Education – a gift to give.

Posted on September 27, 2011 by

As educators we like to give the impression that we know all there is to know about sacrifice for our vocation. We quite naturally occupy the higher moral territory whenever the opportunity arises, and we sleep well in our beds knowing that the job we do is worthwhile.

So it’s very difficult when a fellow educator from another part of the world comes along and knocks that comfortable mindset, or to use a good Scottish expression “ca’s the legs frae ye” (sweep your legs from underneath you).

Yet that’s just what I experienced on Monday when I met Thein Naing. Thein is a remarkable man, from a remarkable place, full of remarkable people. He works in the Mae Sot area of Thailand just on the border with Burma. The area accommodates over 150,000 Burmese refugees and economic migrants.

The Mae Sot area has around 70 migrant schools which have started spontaneously to meet the needs of 30,000 children who have crossed the border with their parents from Burma. Of this number only 7,000 currently attend these schools, which receive no support from the Thai government and rely solely on resourcefulness and international support.

It’s to this cause that Thein has dedicated his professional and personal life – to help these children, many of whom are stateless, to receive an education and to improve their lives. He works with schools to develop their curriculum, teaching skills, health education, child protection and so many other elements of education which we take for granted.

I was close to tears when he told me that some parents choose to abandon their child at a school knowing that they will have a better life in the care of others – a story of parental love which is beyond anything in my experience.

As we spoke we began to explore possible things that we might do in East Lothian to support education in Mae Sot.

Here’s the pitch!

Next year we could ask each of our secondary schools if they would be willing/able take on one senior student (17 year old) to follow a full year’s study ending in formal qualifications. The schools would seek to find a family in their community who would be willing to host the student. The family would be responsible for feeding and supporting the student for the year – but we would look to raise funds to pay for recreational activities. For our part the authority would seek to find the money to pay for the travel costs for the six students and co-ordinate a support system for the students during their time in East Lothian.

I know that I would have been interested if one of my sons had come back from school and said he had wanted to host such a student, just as I would have been interested as a head teacher. The learning opportunities for our East Lothian students are obvious but we need to look beyond that benefit to the transformational effect it could have on our visitors, their own communities, and development of the democratic process in their country.

Could there possibly be a better gift to give?

Donations to help provide basic education for internally displaced people of Burma can be made at www.nhecburma.org or theinaing@nhecburma.org

TESS Article: Resisting the pressure to “dae sumthin”

Posted on June 8, 2008 by

Every educational leader, regardless of position, has to wrestle with the powerful temptation to intervene or to meddle in the business of those whom they manage. The logic is fairly simple – “I’m being paid to manage and to be accountable for the work of others – so it’s reasonable that I take action in order to ensure that the desired outcome is achieved.” Maybe it’s something to do with the Scottish work ethic that we feel there’s a need, in the inimitable words of Billy Connolly, to “dae sumthin”.

It’s perhaps one of the most addictive elements of management – “I can fix this” – as the manager learns to solve the problem through direct action. Unfortunately the hidden cost of such behaviour is that it helps to create a dependency culture as everyone comes to know that any problem belongs to the manager – and that the manager will “sort it”.

The ironic consequence of such a relationship is that it leads to dissatisfaction from both sides, i.e. the manager complains that people don’t accept the responsibility which goes with being a professional; and the managed complain that the manager is always interfering with solutions, policies and structures which run directly counter to their ability to do their job.

Yet to challenge such orthodoxy is much more difficult than one might imagine. The pressure to conform to the traditional role of the manager is almost overwhelming. Not to take action, is to be seen to be indecisive, lazy, cowardly, unimaginative or simply not being up to the job. In a similar vein the manager’s own boss has expectations about effective management behaviour and in many cases is expecting the manager to come up with a plan of action that is, most probably proactive, innovative and definitive. It’s this latter adjective which is the most telling in terms of the relationship between the manager and the managed. The definition of the word “definitive” in this sense is “final and unable to be questioned or altered”. In a sense this form of manager’s plan is the Holy Grail, that is something that can be passed on to others and is implemented without question.

Of course, things are never as simple as that for as we know others must carry out the manager’s plan and there exists “many a slip twixt lip and cup”, especially if the “managed” do not fully subscribe to the manager’s solution. It’s into this educational Middle-earth that the manager’s initiatives and centralised plans are launched only to be subverted, modified or ignored. And so it goes on with managers having to conform to their role by taking action, to which they are probably addicted anyway, and the managed expecting the action, criticising if no action is taken, but being free to criticise the action as they have played no part in it’s development.

So how might we help managers escape from the tyranny of the need to always “dae sumthin” in the face of a perceived problem? Perhaps a starting point might be for local authorities to shift from being action focused, i.e. we will implement, act, do; to becoming outcome focused and supporting and enabling the schools to work out the most appropriate action for themselves. The reality is that what works well in one school is not necessarily the best solution in another school. Yet the pressure to work out the universal solution and to implement it across an entire council is difficult to resist – particularly for those of us who have been addicted to taking action throughout our careers. That’s not to say that local authorities should never seek to implement an action across all schools but at the very least there should be a loop where we ask ourselves if our preferred course of action empowers or disempowers our colleagues in schools.

Nevertheless, Scottish education does appear to be thirled to the idea of “daen things”. It would be a brave person who wouldn’t back a highly technical, carefully managed and comprehensive plan to implement a course of action across every school in an authority, against a strategy which placed the decision about what type of action to take in the hands of the individual school.

Reconfiguring services – meeting the challenge

Posted on May 6, 2008 by

We held a very successful “Corporate Parenting” Conference today at the Marine Hotel, North Berwick. .

Adam Ingram MSP , Minister for Children and Early Years gave a well informed and committed keynote address and emphasised the need for us to collectively address the needs of Looked After and Accommodated Children and to focus upon the improving outcomes for such children, namely:

Raising Attainment
Improved Leaver Destinations
Reducing offending
Improved Health

In the follow up questions Adam was asked a question about the need to reconfigure services and his vision for the future. He alluded to an extensive vision but focused upon Early Years support and intervention encouraging us to reprioritise around this point if we are to make a difference to chidren’s lives.

In recent discussions with colleagues from many different fields I’ve found a similar willingness to engage with this agenda – although it remains to be seen if we can begin to reprioritise budgets to this area. Having said that we had a very useful example last week when we were able to redirect some work towards early years. In a meeting with Diane Littlejohn we were discussing our parenting strategy and Diane was telling us about the transition work she is doing in one of our clusters to help all parents make the transition from being the parents of a child to the parent of a teenager (which any of us who have been parents will tell you is quite an adjustment). Nevertheless, we were able to connect the conversation to a recent meeting we had about a desperate need to support parents of very vulnerable young children to help the child adjust from home to nursery and nursery to primary school.

The emerging proposal was that we would be better directing Diane’s expertise to this age group with a view to making a long term impact – as opposed to trying to intervene in a situation which might be beyond help. Now I know the danger here is that we have a “lost generation” but if we are serious about making a difference we need to move from “trying to fix” to “trying to prevent”. As I’m finding out the consequences of reprioritising funding from previous areas of emphasis to other areas can cause significant distress and concern amongst those who perceive themselves to be losing out in this adjustment.

I reckon the solution/challenge here is to engage with all interest groups to describe what want to do, why we are doing it and involve them in the solution – without this dialogue the system can begin to break down with single issue groups only focusing upon their own needs and challenging the wider agenda which is to advocate for the needs of all children.

It’s this agenda which I’m finding professionally challenging but the potential rewards for taking this approach seems to me to be too good to miss.

Leadership Dilemma: If a child swears at a teacher what should you do?

Posted on April 27, 2008 by

Leadership Dilemma: You are the head teacher of a school. A child swears at a teacher in front of other children. What do you do?

Does such an occurence automatically mean that the child should be excluded from school?

It’s certainly one of the most common reasons for exclusion.

My own point of view has always been to treat every situation as a discrete incident – and make a judgment accordingly. Yet there exists an expectation that where a child swears “directly” at a teacher that classroom order and the digniity of the teacher can only be maintained if the child is punished by a period of exclusion.

What do you reckon?

Composite classes – a pressure point

Posted on April 20, 2008 by

I’ve received number of e-mails this week from parents pleading with me not to establish composite classes in their schools. A composite class is one where a primary school class is composed of children from more than one year group, e.g. P3/4 composite class.

The common theme in all the e-mails is that if I care about children then I can’t allow this to happen. I should probably point out at the outset that my own children were taught in composite classes. On first being notified of compositing I have to admit to being concerned – despite my own experience as an educator. As parents we tend to like the status quo – we don’t like the idea of change – especially change which seems intuitively risky.

Whilst I understand the reflexive reaction that many parents have towards composite classes the issue often has the potential to whip a storm of fury all based upon the supposition that the quality of education will suffer. When looked at from a certain perspective you can see how this appears to be a convincing and logical argument – which can be captured as follows:

“Children in non-composite class are all the “same age” and can be more effectively taught by a teacher than a class made of of children from two different year groups.”

However, when one considers the reality of this situation most “normal” classes are made up of children who have an age range of 12 months. Yet given the arbitrary way in which we identify cut off dates for entry to school – its very possible for children who are born days apart to be in separate years groupings.

As I have explored before such range of ages can mean that in child development terms there can be a gap between children of between 24 – 36 months. Chronological age does not equate to stage of development – any of us who have had our own children can testify to that.

The reality is that a composite class will often have a less of an age range than a “year group class” – as we group the class by birth date, e.g. an age spread of a less than 8 months.

Yet compositing can also strike fear into some teachers – particularly those who have never taught such a class grouping before. I recently spoke to very experienced head teacher about this and she told me that there is no more differentiation required in a two year group composite class than there is in a single year group class – in fact because of the closer age range there might even be less. Of course some of our smaller East Lothian schools have composite classes composed of up to four years groups – now that is challenging but as I’ve described before can lead to truly stimulating learning situations.

To return to my e-mail correspondence – I do care about children (that’s why I’m in the job). I know it goes with the territory and it’s why I get paid but people seem to think if they apply enough pressure that they can get more money for their own school. It’s my job to advocate for all children in East Lothian – not just those whose parents might be able to mount a campaign to change a very fair system for allocating teachers to schools. The reality is that an average teacher’s salary – with on-costs such a pension etc – is £36,000. One extra teacher for one school means that this money must be taken from another school (93% of our education budget is devolved directly to schools).

Last point – no parent has ever complained about compositing once their child has moved into such a class – only before.

Leadership Dilemma 4: Do outstanding teachers make outstanding headteachers?

Posted on January 2, 2008 by

Should one of the key criteria for becoming a headteacher or school principal be that the person must have been an “outstanding” teacher in their own right?

Now I suppose this will inevitably lead to the question and some argument about the constituent elements of an outstanding teacher and headteacher.

It might even help to turn the dilemma on its head and ask if it’s possible to be an outstanding headteacher/principal without having been an outstanding teacher.

Oops nearly forgot – Happy New Year to everyone and best wishes for 2008.

Leadership Dilemma 2

Posted on October 7, 2007 by

Following on from the first Leadership Dilemma here’s the second on the series.

You are a newly appointed Headteacher/Principal (two months). The Depute Headteacher/Vice Principal applied for the post and was unsuccessful. You have gone out of your way to accommodate the Depute’s opinion and to be sensitive to her/his feelings.

You have been told by someone you trust that she/he is making derogatory comments behind your back about your opinions on most issues relating to the school.

Do you confront your Depute or not?

Would you sacrifice occasionally excellent for consistently good?

Posted on September 15, 2007 by

I’d welcome your opinion in relation to this very hypothetical situation:

Imagine you are the Head Teacher of a school with 40 teachers. In that school there are 10 excellent teachers, 20 very good or good teachers, and 10 weak teachers.

Excellence = teachers who enable all children to consistently achieve and attain well beyond what might be predicted; the children develop a realistic confidence in their abilities which is matched by their achievements and approach to learning; children are often inspired to continue their learning beyond the classroom situation.

Very good or good = teachers who enable children to consistently achieve and attain beyond what might be predicted; children become confident learners and respond well to the encouragement of their teacher; children make sound educational progress and a have good platform for future learning..

Weak = teachers whose children consistently and significantly underachieve and underattain in relation to what might be predicted; children will often regress in their attitude to learning and attainment; their own confidence is diminished; and their future educational progress is undermined by the experience.

Your Leadership Dilemma

In this imaginary scenario you have the opportunity to transfer 20 teachers from your school and replace them with 20 good teachers – you can only transfer the ten excellent teachers and the ten weak teachers -would you take up the offer of the transfers?

Don Ledingham's Learning Log

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Albert Einstein

Category Archives: Leadership Dilemmas