‘Architect’ Heads Needed To Build Great Schools
With the right kind of leadership, every school could be successful – so let’s stop incentivising what doesn’t work
- by Fiona Millar
Every so often a piece of research comes along that provides a light bulb moment. A recent study, ‘The One Type of Leader Who Can Turn Around a Failing School’, published in the Harvard Business Review, offered one of those occasions. The characteristics described by the researchers, who interviewed 411 leaders of UK academies, are a bit ‘cartoon’ – heads are categorised and labelled as either surgeons, philosophers, soldiers, accountants and architects – but we probably know them all.
The surgeon, often a PE or RE teacher, may be the one with whom the wider public feel most familiar. He or she is probably dubbed a ‘superhead’, and will often be feted by the politicians and press for having rapidly turned around a failing school and boosting exam results very quickly.
Almost two fifths of the ‘surgeons’ interviewed has been knighted by the Queen, a quarter had received a CBE, MBE or OBE, and they were typically paid 50% more than other leaders.
Their success tends to come from pouring resources heavily into exam year groups and removing poorly performing pupils from their schools. However this management style comes with a downside. Once surgeons leave their schools and move onto the next ‘patient’, results often crash and financial deficits appear.
Military precision
‘Soldiers’, by contrast, like to cut costs and set deadlines. They tend to be ICT or chemistry teachers. In their tight ships staff morale often drops and spending has to be rebooted once they leave for a new mission elsewhere.
‘Accountants’ (maths teachers, obviously) try to grow their schools financially, concentrating on new revenue sources and building an edu-business, often without any impact on exam results, while ‘philosophers’ (English or MFL specialists) like to debate and discuss the purpose of education and the art of teaching.
Philosophers also get high public recognition, both through the honours system and as National Leaders of Education. However even though they talk the talk on the importance of good teaching, they don’t change much and their schools tend to coast, says the study Only the ‘architects’, usually history or economics teachers, get the thumbs up. Their slow burn approach yields least in terms of public recognition, honours and pay, as they eschew quick fixes and quietly redesign their schools by solidly improving teaching and learning, investing in professional development and offering enrichment opportunities for their students.
But this long-term view of improvement delivers results over time in a way that means progress can be sustained after they leave their schools. The researchers suggest normalising such an approach to school leadership could add up to $7 billion to GDP by increasing the number of educated, innovative citizens and reducing the high social costs of exclusion and educational failure.
Collective responsibility
It is not hard to draw conclusions from this report. Heads now operate in a culture that can easily entice the wrong people and incentivise bad behaviour while failing to attract and nurture the people we obviously need.
There are already architects currently beavering away in our schools. People who are motivated by a strong moral purpose rather than desire for money, fame or gongs; people who have the confidence to do what they believe is right even if instant results are not instantly forthcoming; people to whom all children and young people matter (“We can’t help everyone,” was the opinion of one surgeon head interviewed in the study).
However, we need more of them. And that means valuing this style of leadership without running the risk that slow burn isn’t so slow that it never yields results. Children only get one crack at their education so accountability measures needs to be able to spot whether schools are moving, albeit gradually, in the right direction.
So, how can we do this? Several thoughts spring to mind. A school’s performance – progress and attainment – should be judged over a longer period, maybe three years, rather than having so much weight placed on one year’s results.
And external assessment of progress of pupils currently in a school would be better than placing such emphasis on those who may have already left. Several campaign and head teacher groups have been pressing for a radical overhaul of school inspection with more regular, light touch peer review – by small groups of head teachers from other parts of the country – replacing the heavy and often mistrusted hand of Ofsted. This now seems a sensible idea.
But perhaps more far-reaching would be to move away from individual school performance and towards locality targets so that all schools in a given area would be obliged to take responsibility for all children. Everyone would rise and fall together and the incentives for both exclusion and personal self-aggrandisement would disappear.
The Harvard study makes no mention of the professional willingness or ability of heads to collaborate with others. But the architects may well be attracted by this style of leadership. And judging success in terms of a wider community rather than a single school would benefit us all.
