The Tyranny of Innovation
Earlier this week I attended a conference in Oxford with a number of colleagues which focused on managing transformation in education. There was an interesting range of speakers, not all from the education sector, who had some interesting international experiences to reflect on and share, and even though I know I had the added incentive of being at an event with a new company and new colleagues, I found it peculiarly thought provoking. Not a common sensation to have at education conferences during the last decade or so!
The one question I came away with was this: what is so great about innovation? I feel I can ask this safely because I can look back a career that has been built on innovation, from the small scale changes made in a house system, to involvement in the international award winning Scottish intranet, Glow, Teach First , or more recently success in the Entrepreneur of the Year competition with, RM, my last company. I’m so habituated to innovative thinking that I had to smile when Matthew Taylor assumed I was anti-progressive, and would therefore somehow naturally approve of rote learning in his blog some weeks back.
I can recall at a conference at the Serious Games Institute asking one of the speakers, a Canadian “innovator,” whether he thought innovation was always good and being not the least surprised when he had to think long and hard before saying, Gee, I guess I’ve never thought about it.
Just a quick look at the language used to describe the programme at a Guardian conference, coming up in November, ought to set alarm bells ringing for any skilled teacher. The Innovation in Education Conference, is aimed at exploring education systems to meet the high learning challenge of the 21st century. The utilitarian assumption behind this and much of the programme, is just startling. And I have no personal axe to grind about Lord Puttnam, but just because he claims to be passionate about education, because his own experience of state education was so disastrous, is no reason whatsoever to seek his advice or advocacy for transforming education. Why on earth would you seek advice about how to design or run great schools from someone whose own experience of schooling was so poor? What concerns me seriously about so much of the innovative rhetoric surrounding education is that it masks an unspoken, anti-schools agenda for so many of the individuals front of house.
What’s needed is not just an awareness of this amongst the teaching profession widely, but a counter argument which asserts the undoubted value of stability and consistency. Values even more precious in the world of education where every single lesson counts…if you are the child on the receiving end.
Joe Nutt
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Response: Edumacation, edumucation, edumucation
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"...rather than contributing to substantial improvements, adopting improvement programmes may also add to the endless cycle of initiatives that seem to sap the strength and spirit of schools and their communities."
This hasn't deterred our present government from imposing some of the most revolutionary (and the most confused and ill-implemented) initiatives in living memory. Innovation is not, in itself, the problem: when new ideas arise from within the profession, and are adopted voluntarily by other teachers, it is usually positive.
Unfortunately, most innovations arise in education colleges. They are almost always concerned with process rather than content: as Chris McGovern so succinctly put it in "The Corruption of the Curriculum",
"Content is just the ass that has to carry the sociological baggage of 'skills', 'concepts' and 'perspectives'. "
Over ten years ago--the last time I taught in a school--I encountered this when our head of English conducted a seminar on 'Literacy across the curriculum'. I'm not sure if this is still making the rounds, as it's never easy to predict the half-life of these toxic innovations. I was fortunate in that I didn't have to attend the seminar, but my head of department (SEN) came back livid. His copy bristled with post-its with comments such as "What does this have to do with our kids?" (many of whom could barely read, and most of whom couldn't write a sentence without a misspelling or grammatical error). When I read this manual, I couldn't believe what a load of tosh it was. It fitted McGovern's description precisely.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when you believe that skills are independent of context. And it's what happens when you believe that management is a discrete skill, independent of the activity being managed.
Having spent the last six months studying the management of education in England, I can safely say that our schools are the most over-managed enterprises I have seen anywhere. Not trusting the glossy versions put out on official websites, we have taken to phoning around to confirm suspicious claims and to resolve contradictory or confusing information. And frequently, the people we talk to and correspond with don't have a clue as to what is happening on their patch. This is largely due to the principle of 'integrated delivery': it's not unusual for an initiative to be delivered by more than one ministry, up to a dozen quangos, and any number of local authorities, all engaged in 'inter-agency collaboration'. This ensures that no one carries the can when things go pear-shaped (as they do all the time) and the press finds out (alas, a far less common occurence).
I seriously doubt that the next government will be able to resist the temptation to meddle, but at the Centre for Policy Studies we have been putting forth an unvarying line: efficient organisations rely on internal markets, and not bureaucratic structures. This has a lot of support in Tory circles, but it will take a lot of cojones to turf out all the useless tax-eaters.