Layer After Layer

I wonder if in the world of English education we ever stop to ask, ‘do we have to do it like that?’ I say English because it seems to me that we are so blinkered that we don’t even look at how things are done differently in Scotland and Wales let alone across the water. For example, a colleague messaged me today to say:

‘ I attended a presentation today about Wales' new 3-16 curriculum . Equalities / diversity / human rights is a key strand which runs right through it. They were shocked when I said the reverse is happening with the English curriculum thanks to the culture wars’.

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Further afield it makes no sense to colleagues from different educational cultures that in English secondary schools a bell rings every 50 – 60 minutes and possibly well over 1,000 children pour down corridors while 100 adults stay put. They wonder why it is not the other way around. Of course, if your tradition is one where all you need to teach is yourself and a whiteboard the movement of so many pupils makes no sense, but in England the culture is one where staff value ownership of their own space and resources.

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Another area where other countries do things differently is in school leadership and management. When I was teaching economics and business something called ‘de-layering’ was very popular in business making it increasingly difficult to find examples of hierarchical management structures. I could though always rely on my school to provide the diagram to illustrate what outside education was becoming an increasingly outmoded form of management. I was reminded of this when introduced recently to an ‘associate assistant headteacher’. I wondered if these increasing tiers of management in school was peculiarly British and if so whether there was a direct correlation to better educated young people. I mentioned it to a multi-academy trust chief executive who said the multiplication of job titles was all for recruitment and retention. I then used my membership of the council of the Association for European Economics Education (AEEE) what the school management systems were in their country. The responses were:

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·???????? ‘In the Netherlands most schools (secondary education) have a team of teachers, led by a team manager, mostly 4 or 5 per school depending in the offered levels. Above the team managers mostly there is vice-rector and a rector’

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·???????? In Austria, there is no management between the Direktor and the teachers.? In my wife's school, at least, that means the Direktor is involved in everything, large and small.? My wife is Language Coordinator, but that is merely tacked onto her teaching job and carries no authority or major responsibility. In Austria, the Administrator's main job is making up the teacher's schedules and classroom plan.

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·???????? In the U.S., in contrast, the department chair comes between Principal and teachers.? My Dad was high school science department chairman, which was essentially a full-time job.? I was never clear on what the Principal actually did.? All I knew was that my Dad and the other department chairmen -- never women -- had responsibility for everything in their departments.? In other words, his role was exactly the same as that of a Studiengangsleiter at a university here.? As far as I know, this is still the case. In the U.S., the Vice Principal's only job, as far as anyone could tell, was maintaining discipline

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·???????? In Denmark ?the teachers have m ore or less 100% pedagogical freedom for the first day in the school. In practice the teachers with the same subject organise things together (and this will be more in the future because of less time to preparation. Every teacher in the school have, what we call the nearest leader, which is a person from the leadership , that - in theory - the person to communicate with about relevant things of the organisation. But it is both formal and informal for most teachers -at least they meet 1-2 times a year for a talk about the teacher's ?situation.

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·???????? In Italy it is quite simple.. just one layer called ufficio di vicepresidenza, which is vice principal office. These teachers are selected by the principal?

·???????? In Germany the principal is a teacher - usually still giving a small number (2) of hours. The vice principal - doing much of the management - still around 4 hours. Larger group of heads of ... and special functions (equality ...) - all teachers (getting, competing for hour reductions, creating dependency from the principal granting them ...) --> no special/professional management position - currently there are discussions on having more specialized staff (apart from secretary and housekeeper) to get more hours from the scarce teachers. Main decisions taken by full body of teachers (Gesamtlehrerkonferenz) - the principal usually gets what he/she wants. Additionally there is the 'Schulkonferenz' consisting of 3 students, 3 parents, 6 teachers + principal - formally it can decide a lot, practically it does not.

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·???????? A typical staffing arrangement in a German secondary school may be:

·???????? In the country that is held up as the shinning beacon of European education, ‘there is none: the teachers are directly under the rector’.

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By contrast, in an English secondary school a teacher of business may be accountable to the head of the ?business department. That head of department may be accountable to the head of faculty. The head of faculty many be managed by an assistant headteacher, but below the assistant headteacher we now have a new role creeping in of associate assistant head teacher. Above the assistant headteachers are three or four deputy headteachers, one of whom will be the senior deputy headteacher who takes charge in the absence of the headteacher (there may also be an associate headteacher ). At the top of the pyramid sits the headteacher who may or may not teach. Very often, the headteacher is managed by a Chief Executive Officer running several or sometimes very many schools. In large departments there is even more structure as for example in science, below the head of science there may be heads of physics, chemistry and biology.

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?I raise the question of does it have to be like this because while the focus on accountability has recently revolved around Ofsted, it is not the only way in which English teachers may have less autonomy and therefore less job satisfaction than teachers in other countries. Again starting my professional career as an economics teacher, I am wary of over simplified comparisons because of the concept of ceteris paribus (i.e. all other things being the same). Cultures are different but also different are the length and quality of training and the attainment on entry to teaching. For example, in Finland where management seems to be the least, teaching s a respected and sort after job where a masters degree is the minimum required.

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Perhaps it is a good thing that there are so many levels of quality assurance in English schools or perhaps a system of lacking trust in teachers has simply evolved without anyone ever really designing the system.

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