Effective School Management

Environment
The organization is seen as an open system embedded in a complex
environment with which it constantly interacts. The changing demands of
the environment are regularly tracked, and an appropriate response made. A
school would have its eyes and ears open, alertly sensing what was going on
in the community and in the corridors of power. In turn, the environment
would inject a sense of reality and proportion into what might otherwise be a
claustrophobic system.

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EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT
Balance
All these factors are interdependent, and have to be balanced. For example,
Everard was involved with a major change initiative in ICI, the ‘Staff
Development Programme’ (Pettigrew, 1985). Its objectives, which are still as
relevant as ever in schools today, were
(1) in the short term, the achievement of an exceptional and demonstrable
improvement in organizational effectiveness; and
(2) in the longer term, the development of an environment in which major
improvements occur naturally and continuously, without being enforced
or imposed.
In conducting the programme it was essential to link the benefits to the
organization in terms of improved effectiveness with benefits to the individual
in terms of personal and professional development.
In educational settings, Fullan (1982, pp. 97 and 112) makes the same
point, applauding leaders who not only plan the organization development
associated with the change but also simultaneously foster staff or pro-
fessional development. He argues that effective educational change cannot
occur without improvements to the teachers’ working life. Change must not
simply aggravate teachers’ problems.
The second ICI objective above is a reminder that the best change agents
are catalysts: they do themselves out of a job by embedding their skills into
the social system, so that it has an in-built capacity for continuous self-
improvement.