Category Archives: OUtcome agreements

Aspiring to be “good” – would this provide space for improvement?

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Amongst a number of  other duties the Standards in Scottish Schools Act 2000 sets out two key responsibilities for Scottish Local Authorities in respect to school education, namely Raising Standards and Reviewing School Performance.

Yet I was wondering if it’s time to reconsider these duties in light of the impact – or otherwise – that Local Authorities have had upon schools in their charge? As a headteacher, and in my ten years a member of school senior management teams in a variety of schools,  I would have to question what impact Local Authorities had upon raising standards in the school and whether or not the School Review process made a positive contribution to the raising of said standards. I want to make it clear that I am not denigrating in any way the efforts and support given to schools by Local Authority colleagues but that the very assumption that an external force can drive improvement within a school is perhaps founded upon a false premise.

For the reality is often that the standards in a school are directly related to the quality of leadership and commitment from staff in that same school. However, by giving responsibility for raising standards to the Local Authority it creates an expectation – from all – that the authority can make an impact from an external position.  This is turn gives rise to what I’ve previously described as the “Dae Sumthin”  mentality where Local Authority managers are under pressure to be seen to be taking action – even if this action doesn’t necessarily result in any observable consequence.  The important thing is that action is taken. 

In a similar fashion Authorities have gone to considerable trouble to create a range of means of “Reviewing School Performance”  . These mechanisms have taken many different forms all with the intention that we can “know our schools”.

What I want to question is the assumption that there is a direct causal relationship between how well we know our schools and how well we can raise standards? ( in the case the “we” are those outwith the school).

It would be my contention that the responsibility – and much more importantly the capacity – to raise standards lies with those who work in a school.  That was always my belief as a headteacher, a principal teacher, or even as a teacher and I’ve seen nothing in the last five years as an educational administrator to change that opinion. I’m not saying here that all of our efforts in Local Authorities are wasted but that there is an unintended consequence of our adherence to the notion that the more we do from “outside” the school the better things will be “within” the school.

So if the responsibility for raising standards should lie with the school does that mean that the Authority can abdicate from it’s responsibilities for school education?  I would argue that the quality of school education should still lie with the Local Authority – yet the responsibility to raise standards should lie with the school.  Now if this seems like “having one’s cake and eating it” I can understand how such an assertion might appear peculiar.  Yet what I have in mind is much more of a commissioning approach, whereby the Authority commissions the school to deliver education on its behalf.  Just as Children’s Services currently commissions a charity to deliver an aspect of its service, the overall responsibility still lies with the  commissioning body. It is the role of the commissioner to ensure that those who are commissioned are delivering the service to the agreed standards – it is not the commissioner’s responsibility to raise standards, simply to ensure that the standards set out in the agreement is achieved.

This actually chimes with something which Pasi Sahlberg said recently at a  conference when describing the success that is Finnish Education. For Pasi said that in Finland to be “good”  is “good enough”.  They do not aspire to excellence as a system but focus on ensuring that everyone is at least “good enough”.  I know this seems to lack the aspiration of our Journey to Excellence – but I actually think that this provides exactly  the kind of space in which teachers and schools can flourish. 

So in such an environment what should happen to the Authority’s responsibility to “Review School Performance”? Perhaps the clue lies with the last couple of sentences in that particular section of the Act when it describes how where the Authority concludes that following a review that where:

” the school is not performing satisfactorily they shall take such steps as appear to them to be requisite to remedy the matter.”

It’s here that I would want to refer to the model of practice which is emerging from many directions, namely Risk Assessment.  What I’m wondering is whether or not a Risk Assessment approach might provide schools with much more space to innovate and develop local solutions to raising standards?  Would it be possible for an Authority to assess the “Risk” relating to the quality of education provided by a school.  Rather than stating that a school’s performance is somewhere on the six point scale we instead provide a simple statement to parents and others that the risk that the school is not providing a “good” education is low, medium or high.  Schools would aspire to be in the “low” risk category.   I would reckon that only around 5% of schools would fall into the high risk category and that the Authorities’ resources could be targetted on those same schools – with others being given ever more freedom to innovate and create local solotions without external interference.

Postcode Lottery Explored

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“It’s a Postcode Lottery” is a recurring term used to highlight any difference in provision of services between one area and another. 

The underlying assumption in all such cases is that this “lottery” is unfair and that services should not be dependent upon the “luck” of where one happens to live, i.e. they should be exactly the same throughout the country.  I’d started to tease this out in a recent article entitled “Uniformity or Diversity” and wanted to explore this concept a little further. 

“Postcode lottery” is, without exception, employed as a disparaging term.  Here are just a few headlines to demonstrate this:

All of the above use the term “postcode lottery” as shorthand for something which is unfair and can only be rectified by a change to situation where provision is identical – regardless of where you live.  But what if you were to take the opposite perspective, i.e. begin to see variation and diversity as a strength – not a weakness?

You see my problem lies with the fact that things are different from one community to another.  Things have never been identical.  Just because things are different doesn’t mean that they have to be worse – just as we mustn’t think that just because things are identical that they must be automatically better.

I’ll exemplify this using two secondary schools in an authority.  They are both allocated an identical amount of money through a formula allocation. The only way the authority could avoid being accused of creating a “postcode lottery” would be to give each school definitive guidance on how every pound was to be spent in each of the schools.  All of the following (and much more) would have to be identical: the curriculum, the times for each subject identical, the quality of teachers, the extra curricular activities, the discipline system, menus for lunches, the subjects to be taught at all levels, pupil support systems, etc, etc.  Any divergence between the two schools would fall into the trap that is a “postcode lottery”.  Of course, some would claim that I’m being too extreme here only to make my point – but I’d argue you can’t have your cake and eat it.  You either accept variation or you don’t!

Variation within postcodes is a reality – it exists and the sooner we realise that the better.  Surely the real challenge is not so much to ensure that things are identical but to ensure that the quality of service provided in every  postcode is of an exceptionally high standard. 

So if variation exists how might we turn it to our advantage?  It’s here that I would return to the theme I’ve been exploring for some time now i.e. community ownership of schools.  For if a community decides that it wants to see its schools diverge from what the schools in the next community are doing – in order to meet its priorities – why shouldn’t it be allowed to do so?

There are more than enough legislative guidelines in place to ensure that the needs of individuals within each community can be protected within such an autonomous system.  The real challenge lies with the funding body who need to find a way to ensure that each community achieves national and local outcomes – but is given the necessary freedom to find its own approach to achieve these outcomes.  That really is the $64,000 lottery prize!

Community-Based School Management

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been continuing to exploring the concept of school based management.

Some authorities in Scotland have implemented the concept of Learning Communities based around the secondary school  and the local primary schools, Glasgow runs New Learning Communities, Falkirk has Integrated learning communities and South Lanarkshire has Learning Communities.

Each of these schemes has very positive features, most notably in relation to the integration of other services to support vulnerable children and to co-ordinate developments across local schools.

However, there would appear to be scope to develop these schemes by exploring further devolution of budgetary control and employment of staff within the community of schools.

I haven’t been able to find many international examples of such a development aside from on in Madagascar which might suggest that such a idea is not that practical but in the interests promoting a dialectic of possible worlds I thought I might take the Learning Community concept and extend it to community-based management of schools.

Would it be possible for a local authority to establish a concordat with a group of local primary schools and their associated secondary school and devolve all budgets to a Learning Community Board of Management? 

A Head Teacher from the schools would take on the position of Chief Operating Officer.  The Board of Management would have representatives from the parents, staff, local community, elected members, health service, police, community learning and social services.

The biggest problem I see with this idea is the fear from some schools that they get subsumed within a larger community and lose their identity.  Yet the potential for every member of staff being employed by the Learning Community and the possibility of using the collective resources in much more coherent manner than at present might allow real progresss to made on promoting education as a true progression from 3-18 and the associated ownership of the school and the wider educational agenda by the local community.

School Based Management 1

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I’m attending the Association of Directors of Social Work conference in Crieff.

One the key themes emerging is that of personalisation of services to users. The social work field is light years ahead of education in terms of using a mixed economy system for delivering services, by commissioning others from the private and voluntary sector to provide a wide range of short and laong term requirements.

As I was listening to the presentations my mind turned to how education might develop such a model.  It’s been something I’ve been considering for a while but the cogs seemed to click together this morning.

The starting point for this is how do we really devolve services to our communities?

What follows is definitely “blue sky” and might be disconcerting for some but I’ve found that sometimes we need to start from the extreme perspective if we are to shift our ground.

The local authority would set the local outcomes which schools would have to work towards.

Each child would carry an educational value credit which directly related to money which would go to the school. All other current budgets would be rolled together and added to the educational value credit.

If a child left the school the money would follow them – even part way through a year.

The school would deliver – though a contract – the educational service for the local authority in that community.  If the outcomes were not achieved in a given period of time then another service deliverer would have to be employed.

The school would purchase services from the local authority – or other providers e.g. finance support, personnel, staff development and even quality improvement and assurance.

The authority would maintain responsibility for strategic estate planning, such a new school buildings but all other items would be devolved.

Schools in a community could combine their resources to purchase a service from elsewhere.

The pupil support function could also be delivered by a independent unit commissioned by the authority and underpinned by a contract arrangement.

Parents would have a significant role in the strategic direction and monitoring of the school and would be involved in the review of outcomes at the end of a contract period. 

I know one of the major concerns would be the fragmentation of the current system which is building very vibrant learning communities where schools work together. However, if we believe that partnership working improves outcomes – and outcomes will be used to judge the effectiveness of a school – then the leverage for it to happen will be even greater than it currently is. In a similar way the need to engage with other agencies would be built into the outcome agreement.

Using outcome agreements for school improvement

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I came across the concept of a social return on investment last summer when Jim Honan explained the Program Logic Model.

The model seeks to find a way in which public services can actually have a greater impact by focusing upon the things that will actually lead to a return on social investment.  The tendency in education has often been to focus on outputs or activity and to only try to work out the outcome – or success criteria – at the end of the planning process, i.e. there are a legion of initievies and activities which have been implemented in Scottish education which have not had any discernible positive impact.

The model flips this on its head by forcing the service to consider the impact that we wish to have as the starting point for action. I’ve explored this in a number of previous posts but this week we sent out our Service Improvement Framework which schools will use to guide their activity for the coming year.

The Framework tries to make a link with the Council’s corporate plan and priorities but the pages which schools will undoubtedly focus upon are pages 8 and 9 – which set out the outcomes which we will use to judge the level of return we are getting from the investment in education in East Lothian, i.e. £75 million.

Borrowing from the Scottish Government’s concordat with Local Authorities we intend to give much greater flexibility to schools and clusters as to how they will go about achieving these outcomes – what works in one school or community won’t necessarily work in another school or community.

I know how positively I would have responded to such an approach, or as  one head teacher said to me this week – “trust us and we’ll do the business”.

Solution Focused Planning

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The power of our strategic groups came to the fore this week at our 3 -18 Strategic Learning and Teaching Group.

This group has 25 members who represent a wide cross-section of those of us involved in education in East Lothian.  I know its accepted logic that such a large group can’t operate successfully but it’s the very size of, and representation within the group that actually makes it effective.

We started the meeting reflecting upon the impact of our Learning and Teaching policy in the last year.  By splitting up into groups of 3 we were able to identify a wide range of observable changes in our practice throughout the authority that would evidence our emphasis on learning and teaching.

The second part of the meeting was given over to considering our Service Improvement Plan for the coming session. I showed the group a range of the possible outcomes which we have been exploring.  One of the draft outcomes read as follows:

“All children will achieve Level B in reading by the end of P4, level D by the end of P7, and Level E by the end of S2.”

We discussed the thinking behind this desired outcome and the reaction it might stimulate amongst teachers. The problem lay in the notion of “All” and the idea it just seems to reaffirm a focus on attainment – which many teachers just see as a means of keeping the Authority and HMIe happy – as opposed to helping individual children learn.

I’ve written so many plans for departments, schools and authorities now that I’ve become acutely aware of the dissonance between what the writer of the plan might intend and the perception of the plan by those who have to implement it.

The idea behind the outcome is that we would like every child to be able to read by the age of 9 – at least well enough that their reading ability does not limit their progress in any other area of the curriculum. As we wrestled with the problem of how we might come up with an outcome which was clear, kept our focus on reading, but didn’t antagonise teachers we struck upon a solution. That solution was to take the problem to the teachers – let them know what we wanted to achieve, why it was important, and  some guidance on the characteristics of an outcome – and let them come up with the answer.

The power of this idea is that has so many advantages:

  1. It engages teachers with the rationale of the outcome approach;
  2. It will enable us to generate an agreed outcome which has a wide range of stakeholder ownership;
  3. It will enable us to have the impact we desire, i.e. make reading a central focus of our practice in schools.

It’s only through talking through a problem like this with such a wide ranging group that such solutions can be generated.

Using outcomes to focus the planning process

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We had a meeting on Friday where we looked further at how we could use outcomes as drivers of our new service improvement plan.

It was good to give this topic a significant amount of time and it looks like we are making progress.

We have agreed that each part of our plan will have:-

– an overall outcome, e.g. Every school will achieve a very good level of performance in Learning and Teaching. This replaces the aim or objective section.

– a desired impact, e.g. Children will experience a consistently high level of education. This is the “why are we doing this”

– measurable outcomes, e.g. we will identify a range of outcomes which will relate to the overall outcome. It will be important that these outcomes are well balanced and possible to gather.

– the actions, e.g. develop learning teams in every school.  In the school’s version of this we will be less interested in the actions and maintain our focus upon the outcomes.  Hopefully this will free up some of the bureaucratic demands from which the planning process often suffers.

In the past the success criteria (OUTCOMES) came tagged on at the end of the planning process.  What we are proposing is that the process is actually driven by the outcome and desired impact.  I hope to have completed a draft version of our plan for general consideration by the middle of February.

We are replacing the National Priorities as the strcutural framework of the plan with the UN Conventions rights of the child: Safe and Nurtured; Achieving; Included; Healthy and Active; and Respected and Responsible. The example given above would fit within the Achieving dimension.

So much of this relates back to something I encountered last summer relating to Social Return on Investment.

Outcome agreements between a local authority and schools

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Continuing on the theme of outcome agreements I’ve been working with colleagues over the last few weeks to try to put some meat on the bones of what this might look like.

It was interesting to read what the OECD examiners recommended in relation to this:

Greater school autonomy in a local government framework

Some of the recommendations include:

Each local authority develops a policy framework which defines the priority targets it seeks to make including improvements in student opportunities and outcomes; where a local authority provides additional resources for equity purposes it should do so within a the framework on the national innovation plan; local authorities should negotiate agreements with schools under which greater management autonomy in staffing and curriculum is established in return for an agreed platform of improvement in learning opportunities and outcomes

The challenges facing us all here is what might these outcomes look like; how would we know if they were achieved; and what happens if a school fails to achieve an outcome?

Outcomes need to be specific – a challenge to educators who are used to flowery and high falutin’ aims and objectives – they  need to relate to how evidence will be gathered and they need to leave enough freedom for schools to work out how to achieve them depending upon their own context.

As regards methods of gathering evidence we have identified three key aspects:

1. PIPS and MIDYIS testing which will take place at P1, P3, P7, and S2, together with SQA data.

2. A series of pupil questionnaires (using SELS) which will take into account the developmental stage of children,  These questionnaires will focus on student perceptions of the education process and their own development.

3. School self-evaluation – validated by the authority

It will be of vital importance that each of the three aspects is given an equal weighting. For example – if pupil attainment were to become the sole focus it could skew the education process to the exclusion of many of the other desirable outcomes we seek to achieve.

So what might some of these outcomes look like?

I’ll share some of the ideas we have been working on recently:

Curriculum for Excellence

  1. I can share my opinion with my class (SELS)
  2. I can work well as part of a team and a group (SELS)
  3. Each child makes progress in line with or better than their PIPS or MIDYIS prediction

Promoting Wider Achievement

  1. Each pupil takes part in extra-curricular or community activities (SELS)
  2. Each child has a cumulative record of their achievements throughout their school career (SELS)

Additional Support for Learning

  1. Each child makes progress in line with or better than their PIPS or MIDYIS prediction
  2. All Looked after and accommodated children have postive school leaing destinations
  3. At least one teacher knows me well in this school (SELS)

From these three examples we can begin to see the matrix effect how one outcome can relate to more than one area.

What we hope to build up a series of outcomes (perhaps 30) which will form the basis of an agreement with schools.

Throughout the year these outcomes will be collected and reviewed. At the end of a year each school’s collective outcomes will be considered. Where a school has made good progress towards achieving these outcomes it is likely that a proportionate response will be made by the authority with a very light touch being taken the following year and the school being given even more autonomy in terms of the processes it uses to achieve outcomes.

Where a school does not achieve some of the outcomes the reasons will be explored and more specific actions planned between the school and the authority would have to feature in the following year.

Where a school failed to achieve a wide range of outcomes it might be necessary for the authority to take much more interventionist approach the following year and take more “hands-on” approach in terms of specifying processes which have perhaps worked well in other schools.

The key to the success of this approach is that schools are rewarded for achieving outcomes with even greater autonomy – whilst the authority manages to achieve it’s outcomes which have been negotiated with the government.

I cannot stress enough the need to come up with a comprehensive basket of outcomes which represent the education process.

Just to remind people that this is work in progress but we are currently “reverse engineering” our Service Improvement Plan by linking each area to specific outcomes as outlined above – at first glance it seems to be a much more focused and user-friendly document

A focus on outcomes – and leave the process up to schools and teachers

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I’ve been doing some more work on how we might make use of outcome agreements with schools.  I’ve looked at the logic of this in some earlier posts but it’s only by experimenting with actual outcomes that we can start to see whether or not they would be a good idea.

Sometimes it’s only by looking at such possibilities that we can identify weakenesses and opportunities.  Don’t freak out too much as you read these outcomes but the whole idea is that these outcomes would actually free up clusters, schools and teachers to work out how they might go about achieving these outcomes – as opposed to spending all their time filling in forms and plans.

Some of this links back to something I came across in the summer about social return on investment.

The following are possible examples:

Within three years every child (without severe or complex needs) will reach the international literacy, maths and science benchmark levels for 10 year olds and 14 year olds

Every school will be able to demonstrate how they have developed their curriculum to take account of co-creation, personalisation and flexibility.

Every teacher will be able to demonstrate how they have developed their teaching in response to a curriculum for excellence

Every teacher will be able to demonstrate how children received their entitlement to digital access as set out in our Learning and Teaching policy.

Children will report that they experience a smooth transition in terms of learning and teaching from one stage to another throught their school careers.

Within two years every child will have a personal on-line space in which they can keep a progressive record of their achievments and attainment

All schools will be able to accurately forecast pupil attainment on an annual basis.

All schools will be able to measure value added and use this data to formulate future action.

Within three years all pupils will match or exceed their predicted progression levels

90% of children will report that school has a positive impact upon their health.

The number of children with a body mass index above the norm is reduced by 30% over three years.

The number of children participating in regular physical exercise outside school increases by 30%

All children can run continuously for 12 minutes at the age of 10, 12 and 14 years of age.

All children will be able to identify examples of how they make a contribution to their school or community.

All children will be able to provide an example of how they work successfully with others .

All children will be able to provide an example of how they have demonstrated confidence to work independently of others