__ LIPS – Leading in Public Schools

A recent visit to the Art Gallery of NSW was, as always, an interesting few hours and a cause for reflection about how a number of themes come together in relation to change and the way we deal with it.  Most importantly, it set me thinking about some leadership behaviours.

Words in an instantly recognisable typeface provide a glimpse of familiarity in a sea of change. 

In this painting by Sali Herman, the Sydney Morning Herald masthead, from the 1940s, is juxtaposed with some freshly caught fish.  Sixty or more years separate freshness which will surely fade fast from an icon which persists. Change happens yet we always have the possibility to retain vestiges of the past.  This is how it should be.

In leadership, we must always remember that we are at any moment poised precariously between our past and our future. The immediate needs of a fresh catch, sit alongside the knowledge that there will be those trappings of our existence which will persist long past the time when some of the immediate intents of our endeavours have been consumed or rotted away.

Therefore, when reacting to emergent need, we should always try to retain a view which ‘looks both ways’ and which has a sense of desire to ensure that any icons which endure from this present do so because they represent a purpose which is still current and meaningful, years down the track.

Sometimes, the thought of the function and existence of the finished product leads us to forget, or discount the processes of creation.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge must have been a massive dominator of the Sydney skyline in the late 1920s: reaching out tentatively from both shores to finally nudge together way up above the ‘big smoke’ of the city and its bustling harbour.  Huge tracts of housing at both its Southern and Northern ends bulldozed to provide the approaches, and tunnels bored within the sandstone waited to feel the rush of air and the trundle of trains and trams.

The leadership of this massive project must have needed a huge team to manage the complexities of building something on such a vast scale and to promote a shared belief in the value of the intended outcome and of the need for care and precision in the building.  Huge arcs of steel, supported by cables anchored deep in the sandstone, eventually settling together, complete, high above the water.

It can be easy to think of great leadership as the qualities which enable a person to take large numbers with them as they move toward an objective which is seen to represent a national interest, or loyalty, or a grand endeavour.

Dominating one of the galleries at the NSW Art Gallery is a huge canvas by Edouard Detaille entitled ‘Vive l’empereur’ which depicts Hussars galloping in a full charge, bugles sounding, sabres swinging, toward the Russian lines in the battle of Friedland in 1806.

The notes posted beside this enormous painting point out that Detaille had set out to

“Recapture the appearance of the men of his period as they went to their death covered in gold braid.”

It is sobering to think through the psyche which led men to see themselves as taking part in a ritual of warriors, where manhood can be seen as a status symbolised by the willingness to rush headlong into battle for worthy causes: accepting the very real possibility of death as a consequence of honouring the traditions of gender, race, culture or religion.  A faith in the ‘righteousness’ of the need to win a battle was enough to circumvent the natural shrinking from those things which would otherwise seek to overwhelm us.

We should choose very carefully when it comes to selecting any pursuit where the need to ‘win’ becomes a significant justification for asking others to follow into places where there is danger and the possibility of very real risk.

There are those who still speak of ‘leading by example,’ of ‘not expecting anyone to do that which you are not prepared to do yourself.’ There are certainly times where this may be necessary but, as with language, behaviour and leadership: there will be times where it is better to ‘lead from behind’

Nelson Mandela says:  “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership. “

Mandela had spent long afternoons herding cattle. His mother owned some cattle of her own, but there was a collective herd belonging to the village that he and other boys would look after. He then explained to me the rudiments of herding cattle.

“You know, when you want to get the cattle to move in a certain direction, you stand at the back with a stick, and then you get a few of the cleverer cattle to go to the front and move in the direction that you want them to go. The rest of the cattle follow the few more-energetic cattle in the front, but you are really guiding them from the back.”

He paused. “That is how a leader should do his work.” (Richard Stengel)

Clearly, there are challenges to face when it comes to changing leadership style to suit the context.  Our natural sense of who and what we are; of how we see ourselves from the inside out, will have an impact.

It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse. Adlai Stevenson

Drawing some of these threads together with, hopefully, some relevance for leaders in schools, maybe there are some key messages:

• Within what we do there are some things which, while pressing and immediate now will be gone in time.  There are others which may seem now to only have a secondary function but which may still be there in decades to come: still recognisable and an icon of familiarity.  Within our work, try to maintain an awareness of not only the rearview mirror, but also the vast horizon of possibility in front.
• We need to be clear about what we stand for and what it is that we believe would be a good possible future.
• Large products do not come about overnight, but can be years in the planning and construction.  This requires leadership which builds teams and co-ordinates, provides feedback and in general keeps all committed to the intended outcomes.  Our work in building something new may mean that we have to leave some things behind.
• Symbolic leadership, achieved with horn blasts and the smell of fear and the sound of thundering hooves, may be appropriate in certain circumstances, but must always be questionable when it is predicated on blind faith in ‘righteousness.’
• While it can be hugely difficult to let go and sit back, there is a massive satisfaction to be had from ‘leading from behind.’

Please feel free to click up the top where it says Comments and add your thoughts.

This reflection on the shifting ways that our ability, as humans, to connect and collaborate is well worth a read.  maybe you’d also like to see how it looks as a much expanded version of the reasons why we need to engage with the  ‘pram pushers.’

An excerpt from Mark Pesce’s blog: Education is freely available.  That is not in short supply.  What is in short supply – and always has been – is that moment of human contact, the connection which produces the transfer of insight, of skills, and understanding that won’t come from any webpage, however brilliant, or any podcast, however well-produced.

Students are connected as never before, but few of those connections lead to understanding.  This is the failure and the challenge of our generation.  It is a failure because we let the school grow up outside of the network, where we should have been binding the two together at every point.  It is our challenge because unless we do begin the hard work to knit these two together, we will see formal education become increasingly irrelevant in the presence of an ever-more-potent educational field.

Because the network is everywhere, the school is everywhere.  Because the school is everywhere, the hard-and-fast boundaries between school and the rest of life, as we live it in modern-day Australia, must collapse.  The idea that school is something that happens ‘over here’, while the rest of life is lived ‘over there’ doesn’t make sense anymore.  Given that the connections a child establishes from her earliest years persist throughout her lifetime, shouldn’t some of those connections – arguably, the second most important, after family – be to educators and educational resources?  These connections would become the core of the mentoring bond, which rises to work in partnership with the parental bond, a constant nurturing force throughout the passage into adulthood.

For a good read, have a look at Mark Pesce’s blog – The Human Network

In the meantime, isn’t it about time we moved from ‘School Planning’ to ‘Planning School?’

Someone tweeted a link tonight to 100 quotes about innovation.  As I read through them, I picked out a few which seem to have make sense to me. After all, in the words of Anais Nin,

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

All of us are looking from the inside out.

Consciously challenging ourselves to examine our paradigms is critical if we are to look at new ways of doing things. We grow comfortable with what is, and moving on from it is sometimes akin to the final action of admitting that a favourite piece of clothing has had its day.  Do we try to buy a ‘genuine replacement,’ or do we look for a different way to achieve similar outcomes: be that comfort or statement or even utility. Mostly we want for that ‘different way’ to also add something to the experience we had before.

“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.” – Albert Einstein

In large systems, the ability to move on, and not adopt different ways of achieving the same outcomes but to look at adding value to the experience depends on the capacity to imagine different futures.

“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

Just how might we get engaged in  the business of ‘planning school?’ This is not about bulldozing and replacement.  We simply cannot afford that, and we are left with the challenge of modifying key systems and motivation while the wagons roll on.  How do we imagine that we can do this without some breadth in the way we devise our policy and the means by which we source our ideas.  It may take time and some room to move for patterns and the lines which create meaning to emerge.

“I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.” – Steven Wright

There are great ideas out there. And, there are lone nuts dancing.

“The man with a new idea is a crank – until the idea succeeds.” – Mark Twain

We have great tools at our disposal to connect: with people and ideas. Our access to a metalanguage which can transcend the ‘localisation’ of culture, religion and nationalism provides the fabulous potential for ‘glocalisation,’ in which our ability to act both locally and globally is seen as an enormous adding of value to our horizon of possibility. As we connect using social media like Twitter, we see linkages form across town, across the state, the country and the world.  Projects spring up between teachers, discussion and debate takes place about what it is we do, and woven through the warp is the weft of bright ideas and willingness to follow each other laterally, providing a meaning and expression for the vertical warp.

Sometimes it can feel as though we are travelling up and down in the vertical elevator of bureaucracy: glum with the realisation that you can’t even get to certain floors without a swipe card. And then, sometimes, when the doors open and we see a corridor of connectedness to fresh ideas and helpful others, we are reminded that the up and down can only ever really have meaning and purpose when it serves as a means of getting people to the places they need to be to laterally grow.

Look around: there are countless opportunities to learn and to find things to excite our curiosity. We, as teachers, will often find that we find the best opportunities for learning by looking directly outward and around, not up; or down.

After we connect, there is then the power of our ability to collaborate.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” – Carl Jung

Given an atmosphere where it feels safe to do so, and where it is clear what is expected, people have a great capacity to innovate and, importantly, to improvise: working from what is at hand, creating solutions which provide glimpses of possible futures.  If we adopt a tight, loose, tight model within the way that we structure our learning environment we can create ways of doing things where there can be sufficient looseness to encourage the harnessing of a plethora of possibilities in demonstrating the outcomes of learning.

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” – General George Patton

Social media like Twitter and Yammer have clearly shown the vast store of creative capacity which exists within all of the people who work within education. Our huge challenge is to find ways which allow this creative capacity to be appropriately recognised and used productively, with benefit for all.

“After years of telling corporate citizens to ‘trust the system,’ many companies must relearn instead to trust their people – and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

This is not just a challenge for the ‘companies,’ however.  It is a challenge for us all. New learning and the fresh application of things already known requires commitment and time.

“You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Burton

Today, I was happy to learn something new about something I wanted to do better by noticing what someone else had done by accident and then learning, via a flurry of email, how the result was achieved. In the middle of this, new ideas took form to be added to the mix. Separated in the vertical elevator of age by at least 20 or more  years, we were able to get off at the same floor and walk away with a sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that we can both apply something new to the way we do things.

This is a good result.

A graffiti tagged girder frames a reflection of the reality of a bygone line to other places.  Rusting piers, capped by grasses and an air of indignation,  thrust their reflection onto the slick green Limpopo look of Cockle Creek at Teralba. This was a grand new project: a line to the mines at Killingworth and West Wallsend.  It must have seemed like an optimism of the age; now a memory.  How much of the stuff that we engage with, in the belief that it is the stuff of sound planning for the future, may, in turn, become rusted grass topped piers in the creek?

The stories we can tell though: of best endeavour, or deceit, of human beings with all of their follies and fascinations, are the things which will inform us. There was a time where the creek was also a thoroughfare, then no more.

As things keep changing, as new bridges superimpose themselves on old, the importance of increasing the horizon of possibility for every child continues to assume a clarity which needs to be promoted as a simple and wonderful principle for what we do as educators within public schools.  That is what we do.

And the grass topped bridge?

We’ll cross that when we come to it.

(Pics taken on mobile phone en route from meeting at Speers Point to Barnsley via Teralba 25 May 2010)

Currently very excited by some of the links being made between a whole host of people.  Locally in Newcastle there’s a ‘diverse twitterverse’ with great potential for an innovative future. For anyone near enough, keep watching out for some amazing events coming up.

Planning for one of the events and trying to get some ideas, who better to ask than my ‘tweeps?’

Twitter: what’s it good for?

Within a very short space of time, here is what they said

BiancaH80 @pryorcommitment Free learning that is lively, engaging and fun! Constant support and a plethora of new ideas everyday. CCC

MitchSquires @pryorcommitment Conversational learning that is relevant, interesting and really available at any level.
Mon, May 10 19:34:36 from TweetDeck in reply to pryorcommitment

k8tra @pryorcommitment learning and connections
Mon, May 10 19:34:43 from Tweetie in reply to pryorcommitment

MitchSquires @pryorcommitment Great connections that are invaluable to my class and me.

woojm @pryorcommitment constant inspiration and encouragement. plethora of new ideas every time you log in
Mon, May 10 19:42:35 from TweetDeck in reply to pryorcommitment

victeach @pryorcommitment opens my mind to professional learning not available in my school context and makes a big world smaller and more friendly.

alisa_williams @pryorcommitment twitter is immediate! No waiting on hold, no endless Google searches. You ask… your network AND the experts reply to you.

teachercolin @pryorcommitment Join the global conversation without barriers
Mon, May 10 19:45:47 from Twadget

siobhan_curran @pryorcommitment croudsourcing and immediacy
Mon, May 10 20:08:56 from Tweetie in reply to pryorcommitment

JSP2283 @pryorcommitment #twitter_what‘sitgoodfor : news, information links; encouragement; humour; diversion; venting;
Mon, May 10 20:13:20 from web

pipcleaves @pryorcommitment Twitter is connecting, collaborating and creating.
Mon, May 10 20:41:48 from TweetDeck

paulwils7 @pryorcommitment 24/7 Professional Learning FREE!!!! What more could you want???
Mon, May 10 20:55:45 from HootSuite in reply to pryorcommitment

growthwise @pryorcommitment benefit as gives you access to info to help build your business – the learning aspect
Mon, May 10 21:43:08 from TweetDeck in reply to pryorcommitment

growthwise @pryorcommitment Twitter is also a great way to stay connected to not only your client but also suppliers & the rest of the community
Mon, May 10 21:44:16 from TweetDeck in reply to pryorcommitment

growthwise @pryorcommitment it’s a forum to allow you to gather ideas & suggestions & a great tool to meet other like minded people
Mon, May 10 21:45:10 from TweetDeck in reply to pryorcommitment

jangreen31 @pryorcommitment resources, meanings, understandings. Synergy via CCC.
Mon, May 10 22:10:33 from web

jangreen31 @pryorcommitment Seems first tweet lost. Twitter great 4 modelling 21C leadership. Building, creating connections, school community, teacher

sandynay RT @jangreen31: @MCT_DG Twitter is a gr8 tool 4 modelling 21C leadership. CCC – school community, PLN, national/international. Create new…

jangreen31 @pryorcommitment teachers, PLNs, international/national opps 4 research and sharing. Its about CCC & synergy; personal & professional growth

And, last word from one of the ABC1233 crew from Newcastle

Twitter? what’s it good for?

carolduncan @pryorcommitment everything!
Mon, May 10 22:45:22 from HootSuite

Watch out for the New Institute, and the New Lunaticks

Prams these days are triumphs of modern design.  Engineered with the lifestyles in mind of smart men and women who want to share a walk with dogs and community spirit, around the inner suburbs.

The western gold glows in leaf falling colourscapes, the autumnal twilight melts slowly.

These are the parents of our Kindergarten children around 2015.

Intelligent adults full of expectation: with a world of information available on any conceivable topic. Curriculum to class sizes, policy to pedagogy, student welfare to sunsafe; it’s there, just a mouse click away,  for the reading.

Amongst these adults will be tweeps and mummy bloggers: intuitive users of social media available right now and not likely to go away anytime soon. People with huge opportunities for canvassing opinion and gaining input to a range of ideas about school and schooling: and their own child. From contentment with ‘getting what they got,’ to ‘expecting change, and wanting to see added value.’

The pram pushers will push us. Let’s not respond by pushing back.

Instead, let’s see if we can engage them in going about the business of planning school; as opposed to school planning.  School planning uses all available sources of data and information to plan how to make WHAT IS better.  Planning school is about being able to connect people and ideas; as well as using all available sources of data and information to collaborate across a range of forums and media, and then create something which is different, and allows us collectively to echo Michelangelo:

‘I saw an angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.’

I don’t know about angels, but I think we all know that there is huge potential in a generation of young people. And, for those still being pushed up my street in the fading amber of an autumn day, I hope that, by 2015, we can be walking alongside, planning school as a shared journey where there is a sense that we have gone from pram pushing to sitting beside each other at a planning desk, as we build scaffolds around the fabulous humans we are seeking to build.

Sometimes I think many of us dream about the potential to use our power to connect to build networks which go way beyond the traditional boundaries of state, or church, or cultural boundary.  It is early days, but there are many things happening which rattle the cage of beliefs we might have about just how things ought to be.

I still find it inspiring that a person with strict localised cultural, religious or political beliefs can, in a connected world, zoom between levels of engagement with these: sometimes wide-angling, and connecting with a potential new market, or relationship network which was formerly beyond possibility.

How then, do we define the ‘rules of engagement?’

Recently. In Melbourne, I was staying up the backpacker end of town, and wandered into the All Nations Nomad Hotel for a drink.  The pub is connected to a Backpacker Hostel and, another chalkboard over the bar offers treats like:

• Goon Rouge or
• Goon Blanc

Along with a scale of prices for beer in pots, schooners and jugs.

Music requests

They obviously have a computer set up running iTunes or similar and punters ask the bar staff for requests. Some simple rules appear in bold caps on a chalkboard above the bar.

SONG REQUEST RULES

1. NO PRESSURE – ASK ONLY ONCE
2. IF WE ARE BUSY, ASK LATER
3. DON’T GO AGAINST THE CURRENT STYLE
4. DON’T TOUCH THE COMPUTER
5. SAY PLEASE

There are some key messages here about setting clear guidelines and expecting co-operation.  By the time we read number 3, it puts some responsibility back to us and may make us re-read 1 and 2, which also ask for common sense and respect for the role of the other.  Calls for respect of property and common courtesy simply reinforce the potential for more civil ways of interacting when we are able to recognise that all parties have sometimes complementary, sometimes competing, needs.

This may or may not be a good example, but, for me, it says a lot about how there are different possibilities around gaining common understandings for the way we do things or would like to see things happen. A faith in this, however, requires a shift toward an environment in which there is a ‘bias to yes,’ and a promotion of that curious tri-chotomy of tight ~ loose ~ tight.

The underlying premise is that we have something to offer you: a song to sing

• Ask us for what you want and we’ll try to help
• Please understand that if we are busy we will still try to meet your needs but your understanding would be nice and would make it best for all of us
• Think about the current vibe and the collective feel and reflect on how ‘what you want’ fits within this landscape of ideas.
• So that we can continue to provide this, please don’t play around with our equipment.
• Courtesy and ‘manners’ are trans-cultural matters which demonstrate our commitment to a ‘meta language for cross-cultural positive interaction.’

I then sat and watched young people, and listened to a variety of accents, and saw the possibilities of a ‘metaverse’ before me: where we can construct other possibilities for the way that we work and make decisions.

I then think about the possibilities which are provided in a connected web 2.0 world to enable a very much more varied ‘message stream.’

This will take much longer if there is anchorage in a past culture which seeks to garner support for collective action by employing rhetoric around solidarity which could be seen as exaggerated in an Australian work environment where less than 20% of workers belong to unions.

Our education system should be able to embody some simple rules for backpacker song requests in a pub.  And it would be really nice if everybody who wanders in to have a drink is happy to take note of a mutually beneficial and respectful way of doing things.

Then, if you are putting your hand up to ‘have a go’ we ought to be doing whatever is possible, to support you.

There are so many conundra in education.

For example: if we believe that all people should be supported to achieve their potential, then why do we continue to accept a concept of ‘strength in unity for collective bargaining’ which prefers to reduce the points of individual excellence to the blunt object of a bludgeoning of creativity.

If we really do believe in the uniqueness of the individual, and the efficacy of differentiated curriculum, and accepting the broad spectrum of humanity and human behaviour, then why do we still see a uniform policy as a key measure of positivity in public perception of our school?

As teachers who are so aware of the ability of Twitter to transcend linear control of the message, why do we still blindly buy the idea that an Australian government will fall sheeplike, into the production of a facsimile OFSTED or NCLB:  with or without apples and meat-cleavers.  Why is there the huge trust differential?  Faced with a vodcast from a Director General and a similar message from a union official, why is it almost automatically accepted that there is a huge trust differential based on who is seen as the member of the ‘boss ‘class.

Teachers are the people who provide the interface. Teachers will always have the ability to make this interface as productive as possible with the most valuable and transcending resource being their own engagement with the ideal of, in its purest sense: ‘being a teacher.’

Yet, we still expect that those people who have progressed to any ‘higher up’ level are, by their demonstrated aspiration: ‘not to be trusted’

The depressing sight of men, in the great depression, fighting each other along the hungry mile to catch a token for a day’s work. There are good and strong reasons why people have had to band together.  When we have a vastly different ability to connect, though, let’s look beyond the ‘bust or ban’ strategy which seems to have delivered so little for our young people in terms of an innovative educational setting.

In a world wide web world,  the ability to connect leads us closer toward a proposition where we can develop an international meta language related to answering the question:  “Beyond culture and religion, what are the things we all need to agree upon if humanity is to be sustained for the benefit of all?”

We can have enormous diversity yet a tight commitment to some fundamentals.

I was so relieved to have someone tell me this week that they had an optimism that our communities would actually be intelligent enough to see beyond the hype of league tables in education, if they were created.  Is it reasonable that we take action to prevent the gathering of data which allows feedback which lots of parents seem to be interested to know.  Our communities have access to so much information these days in every area of their life.

In a web 2.0 world, is it reasonable to adopt an activist stance which is predicated on a perceived need for teachers to advocate on behalf of an unknowing and helpless public.

And, have we asked them?

The Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday announced a review of the model for funding schools in Australia.  This will take place in the run up to the next Federal election and, predictably, it has made some sectors very anxious. In an attempt to hose down this anxiety, Julia Gillard has maintained that no school will end up poorer as a result of the review.

Various sectors of the educational community have been very vocal in the last months regarding the Federal transparency agenda and the MySchool website in particular.  This site, rather than being static, will continue to evolve, with more and more information being added.  As well as the very important addition of growth data, this year will also see the addition of much more disclosure of all sources of funding for the private sector.  When this is added, it will allow even more clarity in the overall picture across sectors of schooling.  As the piece at the end of this post demonstrates, we haven’t necessarily been shown the full picture before.

Many sources are revisiting the ideological debates surrounding testing agendas and the potential for a narrowing of curriculum, loss of holistic approaches creation of league tables and a perception of stifling creativity.  Some of the loudest voices in this actually come from the non-government sector.

In an avowed attempt to mitigate the negative impact of the use of data to create league tables, unions have called on teachers in public schools to refuse to administer tests.

In the non-government sector, while there’s plenty of rhetoric about holistic education and the evil of a league table environment, there’s absolutely no suggestion at all of a similar form of action against the testing program.

Despite the finely argued ideological opposition, the overwhelming outcome of this action will simply be a reinforcement, in the court of public opinion, that public school teachers and schools have things to hide.

Our public schools are doing some wonderful things for children from the entire spectrum of our local communities.  This year, we have the opportunity to publish the extent to which this is occurring by having the data available which shows growth.  In the years to come, we also have the chance to track and verify this progress, assisted by a range of National Partnership programs which focus heavily on providing even greater access and opportunity for children from low SES communities.

Far from ‘protecting’ low SES communities from the stigma which many fear will flow from the media creation of league tables, we may actually lose the ability to demonstrate that additional resource has meant that our hard work is paying dividends: that the fundamental tenet of free and secular public education can deliver a fair go for all, especially as increasingly fairer funding models are applied.

Let’s ensure that we think through the balance between the need to ‘send messages,’ or to advocate for ideological stances, and the possibility that a broad based agenda of transparency and reporting of a wide range of measures, including NAPLAN data can actually assist in the movement toward a funding model which is more of a level playing field for all.

NAPLAN, approached correctly is no more than a ‘point in time snapshot’ of how we are travelling toward our objective of providing maximum opportunity for every child to grow their potential and to assist us to realistically look at how we can get into the business of ‘planning school’ as a place where this can occur.  Without the snapshot, taken at regular intervals, we have no means, other than asking a sceptical public to ‘trust us, we know best,’ to highlight the quality of the work we do.

As a comment on the current model of funding for schools, the piece below was written a number of years ago, using references to source material which was available at the time.

Having your cake and eating it too

Imagine running a business where you could apply the following formula :

• Assume that you have no funds carried forward, and no debts: you are starting from scratch.  Despite having the capital value of a fully functional site, you are starting with a zero budget.
• Estimate what it will cost you to operate over the next year: salaries, maintenance, contracted services, risk management etc.
• You are now well below zero in the value of your business.  You need to plan to get ahead, and to make sure that you have an attractive product. (All within a highly competitive area and within a narrow market where the consumer described ‘indicators of quality’ are not necessarily a construct contemporaneous with other general societal trends.)
• To stay competitive, in a pro-choice environment, you need to create surpluses to be applied to growth of the business and its capital.
• Work out how much profit you want to make, your ‘operating surplus.’
• Your business is eligible for significant grants from the government.  Work out exactly how much you will get from these grants.
• Now decide how much you will need to charge per unit of your product to achieve the operating surplus you have set as a budget goal.

With no effect on the size of the government grant !

In fact, as you attract more customers, the government will make sure that you get more funds, so that you can set the price that customers pay to give you the profit you need.  A sort of government underwriting of a set income stream ! Oh, and while you get the funds you can decide who works for you based on whether they go to the same church as you, or reflect your beliefs, despite the fact that the government funds you get come from everybody.

And this is how a consultant to the independent schooling sector believes private schools should run their business.  Speaking at a conference of Heads of Independent Schools, Trevor Gorey, suggested some key principles for financial management in private schools.

As a matter of interest, most schools operate on a gross profit (income less direct teaching costs) of between 30% and 40%

Critical Financial Issues in Independent Schools Trevor Gorey –AHISA Conference –  April 2003

In another cool and clinical analysis of how to play hard but fair, Audrey Jackson, 2002 Executive Director of the Association of Independent Schools in Western Australia, has little time for the proponents of the concept of being a ‘not for profit’ organisation, preferring to dismiss this as ‘altruism in the extreme.’ Audrey Jackson – Building a Capital Base in a School – 14^th Biennial NCISA Conference, 2002

Now, look at some strategies to increase surplus.

Clearly, to get a bigger surplus, you need more customers, and preferably customers of the type which will attract the highest level of government funding.

As the calculation is done on postcode, the retention of a boarding house as a home for the sons of western graziers actually retains a number of students who may be from postcodes where the average income levels are massively depressed due to drought and the flight within the Australian GDP from the rural sector.

Or, you can offer scholarships, which give you a double barrelled benefit.

• Firstly, you get to pick the cream from other schools, making your own outcomes improve and enhancing the perception of the value of the education on offer.
• And, what a bonus, because the scholarship can be directed to worthy students from certain SES groups, the actual cost to the school of offering it is not comparatively high.

The judicious use of bursaries and scholarships can have a hugely beneficial effect on enrolments both in the short and long terms.

They can be used to improve the overall academic profile of a school and to bring students into the school from low income families.

The strength of the strategy from a financial point of view is that the scholarship students attract full federal and state funding so the cost of forfeited fees is lessened.

Critical Financial Issues in Independent Schools Trevor Gorey – April 2003

Now, before you rush to describe this as the politics of envy, stop and think it through again.

• How many parents who choose to send their children to private schools understand how their fees are calculated. ?
• As they work themselves into the ground, and sacrifice things to provide what they see as an opportunity, do they understand that the fees they pay don’t just fund the gap between what they think they would get in their local public school and the cost benefit they see in their choice of a private school.?
• Do they understand that they are also paying up to 30% on top, so that the school can maintain and improve its ability to sustain annual capital growth ?
• What would the outcome be of using a percentage of the funds invested in this business, which sets a margin of profit, to invest in a system which can be a hub of the community in which you live, and, as such, be the means by which the entire community will move ahead.

And, in the fairest of all Aussie ways, wouldn’t they agree that there could be some compromises of the aspirational need to ‘have the best’, to create a better, fairer, more truthful system all round ?

References : (These were active at the time of writing – may now be broken)

(www.ahisa.com.au/documents/conferences/SSC2003/Trevor_Gorey_WS.pdf)

(www.isca.edu.au/html/PDF/conf%202002/Jackson%20paper.pdf)

The recent ACEC 2010 conference in Melbourne was interesting from a range of perspectives.  Disappointingly, I became more and more and more dismayed at the perpetuation of a number of dominant paradigms.

Prominent amongst these was the view that the failure of our schools to change to has been largely the responsibility of a range of successive policy makers, governments, management, bureaucrats and, basically anybody not ‘at the coalface’ of teaching. Predictably, the biggest laughs came from the heavy criticism of government policies at both state and federal levels, and in the heady ideals from the seventies, and the belief that the very people who had assisted the rise of these ideas to prominence were now actively proceeding, blinkered and in step, to pull the truck of an ideology which would seek to turn all children into complicit cogs for the machine.

And, you’ll need to allow me a wry grin here when we stop and think that much of this glee and anti-establishment rhetoric was coming from people whose livelihood is derived from working for establishments which value their uniform policy, which suspend girls who have the wrong coloured hair, who know that their faith policies may include profession of religious views which could provoke hatred in various parts of the globe, or lead to significant reduction in the rights of women or other groups, or which have, in the past, decried public schools for their humanist approaches to individual choice making which are divergent from the truth of gospel.

All of these schools have an absolute right to exist in my opinion.  The fact that they can relies, however, on exactly those taxpayers, of all sizes, shapes, colours and faiths, who in turn elect governments who provide a very significant portion of  their funding. This guaranteed funding then enables the creation of budget models which can adjust additional income through fee increases and plan for surpluses which can fund an ongoing cycle of improvements.  After then actively discriminating, in their employment policies, against anyone who cannot produce a suitable evidence of their ethos compatibility, it would be nice if they had the decency to see a little more of the forest which is the realm of public opinion and the broad spectrum of a very diverse modern Australian; and less of the separate trees which they have the opportunity to shape in ways which suit themselves, and their customers.

There was loud applause for widespread criticism of the National Curriculum, for NAPLAN, for the Digital Education Revolution, for Victoria’s Ultralab, Queensland’s Digital Pedagogy Licence etc,  and for the general idea that governments basically always have it wrong.

Whether they are right or wrong, the policies which were planned for implementation were put on the table very publicly prior to the last round of elections. In Australia, we all vote.

It’s like sitting in a pub, in the fug and swill of an after-work session and overhearing the conversations which so often default to the age old laughter and derision to those in the ‘boss’ classes, who invariably ‘wouldn’t have a clue,’  are ‘all brains and no common sense,’  or who are ‘only concerned about putting something on their CV’ etc. This seems fairly usual group behaviour, but we should always remember that everybody started somewhere sometime.

It is also useful to remember that: titles and positions aside, we are all human beings. We all, as a former leader of mine said, “put our pants on the same way in the morning.”

Sometimes we need to hold a mirror up to our own paradigms.  Just as it is unreasonable for ‘the system’ to assume that every person ‘at the coalface’ of teaching, is trying their best to do as little as possible and therefore needs to be whipped into shape with some good testing regimes and performance management systems, may it not be a bit unfair to assume that every person at a management level is spending all of their days planning ways to make life difficult for those ‘at the coalface.?’

‘At the coalface’ is, for me an expression I fundamentally dislike in reference to teaching. While I fully understand the analogy, it simply serves to reinforce all of the stereotypes about organisational behaviour which grow from a labour oriented industrial model of the world. An interesting clinging to a paradigm which so many profess to be wanting to change through working in more student centred ways. Are students just so much coal that we dig? If, as a teacher, you want to be seen as a person who does more than process commodities, in a drudge of non-recognition and encouragement, then stop talking like a coalminer or process worker. We can all make choices about the mental models we apply to our world. Maybe that dude in the suit who’s one of those people from DET might just be a human being like you. Maybe they also like Twitter, or keyword searching on YouTube, or playing volleyball, golfing or building websites. Inappropriately applied paradigms are just as destructive from any direction.

Just for the record, we have many leaders in our system of education who have been trying different approaches for many years. Gary Stager and Seymour Papert may be interested to know that we were using 1:1 computers in a Juvenile Justice school in Sydney in 1985, with Apple 11e computers and Logo, along with wonderful text based story software like ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ etc.

We might also like to remember that, in 1989, the ‘Schools Renewal’ report, or Scott Review, lead to some very significant changes, with the introduction of new structures, smaller school ‘clusters’, educational resource centres, acknowledgement of the growth of technology in schools, and calls for more localised approaches. Full implementation of the recommendations were thwarted, however, by hugely strident industrial opposition: the famous ‘Metherell Years.’ While policy makers and system leaders tried to move away from a centralist organisation and structure and provide a framework for greater engagement with priorities at local levels, teachers came out en masse to decry this direction.

After working as Teacher in Charge at a Juvenile Justice school and teaching myself how to program in Basic and Logo, to provide engagement for very troubled young offenders, I spent a year as a classroom teacher with limited access to a small lab of MicroBee computers and sporadic use of the one Apple 11e in the entire school to produce slideshows of student work using a technique which created a screen display which I have long ago forgotten.

Then, in 1988, in my first Principalship, at Broken Bay Sport and Recreation Centre, the efficacy of using a computer to assist the program booking process and information management became very obvious. The booking database I developed using Appleworks Database and its integration with the Wordprocessor module to mailmerge all correspondence, accident report cover letters etc was then scaled up to operate for all centres statewide by 1990. An upgrade to an Apple 11gs gave a bit more graphic ability, (we couldn’t afford a Mac), and we used this to create brochures to accompany environmental quests and information transfer.

One of my staff told me about Keylink in 1989 and, equipped with a new modem, it was good to be able to use a very primitive form of text based messaging, using the Austpac system with text which wiped onto the screen. Using Keylink, it was also possible to get involved in some of the first online OzProjects like Newsday. It was also possible to send faxes directly via Keylink, including outputting a spreadsheet list directly via fax.

In 1990, we hosted 140 teachers at Broken Bay Sport and Recreation Centre for a Computer Education Conference. The theme was ‘technology and the environment’ with significant input from the regional Aboriginal Education consultant and the Computer Consultancy team. Over 100 computers were manually loaded from a truck onto a ferry for a half hour trip to the Broken Bay wharf. They were then manhandled onto a tractor and trailer, then carried across a footbridge to another truck and then to the dining hall. Computer Consultant, Glenn Mullaney, had arranged for Telstra to provide an additional four phonelines which had to be physically provisioned across Patonga Creek and over the eastern ridge to the camp at Broken Bay. We had Keylink demos in the nurses quarters, Lego on the messhall verandahs, hypercard stacks in the lodges and, at night, lots of connection and fun.

We carried and lugged. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story, under a headline which said, ‘And no Pac Man after lights out!’ about the use of Medical Forms intended for children sent to ‘campers.’ We did it because we believed this was important. It was, and it still is, and many are still trying to scaffold and support.

I remember taking a group to the beach to try an idea I had to develop Logo programs. One pair would write a program to describe a shape using basic sequential instructions eg Fwd 10; right 90; fwd 10 etc. Another pair would then be the turtle..using foot lengths as a unit and a stick as a pen to scribe a shape on the sand. We threw hoops onto grass and leaf-litter and did mini beast counts, tallying the data in spreadsheets.

It is possible to continue listing a whole range of ways that things have been tried to build environments which provide opportunities for students and which encourage shifts in pedagogy and in policy. There are many others who have continued to look for ways to work to make a difference. Don’t let us forget that system attempts, in the early years of the 21^st century, to provide a platform for a range of web-services was met with bans by the union, operating with the majority support of teachers. Did those who speak loudest against the failure of the system to achieve change, speak up in their staffroom? Why does the union still use Faxstream as its primary communication format if not through fear of alienating non- email/internet users? No matter what the leadership vision might be for a school learning environment which is constructivist and flexible in approaching groupings and pedagogy to enable learners, there are still very strict processes in place around staffing schools, which were fought for by teachers themselves, as recently as last year.

There is much that is imperfect in a policy environment which bases itself on a fundamental principle of equitable provision, and the rollout of infrastructure and access. Yes, there may be better ways to finesse this. We can, however, point to the fact that students in Brewarrina have the same level of access to publicly provided ICT as students in Balmain. Our ‘fatcat’ bureaucrats have, in the DER NSW approach, handed a mass of resource to practitioners. Their way of doing it can be scoffed at by visiting experts, but the potential is there for the taking. I’m pleased to say that, if you put your hand up and say you’d like to have a go, if I can, I’ll do whatever I can to support you. Why not connect and collaborate at your staffroom level and gather a team who can then create something better and different through collaboration and mutually respectful relationships at all levels within your organisation. And, at the next social function or barbecue, why not speak up, and if necessary, seek to educate friends and community members about the urgent need we have to move from school planning to planning school. This is everybody’s business.

Please don’t let us, as people engaged in something much more important, allow ourselves to persist with exactly the paradigm entrenchment which we so vehemently criticise.