Professor David Hawker
Professor of Education of The College of Teachers; educational consultant

Professor David Hawker writes of the progress made in the UK and internationally in achieving transformational change in education systems so that every child can reach their highest potential. The article is adapted from a keynote lecture given to the annual international ‘Trends in Education’ conference in Moscow, February 2011.

Anyone who has worked at the system level in education knows that achieving transformational change is far from straightforward. There are so many interrelated factors in play that it would be foolish to think in terms of a single prescription for making systems improve. As someone who has spent the best part of the last 20 years managing large education systems at local and national level in the UK, I have struggled repeatedly with the complexities and contradictions inherent in the task of getting a system which is both equitable and high achieving, and in which every child and every learner is able to reach their highest potential. However, at the same time I have seen real progress, both in the UK and internationally, in achieving such transformational change, and in recent years the principles underlying it have been increasingly borne out by research evidence.

For me, there are three key starting points to any consideration of system transformation in education.

The first is to place education in the wider context of public service reform, as an essential element in fostering values of openness and democracy. Across the world there is a lively debate about the way public services operate, and the way they need to develop in order to reflect and promote these values. This is particularly topical in the UK at the moment as the Localism Bill makes its way onto the Statute Book.

I would identify five key aims against which the success of any public service reform process can be measured. First and foremost, public service reform should achieve better outcomes for citizens, in heath, education, economic prosperity, social wellbeing and so on. Second, it should engage citizens more actively and effectively in public life in their own communities. Third, it should achieve better value for money in the services provided to the public, measured in terms of both effectiveness (quality and Impact), and efficiency (cost and productivity). Fourth, it should build trust between government, enterprise and civil society. And fifth, it should foster transparency in the administration of public affairs.

These five important aims provide us with a useful health check to help us determine whether the work we are doing in the education sector is going in the right direction or not. The UK Coalition Government has embarked on the largest scale reorganisation of the school sector in England since the Second World War, by removing local authorities from the management and governance of schools, and replacing them with chains of academies, free-floating academies and free schools. How will these reforms measure up to the aims set out above? Will they, for example, effectively deliver both better democratic engagement and better outcomes for all children, including the disadvantaged? Will they make for greater transparency and cost effectiveness, and better trust between government, enterprise and civil society? The rhetoric from Government says they will, but we will have to wait a little while before we are able to assess the evidence.

The second starting point for system transformation is to ask ourselves the question: What is a good school? A few years ago I was commissioned by the World Bank to produce recommendations for a set of system-wide quality indicators for Russian education, building on the best practice internationally. The model which emerged from this project identified eight dimensions to a good school:

• Good financial management, including per capita and needs driven funding
• Good governance and community links
• Good leadership and management
• Good teaching
• Good student outcomes
• A good curriculum, appropriate to the ages and needs of the students
• A good ethos, where learning, social responsibility and personal development are valued
• A good environment, where best use is made of physical facilities and resources

Of course, there are a number of school effectiveness models in circulation, many of which form the basis of inspection and evaluation systems across the world. The international literature on school improvement is now rich in examples and advice on all these matters, so I won’t dwell on them here. The point, however, is that any strategies for improving the whole system depend ultimately on improving the quality of the individual schools which are at the heart of it. The question for the present article is how the wider system can do this most effectively.

My third starting point is to make a comment about international performance measures. We rightly use international surveys like PISA(1), TIMSS(2) and PIRLS(3) to measure the success of one national system against another, but this needs to come with a health warning. Some of the studies produce results which seem to be contradictory, often changing the rank order significantly. For example, the UK has fallen in the international league table in PISA, but has maintained its high ranking in TIMSS. The Russian Federation performs poorly in PISA, but does well in TIMSS, and is top of the international league table in PIRLS. Of course, these tests are taken at different ages, they test rather different attributes, and they are often administered under different conditions. So we need to look beyond the headline results and examine the detailed analyses if we want a more accurate view. We also need to recognise that, no matter how thorough an individual survey is, the results can only ever give part of the picture about what is actually going on in the system. It is for managers and policy makers in the system to use the data intelligently to work out the implications of the various international comparisons for their own system, and to beware of jumping to hasty conclusions. I speak as someone who has been both at the ‘design end’ (as a member of the expert technical panel for OECD responsible for evaluating the bids to run the PISA programme for its first three cycles), and also at the ‘consumer end’, as Director General for Education in Wales, working with my Minister to use the results as a lever to secure improvement in our own national system.

One of the messages to come out clearly in the analysis of international surveys is that there is a rather weak association between quality and level of investment. As the table below shows, the highest spending countries in the PISA 2006 survey did not perform nearly as well as some of the lower spending countries(4).

This is a rather crude analysis, because it says nothing about how the money is actually spent in those countries. However the basic message, that money alone is not the answer, is clear. In order to identify the kinds of strategies which will achieve transformational change in educational systems, we need to look more deeply.

Three Transformational Themes

From my own reading of the international research evidence, and from my own experience in the UK, I would identify three big themes which I believe have a fundamental part to play in any system transformation. These are:
the development of national standards, public accountability and consistent measures of performance, the recognition that education is part of a wider system, concerned with children’s overall wellbeing and development, and
the impact of national, local and school leaders taking forward a structured programme of system improvement.

Theme 1: Standards and Public accountability

In the UK, education used to be regarded as a kind of ‘secret garden’ where only the professionals in the system knew and had the expertise to understand what was going on. This attitude was contrary to all the principles of open society I have mentioned above. But the UK wasn’t alone, and neither was the education sector. In fact there are still areas of our public life which, even today, are closed to public scrutiny. This all began to change in the education system with Kenneth Baker’s Education Reform Act of 1988, which for the first time introduced a national curriculum, a national school testing system, and devolved school management. Together with the introduction of a reformed school inspection system in the 1992 Education Act, this led to dramatically increased accountability and transparency through the whole of the English school system.

Other countries have moved in a similar direction, and indeed a recent analysis by McKinsey(5) points to the establishment of public accountability measures as a key requirement in getting poorly performing education systems to improve. One of the most significant developments in Russia, for example, was the introduction of the single national examination for students wishing to enter university, which is also now used as a way of measuring the success of individual schools. Most developed systems regularly review their systems of accountability to check that they are still delivering the kind of performance information that the public needs, and make changes to those systems as necessary.

In view of the significance of these systems to the overall health of education, it is not surprising that the UK coalition government has decided to review all three systems – curriculum, testing and inspection – at the present time. The key thing is that these systems should concentrate on those elements which society as a whole agrees are important for success, and that they should provide the kind of information to managers, policy makers and the public which will allow them to take the appropriate actions to improve the system.

The history of public accountability is, however, littered with examples of where specific accountability measures have provided perverse incentives to managers. In the UK, the introduction of national tests for 11 year olds meant that teachers concentrated (rightly) on improving their pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills, but also that they tended (wrongly) to neglect wider aspects of the school curriculum. In Russia, the introduction of the single national exam has reduced corrupt practices in university entrance processes, but there has been an undesirable growth of paid-for private tutoring for the exam, often replacing work which should be carried out in school.

It is very difficult to avoid such problems altogether, because any system of accountability will create its own incentives, and these will rarely fully reflect the noble aims of the original policy makers. So it is important for policy makers to be prepared to make adjustments (and sometimes wholesale changes) to the system as they go along. There have been several reviews of the accountability system in England since it was first introduced, and there are regular lively debates about the subject. I see this as a good thing – provided policy makers and managers in the system are prepared to have this debate openly, they are likely to find answers to the question of how to improve it.
I vividly remember being at the centre of some of these debates in England in the 1990s, when I was Assistant Chief Executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Informally, we operated according to four key principles:

• The tests should be based on agreed curriculum standards
• The tests should provide a fair and consistent measure of pupils’ achievement, regardless of institution
• They should assess what is important for children’s future success as citizens, and should provide good predictors of that success
• They should be free from corruption, and thus able to be used for monitoring progress, selecting for future study, reporting on the performance of schools, reporting on the performance of local and national education systems, and other legitimate public uses.

The system which we put into place in the mid-1990s based on these principles has remained largely in place ever since, although there have inevitably been numerous modifications along the way. It facilitated an ongoing public debate about educational performance which has become increasingly sophisticated over the years, and has led to many of the strategies for improvement which successive governments have put into place. Other countries have taken a similar approach. We have gone from a virtual absence of system-wide performance data in the early 1990s to a system which is now extremely data-rich. There are still challenges in making the performance information genuinely meaningful and transparent, but we cannot any longer say that education is a secret garden.

In policy terms, the previous UK government adopted just two overarching goals: to raise the educational achievement of all children and young people, and to narrow the gap in educational achievement between children from low income and disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers. There are two significant points to note in this. First, government policy had moved from a basically regulatory approach (ie setting the standards, regulating the system) to a much more active approach (ie intervening in the system directly to secure the improvements needed). Second, one of the two overarching goals – to narrow the gap in outcomes – was a direct result of analysing the data over a number of years, and realising that this achievement gap was getting wider.

So the presence of a standards and accountability system has opened the door to a more informed and focussed consideration of how the system is actually performing at the different levels. It has also brought about a fundamental shift in the approach of government policy towards a more active concern about the performance of the system, and a new emphasis on developing and funding programmes which are directly aimed at securing performance improvement, and are informed by an increasingly sophisticated analysis of the data.

Theme 2: Education as part of a wider system

It is well known that children’s educational outcomes are affected by their wider wellbeing. The ‘Every Child Matters’ reforms in England, starting in 2003, explicitly recognised this fact and translated it into public policy(6). As Director of Education for Brighton and Hove at the time, I was privileged to be at the forefront of this policy, and became one of the first of the new generation of directors of children’s services, charged with bringing services together across education, healthcare, family support, social care, youth work and childcare. The ‘Every Child Matters’ policy set out five key aims for children and young people:

Our fundamental policy shift was to recognise that we needed to stop thinking in terms of individual services in isolation, but to think of the system as a whole, in terms of how it impacted on the child. This was particularly important for the more vulnerable children, who tended to have dealings with several separate agencies. Getting these agencies to work together, under a coherent local leadership, was the most important challenge we faced, but it was also where we saw the most to gain. Historically, both at government level and locally, these services have tended to work in isolation from each other, and often in ignorance of each other’s activities, so that the experience of individual children and their families could be quite fragmented and unsatisfactory. It was inefficient in terms of the use of public resources, and not at all helpful to the schools which needed to be in contact with other local agencies. Most crucially, the incoherence of the way we managed our services for children resulted in worse outcomes for them – children dropping out of school, children not having their emotional and psychological needs met, children failing to obtain good results because of a lack of parental support, and so on. We realised that we needed to address these fundamental issues at both national and local level if we were going to enable all our children to succeed.

Accordingly, we set about redesigning our services, including the way schools interact with other agencies.

In the most successful local authority areas this work resulted in an integrated, whole system approach to the management of all public services relating to children and their families (see diagram below).

In the case of Brighton and Hove, we selected three key indicators by which we could measure the immediate success of the reforms. These were

(i) the number of children who needed to be taken into public care because of family breakdown or abuse,
(ii) the number of children excluded from school because of behavioural problems, and
(iii) the number of young people aged 16-19 not in education, employment or training. In each case, the numbers improved by 10% in our first year of operation as a fully integrated system.

As yet, international research evidence concerning integrated systems is quite thin, as they are a relatively new phenomenon. There are a few well known examples, such as the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, which combine whole system reform with school improvement, and these are starting to generate some impressive results. And as many of the more forward thinking systems internationally are now starting to look at the integration of services in this way, we should soon start to see the emergence of a new generation of performance measures to capture their progress.

In the UK, the ‘Every Child Matters’ reforms had started to place the English system at the forefront of world developments in terms of integrated services. However, following the change of government in 2010, some of the local arrangements for integrated children’s services which had been established under that regime have begun to show signs of decay. Partly this is a consequence of financial constraints, where the resources needed to sustain a fully integrated approach are becoming increasingly stretched, and partly it is because of the deliberate reduction of the local authority’s role in the school sector which I have touched on above. There has been a reduction in funding for the ‘Extended Schools’ programme which supported many of the services which schools  provided as part of local integrated systems.  Nevertheless, many schools have decided to keep these services going, because of the benefits they bring for the children. One of the ongoing challenges for researchers will be to gather the evidence of impact of the integration of services from within the English system, and to link this to developments elsewhere, for the benefit of both present and future policy makers.

Theme 3: The impact of leadership on system improvement

Ultimately, the overall quality of an education system depends largely on the quality of its leaders, and in particular, what its leaders do. The mere fact of having good quality performance data does not guarantee that it will be used wisely. Leaders in the system need to be reflective, and be able to see the full picture, in order to make the right decisions about taking the system forwards. It is essential that researchers and managers help politicians at both national and local level to gain a deep understanding of the performance of the system, so that they can make wise policy decisions.

In the UK, the three factors which account for the greatest variance in terms of students’ educational outcomes are: (i) home background, (ii) quality of teaching in the classroom and (iii) quality of leadership in the school. In different countries the relative strength of these three factors varies, with Pacific Rim and Scandinavian countries, for example, being typically less polarised than the UK in terms of socially-driven differences, and some systems having lower within school variance than between school variance. The point, however, is that strategies for improving the system need to be based securely on an intelligent appreciation of the story behind the data.

In England, the analysis has led to policies which target these three factors very specifically:

A deliberate attempt to overcome the educational disadvantages faced by some children because of their home background by directing funding at them (through the newly introduced ‘pupil premium’); and a variety of ‘catch up’ programmes.

A drive to improve teachers’ classroom skills by attracting more able graduates into the teaching profession, moving to more school-based models of training, and reforming the system of teacher regulation.

Greater support for leadership development, including appointing head teachers of outstanding schools as national and local leaders of education, responsible for helping other schools to improve.

Two graphs illustrate the power of these factors. One (see above) is drawn from a longitudinal study in the US, where pupils’ progress was measured against the quality of their classroom teacher(7):

The second (see below) is a study of the impact of school leadership activities on student outcomes in England(8):

Both graphs illustrate the importance of concentrating on the quality of teaching in the classroom, and the importance of school leaders making it their highest priority.

Ultimately, our goal is for every young person to achieve their highest potential. At system level, in order to do so, leaders need to focus most strongly on the drivers which will enable this to happen. The starting point is to be realistic about where the system is, and not simply copy another more successful system, because this might not be appropriate for you. Although improvement strategies are universal, they need to be applied in a way which makes sense in the specific national context.

From their study of a number of national and regional education systems around the world, McKinsey have mapped out a so-called ‘improvement journey’ which allows all systems to be plotted on a continuum from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. Each stage of the improvement journey is characterised by specific types of intervention, and six some common interventions are identified which apply to all stages in the journey(9) (see diagram above).

Their study identified a number of systems which are all improving, as measured by PISA scores, but which are all at different stages on the journey (see diagram below).

They then analysed in more detail what were the common features of the improvement work at different stages of the journey (see diagrams on next page).

The key message is that successful leaders will recognise where their system is in terms of its current performance, and will adopt improvement strategies which are appropriate for it.

Conclusion

This article has examined three ‘system improvement themes’, based on English experience. 

Opening the system up to public scrutiny, introducing national testing and accountability measures based on children’s achievement, establishing an inspection framework for all types of educational institution (and also for local authorities) using well focussed quality criteria, was an essential first step for the English system.  Within a few years the system moved from being lacking data poor to data rich, and the detailed analyses which arose from this became the basis for much more sharply focussed, and often government led, improvement strategies.  Exposed to the often merciless glare of public scrutiny, schools inevitably concentrated on improving their results.  Despite the ongoing controversies, few would deny that most schools, and most teachers, are now doing a more professional job and getting better results than before the system opened up in this way. 

But then, analysis of the data revealed that the achievement gaps were getting wider, usually associated with socio-economic disadvantage of some kind.  This in turn led to a recognition that a more integrated system would help all children to achieve better, by co-ordinating the efforts around their social, emotional, psychological and leisure needs, as well as their formal learning.  The Every Child Matters reforms of the past seven years represented a massive and courageous, response to this understanding. Local authorities were quick to embrace the concept of integrated services, and many schools responded by deepening their understanding of children’s needs, and by developing  more effective approaches to meeting them, as part of a wider, multi-agency system.  Internationally, a growing number of systems are now seeking to combine educational with social interventions, but the metrics for assessing the success of these systems on a comparative basis are not yet fully developed.

Finally, the third transformational theme is that of teaching quality and leadership within schools, a subject which formed the subject of the Coalition Government’s first Education White Paper, ‘The Importance of Teaching’, in December 2010.  Evidence from across the world shows that the quality of teaching in the classroom, and the quality of leadership at school and system level, are two of the most important factors in getting an educational system to improve.  So governments are starting to focus on teacher recruitment, training, pay, accountability, ongoing professional development, leadership development and networking of expertise, because they recognise that the system as a whole can only be transformed if the individual elements in it – in this case schools – are themselves transformed, and that the best way to encourage this is to foster the leadership potential already within the system. 

I doubt that anyone would disagree.

Professor David Hawker was Director General for Children, Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills for the Welsh Assembly Government from 2008 to 2010, and Director General for Arms Length Bodies reform in the Department for Education from 2010 to 2011. After an early career as a teacher, exams administrator and local authority adviser, he spent seven years with QCA and its predecessors in charge of the national school testing system, before moving in 1999 to Brighton & Hove as Director of Education, and subsequently Director of Children’s Services. He was appointed Deputy Chief Executive of the City of Westminster in 2007, moving to Wales the following year. He has been a professor of the College of Teachers since 2007, and now runs his own educational consultancy business.

References
1 Programme for International Student Assessment, OECD.
2 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, IEA.
3 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, IEA.
4 OECD, Education at a glance, 2007.
5 How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better, McKinsey, 2010.
6 Every Child Matters, Department for Education and Skills, 2003.
7 Sanders, W. & Rivers, J. Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement, University of Tennessee, 1996.
8 Robinson, V. The impact of leadership on student outcomes: Making sense of the evidence, Australian Council for Educational Research, 2008.
9 Ibid.