Corporate employers wonder why staff leave their organisations and worry about the cost and instability that such staff turnover incurs. There has been a fundamental shift in the psychological contract between employers and employees. Both now recognise that with globalisation and shifts in consumer demand, there is no longer a job for life. This signals the end of employer paternalism and places a greater emphasis on the individual to make their own decisions and shape their own lives.

Those with technical skills, can sell their labour in a global market, redefining the career as a journey through working and personal life rather than a relentless climb to the top and the key to the executive toilet.

To this end, employment has become, for those with marketable skills and experience, one component of a life-style package in which job and life satisfaction are inseparable.

In “Well-Being in the Workplace”

by Kahnman, Diener and Schwarz, the authors identify the features of the work environment which impact on job satisfaction and therefore on life satisfaction.

These are;

• The opportunity for personal control

• The opportunity for skill use

• externally generated goals ( job demands, work-family conflict )

• variety

• environmental clarity

• availability of budget

• physical security

• supportive supervision

• opportunity for interpersonal contact

• valued social position

Retaining staff, where it is possible, will entail maintaining levels of job/life satisfaction in an environment which is turbulent.

There are aspects of job/life satisfaction which can be adjusted by the employer. These focus on organisational culture and are expressed here as a series of questions;

1. Does the company recruiting literature describe a fictional, idealised working experience and make promises which are not met?
2. Does the employee reflect that the actual working experience has come as a surprise?
3. Is there a genuine induction process rather than a tick-box exercise or a macho rite of passage?
4. Does the organisational culture allow employees to take control of their work and its resources; do they feel stifled or left to flounder?
5. Is there a review system which encourages the employee to use their skills to customise their job?
6. Can employees use their discretion to plan their work to build in variety of activites?
7. Are employees aware of the shelf-life of their skills, to anticipate change and to learn the skills they will need in the future?
8. Do employees enjoy feelings of personal safety, free from bullying or harassment?
9. Do supervisors/team leaders possess the emotional intelligence to manage staff or are they a major barrier to job/life satisfaction?
10. Are there significant conflicts between work and other responsibilities which might be overcome understanding and creative management?
11. Do staff feel there is adequate opportunity to learn for colleagues or do they feel marooned in front of a screen communicating by email, using emoticons as a sad attempt at human interaction?
12. Are staff proud of the work they do and aware of the contribution they may be making to the greater good?

These questions can form the basis of a web-based feedback system to gather data which may show whether a loss of employees is due to a function, a location, a task or a particular team leader. Organisations could then encourage local changes to working arrangements to minimise losses of valuable staff. Organisations which use such tools to learn how to cope with change become learning ecologies.

It is interesting to ask whether the current early retirement of Headteachers without a full pension has arisen from these work/life style choices.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is and that work/life choices of Deputy Headteachers will make replacing them a difficult task.

For the last few months, I have been looking at some of the issues surrounding all-through schools as learning ecologies. This was part of a fresh approach to system redesign stimulated, in part by Building Schools for the Future.

Here are some of my impressions

Commitment

There has to be a strong, professional commitment to the concept of an all-through school. Any lack of leadership will result in each component defending its territory, resulting in a sterile packaging exercise which will lose much of any flexibility and potential of this arrangement.

Clear vision and a carefully managed consultation process will encourage the development of trust and flexible collaboration.

The Every Child Matters agenda has highlighted how important (and how difficult) it can be for professionals from separate and different cultures to work together effectively despite goodwill and a shared agenda.

Challenges will not simply evaporate as a result of new buildings or fresh branding and legacy reputations and issues do not evaporate as easily as old buildings are demolished.

There can be a fear in the smaller partners (e.g. Primary or Special Schools) that they will simply be absorbed in a take- over by the larger Secondary School.

My impression is that the greatest adjustment will be made by secondary colleagues as their traditional culture and expectations are challenged by new institutional arrangements.

Where Special Schools are part of the federation they will make the greatest contribution because of their emphasis on learning and their expertise in designing personalized learning programmes.

All staff will have to accept that they have much to learn within a professional collaboration.

All- through schools do not necessarily provide economies of scale but they can create extensions of opportunity for children, staff and the wider community

Curriculum

The 3-18 school must develop from a vision for an all through curriculum. We must avoid putting a 19^th century curriculum into 21^st century settings.

The design for new schools buildings must be driven by curriculum and the key decisions around how learning will be managed – a concern for the whole learning ecology.

Key concerns will be

§ Maintaining improvements in standards of achievement

§ Progression by age or stage?

§ Division of curriculum? 0-4, 5-8, 9-14,

§ Progression beyond 14/16/18 –

§ 14-19 diplomas, Community education (sperm to worm)?

§ Content or Competence?

§ Personalised/customised learning (ref David Hargreaves)

§ The employment of models which provide coherence for the all-through curriculum. Examples include

§ Learning to Learn

§ Opening Minds

§ Personal and Thinking Skills

§ Enquiring Minds

§ IBO junior and middle years.

§ Common skill sets / mind mapping /De Bono’s Thinking hats

Radical curriculum redesign may take up to a year to plan and is best not implemented at the same time as the development of a new school arrangements or moving into new buildings.

It is possible to have an all-through, hard federated school without a new build which will give time for an all-through curriculum to be planned and in operation before moving into new premises.

Pastoral arrangements

§ Vertical Grouping for tutoring within a house system?

§ Pastoral Curriculum/ SEAL?

§ How will support staff be most effectively deployed?

Professional issues

§ There can be greater scope for personal/professional development within the all through school

§ Greater scope for career development where subject leadership is cross-phase. The maths leader in an all-through school may have come from the primary sector for example.

§ The opportunity to make more effective use of precious professional expertise e.g. Science, Maths or ICT staff

§ An emphasis on learning and progression rather than teaching

§ The increased scope for managers to improve delivery and higher standards by getting the right people, in the right place, doing the right things

Community issues

§ There must be a thorough consultation exercise with community stake-holders through an impartial facilitator. Models include Futuresearch (Bolton), or Joseph Rowntree Trust model for SRB bids, NEF (Local Alchemy).

§ The CEO can come from any sector. Given the ECM agenda, it is an interesting question whether the CEO needs to be a teacher.

§ There can be a fear among parents of size leading to loss of access to their child’s teacher or to the dilution of best practice.

§ An all-through  school which can integrate Children’s Centres is in a better position to deliver the ECM agenda as it may have simultaneous contact with three generations and so become a powerful influence on community cohesion.

There has been little research on whether and how investment in schools can have a regenerative impact on local communities. Much of the anecdotal evidence suggests that when standards of achievement rise, successful learners tend to migrate to area perceived as less deprived.

I wanted to know whether there are ways of maximising the regenerative effect of spending £30 million pounds on a new school within an area of social and economic deprivation

I found one Measurement of Regeneration value – a methodology from the New Economics Foundation

“Value-driven organisations are using new ways to understand, measure and foster awareness of their impacts, NEF’ s innovative approach to social return on investment (SROI) places stakeholders - the people who matter- at the heart of the measurement process”

This implies the necessity to involve the community in the development of the all-through school from the earliest stages of consultation. The ECM agenda cannot be achieved without addressing local communities and creating “learning households”

Collective Leadership & Management

The all-through school represents a real challenge to governorship with a need for training to cover the wider remit, There also needs to be some refinement of the committee structure, the number of meetings and the volume of reading matter

Chief execs in all-through schools seem to work most closely with business managers. They are not headteachers in the traditional sense and are best described as social entrepreneurs playing a key role within the community particularly if regeneration objectives are to be met.

There are two main cultural challenges; first, to overcome the difficulties of a troubled past – the legacy,and second, to deal with traditional perceptions of primary and secondary education, their traditional separation and perceived hierarchies in professional status.

Useful links.

I recommend,

“Are You Dropping the Baton” by Dave Harris as an excellent, practical guide to the all-through school, and

The Consortium of All-Through Schools as a source of excellent advice.

Email:

barry.bainbridge@btinternet.com

Tel: 01527 529461

Thanks.

I would like to thank all those all through schools who made me welcome and who were unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge.

They reinforced my view that the development of new school arrangements is the development of learning ecologies and that new buildings may be the least important aspect of Building Schools for the Future.

I am convinced that for schools to work two things have to be in place. First, the community served by a school has to believe that schooling can make a beneficial difference to the health, wealth and well-being of their young people;  second, the community has to believe that their school is capable of delivering those benefits.

The balance between those who believe in  their school and learning and those who don’t is problematic, but when a school works, when it enjoys the confidence of its community, there is a balance perhaps as high as 80% of believers against the 20% who remain to be convinced.
There can be no assumption that the belief in the value of schooling and learning is evenly distributed as it is often post-code related.

Successful schools in deprived areas have leaders whose influence extends far beyond the schools boundaries and whose influence will be seminal in the social and economic regeneration of their communities.

As a trainer, I have wondered why some sessions simply fail to make any impression. Delegates can greet you with genuine interest , with courteous disinterest, neutral attendance (without presence), with barely concealed anger or even hostility.

You are sometimes greeted by a manager who tells you how much their staff are looking forward to your session and that they are fully primed with questions and anxious to get to grips with the issues and could you cut the session down to thirty minutes as they need to use some of the time to consult on staff restructuring in the light of the new budget.

And then you meet the delegates, often at the end of a working day at a twlight session when they are tired and stressed and often thinking about child care or a difficult journey home. They are conscious of a pile of messages, people to see, incidents to follow up, rumours of staff changes and so on.

They are often in their coats (we’re not stopping), clutching a tea(so busy we drink on the run) sitting on hard chairs in an untidy room in which the technology is unreliable and the flip-charts are covered with the reminders of previous sessions. There is the uncomfortable feeling that since you didn’t do anything after the last session you may have missed something.

For the delegates, this event is simply something to be got through, leaving just enough energy and sanity to go to Waitrose to pick up a chicken kiev, new potatoes with a hint of a mint and a five leaf salad with pine kernels.

Under such conditions, the sort of quality learning which develops practice and which has a positive impact on customer or client is almost impossible to achieve. Within this scenario, there are barriers to successful learning which can be understood in four areas;

 

• Emotional
• Practical
• Intellectual
• Spiritual

On the emotional level, delegates may be fearful of the demands that this training might make on their stress levels, workload, status, reputation, performance or pay.

The practical issues may be as prosaic as being cold, tired or hungry.

Intellectually, delegates may feel that the session is too difficult or presented in a way which is inconsistent with their learning styles, that they have had no time or material to prepare. They may feel that they are hearing nothing new, that the session is pitched at too simple a level with no consideration of prior knowledge and experience. It may too general and fail to clarify how their own working practice will need to change. Often there is an addition to their workload without any indication of where the necessary time is to be found.

The spiritual blockage occurs when the training identifies a course of action which is contrary to the personal or professional values of the learners. There may appear to be little or no benefit to customer or client. The training may be perceived to be part of someone else’s careerist agenda or it may have to be seen to be done, as dictated by an external authority.

Such conflicts are not only a barrier to a particular piece of learning, but they can lead to a loss of identification with the whole organisation and the view that training is part of a cynical manipulation forcing delegates to adopt standard, compliant positions.

It is far to easy for managers to characterise such conflicts as an unwillingness on the part of staff to change and a refusal to adapt to the modern world.

So where do we go from here? Here are some lessons for successful learning

 

1. Make it fun and make it practical
2. Demonstrate empathy (not sympathy) with the learner
3. Make sure the learners are comfortable
4. Don’t ambush a group of learners with issues which need to be dealt with individually
5. Don’t take on too much in one go
6. Put the learning in the context of improvement in the service to clients or customers and of doing what is right rather than what is politic or compliant
7. Clarify precisely where practice will need to change and what will be dumped to accomodate the change
8. Return to the subject to revise and refresh the ideas
9. Support learning sessions with a range of materials which will enable learners to manage to continue their learning in their own way
10. Review with those who work directly with customers or clients because they know best about service delivery

We can create ecologies where staff can be more successful learners who are less stressed and who experience increased job satisfaction.

Who knows, they may even enjoy their learning, go to Waitrose and arrive home with enough energy and creativity to cook!

 

 

 

If you look at this image of a nineteenth century classroom, you will see a learning environment which is designed for the transmission of information for a less complicated age. This model mirrors the nineteenth century factory.
It is as if Henry Ford has been asked to design the school. The learners are passive recipients in a deferential age where access to knowledge is restricted and where mass schooling is designed to lead to mass employment for mass production.

This approach is further replicated in training for and within employment. It has given learning a bad name.
The world has moved on. Between the ages of five and sixteen, young people will spend 15,000 hours in school, 10,000 hours watching television and 60,000 hours at the computer. They have access to vast amounts of information and the role of the teacher as”the one who knows” is undermined.

Learning, as distinct from schooling, is vital to health, culture and economic well-being, but nineteenth century”schooling” systems are not fit for today’s purposes. We need to address ten key issues;

1. What do learners need to know to flourish in the modern world?
2. What is the role of the modern teacher?
3. What will be the professional competencies of the effective teacher?
4. Where will learning take place?
5. When will learners do their learning?
6. How will they learn?
7. Can learning be personalised so that it meets the needs and circumstances of the learner?
8. What will be the role of technology in shaping learning?
9. What are the best environments in which learning is made as comfortable and enjoyable as possible?
10. Can learning enjoy the higher status it needs within a broader section of the population?

Answering these questions, will involve the development of a holistic approach to learning which will require a new understanding of the learner, content, access systems and the environments in which learning takes place.

These are learning ecologies.

Their development will be the key to successful learning in the future and the benefits which go with it.