Teaching is to Emancipate

David Noble set up a great little experiment today using ipadio, an audio-over-IP application server, to host a virtual end of year education conference he dubbed TeachMeet Mobile. Using the mighty power of twitter, he drummed up some speakers for a one-hour reflective which is available to hear live here and after the event here.

My own contribution rides on the back of Drew Buddie’s review of how far the use of ICT in education has come in the last ten years and is meant to be a bit of a foil to any exuberance we might feel about being so far ahead of ourselves. My simple and short point is simply this: I am not convinced that the young minds we are preparing are best served by what I see as an endemic dumbing down of the curriculum. This isn’t a Scottish problem, it’s all over the place and has been brought about by an avalanche of change – in political thinking and correctness, in public funding of state provision, in weak social (read “non”) science research, in promotion of managers of expediency to positions where leadership are required, not least the head teachers of state schools, and the very curriculum itself, diluted to the point of homeopathic uselessness by feeble regression to an exponentially weakening mean level of ability.

The words of the new curriculum are laudable: I hear paraphrases in the modern idiom of the seven liberal arts and sciences and slogans such as “science at the heart of Curriculum for Excellence”, but until a fundamental return is made to decent standards of behaviour, literacy, parenting, leadership and public service provision, no progress will be had without those of us called mavericks being heard.

… and we’ll do the job. This was a phrase often quoted at me as a project manager in industry, usually in response to some request for an explanation as to why a project was falling behind schedule, or why tasks were not getting done. Once upon a time, I was the kind of guy who could happily ask such a question, knowing that the necessary resources – time, tea, toilet rolls or tools – had not been provided properly or at the right time and place. Everything could be correlated to a cost and I knew that cutting costs could be done using the “just-in-time” model of resource provision. I learned, the hard and expensive way, that the T-shirt slogan, “make God laugh – make a plan”, just wasn’t really funny. Especially if it was your plan.

Don Ledingham falls into the same old traps of the deluded project manager in his blog post on reducing bureaucracy in education when he cites the cost of a 30-minute meeting of SMT/PT’s as something approaching £18,000 – £20,000 per year. The cost is, of course, £0.00. The financial costs of the enterprise are the same, with or without the meetings. The posts are filled, the salary bill is fixed. Whatever you want those people to do, they will endeavour to do – whether it is on your time or theirs. No, the cost of spending time is what is not achieved with the remaining time. If you want a fully-integrated, cross-curricular, child-centred, four-capacity-compliant, literate, numerate, articulate, coherent curriculum, then the time to build it must be given to the builders.

The principles are simple but missing from education: from blindness to the effect of initiative layering to the extremes of narcissism, education is driven by expedient and personal self-interest far more than it is driven by the principles of providing good value for public money, future-proofing our economy and preparing people for social, economic and political environments which haven’t been dreamed of yet.

I am posting this from the Clyde auditorium at the SECC, where a packed house is enjoying Knightswood Academy’s beautiful and competent dance performed by a healthy gender mix of really very talented young people.

The keynote is being given by Fiona Hyslop, our esteemed Secretary of State for Education – more on that in the comments.

I’m off to a good start, having had a quick look at the exhibitor displays, met with some of the influential people in education today and had a very positive conversation with one of the senior managers in my own LA, Fife, about the positive things happening in the arena of new technology.

I’ll comment updates as the day and opportunity affords.

I attended #leadmeet09 at the Carlton Hotel in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening and as usual, it was a brilliant, engaging, and valuable experience. I put my name down on the wiki to speak, but as is sometimes the luck of the draw, my name did not come out of the magic selector. Here’s the essence of what I was going to say.

Applying industry leadership experience to an educational leadership role
Firstly, a little about my credentials: I joined the Army in my late teens and was quickly promoted in line with the technical nature of the job. In my 20’s, I entered the simulation and training industry as an engineer and became a Project Manager through my 30’s, leading teams all over the world, eventually gaining senior management and boardroom posts with British Aerospace, GEC-Marconi and other UK and US companies. After running my own IT and training company for a few years, I entered state education about 6 years ago.

All of this experience taught me that many things masquerade as leadership and great leaders are indeed rare. The most valuable thing a leader must do is to trust the people (s)he relies on to do the right thing – quickly, efficiently and effectively.

Wednesday morning at the B&Q car park in Dunfermline, I saw a great example of this. These guys were painting arrows on the ground to help the traffic flow. They measured out using their boots, their experience, some chalk and a lump of wood. No rulers, drawings, specifications, quality control criteria, inspectors, meetings, management or outcomes. Just, “go paint some arrows to help the traffic flow” and their experience.

The other thing I have learned is that resources and reasonable expectations of performance are functions of each other. If you want a job done, the time and materials must be provided. This simple truth seems to have escaped the notice of those leaders in education who seem to think that forcefully telling someone, “It’s your JOB!”, will make it happen. There are many things happening in Scottish Education at the moment, not least a Curriculum for Excellence, in its lovely green outcomes folder. There seems to be some expectation that 2 days of additional CPD, a significant amount of which is stolen by Head Teachers for <insert patronising waste of time here*>,  is going to replace 25 years of parallel development, when staff are already working substantially more than they are paid for:

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The essential elements of leadership are trust, integrity and personal authority, as required. Good leaders know when they are badly led and prevent this from undermining their objectives.

* Group hugs, Tai Chi, focus groups on Vision statements, Eco-schools presentations, Bullshit Bingo, etc., etc.