Effective School Management

part in determining whether change is successful or unsuccessful. Active
support is almost indispensable. Then there are the teacher inter-relation-
ships: it is difficult to bring about successful change without a lot of human
interaction. Professional discussion in a positive, supportive atmosphere
helps change, whereas retreating to the familiar surroundings of one’s
classroom or office hinders it. Are the teachers relatively confident in their
own ability, yet open to suggestions from colleagues on further improve-
ment? If so, the school has fertile soil for implanting a programme for change.
Last, there are the factors deriving from the external environment. Is the
change against the grain of parental outlooks, or of local or national
government policies? Would future employers of the pupils think well of it?
Would they even understand its significance? What will the chair of
governors think?
If, after all this, it is decided to undertake a change programme, someone
with the necessary authority should formally mandate it and a ‘prime mover’
should be appointed to take the next steps.
DESCRIBING THE FUTURE
The next piece of work to be done is to answer, with some precision, the
question:  ‘What do we want to happen?’ Later, we shall answer a related
question: ‘What will happen if we let matters drift?’
We need to define where we want the organization and its constituent
elements (see Chapter 9) to be, how it should behave or what it would look
like as though viewed from a helicopter or through a wide-angled lens, when
the process of change has been fully completed. The jargon for such a word

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EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT
picture, probably projecting several years ahead, depicting exactly what shall
have been achieved, is ‘the future scenario’. When this vision is shared, it can
become a powerhouse for change. The BCLP vision captured many hearts
and minds.
Ignore, for the moment, detailed questions of feasibility (dealing with
obstacles comes later); otherwise the mind gets entrapped by the constraints
of the present, and creative thought is impaired. As Churchill once said:
‘Don’t argue the difficulties; the difficulties will argue for themselves.’
On the other hand, it pays to think operationally, so as to build a self-
consistent picture that has a ring of reality about it, rather than to fantasize
about a dream world in which unlimited resources are available and the laws
of logic and arithmetic are repealed.
Take everything relevant into the scenario – finance, parents, governors,
unions, local education authority, employers, etc. – and decide how these will
be behaving differently in the desired future. What different demands will
they be making on the school? How will the school ideally respond? Let your
reach exceed your grasp. If there is a suggestion of cloud cuckoo land in your
scenario, never mind: the object of the exercise is to find out what you value
and want, and unless you know this you will not have a clear idea of the
direction and goal of the desired change. To stimulate your thinking, read a
few accounts by well-known forward thinkers of where schools are going,
e.g. Anne Jones’ Leadership for Tomorrow’s Schools (1987) and David Hopkins’
Think Tank Report (2001).
Try to be specific: will each child have a computer in the classroom? What
kinds of INSET will be done? Will the influence of a competence-based
curriculum (Bayliss, 2003a) have transformed classroom teaching? Will
schools have enough young, creative teachers in shortage subjects? What will
the universities be demanding? Don’t forget that it is not just the schools that
are changing: they are trying to track moving targets.
It is invariably necessary to take time off from the daily round in order to
give oneself the opportunity to reflect and to muse about the future; there is
no way in which scenario-building can be slotted into a busy, fragmented
day. Some managers never actually get round to starting a change process
until they have learned to manage their time better, and that may have to be a
preliminary personal task in the total process.
Where there is a close-knit team at the top of an organization (e.g. the head
and his or her deputies), the scenario-building is often most effectively
carried out together off-site, say at a residential weekend event in a relaxed
but work-oriented atmosphere, perhaps with the help of an experienced
outsider to guide the process.
However, Fullan (1993) recommends that vision-building should be more
of a corporate effort, taking into account the personal visions of the teaching
staff, in order to get the organization’s full commitment to implementing the
vision. So, if the management team starts the process, it should plan to
involve others long before an ideal scenario is cut and dried.

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A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO CHANGE
261
Having constructed the ‘ideal’ scenario, without too much additional
work we can also project a second scenario which describes the situation that
we think would probably come about if no steps were taken to change
direction. This is sometimes dubbed the ‘doom’ scenario. Comparing ‘where
we want to be’ with ‘where we shall end up’ if we let things go on as they are,
is a helpful way of pinpointing what has to be done. More is said about what
to include in a scenario in the next section.
PERSONAL APPLICATION
Without filling in all the detail, outline on a sheet of paper the desired scenario for
your school five years hence. Then construct your ‘doo
m’ scenario.
DESCRIBING THE PRESENT
The next stage is to articulate the salient features of the present situation in the
context of the future. BCLP carried out a detailed audit in 1999 to describe the
state of the Barrow community, warts and all. Later they repeated the
comparison of the future and present scenarios to ensure that they had
identified all the gaps. In determining the work to be done, they had to adjust
the objectives of the collective partnership to match what each school wanted
to do.
 Sometimes the order of stages 2 and 3 on p. 255 is reversed, but the future
context is always important. The advantage of building the future scenario
first is to free the imagination from the constraints of the present, then to
allow the present to be viewed against some clear goals. Three questions
should be answered:
(1) Where is the system now?
(2) What work is needed to move it?
(3) Where are we, the initiators, in all this?
The answers provide us with a list of what has to be done.
Davies and Ellison (2003) describe various ways of analysing the present
state strategically, of which SWOT analysis is the most popular (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).