Looking Back to the Future: About time for a school leader revolution?

With the recent launch of the government’s first ever integrated strategy to recruit and retain more teachers, recognising the current critical state of the education profession and the rising effect of social media and the internet on the profession, education is sailing through challenging and unchartered waters. In this article I look back on the history of school leaders in England in relation to knowledge, power and communication, to see what lessons can be learnt from history and as a result, offer some new insights into what could lie ahead for the education profession today.

Schools first formally came into being in England in AD 597 with the King’s School in Canterbury. Lay canon school leaders delivered a Latinate curriculum about Truth and God by rote to the select few, provided practical learning into the professions and more scholarly learning into the church and government. Thus, whilst the school leader-priest delivered key lessons in Truth and God to their students, these originated from the Church. As a result, the locus of power and control was with the Church and its leaders.

The expansion of the Church and the emergence of the university in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the Third Lateran Council (1179) saw the proliferation of church schools, increasing the power of the Pope and the control of the Roman Catholic Church. However, a schism between the instructional education in schools and the academic studies in universities saw a growing shift in the locus of knowledge from the Church to the universities. The technological revolution from manuscript to movable type in 1450 and the printing of the first book in English by William Caxton in 1476, saw the metamorphosis of the educational landscape in England take a significant step further. As a result, the Renaissance saw the emancipation and empowerment of scientists and philosophers across Europe, more able to experiment and disseminate their work across a network of university and aristocratic libraries.

The domination of the Roman Catholic Church over schools in England was abruptly changed with the ex-communication of Henry VIII and his accession as Head of the Church of England in 1538. This saw a significant shift in the locus of power and control from the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church and canon law to the sovereign, the Church of England and royal decree enacted through parliament. 

Thus, by the sixteenth century, universities were becoming centres of scholarly knowledge, with the school leader transformed by degrees from religious advocate to academic graduate. Despite the emergence of alternative ways of seeing the world and an increasing replacement of divinity for humanism and religion for science through the Enlightenment, school leaders were still tied to the church and required to teach a religio-centric curriculum to the select few. 

The move from an agrarian, rural economy to an increasingly urban, industrial economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries re-formed society, and as a result, required educational innovation. School leaders needed to continue to provide an instructional education for the future workers and managers of industry, but on an unprecedented scale and in unparalleled ways. In contrast, the elite continued to be schooled in their academic studies in preparation for university. 

The mid-nineteenth century saw a second translocation of power from the sovereign as Defender of the Faith to the government as Defender of the State and an increased centralisation of power over schools and the school leader. This included grants to schools being given directly by central government for the first time in 1833; the significant increase in the school inspectorate in 1849; the evolution of the guilds into trade unions in 1867; the repealing of the Supremacy Act in 1869 and the introduction of regional school boards (Local Education Authorities) and the first Education Act in 1870. The final blow to the Church came with the establishment of the Department for Education in 1899 to replace the Church of England as the central power structure responsible for education across the country. 

Further, an increase in the right of more people to vote through the Reform Act of 1867, the government had an increased electorate to keep onside. By making education compulsory for children up to the age of 10 in 1880, the government overturned 700 years of history by introducing educational instruction for the many in addition to the continued scholarly learning for the select few. 

Mandating compulsory education presented a greater need for school leaders to communicate and support each other. To fulfil that need, education established their own professional unions with the creation of the National Union of Elementary Teachers in 1870 and the founding of the National Association of Headteachers in 1887.

And so, the institution starts to build.

The twentieth century saw a continuance of the work of Victorian Governance with the compulsory school age rising to 14 (1918), a Minister of Education replacing the President of the Board of Education and the introduction of Secondary Modern schools (1944) being crystallised into non-selective comprehensive schools in 1965. By the 1970’s, unions were healthy and school leaders, largely, were able to get on with the running of their schools unmolested. 

However, by the 1980’s, any Cinderellic somnambulance of school leaders swiftly evaporated through a second technological revolution in communication with the invention of the computer and internet, and an intensification of political power with the arrival of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.

Her “Francis of Assisi” speech presented the unofficial manifesto of her government to bring, in their view, much needed improvements across the country. Thus, the school leader saw the unions vitiated in 1985, greater accountability of schools through the dramatic increase in powers of the Secretary of State for Education and the implementation of the National Curriculum in 1988; the establishment in 1992 of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and the annual publication of school performance through league tables in 1997. 

In addition to these, the pace of change in education legislation of at least a law a year since the 1980’s to the present, compared to only nine education acts in the previous seventy-five years clearly demonstrates the government’s far greater control and power over schools and the school leader. 

This unprecedented centralisation of control and surveillance through manipulation by law, continued by successive governments, has produced what Nigel Wright has described as ‘Bastard Leadership’ in schools, the government holding the locus of power and effectively turning school leaders into school managers. 

In response, Sir Michael Barber in 2010 called for the dialogue between the teaching profession and government to move forward, with a change in the relationship, from having a government that is prescriptive, to one which is regulatory and ultimately enabling. How far this dialogue has progressed today is open to debate.

Where there is almost no debate is in the rise and influence over the last forty years on the education profession of computers, the internet and social media.

The transformation of communication through information technology with the creation of the internet in 1983 and the establishment of social media in 2004 has enabled a second proliferation of education to occur in a virtual world, allowing global accessibility to knowledge and learning, anywhere, at any time. However, in addition, it has created the possibility of anyone being able to post erroneous knowledge online, unchecked. As a result, whilst there is the huge potential for the globalisation of education, there is also the huge potential for the de-professionalisation of the profession to occur. 

Today, the school leader must navigate their community through a world of super complexity. But will they ever be in control of their profession? 

In their book “Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness”, Argyris and Schon’s view of professionalism provides an interesting perspective. They suggest that professionalism holds two kinds of technique; the intrinsic technique of the artist and the extrinsic technique to create the institutional settings needed to allow the intrinsic technique to flourish. 

The Church in the middle ages and the government of Margaret Thatcher appear to fully understand that the intrinsic technique of the artist cannot be blocked (be they lay clerks, miners or teachers). But as the dominant power, it is possible to control the institutional settings in which professionals work and thereby facilitate a greater centralisation of that control over them.

Whilst I would contest their view that “professionals often function without considering what they have learned from previous situations”, in that the pace of political and legislative change in the last forty years, has been such that there is little scope for expertise to flourish, nor for learning from previous situations, as each situation a school leader seems to face is new (Brexit being a prime example). 

In such unprecedented times, headteachers and the profession may be able to take greater control of education in a similar way to the lawyers and their profession. 

Reflecting on the history of school leaders however, I do not share Sir Michael Barber’s, nor Nigel Wright’s optimism of a world where an enabling government affords greater freedom and trusts the professionals to lead in a principled and strategic way, like doctors and lawyers for the following reasons: 

• Education shapes the minds of young people who are the future of the country. A government would never allow the control of the future of the country to be in anybody else’s hands but their own (take the academisation of schools as a prime example); 
• Looking back over the history of school leadership, whether in relation to the Church or State, the school leader has always been subservient;
• The Government holds the purse strings and makes the rules – the ultimate control. 

However, the history of communication suggests there may be hope. 

The transformation of communication in the fifteenth century through books, emancipated the intellectual world from the grip of the Church. In a similar way, the computer, mobile technology, the worldwide web and social media are transforming communication in the twenty-first century. 

Perhaps with the rise of virtual learning through, for example, virtual schools, Google Drive and You Tube for Schools, it is only a matter of time before computers and the internet emancipate education and shift the locus of power and control from the grip of the government and finally, into the hands of the professionals.