resources obtained by other individ­uals or groups.

- The Bureaucratic Model in which we assume that conflict generally arises from the exercise of control of one person over another in an hierarchic relation­ship - so it is basically about the power of the boss against the independence of the subordinate over any particular issue.

- The System Model in which we assume that conflict mainly arises between different sub-systems of the organisation that are in relationship to each other - for example, conflict between teaching needs and administrative rules.

- The Semantic Model in which we assume that conflict is the result of mis­understanding generally through poor communications, and that explanations can clear things up.

The model that might be particularly useful to you for isolating the course of institutional conflict as distinct from interpersonal conflict is the inter­action model.

- The Interaction Model

The model assumes that two units (each continuing one or more staff) have some kind of interrelation. If two units are not related, then conflict cannot easily take place, because there are no opportunities for one or both to engage in blocking activities against the other. Such blocking can only take place at the point of interrelation: at all other points the two units will get on with their own business without concern for the other.

There are three points of possible interrelation.

1. Bargaining for Resources

2. Engaging in Inter-Departmental Work

3. Arguing about goals or outcomes.

Bargaining for Resources

The two units may be bargaining for a share-out of the same resources so if one gets more the other gets less. So the first key fact we need to know of the organisation -is whether resources are shared. This is normally the case in education. For example, there is a sum of money available for equipment and each department will argue their case for what they can get. Hence the possibility of conflict.

Ill

Inter-dependency of Work

The two units may be involved in inter-dependency of work so that what one does affects the other. It is common in schools and colleges for different units to be involved in joint programmes for the students, and indeed all the programmes might be part of an integrated approach. In that situation disagreements are very likely. __

Compatible or Incompatible Goals

If the achievement of the goals of one unit can only be achieved by causing the possible failure of achieving goals by the other unit, then conflict is very likely. For example, the goal of achieving maximum success in academic examinations might be in conflict with seeking excellence on the sports field.

So we can • look at any two units in the organisation and check to see if resources are shared or not, work is interdependent or not, goals are incompatible or not. It is possible to have all three potential sources of conflict at once as in the sixth example in the following illustration:

112

es.soog.cLs /ft c o m p A h ' bit

ptLti «ol

* - —

k — & .

^ •

probable co«\ flieh

113

2, What is Conflict?

If we find conflict occurring in our school, we must ask what exactly we have found, because conflict can exist at any one of five levels.

Levels of Conflict

Latent Conflict

4. Perceived

i Conflict

Pelt Conflict

I Manifest

I Conflict

Conflict Aftermath

Latent Conflict exists as potential conflict arising from the existence of sources of competition, divergence of goals, and struggles over control.

This becomes Perceived Control when it comes out into the open and can be discussed by those involved. £t may not, however, arouse any feelings of anxiety, anger, frustration, etc.

When the conflict becomes a personal issue for some staff members, and they experience strong feelings, we have reached the stage of Felt Conflict'.

Up to this point none of these three stages have any overt behaviour attached to them. When conflict behaviour occurs, for example in aggression or disruption, we describe it as Manifest Conflict. It is behaviour which deliberately blocks another member's intention. After manifestations of conflict and the completion of a conflict episode, there is left some kind of situation out of which future episodes will develop. This is the conflict aftermath. For example, one member might feel he has won several points and will now work hard to maintain his advan­tage. Another member might feel angry at having lost ground and is determined to reverse the position as soon as he can. A third might- feel the head teacher handled the position badly and lose some respect for his competence. Not all the conflicts in our schools go through all five stages. Latent conflict may never be perceived because of limits to staff awareness. Many people do not like to confront and challenge conflict and would rather pretend it does not exist. If conflict is per­ceived where no latent conflict exists, this is caused by semantic confusion -i.e. where one of the parties has misunderstood the others' true position, and this can be resolved by improving communication.

At this point, you should think back to the various conflict situations you can recall in your school. Firstly decide for each one whether it was competetion for resources, inter-relationship of work, or opposing goals which was at issue, or whether it was none of these.

114 \

Secondly, decide for each one- which of the five stages of conflict each had gone through.

Thus you might refer to a conflict situation in your school which involved competition over resources and which had moved from latent to perceived to felt conflict but had not been expressed in any manifest conflict.

3. Managing Conflict

This is clearly a complex and delicate matter very much affected by the particular context. There are three rules, however, that are general.

(i) It is absolutely necessary that the cause or matter of the conflict is iso­lated and clearly stated so that both parties recognised what it is they are in conflict over. It is common for two people to exhibit manifest conf-flict but for neither of them to have a clear and agreed understanding of what is at issue. All sorts of accretions and side issues accumulate round the key issue, and feelings or emotions also get in the way of clear perception. The job of the manager is to get through these side issues and emotions and define for the parties unequivocally the core of their conflict.

(ii) In any organisation, most conflict tends to fall into a relatively few key areas. The manager should therefore make sure that there are standard proce­dures for dealing with such conflict wherever possible. This will normally be the case in pay negotiations, disciplinary proceedings or dismissals, but may not be the case in internal promotions, the sharing out of resources

• between departments, curriculum agreements or- work loadings. Where they do not exist serious consideration should be given to establishing standard organisational procedures.

(iii) Where this does not apply, conflict resolution is individual and delicate. However, very few individuals do not have some stake in remaining in some continuing relationship. Most conflict participants do not want to pass over the line which terminates any further relationship, e.g. by resignation,

,_ or divorce, or war. Some kind of bargain has to be struck in which each individual gives up something but also gains something. The skill of the manager is in offering but also gains something. The skill of the manager is in offering sufficient reward to balance the cost of what the individual is to give up. In most circumstances in which standard procedures do not operate, few individuals will give way sufficient for an impasse to be resol­ved without getting something in return. The something may be material or psychological, but the individual needs to feel that his trading account with the organisation has not been unfairly debited - otherwise a new posi­tion of latent conflict exists. The resourceful manager will therefore try to keep available to him a variety of rewards which he can use as part of any conflict resolving negotiation.

4. Operational Conflict Management

Preventing ignition. This may not be a good strategy as the effect may be to suppress the expression of latent conflict which may lead to an explosion in the future. However to create a period of cooling off and to control carefully the timing of a confrontation may be valuable. For example, the manager might ask both sides to produce a written report with supportive evidence of their case, and then announce they, will discuss and resolve it at a meeting in one month's time.

115

Constraining the Form of Conflict. Norms or rules of behaviour can be agreed and enforced, e.g. No fighting in the presence of an outsider. No disagreement without offering an alternative. No attacks on the person, only on his actions or suggestions. These and similar rules protect on organisation from unrestrained conflict, eliminate some provocative tactics and so reduce escalators.

Personal coping strategies. Encourage staff to raise their tolerance level of conflict by being able to ventilate their feelings to a sympathetic friend: generate alternative ways of working so that in future they are less dependent on their opponents: concentrate on co-operative successes rather than conflict failures for personal satisfaction.

Train staff in confrontation and assertive skills as developed in the systems of Assertion Training (see section 6). This would give staff the skills to oppose or criticise without causing agressive or defensive reaction from the other which will be more likely to lead to a satisfactory compromise.

116

SECTION E: EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT

As head of an organization you need to display high levels of efficiency in your own work for two reasons.

The head teacher is the key person whose performance is critical for the level of performance of the whole organization. Inefficient performance at the top is likely to lead to a weak school;

The head teacher is a model for the rest of his staff. If he establishes for himself efficient ways of working, his staff are more likely to accept demands that they work efficiently.

1. Establishing Good Work Habits

Working efficiently and making the maximum use of your time depends very much on establishing and keeping to some simple works rules. Although it is easy to draw up such a list of rules, it requires considerable self-discipline to apply them, particularly at the start when they are not part of our normal routine. Managers who do not work by such rules are likely to be inefficient. The efficient manager is typified by self discipline, particularly in how he utilizes time and orders and arranges activities. It is the easiest thing in the world to fritter away time all day, always doing something related to the job but never getting on top of work and never getting round, to some crucial tasks. So it is common for managers to feel tired at the end of the day and yet to have worked inefficiently and failed to perform some of the things expected of him. Instead of the manager being in control of his day and master of his work, work and time are controlling him.

A key quality for the manager is SELF DISCIPLINE in work habits.

The following list was compiled jointly by a number of managers, including head teachers. Although you might wish to change the form and wording for your « own set of rules, it is likely that most if not all the essential work habits and routines are in it.

(i) Have a plan of how you intend to spend the day

You will no doubt have to alter it at times and accommodate the unexpected, but if you lay • down for yourself what you intend to do you are more likely to do it.

( ii) Do the things you ought to do rather than the things you want to do

Almost everyone is tempted to put off things they like doing less by first doing the things they like doing. It needs considerable self-discipline to get the order of priorities right.

(iii) Do your most demanding work at the time of day you work best

Everybody has their own rhythm of work. Some work better in the morning, some after the staff has gone home. Whenever it is that is the time to tackle the hard work, conversely everyone has a period of low energy in the day - that is a time for routine work or rest.

(iv) Deal with correspondence at a regular time and on the day it arrives

This does not mean that it should be dealt with as soon as it is on your desk. You may work better by dealing with it at a regular

117

time in the afternoon. The important thing is to deal with it at a specified time, so that there is not an unresolved task hanging around in your mind for long periods.

(v) Organize an effective system for dealing with paper work

The commonest system is one which divides all paper into (a) action now (b) postponed for more information (c) postponed for thought (d) filed for reference (e) waste paper basket.

(vi) Organize an effective filing system

This is a job for someone trained in office skills, so ask for advice - your secretary, someone else's secretary, your wife or husband, someone else's wife or husband - in fact anyone whose professional skill involves creation of filing systems.

N.B. Teachers nearly always try to work with too few files.

(vii) Keep your desk clear except for working papers

Some managers claim to work better with an untidy desk. . It is not true. At the very least, untidy desks cause time to be wasted.

(viii) Have an effective reminder system

There are very many ways of making sure you do not forget what you are supposed to be doing. It helps to have an efficient secretary, but it should not be dependent upon such a person.

(ix) Make use of the telephone carefully

Inefficient managers sometimes seem to live on the 'phone, wasting not only their own time but someone else's. The ' telephone is not a particularly efficient method of communication, but it is helped if (a) you leave your secretary to make and answer calls which do not really require your participation; (b) you prepare yourself for the call with notes, diaries, reports to hand; (c) you plan a period of time in the day to make your calls; (d) you have reasonable expectation that the person you ring will be free; (e) it is worth disturbing someone else's work for the content of the call.

(x) Have materials conveniently to hand

Writing paper, envelopes, tapes, pens, etc., should not be the objects of a daily treasure hunt.

(xi) Only do one job at a time

This may mean that if the job is difficult, .requiring concentration and some time, you will need to make sure you are not interrupted by the 'phone, by visitors, or by staff.

(xii) Only communicate when necessary and then briefly

Do not write memos and notes to staff for the sake p-f it or to renrind them you are boss. Only write if it is worth your "time writing the message and worth their time reading it - and keep it as brief as possible.

118

\

(xiii) Reserve blocks of time during the week for contingencies

If all your time is planned to be full of work, all contingencies will sabotage your work plan. So create blocks of time in which you can see staff or visitors, or read up rapidly on reports, if that proves necessary.

(xiv) Take rest periods during the day

Really effective and efficient managers do not work flat out all the time. Take rests to refresh yourself and do not let them be interrupted by work demands.

(xv) Make a conscious effort to have good work habits

This is the most crucial point of all.

(xvi) Now add your own ideas.

2. Managing Your Time

Time is the most valuable commodity the manager has. It needs to be carefully used, not wasted. Time is the only real possession that we ever have that is undisputedly ours, and it can only diminish, not increase. The skill we have in utilizing our time at work is fundamental to our success as a manager.

In other parts of this module we have suggested many ways of saving time - by delegating, managing meetings better, keeping our papers orderly, etc. -and these will not necessarily be repeated here. The following are some key points in managing your time.

(i) The first step is. to discover how you do spend your time. Keep a record over several days of what you do minute by minute. There are several forms for doing this, one of which follows this section.

(ii) Scrutinize your record, and work out a time-use plan for yourself.

(iii) Remove from your own work load all the activities which could be more reasonably done by someone else. Most managers insist on doing some things which by no interpretation can be thought of as work for a highly paid manager.

(iv) Group your major activities and set aside parts of the day for each. Have part of the day for reading and answering correspondence, part for receiving outside phone calls, part for seeing staff, etc.

(v) If this is to work well, the people you are in contact with need to know your plan. Parents should be told when you are available on the phone - at other'times they will have to deal with your secretary, Staff must know when you are available, and be persuaded not to visit you at other times. The Education Officer should be informed of when you are available for phone calls. Be ruthless about this -people will soon learn.

119

(vi) Avoid having an 'open-door' policy. Managers who work on such a policy not only are likely to be less efficient but probably indulging in the satisfaction of their own personality needs. There is no good reason why staff in any institution should be able to walk into the managers office, regardless of what he is doing or how inconvenient, and with whatever increase of management inefficiency. Head teachers do not demand their staff nor the Education Officer to have an open-door policy. So long as there are known and stated times each day when staff can see the head, they they should learn to respect his need to be uninterrupted or undisturbed.

(vii) When seeing outside people, it is useful to arrange end-on interviews so that no meeting is unduly prolonged.

(viii) If an unexpected visitor drops in, do not sit down unless you really have time and the inclination to talk at length. While remaining standing, the meeting can be kept brief.

(ix) Have an arrangement with your secretary for dealing with interviews where, even though the business has been completed by you, you cannot get rid of the person.

(x) Equip yourself with all the labour saving devices you can. If you have access to one consider using a recording machine for dictating letters and memos.

(xi) Planning your time does not mean haviijg a rigid system. Quite the reverse. Plan your day to have uncommitted time and use this flexibility to deal with the unexpected.

(xii) Learn to read faster and concentrate better. You- should be able to cut time in reading reports, etc.

(xiii) Do not be a perfectionist. All management is compromise. Do things according to the time available to you.

(xiv) Set deadlines - both for yourself and others. Most people work much better when working towards set dates.

(xv) Remember the importance of good filing systems, good reminder systems, simple and good communication systems.

Now please add your ideas.

120

ft

h^ ON

.C

r\j

UJ Left of •-»

M

" O

m

**>

o r staff room.

H^ ON

» UJ o H»

l\>

X

» n

n H»

M

ding/ ting

CO

(D

M •"»

Routine intervie «

0)

m

Q.

• 3 p- 3 M-

CD

tration. Student

H

H-

3 ffi Dur w

tion 3 O a n X

Hi­ er sr

m

< m

3 rr 3 O < n 3 n 3 rr

a

m

> 1-3

X

•< TS

M

O

> r m

z 9 -<

121

-

3. Managing the Meeting ¡.

Whenever staff of a school or college gather together to consider work issues, a meeting is taking place. Whether outcome is productive or not depends upon a number of factors.

The skill of the individuals in handling the issues raised;

The absence of any staff who are concerned to prevent any productive outcome;

A clear understanding of the purposes of functions of the meeting.

It is the last point we discuss first because it is the responsibility of the manager of the meeting - whether the head teacher or some other member of staff - to keep a clear view of its purpose. All too often staff leave a meeting frustrated and with problems unresolved because there is confusion over what its purposes were. Although a meeting can serve more than one purpose at the same time and may in the course of one session mo e from one type of meeting to another, staff will experience considerable difficulty if they are not clear at any one time what kind of meeting they are in. It is up to the manager to establish this clarity. Any categorisation over-simplifies and in presenting the following typology I am aware there may be meetings which do not fall easily into any of the categories. Where this is the case, the point still applies that the manager must keep clear what kind of a meeting it is.

A Typology of Meetings

(i) A Command Meeting. This is a meeting called by a manager to instruct his subordinates to undertake certain tasks, or to lay down rules for future behaviour. Members may ask questions and seek clarification, but they are not there to offer their own ideas or comment on those given.

(ii) Ritual Meetings. One of the functions of meetings is to reinforce the bonds of attachment members feel towards the organization. There are therefore meetings whose purpose is to initiate people into member­ship of the organization; there are meetings to mark the departure of people from the organization; there are meetings to mark the opening or the closure of the organization itself. Although all meetings have some element of ritual or membership-maintaining functions, when that is the main purpose it should not be seen as having some other productive outcome.

(iii) Communications Meetings. Meetings are sometimes justified as a way of transmitting messages and improving communications. They can be occasions when new administrative rules and procedures are announced, key diary dates given, and other minor matters dealt with.

(iv) Advisory Meetings. An advisory meeting is not a place for making decisions. It is a place for collecting ideas and information prior to a decision being made at a later date. The manager may be advising his- staff or requesting advice or information. Advisory meetings put a premium on ideas, opinions, judgements and information relevant to a named proposition or problem.

122 îr

(v) The Collegiate Meeting. The purpose of collegiate meetings is to work through a problem or agenda to an agreed solution or line erf action by using the technical skill and knowlege of the membership. The equal status or professional worth of all members is recognized; it is a peer group. Positions are rationally supported, disagree­ments logically argued, and the conclusion reached is one which all accept in their professional judgement as workable.

(vi) Comarittee Meetings. Members at committee meetings represent various interests and offices in making decisions on matters of mutual interest. Behavior follows the traditional rules of committee procedures and decisions are normally based on formal voting. Accountability lies not with individuals but with the whole committee.

(vii) The Negotiating Meeting. This is not unlike a committee meeting in its general formality but instead of representing a number of interests bound together by mutual concern in the problem at issue, a negotiation contains two or more sides which are only meeting together because they are dependent on each other to arrive at an agreed solution. Each side uses what weapons it has to hand in order to get the best decision for itself. Each side is out to win and make sure the other side loses.

A Summary of Implications for Managers

We need to be quite clear about what kind of meetings we wish to hold.

We need to ensure that the members of the meeting are clear as to what kind of meeting it is.

If the nature of ¿he meeting changes during the course of one session -say from an advisory to a collegiate meeting - we need to signal the change clearly.

We should be aware of and counter any ambiguity about where the source of decision-making power lies.

Exercise

Consider the following notes you have made for a meeting of your staff that you intend to call in a few days time.

"It is time I got all the staff together again. We do not meet together often enough. I must make it clear that all registers of attendance should be returned to the office by 2.p.m. every Friday. Some staff are not bothering, I want some ideas about what we might do on our annual prize-giving day. We have got to work out how we are going to integrate maths and science in the first year curriculum. I must announce my plans for the changes in the duties of Heads of Departments, and see if I can persuade them to accept them without bother."

123

"The dates for several special occasions - I can pass them on at the me-eting. In future I want all lesson plans in every week rather than every month. I must tell them."

If you intend to incorporate all these into the agenda of the meeting:

(a) Consider what kind of meeting is appropriate for each item.

(b) Consider whether any items could be dealt with more appropriately in a way other than at the meeting.

(c) Consider how you would structure and manage the meeting to avoid confusion of purpose.

SECTION F: INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

Much of the time of any manager is spent dealing with people, and to be successful in his job he needs to handle relationships with his staff with skill and care. The manager must be thoroughly competent in interpersonal skills. There are however a great many such skills. Some of them are much more important than others in particular situations, and many of them vary in style and expression from country to country. It would not be useful to list all possible interpersonal skills as though they were all equally useful to all head teachers. It is necessary for each person to work out for himself the skills which are particularly relevant to his situation.

Exercise

You will need a sheet of paper with three columns as shown, and a second sheet headed Action Programme.

SKILLS GRADING TRAINING PRIORITY

Step One List for yourself in the left-hand column all the interpersonal skills that you think you need in your work. Make them as specific as you can. Aim to write down at least ten.

Step Two In the next column, indicate your own level of competence as honestly as you can, using the following scale.

1 » Excellent 2 * Competent 3 • Fairly competent 4 « Not very satisfactory 5 = Weak

124

Stgp Three Indicate in the final column, which three of these skills has priority for you for further training. They need not of course be the three skills which you assessed as your weakest.

Step Four Consider all the sources of training available to you and set your­self a programme of work.. If you are lucky you may be able to enrol on a training course: if that is not possible, suggest to the appropriate authorities that they set one up. If that cannot be organized, you will have to make do with a mixture of reading, self observation and practice. If it is possible for you to join together with someone else who is equally interested to develop their skills so that you can mutually observe and help each other, that would be beneficial. If you feel able to do it, ask your staff to help identify your strong points and also those with which they find some difficulty.

1. Basic Skills

Although we have suggested that you will have to work out which skills are relevant to your situation, and what cultural form they take, there are some basic skills fundamental to all situations and all cultures. The successful manager must reach a level of competence in all of these.

PERCEPTUAL SENSITIVITY LISTENING GIVING PRAISE OR RECOGNITION EMPATHY PRESENTATION OP SELF RECOGNIZING THE OTHER'S VALUE

Perceptual Sensitivity

This is the ability to perceive more in other people's behaviour than is commonly the case. It requires firstly a high concentration on recording what is there - by listening much more carefully, observing much more thoroughly, and if it is relevant touching and smelling more fully. Most of us cannot listen to other people talking for very long without our minds wandering off.

Likewise we seldom look carefully at a person for very long to note what expression they have, how they are sitting, what body movements they are exhibiting. The habit of carefully recording what is going on so that we actually have a lot more information is something in which we can train ourselves.

The second stage is the developing of fine discrimination between the bits of information we get so that we can give them various meanings. This process of analysis of data involves the ability to interpret what different cues mean. In particular we learn what is implied by changes in facial expression, tone of voice, involuntary movements of feet and hands, posture and vocabulary. This also is something in which people can be trained.

Listening

Listening is a skill many of us lack. We normally do a rough scan of what we are hearing so that we get the general sense, but our mind is also dealing with other matters as well. Other thoughts keep on breaking into our mind,

125

and other stimuli keep on catching our attention. We look out of the window, or at the half-read report on our desk, or begin to think about the next interview we have when this one is finished. Listening with full concentration so that we catch all the nuances and unspoken comments, the non-verbal signs which suggest that something is still hidden, is very hard and requires practice. It is also a very positive act, because the act of concentrated listening conveys the message to the speaker that the listener cares, is prepared to give time and effort, respects what he has to say and wants to hear it. Conversely, casual scanning by the listener, accompanied by fidgeting, looking out of the window, or at the ceiling, prowling round the room, picking up or putting down objects, and a bored or faraway look, tells the speaker that the listener does not really care or value what he has to say, or is prepared to put in much effort. It follows that the positive act of listening must be accompanied by some obvious non-verbal signs - for example of sitting alertly, looking at the speaker and showing an expression of interest and sympathy. We can portray the listening process in the following way:

I Listen You Speak

0 < \ YOU J

I perceive you reacting You perceive me listening and to my behaviour giving messages about degree of

effort, concern, etc.

The following is a check list of behaviours which will aid or hinder effective listening:

AVOID

Let your mind wander on to other things.

Let your eyes wander from the speaker or give other physical signs that you are not attending.

Sit (or stand) in a position expressing apathy, impatience, or other negative states.

Think of what you want to say next while she is speaking.

Give indications by gesture, facial expressions or comment of whether you agree or not with what is being said.

Look cold reserved or hostile.

DO

Give total concentration to the speakers.

Do look at the speaker and give full physical attention.

Do assume a posture which shows interest in the speaker.

Give full attention of your mind to what is being said.

Accept everything that is said without comment, either verbal or non-verbal.

Look warm and concentrated. (Continued)

126

AVOID

Interrupt if the speaker pauses for a minute.

Start listening with pre-conceived ideas about the message or the person.

DO

Tolerate silences.

Come in with a totally open mind.

Giving Recognition or Praise

People respond to compliments, rewards, recognition, praise, thanks, or to use the generic term, strokes, and will modify their behaviour on the basis of the strokes they receive. Some people are very bad at giving strokes and this tends to make them disliked or distrusted. On the whole people who are popular and well liked give a lot of strokes to other people and do it sensitively and creatively. Clearly, if recognition reinforces behaviour, there is little joy to be had in reinforcing destructive or negative behaviour. On the other hand, only to give strokes for achieving well makes the process very conditional on performance. The skillful stroke-giver steers between these two extremes.

Empathy or Taking the Part of Others

One of the abilities we have as human beings is the power to think ourselves into someone else's position and see life through their eyes. Clearly this is a useful social skill and is more highly developed in some than others.

Presentation of Self

We all present ourselves, in terms of our clothes, manner, conversation, etc., in accordance with the particular image of ourselves we want to display to others. This is sometimes called impression management, and it can be done with adroitness and skill or with ineptness. We do not expect the undertaker to tell jokes at a funeral, or the bank manager to be playing poker with his chief cashier when we go into his office. If we present the wrong or inappropriate image we are likely to cause embarrassment and a breakdown in interaction.

Recognizing the Other Person's Value

It will be an uncreative and often persecutory activity- if we do not value the people we relate to, do not believe they have anything to offer us, and do not see them as people of worth who have their own skills and perception which are unique to them. We do not have to agree with everything another person does, and we may wish to criticize them, but that should not stop us valuing them.

2. Specific Areas of Skill

There are three situations which are very common and which we will examine at some length.

Interviewing Marginal Performers Counselling Interviews Giving Criticism and Feedback

127 "

Interviewing Marginal Performers

It is part of the manager's job to help his staff perform at a satisfactory level. What does he do if any of his staff who he knows are capable of working satisfactorily, either intermittently or constantly fail to reach this level in important areas of their work. There is a tried and tested form of interview appropriate for such situations. There is a key assumption to be made at the start, however, and that is that the cause of marginal performance may not lie with the member of staff but with the manager (e.g. the s£aff member has been given too much work, or not given the tools for the job). The purpose of the opening discussion is to enable the lecturer and head of department to reach a mutually agreed definition of the problem. This part of the discussion has to be handled skilfully. If it goes wrong the interview is seldom recoverable and subsequent steps are largely a waste of time.

Step One

Greeting. This should be friendly but brief. No irrelevant material should be introduced. It is a mistake to set the lecturer at his ease by asking how the job is going or how his family is getting on. The lecturer's response can throw the whole subsequent interview. Also, if the manager gives some praise before outlining the symptoms of poor performance, it will simply confuse the discussion. The interview can start by a very simple set of statements. 'Oh hello, Joe, thank you for coming. Do come and sit down*.

Step Two

Statement of the Symptoms. This should be a simple statement of the reason for the discussion. Th'e head offers the information not as undisputed truth but as what he has been led to believe. He can be tentative, though he will presumably have checked beforehand as well as he can. Thus he might say, 'It seems you have been late for your classes every morning this week1, or 'I have a letter from Mr. Young complaining you are not teaching the agreed syllabus to his apprentices'.

If the manager's information is wrong and the lecturer can convince him, the interview is over. If there is a dispute between his assertion and the head's information, the manager should break off the interview and check his evidence. There is a general rule that applies throughout all stages of the interview: if at any time either of the participants becomes over-emotional, the interview should be terminated for the time being. No useful discussion can take place in a cauldron of seething emotion.

Step Three

Defining the Problem. This is a crucial stage of the interview for the Head is seeking an operable definition of the problem, ' and whatever the lecturer comes up with will determine what follows. The lead-in question is simply put.

'What is the problem?'

It is almost certain that the manager will want to ask probing or clarifying questions following the answer, but if the manager feels the lecturer is playing a game with him, for example by raising old injustices as an.excuse for present failings or scapegoating some other colleagues or organization, the subsequent questions will expose this, and the lecturer will be brought back to consider the question again: —

'What is the problem?1

If the lecturer seems stuck and unable to define.the problem behind the stated symptoms, the manager might raise the following problem areas. Is it to do with your working conditions?

with equipment or supplies? with any of the systems or procedures? with the behaviour of other staff?

128

with the load of work? with the pace of work? with actions by supervisors or managers? with a problem you have yourself? with lack of information? with lack of training facilities?

And he must always ask the question:

'Am I the problem?'

Step Four

Other Factors. A standard clarifying question must be asked at this stage.

'What other factors might be affecting the situation?'

The lecturer must be given every opportunity to round out the problem definition and add to what he has already given as the major problem. Marginal performance is seldom caused by a single factor. To address only the major cause without considering other contributing factors will not likely lead to a complete solution.

Step Five

The Real Problem. The manager reflects back the lecturer's definition of the problem, and repeats it in various forms until both are satisfied. There may be a need for more clarifying and probing questions until the manager has got it right. This step concludes the opening discussion. The manager has done no more than state the symptoms and then asked questions.

He has made no value judgements, offered no advice, suggested no solutions. What he has ended up with is a'clear definition of the problem.

THE MIDDLE DISCUSSION

The purpose of this part of the interview is to help the lecturer consider various solutions to the problem and to commit himself to one of them. The sequence of steps will often need to be repeated several times as a solution-searching loop before the lecturer commits himself to an action. It is unlikely to be such a tidy pattern of interaction as the following sequence of steps may suggest.

Step One

Solution-seeking. Having defined the problem, the lecturer is now asked to suggest a solution to it.

'What can you do about it?1

The manager may need to be persistent in pinning the lecturer to an answer. A common strategy of the lecturer will be evasion, silence, or apparent impotence. 'I cannot think of anything that will help'. The manager must clearly try to avoid suggesting solutions except as a last resort. If the solution is not one initiated by the lecturer he is less likely to be committed to it, but some prompting might be necessary "in some cases.

129

Step Two

Assessing the Solution. 'Will that solve the problem?' If the answer is no, the discussion has to return to step one and another more practical solution found. In practice, steps one and two will often merge into each other as successive solutions are checked and found wanting. The purpose of step two is not only to make sure that there is a practical way forward, but to gain some commitment to the solution.

Step Three

Other Helpful Actions. 'What else could be done?' This question is asked so that, the lecturer has the opportunity to flush out the solution. There may be some relatively small and easy action which would help him and can be agreed and attached to the solution.

Step Four

Firming up on the Solution. At this stage a clear statement of the proposed solution needs to be agreed as a summary of the preceeding three steps. The lead statement is - 'then the best solution is...'

Step Five

Feasibility of the Solution. 'Can you do it?* It is essential that the interviewer confirms that the lecturer will be able to carry out the proposed action. It is common enough to arrive at a good solution in discussion, which then turns" out to be one which is impracticable, at least for the persons concerned. If that is the case, the interview has to revert to step one of the middle section, 'What can you do about it?' If however the performer feels he can do it, then his agreement at this point confirms his commitment to execute the solution.

Step Six

Date of Initiation. 'How long will it take?' The interviewer carries on with his technique of pinning the lecturer to specific actions by direct questions. The middle discussion is concluded by setting the solution in a time framework which further commits the lecturer to carry it out.

THE END DISCUSSION

The end discussion is a recapitulation of the areas of agreement which leaves no room for ambiguity or differences of interpretation. This recapitulation should be agreed in writing and can then be concluded in a friendly manner.

Step One

Recapitulation. So the problem is ... The solution is ... and you will carry it out by ...

Step Two

Record. 'This written record of our agreement is confirmed as accurate by both of us.'

130

Step Three

Closing the Interview. The interview can be concluded by some expression of confidence in the lecturer by the manager, and his belief that there will be a successful outcome to the problem. He should then thank the lecturer for his time and co-operation.

Step Four

Reviewing Performance. Before the manager turns to other business, it is very useful if he reviews critically his performance and commits his thoughts to paper. Marginal performance interviewing is full of traps and skill is acquired by reflecting on hard-won experience.

The Counselling Interview

When a head teacher spends time helping a member of staff explore an issue which is a work problem or a social problem or a mixture of the two he is taking part in a counselling interview, and he needs to develop the skills for such a process.

The purpose of a counselling interview is to reach a point where the member of staff finds a way forward acceptable to him that he sees as his solution to his problem, and which he is committed to implementing. Any solution which is imposed, which is really the head teacher's solution, is unlikely to achieve lasting change in behaviour. It follows therefore that the head teacher must be very careful normally not to give advice or propose solutions until the staff member has had a chance to work out his problem and think of ways he might best proceed. We have to assume some preconditions to a counselling interview.

1. That there is a degree of trust between the head teacher and staff member, and they are relatively open with each other.

2. That within the differences of rank or status, they nevertheless recognize the equal value of each other, and respect each other, and respect each others' work and ideas.

3. That there is an acceptance that both may have to change. All the changes may not be on one side only.

H. That any negative feelings of hostility or anger by the head teacher are supressed for the meeting.

It is important that counselling interviews are conducted in an undisturbed atmosphere with no interruptions from the 'phone or from visitors.

During the interview, the head teacher will be using all the basic skills previously listed. In particular he will be listening and encouraging the staff member to talk. The most useful comment he can make is "Tell me more" or "Can you repeat that". The first part of the interview should always be primarily a listening exercise with an occasional prompt. The overall strategy will be as follows:

1. To lead the staff member through an analysis of the problem stated to a redefinition (not of course by stating what the real problem is).

131

2. To present useful relevant information.

3. To lead the staff member to formulate alternative lines of action (not to state what the alternatives are).

4. To'present fact-based estimates of the consequences of various lines of action.

5. To lead the staff members to formulate lines of action he proposes to follow and note both their mutual commitment to this.

The problem for the manager in making interventions is to avoid satisfying his needs by airing his prejudices, expressing negative feelings, scoring off the other person, reminiscing, or showing how clever he is by producing several solutions.

A useful way of thinking about the variety of interventions the head teacher might make is by categorising them as follows:

CATEGORIES OP RESPONSE

THE

THE

THE

THE

THE

NON-COMMITTAL

INTERPRETATIVE

PROBING

SUPPORTING

EVALUATING

Supposing that a staff member, in discussing his future, said:

'I thought I better tell you - I have had this very good offer of a job back in my old firm. I thought a lot about it but I've decided I would rather stay and make my future in the college. So I will be working Sor promotion in the department1.

If we suppose that the staff member in the considered view of the head of department is not a particularly strong prospect for promotion - in fact is just about adequate in his present job - how might he respond?

The SUPPORTIVE response might be:

'Good. I'm glad you've made up your mind what you want to do. I'll be all the help I can in your career, though the promotion race is tough nowadays. If you run across any difficulties you want to talk out I'm always here and if you don't get the promotion you want we will find other ways to help'. (Whatever you decide, I'll make helpful noises.)

The EVALUATIVE response might be:

'I guess that if you weigh up the pros and cons you are probably doing the best thing for your future.' (I'll tell you whether you've got it right or wrong.)

132

The PROBING response might be:

'I wonder if you have really thought through the policy of promotion in the college. How do you match up to the possibilities?' (You have got some thinking to do.)

The INTERPRETATIVE response might be:

'What you seem to have decided is to go for safety and the familiar work, rather than the challenges and dangers of an unpredictable future.* (I will tell you what you were thinking.) _

The NON-COMMITTAL approach might be:

'You seem to be saying that you see future promotion prospects best in this college.' (Tell me again what you are saying.)

Some Common Errors

The following are some of the traps to be avoided, though even experienced counsellors fall into them occasionally.

1. Excessive curiosity which leads the manager to asking too many questions and constantly leads her off on the wrong track.

2. Too much haste to find a quick solution to the presented problem. This fails to solve or even to notice the real problem which underlies the problem initially presented.

3. Blocking the client's expression of feelings and emotions. Trying to stop his crying or expressing his distress doesn't help in any

. way.

4. Being too busy to listen. This is the ultimate put-down for a client who may have invested much courage in approaching the manager and asking for some of her time.

5. Filling silences. If the manager cannot tolerate silence and jumps in with questions or comments whenever they occur, the real issues will never be reached.

6. Being a clever psychologist. Some managers fancy themselves as amateur psychologists and believe they are particularly perceptive. They offload their insights on to the staff member whom they are trying to help-

7. Wanting to be liked. Some managers have a desperate need to be indispensable and it is more important to them that the client likes them than that he is helped.

8. Wanting to take over the client's problems and solve them. The manager can want to do too much and not accept the client as a grown person who can take responsibility for himself.

9. Imposing one's own values on the client. The manager may communicate her own set of values and recipies for life, which are different from and perhaps antagonistic to those of the client.

133

10. Identifying with the client and his problems, but in so doing imposing her own experiences in the belief that common experience creates sympathy.

Our own anxieties cause us to fall into these traps. The problems a member of staff brings to us,.and his comments on them, may create considerable stress or unease in us. Sometimes they are too close to home for comfort. All we can do is be aware of the traps and avoid them the best we can. Pore knowledge is a powerful weapon.

Giving Criticism and Feedback -

One activity a head teacher will be involved in is giving constructive criticism and feedback tó his staff. This is a very delicate area, and if not done well can lead to mutual recrimination, anger and loss of efficiency of work. We need to have some guidelines.

1. Provided that we present our criticism as fairly, skilfully and sensitively as we can, we are not in the end responsible for the behaviour of the recipient. It is his choice how he reacts on the criticism, and if he is angry or upset about it the giver should not feel guilty about it.

2. Making judgements about other people is counter-productive. Statements' such as 'you never think things out properly' or 'you always rush into things without preparation' are of no help to the recipient and are only likely to annoy him.

3. Labelling people by name or trait is not legitimate. It would be difficult to justify by analysis any label given. Furthermore labelling is counter-productive in that it is likely to activate strong feelings in the other person which will lead to rejection of the message being given. Statements such as 'you. are authoritarian', 'you are oldfashioned', 'you are a layabout' need to be avoided.

4. It is unhelpful to attribute motives to other people. There is no way in which we can know the motives of others. They are certainly likely to be much more complex than can be encompassed in a single accusation. Statements such as, 'You can't be bothered', 'You're only interested in the money', or 'All you are after is status' are unjustifiable by any criteria.

5. The focus should be on the value of the feedback to the receiver, nor the release of the feelings of the provider. It would be

- unrealistic to pretend that there was not sometimes some release of frustration, but that is not where the focus should lie.

6. The aim of feedback should be to give to the receiver specific information that is publicly available for consideration, i.e. it is not inferred, it is not judgemental, but it is behaviour that was observable. Thus feedback should concentrate one:

What the recipient did; What he said (not why he said it); Objective observations (without making inferences); What the provider thinks happened; Giving any other relevant information.

134

7. As a general rule, statements should be 'more or less' rather than black and white, tentative rather than certain. 'You don't seem very worried', is a very different statement from 'You never care about anything or anyone.'

8. As part of the giving of specific information, the provider can reveal his own feelings. 'I am angry about ... I am frustrated by ...' Disclosure of feelings is an essential part of confrontation techniques, but this must be done so that it is not manipulative of the other person. Its purpose is not to make him feel guilty or stupid. It is a statement about you, not about him, and it is presented simply as a fact in the situation. If feelings are not freely disclosed, they will appear covertly in the exchange and contaminate it in some way or other. If, for example, you are very angry about another person's behaviour and suppress this when talking to him about it, it is very unlikely the course of the exchange will be honest and straightforward, nor the outcome constructive.

9. Feedback should not be presented so apologetically or so wrapped up in conditional and qualifying statements that the message is lost. Assertive feedback is not aggressive, but it is to the point.

10. Feedback should lead to a negotiated outcome whenever possible and should therefore contain a statement of desired change. As part of the exchange it should normally invite comment, which the recipient may or may not choose to give, on his reactions to the feedback.

The Five Stage Message

If these guidelines are accepted, a strategy for critical feedback can be developed from them. The strategy involves five separate parts to the message.

Stage 1 : Objective identification of the other person's behaviour:

e.g. 'Your handing in of this report latçr than 10 am...'

Stage 2: The tangible effect of the behaviour on me:

e.g. 'Causes me to have to rush to get my report in by noon. Sometimes my report is late.1

Stage 3 : My feelings about that:

e.g. 'And I feel quite frustrated and bothered about that.'

Stage 4 : My request for behaviour changes:

e.g. 'I would like you to get your report in or time.'

Stage 5 : Invitation to other person to comment:

e.g. 'How do you react to that?'

This is a model, and like all models will not suit all situations without adaptation. For some confrontation situations it may not be relevant to indicate, a behaviour change or to invite comment but in most cases it will be, and on

135

occasions there may not be tangible effects that are distinct from one's feelings. If these stages are followed, however, with whatever adaptations seem appropriate, then there is likely to be a successful outcome. In the example given there is no judgement, labelling or attribution of motives. There is a focus on specific behaviour, on the provider's feelings, and on clearly stated requests.

Now think of three situations in your own school in which you want to give critical feedback and write down the five stage message you could use in each case.

SECTION G: EFFICIENT COMMUNICATION

Most people would probably agree that good communications are absolutely crucial to the successful running of an organization. Unfortunately there is generally a communications breakdown even in coming to such an agreement, as the word 'communications' can be used in a number of quite different senses.

It is important to spell out what we mean by 'communications' when we use the word. Here I am talking about the process of passing messages from one person to others in order that the business of the establishment can be conducted. First, we will consider the problem of message distortion and then discuss mechanisms of message transmission.

1. Message Distortion

When messages are passed from one person to another, parts of the message frequently get lost or distorted, thus leading to misunderstanding. The commonest reasons for distortion are as follows.

(i) The effect of hierarchic organization is nearly always to distort messages going to superiors from subordinates, by suppressing information that reflects badly on the sender.

(ii) Research has also suggest that critical content is suppressed in messages between equals if they are on good terms with each other.

(iii) Misunderstanding arises through unfamiliarity with the language used -for example, a foreign language or technical language.

(iv) Messages can be misunderstood through various distractions - physical noise, poor health, lack of sleep, influence of drugs, depressive moods.

Give an example from your own experience

136

(v) Misunderstandings between sender and receiver commonly arise from:-

(a) the sender assuming knowledge that the receiver does not have

(b) the receiver interpreting what he receives in a way not envisaged by the sender. He'may project his own feelings or situations onto the sender. In any case he will incorporate the message with all the other messages he has received into his total way of perceiving things - his schema as some call it.

(vi) The individual, or the system, can be overloaded. If there is too much to cope with, then messages will be ignored or be blocked in a queue.

(vii) Messages can be misunderstood, because the language they are written in is unnecessarily complex, or confused.

(vii) When messages are not fixed in some permanent form such as in a memo, the meaning may well be distorted or lost, when one tries to retrieve them (normally from memory).

Give an example from your own experience

2. Mechanisms of Message Transmission

Ideally one should use a mechanism which:

(i) Fixes the message in a permanent form;

(ii) and which guarantees that the intended recipient has received it;

(iii) and indicates that the recipient has understood it.

Although there is not the time to check that every message has survived these processes, it is worth checking for very important messages - for example those relating to staff discipline problems.

There is no one mechanism which is trouble free. Every method has its problems and the head teacher must pick with care the particular mechanism for the particular message with an awareness of the possible communication failures. We list some of the commonest ways of passing messages in a school or college.

(i) - Notice Boards. This is an uncontrolled way of passing information. You cannot know who has read which messages and when they have read them. It may be useful for semi-permanent messages such as the fire regulations or the termly timetable.

137

(ii) Written messages sent round the staff with a general circulation slip attached. Commonly such messages take too long to get to the last person on the list. There is always one place at least where they tend to get stuck on their way round. Find out how long it takes for a message to go round your staff so that you know whether a particular message can get round in the time you want. It will hasten the movement of the message if you insist that staff members sign and date the slip on receipt of the message.

(iii) Standardised forms can be used with advantage for many messages, but they should be well designed. When would you use standardised forms?

(iv) Ordinary written messages between staff are better sent on printed memo forms. Sometimes the difficult part is to convince staff always to put on the date, the name of the sender and the name of the receiver. If you find an undated memo on your desk you have no idea how long it has been in the system. For example what would you make of this message.

MEMO

To: Head teacher^ ^ From: J.#Singh ^ DATE: .

Can I see you tomorrow afternoon. An important matter has come up over one of the students.

Which afternoon does he mean?

(v) Far complex information that is intended for a large mixed audience, for example parents or intending students, it is often useful to use some representational form such as an algorithm or logical tree.

AÍ1 these forms of message transmission fix the message in a permanent form. The message can be retrieved and re-read. It is probably true of most organizations however that most communication is by word of mouth and is therefore very transient. Once it is said it is gone except in so far as you can remember it accurately.

(vi) It is word of mouth messages that are the cause of most communication breakdowns. Many head teachers prefer talking to people rather than writing to them because they like the personal touch and the social contact involved. But people seldom say exactly what they intended to say or think they said, so if a message is given verbally it is important always to follow it up with a written note that contains any facts, figures, dates, etc. It is important to give verbal messages in the proper setting. If someone is concentrating on something else, for example teaching, or marking assignments, he may well not take in the message, and this is one of the problems of using a tannoy system. Similarly when staff are walking down a corridor or eating a meal, they may well not take in a message fully

138

It is easier to get a written message in accurate form than a \verbal message. Nearly all messages can be divided into three types:

giving orders or instructions providing information offering advice

One of the commonest findings of research is that in a very large number of cases what is intended as an order or instruction is inter­preted, by the recipient as advice or information. This is much more likely to happen with verbal than written messages.

(vii) Some managers love using the telephone but in many ways it is one of the worst forms of communication. Note that the majority of telephone calls do not elicit the information required at the first attempt. The majority of people who say they will call back, do not. Those that do, often ring back when we are not there. Generally it is better to write a letter which is 'fixed1 than make a call which is liable to misinterpretation. If you have to make a call, however, first make a note of what you are going to say, and immediately on conclusion of the call, make a note of decisions with the date and time. Similarly always write down the content of incoming calls with date and time so that it is fixed. Wherever possible leave phoning to your secretary - she willbe better at it.

Exercise

Take any one of your recent work days. Yesterday may be a good one to choose.

Firstly list all the messages'you can remember sending out (up to 15).

Secondly write down the mechanism used - letter, memo, notice on notice board, word o-f mouth, etc.

Thirdly indicate against each message the importance of the message being received and understood using a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 fairly unimportant to 5 very important.

Fourthly indicate against each message whether you know that the message was received and properly studied, by writing down either YES or NO.

Fifthly in the light of the above information, redecide in the case of each message whether you chose the best means for conveying the message.

139

SECTION H: PUBLIC PRESENTATION

What do you think your school stands for? What are its goals? What purpose is it trying to serve? Head teachers are likely to see their school as having a special and unique quality, and having a distinctive mission in the educational development of the area and country. But how clearly can you articulate your sense of what the school represents, what you are trying to do through it? Because if you have not thought out very clearly the philosophy of the schoo 1 and its overriding aims and goals, then there is little chance that the general public or any particular part of it will have a view of the school that at all closely coincides with your own. Indeed, until you have worked out and written down what the various stances and purposes of the school are it is not possible for you as a manager to instigate any useful or consistent activities in the promotion and public presentation of the school. This is a serious drawback. In Parts I and III of this document your attention was drawn to the importance of the schools relationship with various parts of its environment. This relation­ship was seen as a critical one, and managing the relationship by careful presentation and promotion of the school is therefore a key task of the head teacher.

There are, however, two problems in drawing up a statement of what the school stands for.

Gross has pointed out that the goals of an organization can be derived from more than one source. There are the goals which are those that are publicly referred to and proudly announced at official occasions or in publications. These are generally formulated in very high-flown, idealistic terms, e.g. "This school is concerned to fulfill the potential ability of all its pupils." Gross (1969) calls these Ideal or Utopian Goals. However, this may not be how staff actually seem to think when they are talking informally in the staff room. There they may make statements such as "It's only worth bothering with the best pupils as they are the ones that will bring renown to the school." These Gross calls Hidden or Covert Goals. The head teacher will no doubt hope that the Utopian goals and covert goals in his school more or less coincide. If they do not, then no amount of clever promotion work on the basis of Utopian goals will in the end convince the general public. So in drawing up a position statement of the school, it is best to develop it out of the actual activities of the school, and if the activities seem to contradict what you want the school to stand for, then start to change the activities. It is no good talking about the importance of care and concern for the pupil if lessons start late, pupil's work is not checked and marked, and lessons are not carefully prepared.

So the stated purposes of the school must be reflected in what actually goes on in the school. -

The second problem is that, whatever is the official statement of the goals of the school, there might be considerable disagreement among the various staff members. One might believe that the school should act as a focus for the community and its various activities, another might believe it should strive for the highest possible academic standards, a third that it should concentrate on producing good citizens.

So it is important that a consensus exists among staff about what the school stands for.

140

Taking these two problems into account, you should now try to write down a position statement about your school which outlines its major purposes and goals. If you already have such a statement, then subject it to critical review and write an improved version. You might find it easier to sub-divide the document or to concentrate on specific areas which are particularly problematic. For example, a number of British schools have produced policy statements on the school as a multi-ethnic community. You will, of course, need to take into account the views of the staff of the school and perhaps spend time persuading them to accept the principles of the document. Once you are clear about what the school is aiming to be, then it becomes possible to think of public presentation policies. Even if you all have a clear idea of what the school aims to stand f or ' and believe that by and large it lives up to these goals, it may not be how outsiders see your school at all. People outside the boundaries of an organization seldom have the proper information on which to judge it, but that does not stop them making judgements compounded of ignorance, suspicion and fantasy. Every head teacher must be aware of the very unfair views that are held by some outsiders about his school. If that is the case, then the clear managerial duty of the head teacher (or education official in charge of a number of schools) is to promote a more positive and accurate image of the institution. Such public presentation strategies can be divided into two areas - formal and informal.

1. Formal Strategies

There are some standard ways of promoting bodies. Industry spends much time and money on promotion, and one useful tactic for a head teacher might be to get some free advice from a friendly local industrialist if one is around. The extent of promotion activity will depend on the size and location of the school and the audience it wants to reach. A village school with two or three teachers is in a very different situation from an urban college with 70 or 80 teachers, so techniques will have to be adapted, but. head teachers might consider:

Promotion days (either on specific aspects or on the school in general) aimed at the local community; promotion days aimed at specific key groups, e.g. local"politicians ; coverage in newspapers; publication of successes; information sheets to parents; tape, slide/tape or film video presentations of the school - these can

. be highly glossy products or very simple but they can be used to give any new-comer an introduction to the school.

Now add other ideas to this list.

The head teacher will no doubt take every opportunity to speak at meetings outside the school about what it is aiming at and achieving.

2. Informal Strategies

Such formal means will certainly have an impact if well done, but the outsiders' views of the school are probably primarily influenced by informal and often non-conscious activities. You need to consider what kinds of impressions are given to an outsider when he comes into your school. You might consider for example:

What is the state of the building when they come in? (warm, cared-for, clean, tidy - or not)

141

How are visitors received? Do they feel welcomed and cared for or not?

How do tutors see the staff behaving? How do they behave to each other and to the pupils? How do they dress and present themselves?

Not all impressions of a school are gained by going inside the building so the head teacher should ask himself what kind of messages members of the public get about the school from the bearing and behaviour of staff when outside the school. This is likely to be of particular importance in small communities. Insofar as it is controllable, the head teacher should also consider the behaviour of the pupils when outside the school.

Exercise

You can now draw up a plan for the effective promotion of your school in the image that you wish to present to the world. Consider first formal strategies, in each case indicating the particular market you are aiming at, the estimated cost, and the administrative actions necessary to carry them out.

Secondly, list all these informal mechanisms which in your opinion support the image you are trying to portray.

Thirdly, list all those informal mechanisms which may not support the school image, and in each case consider what executive action is necessary to change things for the better.

142

%

REFERENCES

Blake, R.R. and Mouton, J.S. The Managerial Grid. Gulf, 1964.

Blizard, P.J., MacMahon, CM. and Magin, B.J. 'Large Scale Curriculum Change in a System of Teu Indonesian Medical Schools: A Case Study in Educational Innovation'. Higher Education. 198o, No. 9.

Cohen, M.D., March J.G. and Olsen, J.D. *A Garbage Can made of Organisational Choice'. Administrative Science Quarterly. March 1972. Vol. 17.1.

Fiedler, F. Improvising Leadership Effectiveness: The Leader Match Concept. - John Wiley 4 Son. 1977.

Gross, E. 'The Definition of Organisational Goals'. British Journal of Sociology 1969.

Miles, M.B. 'Planned Change and Organisational Health' in Carver, F and Sergiovanni, T. Organization and Human Behaviour: Focus of Schools. McGraw Hill 1969.

Turner, CM. Developing Interpersonal Skills. The Further Education Staff College, Blagdon, Bristol, 1983.

143