Effective School Management

Structure
The structure is determined by work requirements, not by authority, power
or conformity. Form follows function. Different departments may be differently
organized, according to the nature of their work. Procedures may not be
standardized: people can do things their way if it works. Thus, in a school,
some learning would not be subject to the norm of a 45-minute period. Power
to do things is dispersed to where it is needed; for instance, the power to get
a defective pottery kiln repaired would reside in the department, rather than
be invested in a deputy head.
Process
Decisions are made near to where the requisite information is, rather than
referred up the hierarchy. Authority is delegated accordingly, as has happened
in LMS. Communications are frank, open and relatively undistorted. Ideas
are considered on their intrinsic merits, rather than according to their source
in the hierarchy. Conflict and clash of ideas (not personalities) are encouraged,
not suppressed or avoided, and everyone manages conflict constructively,
using problem-solving methods. Collaboration is rewarded, where it is in the
organization’s best interests. Competition is minimized, but when it occurs it
is because people are vying with one another to contribute to the organization’s
success.
People
Each individual’s identity, integrity and freedom are respected, and work is
organized as far as possible to this end. Attention is paid to intrinsic rewards.
Everyone’s work is valued (e.g. including that of the non-teaching staff in a
school). People’s interdependence is stressed. Individuals evaluate their
performance against benchmarks, comparing themselves to others; they
review one another’s work, and celebrate achievement.
As Peters and Waterman report (1995, p. 277): ‘The excellent companies
have a deeply ingrained philosophy that says, in effect, “respect the
individual”, “make people winners”, “let them stand out”, “treat people as
adults”.’ It is the same with BCLP, which is driven by similar values. ‘Making
people winners’ can hardly be better illustrated than by the design of a

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ANTECEDENTS OF SUCCESSFUL CHANGE
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Barrow summer workshop for gifted and talented children: the prevailing
‘wisdom’ is that only 5–10 per cent of the overall school population fall in this
category. BCLP, however, believes that all children have gifts and talents and
that the task of schools is to discover, for each child, in what respect (Hymer
and Michel, 2002). Therefore, selection for the summer workshop is random.
This is splendid creative thinking ‘outside the box’. The caption of a cartoon
of a boy talking to a head says it all: ‘I can suck up pudding through my nose
and blow it out of the corners of my eyes, and you still won’t put me in the
gifted class’!
Central direction coexists with individual autonomy:
Autonomy is a product of discipline. The discipline (a few shared values)
provides the framework. It gives people confidence to experiment, for instance,
stemming from stable expectations about what really counts. Thus a set of
shared values and rules about discipline, details and execution can provide the
framework in which practical autonomy takes place routinely.
 (Peters and Waterman, 1995, p. 322)
Goldsmith and Clutterbuck (1984) also identify the balance between autonomy
and control as crucial. Without this discipline, teachers’ autonomy in the
classroom, or ‘academic freedom’, soon degenerates into licence. Lavelle (1984,
p. 161) also places autonomy in context: quoting Stenhouse: ‘Teacher autonomy
is seen as the ethical base of professionalism and a cornerstone of tradition’,
he points out that this can lead to gross disjunctions of practice unless that
autonomy is set within the framework of the school and its value system.
Mant (1983) makes a similar point.
Realism
People deal with things as they are, with a minimum of ‘game playing’. An
‘action research’ mode of management predominates: i.e. the organization
has in-built feedback mechanisms to tell it how it is doing. Then it uses this
valid and factual information about how things are in order to plan
improvements. There is widespread awareness of the ‘health’ of the
organization and its parts, just as the human body knows when it feels well
or poorly.