Change: remembering the moral imperative

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Education commentator Richard Gerver reveals the tears and a flash of inspiration that led him to reject a targets culture as a headteacher in favour of an organic process focused on the needs of children

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Soon after taking on the headship at Grange Primary School in Long Eaton, I remember driving home on a cold, dark January night, when the flash of a speed camera proved the final straw on a long and very tense day.

I had just finished a meeting with a local authority school improvement adviser, who had spent the best part of four hours listing the many issues in the school I had taken on two weeks earlier. I started to cry, in a way I hadn't since I was a kid. All I could see ahead of us was a challenge even more daunting than scaling Everest. The conversation had been centred on targets, data, outcomes and government pressure.

That night proved something of an epiphany. The next morning I woke feeling strangely free of pressure. During the night I had processed that I was thinking the wrong way about the challenge and that although the local authority had its targets and desirable outcomes for Grange, they weren't the priorities for us.

Our job was to focus on the quality of the journey not the outcome; after all, to constantly look at Everest's peak rather than the path ahead would not only be daunting but also counterproductive because if you don't choose the correct path over the next 100 yards, you'll get lost.

A real sense of freedom came, because for the first time in my teaching career I was no longer going to be driven by exam results and measure- able outcomes. I realised my job was to make a difference to the lives of children, staff, parents.

In the public sector we are so often bombarded with the accountability measures thrust upon us to justify our existence that we are pushed away from our primary focus, our moral imperative, the service we offer our primary clients: our children, our patients, the people who rely on us. As a result, our decisions are often made to keep the wrong people happy first. I have seen too many schools stifled by a fear of failure; not failure for the children but failure of data.

On arriving at school I changed the agenda for our staff meeting, there would be one item: what do we want our children to look like, as human beings, when they leave us?

The challenge now was to change a culture, to build a long-term strategy centred on our children and their futures. Real development, sustained progress could only be achieved if we empowered the whole community, starting with the staff. We began a process I call distillation:
• The generation of abstract questions, for example, how do we make our school as popular as Disneyland?
• Responses that lead to ideas that can be tried and evaluated; action research based on the abstract questions
• The development of a culture that allowed honest conversations, sharing of experiences based on the ideas generated, good and bad; honest, constructive evaluation set against the impact on our primary clients, our children
• From the above process the generation of whole-school strategies that would have meaningful impact on the community.

Very quickly the passion and enthusiasm of the staff returned and there was a tangible 'buzz' that led to a flood of ideas. The school was able to make progress very quickly, changing the entire ethos and offer. Within months we had built a TV studio, radio station, museum, café and shops, all run by the students. Within a couple of years we had redesigned our entire curriculum and created a model that has since been used around the world as an exemplar for change. Most importantly in these challenging times, our academic outcomes were transformed with the school catapulted into the top 20 per cent of schools nationally.

Being caught by a speed camera produced a flash of inspiration that led to a whole new perspective and the following key learning points:

Real change takes time and should not be seen to have an end point. Any organisation that is going to thrive in an exponentially developing world must shift the paradigm from one which sees change as periodic and something that once 'done' can be forgotten about to the genuinely organic, constantly evolving.

Targets must not drive our thinking, or we will only ever effect short-term gain and never real development.

True evolution with real impact can only occur through a process that begins with real communication which leads to empowerment. We must invest in finding the passion and moral imperative of our teams.

We must ensure that our primary decisions are always based on our primary customers. The first two questions asked by a company inspiring customer loyalty are: What do we stand for in the eyes of our customers? What behaviour do we exhibit every minute of every day to support what we stand for?