Effective School Management

Figure 9.2
Aims of a comprehensive school

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ORGANIZATIONS
147
PERSONAL APPLICATION
List the stakeholders in your school. What aims does each stakeholder have for the
school? Is there any conflict, actual or potential? Is there an ‘umbrella’ statement of
purpose that subsumes all these aims? Do all the stakeholders subscribe to this?
How well are these aims articulated and used in directing the affairs of the school?
What more can you do to generate a sense of common purpose and commitment
to agreed aims or ends?
ENVIRONMENT
Much criticism is levelled at schools for being out of touch with the world
outside them. Some of it may be justified in the sense that few teachers have
had an opportunity of working anywhere other than in an educational
establishment: those who have held a responsible post in industry or in the
public service outside education develop a useful frame of reference by which
to judge what goes on in school.
Those who manage organizations should remember that they are part of a
bigger system; they are interdependent with the rest of society, which they
serve as society serves them. To ensure that they keep track of what is going
on around them, successful organization managers make a point of having a
wide circle of contacts and of staying interested in developments outside
their immediate sphere. Blinkered managers are unlikely to pick up from the
flow of events what may hit them tomorrow. They fail to anticipate what new
demands may be made on them, and are caught unprepared. Managers have
to take into account prevailing currents of opinion, to track the changing
stance of the DfES, for example, and to aim not at where the environment is
now, but at where it will be when they are able to respond. It is not easy to
distinguish a fundamental shift from an ephemeral straying off course; but
we have to try.
One way of picturing an organization such as a school in the context of its
environment is shown in Figure 9.3. Rather like a living organism, it pursues
its central purpose, denoted by the big arrow, within an environment with
which it makes continuous transactions. It takes in various inputs (in the case
of organisms, food and energy; for schools, younger pupils, funds, learning
materials, etc.) and it gives out various outputs – older, educated pupils,
service to the community, a livelihood for teachers and their families, etc. The
organism or organization is designed to achieve the efficient transformation
of all the inputs into the desired outputs –  ‘efficient’ signifying that the
transformation takes place with the minimum expenditure of internal energy
(using an electrical metaphor, the battery has low internal resistance).
Such a model does not always appeal to schools as it suggests that they are
a kind of sausage machine. No model tells the whole story, yet there is a sense
in which schools exist to ‘school’ or socialize children and to equip them as
future mature members of society.
The model also depicts the other important properties of organizations:

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148
EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT
the existence of a basic aim to provide a sense of purpose and direction, and
the effect of the interactions with the environment which arise from pursuing
this aim. The arrows on the right of Figure 9.3 show that the turbulent
environment may tend to thwart the fulfilment of the school’s central
purpose; the double-headed arrow in the middle indicates that there is some
feedback mechanism to enable the organization to know how well it is faring
in pursuit of its aims, so that the helm can be set accordingly.
Many long-serving heads we have talked to have remarked how much
over the past two or three decades the nature of their jobs has changed to one
of ‘boundary management’ (Chapter 14): that is, they spend much more of
their time managing transactions between their school and its environment.
They are being forced to keep a weather eye on what is happening around
them, so that they can successfully pilot their schools through the ruffled
waters that lie ahead. Garratt (1987) depicts the dual role of top people in
organizations in a double-loop model (Figure 9.4, adapted) and enjoins them
to spend more time ‘looking upwards and outwards’, delegating more of the
operational management to subordinates. This is a key part of organization