In this series of 10 short blogs – which will issue in rapid succession – I will consider in turn the top themes that have emerged from 50 interviews with teachers, leaders, policy-makers, academics and others from across and beyond the English FE system. Each blog will end with a question which I hope will generate debate on LinkedIn, where the blogs are signposted.
The core question considered has been “what might be the features of a self-improving FE system?” Interviewees have also considered the key features of the FE system as it stands, and what is holding it back from being self-improving.
A significant minority of my interviewees had a very clear, commonly described vision of what a self-improving system would be like. They sometimes referenced known management or QA models such as “Lean” or “Six Sigma”; but not always.
This general view as expressed by those interviewees can be characterised as a “layered model”. The narrative typically goes like this:
This vision had a strong belief in a continuous “line of sight” from each individual making continual incremental changes to their own practice or their immediate operational environment, all adding up to a system that gets better and better as a result.
This vision seems attractive, and I believe it could work in FE. It certainly seems logical and – perhaps more importantly – achievable. It would be characterised by such things as a positive culture and belief in continuous improvement; a high degree of autonomy and trust so that individuals are empowered to make changes; a strong evaluative capacity so that changes could be adopted, adapted or abandoned depending on their effectiveness; a collaborative culture that involved a commitment to the success of others; and a willingness in leaders to tolerate failure (because innovation implies frequent failure).
However, there was also a counter-current amongst some interviewees that said that while this is a good model for a factory or some other bounded system, it’s not the right approach for a highly complex, open system such as FE. They said that the big system improvements needed are not the result of aggregations of thousands of small improvements, but rather they exist at a higher level in the system. For example, if the system needs to get much better at recruiting talented people from industry, no volume of micro-improvements from individual practitioners is likely to shift this – it needs to happen at a more strategic level in response to a system-level problem.
One thing that both camps tended to agree on, though, whether they subscribed to the “layers” model or not, was that a self-improving system would comprise reflective practitioners. The closer my interviewees were to the classroom and the students, the stronger they felt this. Whether they pursued this through a facilitating framework such as the national Professional Standards, SET membership and Chartered Teacher Status, or whether they adopted a more DIY approach, it was a consistent feature. Interviewees further from the teaching experience tended to think more in managerial terms about system improvement, occasionally seeming to hold a non-professional model of teaching as “delivery” or “execution” of prescribed techniques or processes; but this was not a commonly expressed model.
This leaves something of a conundrum, which is the gap that currently exists between the general belief in the power of the reflective practitioner and the general lack of interest from system leaders in the tools and processes that create and grow reflective practice (those being strong ITT, strong Professional Standards, commonly held Professional Statuses, commitment to non-contact time used for collaborative exchange, promotion of practitioner research, etc).
Question: What gets in the way of a universally strong culture of reflective practice in FE? And where it does exist, how can we harness its power at system level?
David Russell
Executive in Residence at Oxford Saïd Business School
Education and Training Foundation