Peter Barnard
Freelance writer, systems thinker and school improver
Former Headteacher
Recent Books include
The Systems Thinking school: redesigning schools from the inside-out (2013)
From School Delusion to Design: mixed-age groups and values-led transformation (2015)
The Heretic's Guide to School Improvement: a systems thinking approach to collaborative prrofessionalism. (To be published shortly).
I have worked intensively with hundreds of schools on transformation and system change with particular reference to Vertical Tutoring.... www.verticaltutoring.org
I have run a successful intrernational training agency specialising in this area and an allotment.
The management model universally applied in schools is past its sell-by date. Its hierarchical structure is limitational, separational and unable to distribute power to enable emergence. It is unable to shift from its original design specification. Depite a century of add-ons, reforms, and fixes there has been no substantive change to the way schools are managed and led. The system is now a wicked problem causing considerable collateral damage to wellbeing, morale and learning.
At the heart of the industrial model design is the same-age leverage point. This original design blueprint no longer serves any organisational purpose. It sets in motion a domino effect that gives rise to complicated (not complex) power structures. This self-structuring mechanism is assuming of both motivational and child psychology, separational in form (eg. pastoral and academic divide, school v. home) and unable to handle the information needed to support teaching and learning. It is also low in the trust and collaboration any valid learning organisation needs. In effect it creates failure demand which in turn increases bureaucracy, hierarchy, delays, and costs.
Eventually, values too become assumed. Importing business ideas (NPM) to this fragile system has disastrous consequences, one likely to lead to a bleak, dystopian future. We are, for example, witnessing mass curriculum convergence rather than the diversity and multiple pathways needed for advanced civic society and a better world.
When a school adopts mixed-age tutoring for twenty minutes a day (NB. This is not a programme but more a gathering), it replaces one leverage point with another. Mixed-age organisation sets in motion the potential for a very different management and leadership structure, one with the capacity to develop into what Beer called a Viable System Model (VSM) and self -organisation. This self-organising model has the potential to design in collaborative professionalism; in fact, it depends upon it as the means of management. In this model, power and leadership are redistributed to the edge.
Schools that have made the change to vertical tutoring (VT or mixed-age tutor groups) report decreases in bullying, enhanced parental engagement, less hierarchy and better communications. In this model all students are mentors and leaders and empathy, respect and tolerance are designed in reducing the need for pro-social programmes (add-ons and fixes.)
This paper shows how to take the VT model to the next collaborative level of emergence and self-organisation and suggests the further research needed to make the journey.
