Problem solving from the classroom to the wider system

The ultimate anchoring concept

Sitting at the core of what schools are for is children’s learning and therefore the expertise that teachers and leaders need in order to maximise it. Viviane Robinson puts it succinctly:

Whether we’re teaching a class, leading a phase / department, leading a school or leading multiple schools, this model is relevant. We all need knowledge (both formal of what makes great teaching and tacit/hidden about the children in front of us, the colleagues we work with and the communities we serve). We’re all solving problems whether we’re teaching a Year 2 class, leading LKS2, leading the school or the Trust / Federation. And we all need to build trusting relationships with children, families and colleagues. Keep this in mind as the post unfolds…

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The core business of teaching and learning

This is what schools are for and so arguably the most important questions that we should all be striving to answer are What is learning? and What makes great teaching? When it comes to Robinson’s relevant knowledge from research, these two models are a good place to start:

And what of great teaching? There are so many different ways of breaking this knowledge and behaviour down but you might start with Rosenshine or the Great Teaching Toolkit.

Mary Kennedy had a different way of parsing the practice teaching though. She argued that the focus should not be on teaching behaviours but on the purpose that those behaviours serve and suggested five persistent challenges that all teachers face:

These persistent challenges work well as anchoring concepts (listen to this podcast with Sarah Cottingham about Ausubel’s work on meaningful learning). Nesting beneath these anchoring concepts would be all the minutiae of what teachers might need to know and do in order to meet these challenges. Remember, the focus is not on the teaching behaviours themselves but the purpose they serve – getting children to learn effectively.

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School leadership

If we have a clear conception that schools exist so that children learn well if we understand the persistent challenges involved in enabling this, and if we understand the kind of practices that might bring it about, school leadership is arguably about enabling teaching staff to tackle these challenges at scale.

School leaders have an indirect influence over children’s learning through affecting school level conditions. Evidence Based Education has identified what they believe to be these school level factors:

It is the indirect influence, one degree of abstraction away from what is happening day in day out in classrooms, that is difficult for leaders to navigate. Leaders’ grand plans for improvement can easily be out of touch with the reality of the classroom so it is important for school leaders to develop and refine a deep knowledge of the core business of teaching and learning, as advocated by Amanda Goodall in her theory of expert leadership:

Taking all this into account and returning to both Robinson’s concept of leadership as problem solving and Kennedy’s persistent challenges of teaching, are there problems that all school leaders need to attend to? Step forward Jen Barker and Tom Rees from Ambition Institute:

Now if we conceive of persistent problems of school leadership as anchoring concepts, there needs to be increasingly more specific concepts or problems nesting within each of these that leaders need to appreciate and have expertise in. By no means exhaustive, here’s my adaptation of these persistent problems of school leadership with the next layer of concepts or areas for school leaders’ attention:

Organising and teaching the curriculum

• Developing a coherent curriculum with high quality materials
• Developing collective teacher expertise in portraying the curriculum (aligning pedagogical principles)
• Developing collective teacher expertise in enlisting student participation
• Developing collective teacher expertise in exposing student thinking
• Developing fit for purpose assessment systems
• Developing collective teacher expertise in meeting the needs of the most vulnerable
• Developing early intervention systems for children with SEND and / or are disadvantaged in any way
• Maximising time spent on learning (school day, timetabling)

Influencing student culture

• Designing a behaviour strategy to support managing behaviour at scale
• Developing collective teacher expertise in establishing behavioural norms
• Designing attendance management systems
• Developing collective teacher expertise in influencing motivation and feelings of belonging

Provide strategic direction

• Understanding the present and diagnosing problems from multiple viewpoints (quality assurance and self evaluation systems)
• Strategic planning (choosing the right problem, pragmatic implementation)
• Teaching the school how to think (improvement mindset, appreciation of complexity)
• Governance

Ensure a safe environment

• Refining a culture of safeguarding amongst all staff
• Meeting health and safety requirements

Allocate resources and provide organisational structure

• Staffing (clarifying roles and responsibilities, deploying staff strategically, recruiting and retaining talent)
• Finance
• Facilities management

Activate the community

• Develop collective teacher expertise in tacking the persistent challenges of teaching
• Empower parents as learning resources
• Building trust between children, families and school
• Learning from and with other schools

Robinson’s capabilities for leading improvement include using relevant knowledge from experience and while great leaders have expertise in the core business of teaching and learning, they are also deeply contextually literate – they know their schools inside out.

Barker and Rees argue the same in their paper School leader expertise:

Effective leadership is born out of the interplay between the leader’s expertise and their environment.

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System leadership

If there is little definitive evidence about the precise nature of school leadership, the evidence for the precise nature of system leadership is yet more elusive.

System leaders are another layer of abstraction from the core business of teaching and learning in classrooms and for ease here, we’ll define them as those who have leadership responsibility across multiple schools. The rise of this role, particularly of ‘line managers’ for Headteachers, could be to the detriment of Headteachers’ autonomy and it is unclear whether the emergence of system leaders is even an effective model:

Raising standards is now simply a matter of asserting that headteachers need a boss, a CEO, who will make sure their schools improve and to whom they will be accountable.

Hans Broekman

We can learn from both examples and non examples and it is often easier to think about what we don’t want or what seems ineffective based on lived experience in the absence of research findings (even if that is down to climate alone) such as this piece on the seven deadly sins of executive headship.

Nonetheless, the roles exist and should be open to evolution. So far we’ve started in the classroom with a concept of improving outcomes for children as problem solving that consists of universal challenges that manifest differently depending on context. If teachers face persistent challenges regardless of the group they teach and school leaders face persistent problems whether they lead a small or large schools, urban or rural, high performing or in need of turnaround, a logical assumption is that there must be some persistent problems that system leaders face. What might they be? I’m suggesting three for a start but first, some personal assumptions because this work is uncertain:

• System leadership is about problem solving and it would be useful to have some anchoring concepts on which to base relevant domain specific knowledge to support the development of expertise.
• System leaders cannot be too far removed from the core business of teaching and learning – keep the focus on improving learning in classrooms and schools.
• The expertise required to lead multiple schools is likely somewhat different to leading one school.
• Adding a layer of responsibility or accountability above Headteachers leads to having to solve problems about ‘whatever pops up’ so there is an increased element of unpredictability.

Proposed persistent problems of system leadership

Enhance professional capacity and capital within the system

• Contribute to collective knowledge building (balancing thought leadership with practical leadership; establishing enabling routines such as peer review)
• Connect to other schools and institutions (the wider system) and bring the wider system into school (operating at school, local and national level)
• Sustainable growth or alignment with other Trusts / Federations

Ensure that the Trust / Federation improvement model is responsive to each school

• Protect distinctiveness of each school and reject isomorphism (appreciate complexity and emergence of new goals and practices)
• Standardisation vs alignment vs autonomy across schools
• Enable school leaders to understand the present and diagnose problems from multiple viewpoints (appreciation of improvement trajectories and taking a multidimensional view)
• Deployment of staff and resources across multiple schools

Develop relationships of interdependence and trust

• Develop collective school leader expertise in tackling the persistent problems of school leadership
• Clarify and act predictably regarding values, expectations, priorities and actions

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• A rising tide | What we might attend to most to improve our school
• Layers of school improvement activity
• Culture setting | More than words
• Avoiding the traps of the imagined school
• The imagined school | Traps to avoid