Tim Brighouse – in memory

As I write, Tim Brighouse passed away last week. Aged 83, but no less sad. I hope it is some compensation to those close to him that his influence will live on so vividly – in the practical things he achieved; in his writings and thought leadership; and above all within and through the literally thousands of people influenced by his passion, idealism and fundamental humanity.

This is a personal contribution to his memory. He intersected with my life and career. My second school, in the 1970s, was Cheney School in Oxford. Tim was Director of Education and there he introduced the Oxford Certificate of Educational Achievement (OCEA), a personal profile or ‘portfolio’ for each student recognising their unique achievements (now long gone, and we still don’t have the equivalent for all children in 2023). Later, when I was a Director at the National College for School Leadership (also long gone, of course), he contributed generously and profoundly whenever requested – writing think pieces for ‘New Visions for Early Headship’ (long gone), speaking at events, supporting the Networked Learning Communities programme’s commitment to school-to-school collaboration (now corrupted into managerially structured MATs). Subsequently, he was both a reference point and an ally, most recently in discussions about the potential establishment of an Open School. The last time we spoke, he sent me a copy of his and Mick Waters’ latest book “About Our Schools: improving on previous best”, from which some of the notes below are synthesised.

That’s it for bits about me. What I want to share are some of Tim’s ideas, starting with some edited notes I have in my computer from a talk he gave about ten years ago at a school leaders’ conference:

• You know you’re in a good school when: teachers talk about teaching & learning regularly, they observe each other teach, they plan, organise, teach and evaluate together in a collaborative not competitive sense.
• A school: for our times: a curriculum which includes young people’s experiences, opportunities for co-production & enterprise, pupils access coaching & bespoke learning reinforcement at any time, anchored in research, continuous staff development through planned and focused networks with other schools as part of a shared programme of professional development and pupil enrichment
• Outstandingly successful teaching beliefs: success for all, intelligence as multi-faceted concept, every child needs a worthwhile relationship with at least one adult – hence the power of the whole school community and probably the value of support staff in particular, ‘transformability’ rather than ‘ability’ of each child
• Outstandingly successful teaching habits: treat teaching as a co-operative activity, hone questioning skills, team planning & teaching, observe other teachers, share leadership & management, utilise ‘teachable moments’ in corridors & around the school, accept the unpredictability of learning
• A future learning school: the outlook focuses on big question and philosophy to embody real learning
• Creative support for staff development: encourage new experiences & reflection on these, reimagine the use of time, and also understand and permit specific personal circumstances. Respect and mutual trust need to be key principles
• A courageous leader: displays unwarranted optimism, manages complexity creatively & with enjoyment, has a bottomless well of intellectual curiosity and a complete absence of self-pity, ego, arrogance or belief they always know best
• On Leadership & Vision: it’s about creating energy, building capacity, being infectiously optimistic, a good listener; leaders as ‘path makers’ not ‘path followers’ or ‘path tidiers’
• Leaders more than Managers: most UK schools are over-managed and under-led
• Above all, Leaders as Learners: striving to be model learners, demonstrating that learning is truly a lifelong experience.

And more recently (edited and very much reduced from the book – bearing in mind these are fragments from more than 600 pages) here are ten examples of what he and Mick Waters call for:

• An overarching Schooling Commission that would be cross-party, non-partisan and provide stable policy oversight (so de-politicising education, providing more expert oversight and offering continuity within a 10 year plan)
• The establishment of an Open School – as in many other jurisdictions across the world
• A fairer qualification system, criterion referenced, with learners presenting themselves when ready and incorporating a means of recognising learning and achievements beyond school as well as within
• Transformation of Ofsted, from being a backward-looking individual school inspections system to one deploying a balanced scorecard for schools and focusing on the role of school partnerships
• The establishment of Area Admission Authorities to manage ‘fair admissions’ across an area and to protect the interests of the vulnerable or marginalised
• A dramatic review (Warnock for our times) of provision for SEND and all other high needs learners, including those excluded from schools or transferred
• A review of some taken-for-granted ‘platforms’ of the system e.g.: the school year; the starting age for school; pre-school provision; the school funding system; the role of an Open School in non-school based learning
• Support for a cohort of consultant teachers (alongside others) to visit schools abroad annually, in order to ensure that our system has access to examples of best practices from across the world
• A dramatic expansion in support for adult ‘learning’ – a staff CPD entitlement; learning for early parenthood; school-to-school area learning partnerships; the establishment of a national cohort of expert ‘consultant teachers’
• A massive shift in school-to-school collaboration through a progressive move towards LA schools and academies reforming into local area partnerships, working together in the interests of all children within a locality.

That’s it. Saddened by your passing, Tim, I have sought to contribute one more testament to your towering influence and your very human way of expressing it.

What do highly successful schools have in common?

Introduction

There has always been debate about the relative merits of different school ‘types’ or ‘models’ and their characteristics – traditional or progressive; setted or mixed ability; formal or informal; large or small; strict or informal; subject-based or interdisciplinary etc etc. This piece is not about that debate. It is about what highly successful schools of any type have in common.

The Free School programme offered a (largely missed) opportunity to seed and evaluate the success of different school models – something I have written about elsewhere. However, given that all the UK’s Free Schools are start-ups, there is another comparative evaluative lens that can be applied: What do the most successful Free Schools, regardless of model, have in common? Some schools of all types have been highly successful, ranging from ‘strict/traditional’ to ‘progressive/relational’ – very different, but also very effective within their own terms.

In 2021 I was a member of a team of three that interviewed the leaders and founders of a small group of these schools – the schools deemed the most effective and successful in their own terms from the 600+ cohort of Free Schools. The original objective was to create case studies of these school for use with potential future cohorts of Free Schools, but the result was also a body of evidence across the cohort of schools from which it was possible to sift out common characteristics. That is what this piece is about. From the body of evidence we synthesised twelve common features. The way that each of these features manifested in practice varied, of course, but each was distinctly present.

TWELVE FEATURES COMMON TO THE SCHOOLS

1. A clear sense of mission and moral purpose – often strongly linked with the journey to founding a school, all had unusually strong and well articulated sense of purpose

2.Explicit emphasis on culture, cultural coherence and cultural buy-in (staff, students and parents)  – usually part of the explicit ongoing narrative of the school, including the display of physical artefacts or maxims that enshrine the culture

3.Strong leadership: the leader as holder and narrator of the vision – the leaders were notably assertive; almost all had been founders of the school or internally appointed since its inception

4.Recruitment to the school’s values – a commitment to employing people who buy into the approach.  Values coherence above teaching knowledge and experience

5.Internal succession of key internal leaders – there was a consistent commitment to developing and progressing their own leaders, in one case exclusively so

6.Advanced professional learning strategies – from training student teachers and developing NQTs, to middle and senior leaders’ progression pathways (and including induction and ongoing professional learning for all)

7.Sweating the small stuff – a preoccupation with getting the minutiae consistently aligned; a clear ‘grammar’ of behaviour and learning expectations

8.Unusually strong focus on the fundamentals of learning – a clear, well articulated and consistently applied model of learning (e.g. mastery teaching; cognitive science; project-based learning) and a shared body of knowledge about it

9.Internal strategies to ensure the rigour of classroom learning – from co-planning, to team teaching, to drop-in observations, to close monitoring

10.A strong connection with international models, schools and practices – most were informed about and influenced by well-evidenced international school and practice models (from Teach Like a Champion to Expeditionary Learning; from KIPP to High Tech High).  Many had ongoing partnerships with particular models

11.Thriving on being publicly visible – being mission driven, they are energised by influencing others and value being seen as trailblazers

12.Codification and scaling as a part of their lexicon – scaling the model is a feature for some schools and MATs, but all have strategies to codify key practices and are open to visits and to sharing materials.

That is it, really, except to make a few additional overview comments.

• Three of these items (3, 5 and 6) emphasise the significance of developing internal personnel. In one sense this should be self-evident, yet many UK schools have poor internal adult learning strategies and consistently demonstrate through recruitment strategies at all levels (including headship) that they believe a random candidate from Cleethorpe or Clacton-on-Sea will be a better fit than their own personnel.
• A different three (8, 9 and 10) relate to the quality of the learning experience for students – drawing from best international practices, having shared models of practice, and taking quality assurance seriously, whether benignly or otherwise.
• Three (1, 2 and 4) address the issue of ‘loose coupling’ – Karl Weick’s term for the connections required between classrooms and between schools. In ‘tightly coupled’ organizations performance expectations can be mandated and are visible. In schools, historically, classroom behaviours are much more private and, Weick argues, need to become ‘loosely coupled’ by shared values, beliefs and practices.
• Two items (11 and 12) get to the essence of professional practice. Teachers, differently from those in professions like law or medicine, do not tend to see themselves as knowledge creators. In the schools in our study, they did.
• Finally, three (10, 11 and 12) describe schools that are unusually receptive to learning from international evidence of practice and who see themselves as active participants in this community of ‘missionary work’. This commitment to professional exchange requires them to codify their everyday practices (or ‘reify’ them in Wenger’s language) such that they are available for adoption or adaptation by others – whether internally or externally.

Some thoughts about RELATIONSHIPS and the joy of teaching

There are lots of factors that influence or impact student success. Some, like physical and emotional wellbeing, or aspiration, or motivation, or self-belief are self-evidently significant, yet at the same time they are amorphous and difficult to pin down. It’s not like learning your tables, something that can be drilled and tested. However, there is one component factor for which there will be pretty widespread agreement – and lots of empirical evidence. It is that relationships are a central feature.

For example, one of the almost universal factors from research with students who achieve against the odds, or who overcome adversity, or who turn their lives around is a significant adult relationship. The significant adult may be a teacher, but it just as likely could be a sports coach, a teaching assistant, a youth leader, a relative, a community policeman, a neighbour – someone who gives time and who cares. Someone who cares enough to give a damn. Looking back, I was lucky, There were probably three people (one a teacher, one a sports coach, one a mentor in a cash and carry on a vacation job when I was 16) who I would say significantly impacted my life trajectory in some way. My guess would be that none of them had any idea how significant they were in developing my sense of self. But the fact that I still remember them fondly now, 50 years later, is a testament to the significance of those relationships in my life.

The point, though is not about me. It is that relationships matter. We know that they do. And yet UK secondary schools are so designed that meaningful relationships are just not feasible for most learners within the mainstream of school business.

Typically, students are allocated a Form Tutor, about whom they have no choice, and who perhaps has 15 or 20 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the afternoon to take a register, deal with the business of the day and escort to assembly. Beyond that the average student might have 10 or more teachers, each for 2 or 3 hours per week (and each of whom may teach over 200 students a week).

That’s the context that the formal school routine offers for relationship formation.

Good teachers will surmount these odds for some students. As one learner once said to me: “There isn’t time for individual conversations, but just a few moments at the end of a lesson where my teacher recommends a book or asks what I am reading makes me feel known – and that’s all I need.” For many students, it may be the arts or sport, or other extended curriculum activities where a meaningful relationship is formed. However, it will only be for a few that this is feasible in the the mainstream curriculum.

So what is the point being made here? It is this: (i) the relational dysfunctions described here are hard-wired into the design of schools; (ii) they are also built into teachers’ pervasive professional identity as subject teachers and (iii) it need not be like this. There are examples of school designs that are fundamentally different and there are examples of schools where, despite the designed-in barriers, ways are found to mitigate them.

Take point two above. If you ask a secondary school teacher about their professional knowledge-base they are likely to tell you their ‘subject’. But that is wrong – or at least should be! Our professional knowledge-base is the design and facilitation of great learning through relationships. When I was a headteacher there was one interview question I usually asked: “Do you view yourself as a teacher of (maths, history, languages etc) or as a teacher of young people?” To be honest, the question was basically contractual. Anyone who had spent a day in the school would get the point – a school where all teachers are teachers of children and who bring their subject knowledge in service of that is likely to be a relational school.

So, this is a shorter post than most. It reasserts that relationships matter; that children need to be known; that our influence on young people’s lives will extend way beyond their schooldays – and that we are likely never to know the difference we make. That’s the joy of teaching.

In Exam Results Season – 10 reasons exams make no sense

Congratulations to all those students who this year have achieved the grades they need for the next stage of their lives – and commiserations to all those who haven’t. Exam days and results day are such an institutionalised part of our education system that no-one really challenges the appropriateness or relevance of this way of assessing the outcomes of each student’s dozen or so years learning in our education system.

But exams make no real sense any more – if ever they really did – and these (from a former teacher, headteacher, Exam Board marker and team leader for exam markers) are some of the reasons why:

1. Exams are an anachronism. First, they are an anachronistic medium. Young people work on computers. They type, edit, cut and paste, spell check – they craft their work. Very few learners will be accomplished at sitting at a desk and writing at length with pen and paper. And universal access to knowledge via the internet makes the historical habit of memorising and regurgitating of questionable merit anyway.
2. Who should do the assessing? We pay trained and trusted professionals to work with young people, to teach them and to know them well as learners and individuals. Yet when it comes to assessing their suitability for the next stage of their life we give that job to anonymous Exam Board organisations, the largest of which, Edexcel, is a billion pound business.
3. Who actually does the assessing? Exam Boards employ large numbers of assessors – 67,000 markers in the year prior to Covid. Many will be teachers doing this on evenings, weekends and holidays to supplement their salaries (I was one of these). Many will be retired teachers or people from other backgrounds. Some of this last group will be very out of touch with contemporary education and some will be people you might not choose to be entrusted with your children’s outcomes. (When I was an examiner and team leader for the Oxford Delegacy, all examiners marked a set of sample scripts before their collective outputs were mapped on a scattergraph of grades. Trust me, you would not have believed the spread!) There remains a myth of rigour to this largely invisible process.
4. Exams versus other ways of assessing. Portfolios of evidence, coursework, continuous assessment, exhibitions, practicals, orals, aurals, vivas… There are multiple well-evidenced better ways of assessing learners than exams – and remember that most PhD students (our highest form of assessment) are not assessed by exams. And whilst Exam Boards and schools have become increasingly sensitive to the challenges exams pose for many SEND students, no amount of extra time or special consideration can take away the trauma that this form of assessment inflicts on many neurodiverse or physically challenged or emotionally vulnerable young people.
5. Vested interests and exams. I’ve mentioned Exam Boards (who make money from exams). Government also has a vested interest. They can manipulate learner outcomes, as they have this year by ‘levelling down’ the outcomes. Regardless of how well learners do, the proportion of top grades available is pretty well fixed by government. If it was some other sphere, like gambling, that did this we’d say that the outcomes were ‘fixed’ or ‘rigged’. And, of course, another vested interest group is comprised of affluent parents who choose to pay for private schooling, or private tuition, or crammer school to do intensive exam preparation and mock exams.
6. Subjects. We examine ‘subjects’ and subject knowledge, so schools teach subjects. The model goes pretty much unquestioned in a world where knowledge deployment is integrated and multi-disciplinary and applied. Subjects and the constant narrowing down of ‘subject choices’ leading to ‘subject qualifications’ is out of its time.
7. Progression dependency. Exams are high-stakes tests. What university, what course, what job – these are dependent not on what kind of a learner you have been for the last decade or more and your achievements in school, but almost entirely on the outcomes of examinations. (This, we are reminded, on the day that Michael Parkinson died, who had just two ‘O’Levels to his name.)
8. Progression inappropriateness. How did we ever design a system where our entire cohort of 18 year-olds do not know to what or where they will be able to progress until a month or so before the start of the new university or school year. Whether it’s Birmingham or Bristol or Bangor or Bedford – it’s all in the air still in the middle of August and then it’s a mad scramble. Crazy. Inhumane.
9. Age-cohorting. If driving tests were age-cohorted and we all had to sit our test in our 18th year, or if music grades were, or Duke of Edinburgh assessments etc then there would be very high failure rates. The point is that we have ‘age-cohorted exams’ just so that we can fail a proportion of learners. If everyone could be assessed when they felt ready there would be much higher pass-rates. Failure is designed into exams.
10. ‘A’ levels as a predictor. We also need to see all this in the context of what is known about the correlation between ‘A’ level exam results and final degree outcomes – which is poor. As Professor Ted Wragg (Exeter University) wrote: There have been several studies. The usual measurement is a correlation between 0 and 1 (where 0 means no relationship and 1 means a perfect relationship). Typically, a correlation of between .3 and .4 has emerged.

I’m honestly delighted for those young people joyous this year at their results. They have navigated an unnecessarily tough system and succeeded. And I’m equally genuinely sorry for those who have not achieved what they needed to progress to the next chosen stage of their life, and for whom this same tough system can leave a legacy on their self-esteem and future aspirations. It doesn’t have to be like this.

The UK is stuck with an out-of-date school model

The United States has more than 100,000 schools, so it’s not surprising that it has some of the worst and the best school practices in the world.  A key point, though, is this: the best are best by design.  I’ll emphasise that.  The best of the American schools are by a mile some of the most interesting in the world.  They are worth learning from – and this is not surprising, because they were designed for this purpose.

There is a recent innovation history in the US which supports new school designs.

In 1984 the Coalition of Essential Schools was set up following publication of Ted Sizer’s book ‘Horace’s Compromise’.  It began as a network of 12 schools and as of 2016 had more than 600, connecting under the banner of ‘common principles for uncommon schools’. Basically, it represented the start of the US whole school reform or redesign movement, with each model tending to be based upon a set of shared design principles. As an example, the Coalition’s principles include:

• Less is more – depth over coverage 
• Personalisation – built on profound knowledge of learners
• Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach
• Assessment based on demonstration of mastery and real tasks. 

In 1991 the New American Schools initiative was launched.  Its intention was to stimulate the development and implementation of transformative whole school designs.  It was intended to break free of a paradigm that simply improves the existing model, or that bolts onto it new programmes.  It supported school design teams (educators, business people, researchers) to create potentially transformative new school designs with the scope to be scaled.  Of course, not all were successful, but some proved to be seminally influential – such as Expeditionary Learning, Co-NECT Schools, ATLAS Schools or Roots and Wings.  Even more successful was the establishment of the precedent of new school design, the practice of individual and collective evaluation of designs and the intentional efforts to scale.

Fast forward to 2000 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had a big idea about how to fix the problems of American education. They resolved to break up large high schools and turn them into ‘small schools’ – small learning communities of 400 or fewer students. They believed that small high schools would lift graduation rates and student achievement, especially among minority students, because the strong relationships between students and teachers would ensure that learners were profoundly well known.

The Foundation spent $2 billion promoting the dissolution of large high schools and the creation of small schools across the nation. Some 2,600 new small high schools opened in 45 states. New York City alone now has more than 200 such schools, with high schools devoted to such themes as leadership, the sports professions, technology, health professions, the media, diversity, peace and social justice.  By 2005, Bill Gates had told the National Governors Association that ‘America’s high schools are obsolete’; that small schools made everything ‘relevant’, through hands-on activities and new pedagogical approaches.

In 2010 Joel Klein, Chancellor, established New York’s iZone. A key strand of this was iZone360. This involved 50 middle and high schools engaging in whole school redesign, creating innovative, student-centered school models. Each was supported by a design partner – some drawn from the New American Schools cohort .

Were all the schools in these initiatives entirely successful?  Of course not.  However, the small-high-schools programme funded the growth of the Big Picture high schools, founded by Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor (initially a single school – the Met School in Providence, RI – three decades ago, now 80+ across the US and another 100+ around the world). These small, personalised high schools, started for drop-out learners, graduate 92 percent of their students on time. Amazing.

Gates also funded the EdVisions network of schools, (120+ high schools in 24 states and 3 countries). SAT average composite scores for EdVisions schools far exceed the composite average; and over 82% of EdVisions graduates progress to degree programs.  This speaks for itself.

New Tech Network  now has in excess of 170 schools in the US and Australia, and is a leading design partner for comprehensive school change and innovative learning environments.  They achieve 72% college enrolment and 84% college persistence – and this with a model that transforms existing schools, not just start-ups.  Truly impressive.

The Foundation also funded the growth of High Tech High (HTH), now 16 elementary and high schools in the San Diego area. 98% of HTH’s graduates have been admitted to college or university, with approximately 80% admitted to four-year programs. About 35% of HTH graduates are first-generation college students, and 85% of their free school meals students complete degrees.  Astonishing.

The high schools in these four school design networks work.  Students in these schools all consistently outperform teenagers in conventionally sized, conventionally structured high schools with comparable demographics.  The system is learning to learn from them and the work has spawned other diffusion organisations – the Buck Institute supports robust models of project-based learning to spread, as does Imagine If (based in Denmark, led by ex-High Tech High teachers and working with The Lego Foundation to scale “playful learning” approaches); Bob Pearlman (formerly of NTN) curates a school reform and innovation web space.

There are also some common design features across all these models:

• All include project-based learning, an engaging and empowering pedagogical model, which requires teachers to collaborative as designers of learning
• All focus on the centrality of relationships – have ‘advisory’ (where advisory is the soul of the school, symbolising support of students before teaching curriculum)
• All have powerful and sustained adult learning norms
• All have pervasive cultural identity and school-level ownership of what matters, including what is assessed and how and by whom it is assessed.

For the UK, the point of this range of US examples is simple.  Healthy systems need innovation capacity – an intentional strategy to design, implement and evaluate potentially paradigm-shifting new models of practice.  Yes, there are real schooling problems in many US States and cities, but the system is healthy and will be fine because it knows where it is heading.  It has great icons from which it can learn – as evidenced in two very current reform movements:  XQ America and Education Reimagined. They build from these iconic innovative school designs with the intention of scaling; of fostering a  transformation movement.

We do not (yet) have this tradition in the UK.  And not to have it simply means that we constantly focus on striving to improve the existing school model.  This is a model that is more than 100 years old and way, way, way out of date.  It is a model that has failed to achieve equitable outcomes, or to address socio-economic challenge, or to engage the potentially disengaged learner (or to engage most learners, for that matter).  Nor has it provided teachers with an intellectually challenging professional life, or excited and involved parents around the experience of their children.  Effectively, this means that innovation becomes limited to new ways of delivering the 60 minute subject-based lesson!

There should be a comparable movement in the UK despite, or perhaps because of, the inhospitable policy environment.  One of the most hopeful catalysts might be Big Change as it represents a new philanthropic agency for change in the UK and could mirror some of the achievements of the Gates Foundation or XQ Schools in the States.  Rethinking Education is evolving as a forum and mobiliser for like-minded and change-oriented progressives. Innovation Unit established a School Design Lab that contains tools, processes and extended support for design of new school models and redesign of existing ones.  (Gesher School’s impressive blueprint is an example of an outcome of the SDL process.) There are also influential UK thought-leadership materials to generate energy around  ideas, and to provide evidence and images of practice that mark out a direction of travel.  Valerie Hannon’s books, “Thrive” and “FutureSchool” (and her youtube lecture “The future school Is here”) or David Price’s publications provide a compelling rationale and imperatives, for example. We have the jigsaw pieces for change.

The policy vehicles for innovation in the UK (such as Free Schools; Academies; Multi-Academy Trusts) have come and gone, each largely regressing to government controlled, Ofsted-shaped norms. Perhaps the hope lies in movements rather than policy initiatives – driven by compelling school (re)design principles and a shared belief that we can certainly do better for all young learners – and especially those least well served by existing norms.

All-Through Schools

A personal and professional reflection

Short Story No 1

Some years ago I visited an excellent primary school in King’s Cross – and was shown around by three fascinating young people: one sedate and polite; one diffident and reserved; one talkative and bouncing around with enthusiasm.  When I commented on them to the head, she said that the relationships and the culture of the school had embraced and socialised this third student, who had been transferred to them from another school. She feared now for his destiny on transfer to secondary next school year.  Why?  She doubted he would last a term.  When I asked what would happen if he could have progressed at her school, she said simply: “What could go wrong?”

Not one or the other, but one and the other

I was headteacher, for 14 years, of a community comprehensive which grew to a role of 1,500 students.  I can make many arguments in favour of large schools – the school had a Sixth Form of 500 with an extensive curriculum that offered 100% of our students progression pathways; great sport and teams; fantastic arts and productions and concerts and exhibitions; a huge extra-curricular programme; over 300 D of E participants a year; lots of progression routes for staff; comparatively resource rich etc etc. 

There is no doubt that large secondary schools can work really well, but let’s be clear at the outset that this is not a think-piece saying that one model (large co-educational secondary schools) is better than another (smaller all-through schools).  Instead, it says that each can be highly effective, yet that (a) insufficient attention has been given to the virtues of both small schools and all-through education, or to the value to learners (and parents) of their unique characteristics and (b) that the UK seems to have insulated itself from the growing body of evidence and practice across the world.

It is probably an important framing piece to start with some of the obvious things that can be not so good about large secondary schools.  They can feel very anonymous to 11-year olds transferring.  They can be intimidating.  Students (and parents) can feel ‘unknown’.  Indeed, students may well be unknown, with perhaps a dozen teachers each week (each one teaching 150-200 students weekly).  Additionally, transfer is clunky at best.  Basically, learners transfer and some data about them transfers, but all the relational capital, the knowledge about them as people and learners, the relationships with parents – this all dissipates. And, being honest, the relationship between many secondary schools and ‘feeder’ primaries is tenuous at best.

Does this all matter?  Well, it certainly does for SEND learners and the research evidence says that it does for many more.

School transfer – what research says

There is actually a surprising dearth of research into school transfer effects, especially in recent years.  What was called the ORACLE Report from 40 years ago (Croll, 1983) drew from about five years of research and showed that there was significant learning loss from school transfer.  Basically, using the same tests (Maths, Reading, Literacy) the year before and after transfer showed that around 40% of students made no or negative progress.  A couple of subsequent pieces looked at reasons why and revealed that both the social effects of transfer and the new instructional approaches of secondary school were factors.  When the ORACLE research was replicated a decade or so later it generated similar results about discontinuities, relational instability and achievement hiatus.  

This all created quite a flurry of interest – as it should – and it became a focus of attention.  Yet there is very little recent research.  Why?  Well probably because more recent government policies have almost certainly made things much worse for transferring students and their families, as parental choice policies, academisation and changes to admissions regulations mean that there are many fewer ‘catchment area schools’.  

So, what little research we have on the transfer issue makes uncomfortable reading and the current situation is probably worse than that!  

Beyond the challenge of transfer – the models

A few years ago, an  NCSL publication, focusing primarily on federations of schools, identified that: there is growing interest in all-age schools, and the five main drivers are:

• personalisation (raising achievement)
• pedagogical (sharing expertise – cross-phase)
• care and support (every child matters and shared ethos)
• community (engagement in learning)
• organisational (shared expertise and resources). 

It is hard to disagree that (a) these are highly desirable aims and (b) that all-age schools are better placed to meet these ambitions than any other set of arrangements.

It may also be worth considering the issue from a reverse lens – current student dissatisfaction levels with existing secondary school provision.  The Edge Foundation report “Schools for All? Young people’s experiences of alienation in the English secondary school system”, published in February 2023, listed the following amongst its key findings:

•  For nearly 1 in 2 of young people aged 15-16 secondary school is not an enjoyable or meaningful experience, but rather something they feel they need to ‘get through’
• Many secondary schools have adopted teaching methods that many young people experience as alienating and stressful….particularly those who have special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
• Many young people feel unsupported by their teachers at school.  This is most common among young people with SEND or from backgrounds of social disadvantage

So, the following might be synthesised from all this:

• Transfer to secondary school is socially challenging for children and educationally challenging for schools
• There is consistent evidence of learning loss that relates to transfer discontinuities
• The relational knowledge about children and families is largely lost on transfer
• Many secondary school students become disaffected or alienated from their secondary school experience
• The needs of SEND students are often least well met in existing secondary school arrangements and sizes.

There is an international evidence-base

Earlier in this piece it was suggested that, for such a crucial issue, there is remarkably little recent UK research about school transfer effects.  The same can also be said about the wave of new all-through Free Schools.  The significant increase in numbers (perhaps 150 new all-through schools in the last couple of decades) warrants study.  In particular we could have expected a significant research study into the government sponsored Free School cohort.

It is different elsewhere in the world.  For example, in 1991 the New American Schools initiative was launched.  It supported school design teams to create potentially transformative new school designs with the scope to be scaled. Expeditionary Learning schools was one such example amongst many.  Its success is well evidenced.  Fast forward to 2000 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation resolved to break up large high schools and turn them into ‘small schools’ – small learning communities of 400 or fewer students. They believed that small high schools would lift graduation rates and student achievement, especially among minority students, because the strong relationships between students and teachers would ensure that learners were profoundly well known.

The foundation spent $2 billion and some 2,600 new small high schools opened in 45 states. Two examples will illustrate the evidence-base resulting:

1. The small-schools programme funded the growth of the Big Picture schools, founded by Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor (now 65+ Big Picture high schools in 18 states and more around the world). These small, personalised schools, started for drop-out learners, graduate 92 percent of their students on time.
2. The foundation also funded the growth of High Tech High (HTH), now a federation of 16 elementary and high schools in the San Diego area creating an all-through local school system. 98% of HTH’s graduates have been admitted to college or university, with around 80% admitted to four-year programs. About 35% of HTH graduates are first-generation college students and 85% of their free school meals students complete degrees.  

Students in these schools consistently outperform teenagers in conventionally sized, conventionally structured high schools with comparable demographics.  All focus on the centrality of relationships and the personalisation of learning that arises from knowing students well.  

New York City now has more than 200 such small schools.  I worked in New York on and off for three years, alongside some of them.  The enduring memory is of being engaged with and by some of the best schools I have ever experienced (City As School, NYC iSchool, NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies, New Design High School…and many more).  I have visited High Tech High’s small schools within an all-through local system in San Diego three times and Big Picture Learning schools in the US and in Australia.  Ditto.  Small and all-through.

There is much that we could learn.

End note

The short version of all the above is that all-through schools work. This certainly helps to explain the current growth in numbers and interest. Do they work better or worse than phased schools?  Stephen Heppel suggests that this is almost certainly the wrong question.  The right question may well be about what we value in education, what really matters in the learning journey of our children, and all-through schools have a demonstrably appealing case to make.

Short Story No 2

Big Picture Schools have what they call Advisory.  Advisors spend at least an hour a day with their advisory group, often much more than that.  They are effectively a learner’s personal tutor; their significant adult; their advisor.  They stay with them throughout their schooling.  When I asked whether they were still in touch beyond school I was told: “They are only a text message away – and 80% of our former learners are still in touch with their advisor at age 25.”

Our Education System Needs More Architect Leaders

You may or may not think that leadership of our schools needs to change. I do. Probably most people feel that we will need to rethink the shape and purposes of school post-Covid. More emphasis on equity; more relational; more diverse in teaching and learning methods; a step-change in the role of virtual learning; more peer-to-peer support; ; greater awareness of emotional welfare; different modalities of assessment. It could be a long list.

We Need a Change in School Leadership Culture

Two or three years ago there was a lot of noise in the educational world about the Harvard Business Review’s publication of UK research into types of school leadership. A feature on BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ and a great deal of debate on twitter and in Schools Week signalled its significance. People identified with the call for more ‘architect leaders’ — those who invest in the sustained improvement of learning and look beyond their school walls to have an impact in the wider community.

For Innovation Unit there was a deeper significance to this research. We are convinced that there are multiple imperatives — global, economic, social and equity imperatives — to go beyond improvement and begin the process of reimagining and redesigning ‘school’ as we know it. The disruptive power of the Covid pandemic has merely accentuated that belief. And for this to happen, a certain kind of leadership will be required. We will need the qualities, capabilities and characteristics of architect leaders who can go beyond school turnaround and take on fundamental school redesign.

The research

The research says that currently we are recognising the wrong qualities in leaders — with that recognition being signalled by salary levels and public approbation in the form of knighthoods and gongs. The researchers (Alex Hill, Liz Mellon, Ben Laker and Jules Goddard) generated five archetypes from their study of 411 Academy leaders. They are:

• Surgeons — who focus on test scores and cauterise underachievement
• Soldiers — who are task-focused and cost-cutting
• Accountants — who grow revenue, increasing students and income sources
• Philosophers — who focus on values and the debate about good teaching
• Architects — who progressively redesign school and the community it serves.

Using financial savings and student results on test scores as the two primary dimensions of achievement (which is certainly open to challenge, I know) the research suggested that only the ‘architects’ create long-term and sustainable improvement. They are more strategic and their effects are more enduring, yet they are by far the least recognised group, in salary terms and in public recognition.

The conclusion, of course, is that we need to appoint more architects to our schools.

Now, there may well be some dodgy dimensions to this research, despite its peer-reviewed status. For example, the sample of 411 leaders is inevitably skewed — those 2012 early academy converter heads were, by definition, an a-typical sample, having been relatively early adopters of an aggressive system restructuring policy. Another is the association of school subjects with the archetypes — PE and RE for surgeons; IT and Technology for Soldiers; Mathematics for Accountants; English and Languages for Philosophers; and History and Economics for Architects. (We can assume that this has an empirical validity in the sample, but it doesn’t hold a ring of truth in reality. Many of us will know some stunning long-term leaders and team builders with a PE background, for example, and where on earth are the geographers — a subject that throws up some excellent leaders?)

The truth

However, reservations aside, there is undoubtedly truth in this — truth at two extremes.

At one extreme short-term improvement in results is all too often achieved by leadership ruthlessness — restructuring the organisation; getting rid of a proportion of staff; focusing on Key Stage 4 pupils to the detriment of younger learners; excluding unwanted students; disproportionately focusing on those near the C-D borderline; being tactical about exam entries; putting the most successful staff with high stakes groups…and a range of other similar short-term and culturally damaging strategies. They shout out to everyone that what matters in this school is ‘our league table position and my career as a leader’. Culturally, this tends to create threat, fear and internal competition, along with cynicism and resentment.

At the other extreme, we know that long-term growth requires deeper change strategies. Unification around a long-term vision and optimism about its feasibility tend to be supported by capacity-building and enabling strategies that liberate the creativity of staff, unleash discretionary energy, and develop collaborative learning between both teachers and students. Such a culture isn’t focused disproportionately on one type of achievement or particular target groups, but recognises diverse success and values all learners equally.

So, whilst there may be some reservations about the characterisations within the research, it is essentially true. We are encouraging, lauding and publicly valuing and rewarding the wrong kinds of leadership for sustainable growth in our schools and system.

From leadership for sustainability to leadership for school redesign

It makes sense that organisational architects, those that build for the medium term and grow for the long-term, will create sustainable improvement cultures. This is welcome, but we need more.

Our system needs leader architects who can redesign schools for the future.

Ken Robinson has said, in multiple ways, “Education doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be transformed”. Those who have seen the case for change made in the award-winning film “Most Likely to Succeed” will know what this means. The compelling message of the film is that our 100+ year-old model of schooling and learning needs to change, and change dramatically, if we are to serve young people well for the future and if we are to tackle the equity and achievement gap. (Despite more than 100 years of trying, the existing model has patently failed to do this.)

This equity and social justice reason really matters — and it matters in the UK particularly because we have some of the most dramatic equity gaps in the world. Covid brought this into stark relief. It is a priority morally, of course, but it matters socially and economically, too. Our schools still remain the only entity in our modern world that has institutionalised a fixed notion of ‘ability’. We talk about ‘able’ and ‘less able’ children as if this is a defining categorisation – and in a way that would be utterly unacceptable in the adult world. We even group learning by spurious notions of ‘ability’ — notions which are, in effect, little more than socio-economic pre-determinants, but ones which then go on to become determinants. As Larry Rosenstock, CEO of High Tech High recently said: “The more narrowly we define intelligence, the more broadly we define what is not deemed intelligent.”

Innovation Unit believes that our schools need to be redesigned — we need to transform our schools for the future and, if this is to happen, we need architect leaders who can both reinvent and then sustain and grow the new model.

Why do we need leader architects in this context?

Such a learning transformation will of course require significant changes to the way we conventionally structure the curriculum, the way teachers teach, and the way students are assessed. However, for a school leader trying to redesign their school, these are secondary effects. There have been many experiments, projects and pilots over the years that have developed new approaches, and many have benefited students and convinced teachers. What is remarkable is that most of these new ideas have not been sustained; they have not spread within schools nor between schools; the practice hasn’t deepened with time; and the ownership of the practice hasn’t transferred beyond the innovators or transformed the deep structures of school – and certainly not survived changes at senior leadership level..

The fact is that the impact of these new ideas was limited because they didn’t go hand in hand with a systematic redesign of the architecture of school as an organisation. When we learn that at High Tech High there is an hour of collaborative adult learning every morning before students arrive; or that teachers do not teach 28 students on their own, but 56 students in pairs (plus support staff), in half-day units; or that all projects (Project Based Learning is the dominant norm) are refined and critiqued by other teachers before being introduced to students — then we know that something significant in the organisational norms is different. And it is changes to organisational architecture — the culture, the structure, and the organisation of time across the whole school — that make possible the design, delivery and evolution of more engaging learning opportunities for students.

Change of this depth requires strong and bold and committed leadership. It requires school leaders prepared to rethink some of the conventional norms in school culture, who are prepared to reimagine the structures that staff, students and parents have grown used to, and are prepared to change the way the timetable and the school year has governed people’s lives for many generations.

This kind of change requires architect leaders.

A moral from this tale

The research on leadership styles was welcome and has a resonance of truth. If we want sustainable school improvement, the qualities of the organisational architect need to be held in higher regard. That much is obvious.

However, as stated at the outset — and as as set out in the case for change in “Most Likely to Succeed” — there are utterly compelling reasons for taking seriously the need to reimagine and redesign schools. Indeed there are multiple examples around the world where this is already happening. If it is truly to happen here, in the UK, then we will need bold and ambitious leader architects to pave the way.

This research may just be more profound than the writers imagined.