Reconsidering the Educational Context
The administrators, teachers and owners
of educational institutes are faced with the challenge of operating in a
rapidly changing world. In this world the globalization of economic systems,
technological advance and the increased expectations that society has of its
education system have replaced past certainties with new and uncertain
frameworks. Dynamic change has become the order of the day. How do actors of
education meet this challenge and develop approaches in order to operate
successfully in this new environment? I would suggest that faced with the
increasing complexities of the modern world, the educators need to understand
some key perspectives, each of which is itself operating at different levels,
namely that of the wider global environment, that of the organization and that
of the individual. The first perspective to understand is the changing nature
of the wider society in which educational institutes are set. This involves not
only understanding the globalization of economic, societal and technological
trends and how they manifest themselves today but also involves assessing how
they are likely to impact on schools in the future. An interesting combination
of forces: the reengineering movement (called business process reengineering)
from the business world and the reform and restructuring movement in education;
is providing a useful framework to rethink radically the context in which we
work.
A child, for instance, started school
at the age of five in the year 2000 has a long educational journey to the
completion of a university or a professional education and will probably not
start work until the year 2010 or later, on completing matriculation or O’
Level at least. That same child will be in the Educated Labor Force (ELF) in
the year 2016 and beyond. What is more, that child could be working with
technologies that have not yet been invented in an organization that has yet to
be created. While it is necessary that those with strategic responsibilities in
schools must have the skills to operate in today’s educational environment, it
is also very important that they develop the educational leaderships
capacity to challenge today’s orthodoxy and to envision what the future
educational and societal framework will be. It is one of the roles of leaders
of educational organizations to interpret and make sense of future realities
for members of their organizations. We are very good at looking backwards but
not so effective at looking forward to the same extent.
Certainly, concepts of (a) focusing on
the customer, (b) setting benchmarks, (c) defining fitness for purpose and (d)
aiming for continuous improvement are valuable ways of thinking in establishing
effective educational practices. These four ideas can be seen to be working
themselves through certain parts of the education system. There is now a
greater focus on the customer, for example by listening and taking into account
the views of parents and children, both in the formal mechanisms of school
choice and in the approaches to management within the school. Setting up
benchmarks and defining fitness for purpose took a significant step forward
during the first half of the 1990s. The emergence, in many countries, of
educational managers, curriculum, examination, teaching-learning frameworks has
put a floor under standards by providing benchmarks against which to assess
progress. As well as this control and accountability culture, it is also
evident that there has been the development of an
‘improvement culture’.
What is probably needed is a much more
radical and fundamental rethink of the nature of society, education and the
role of the school. One of the ways of achieving this fundamental rethinking is
to adopt concepts from the business world, especially those from the
reengineering movement. Reengineering, in fact, involves the fundamental
rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic
improvement in critical contemporary measures of performance. Why should this
be necessary for us? Cannot successful organizations carry on as before and
continue to be successful? Now, three forces are driving companies into a new
and unfamiliar operational context, education is no exception. These forces are
customers, competition, and change (3Cs).
In the recent past, customers were glad
to receive any product but this situation has now changed to one of a quality
product approach aimed at individual customers. The factors those can be seen
to have emerged during the 1980s and 1990s in developed economies: Customers
have experienced quality and good service and expect more and better quality in
the future. They are better informed, having more data on which to make their
decisions, know their legal rights in cases of dispute, customers also dictate
what they want, when they want it and how they want to pay for it, and their
want to be seen as individuals and to receive a customized product, and are
aware that there is a plentiful supply and that they can pick and choose.
The parallel trends in the education
sector are almost identical. The study programs (science, humanities, general
group, etc), curriculum delivery, testing and measurement frameworks
(examination system) are providing benchmarks to help parents to measure the
quality of education received and the achievement made by their children. The
culture in which the school knew best and parents were kept at arm’s lengthy has been replaced by a move to a more equal
home/school relationship. Selection of school through open enrollment
legislation has, in several countries, increased choice and given more power to
the students, prospective employers and parents as customer of education.
However, a fundamental problem has emerged in that, while customers expect and
receive 100 per cent quality when they buy consumer goods, there is less
satisfaction with the products and services from the public sector, including
the education service. Government inspection reports, if any, have never
highlighted the percent of satisfactory levels of lessons delivered at key
stage 3 through post-graduation. This divergence between increasing quality
standards in the material goods markets, where consumers expect high quality
all the time, and the public sector, where serious quality problems remain,
produces comparisons which cause friction between the consumers and producers
of education services.
The increasing importance of the
customer is evident in markets where there is increasing competition. The
private sector has brought competitive forces into play within the education
sector. What is happening in the global goods and services market in terms of
competition? Currently, there are competitive pressures as producing a
situation where good performers drive out the inferior, because the lowest
price, the highest quality, the best service available from any one of them
soon becomes the standard for all competitors. Adequate is no longer good
enough. If a company can’t stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best in a competitive category, it soon has no place
to stand at all. Does this apply to education? Is education not somehow
different from the business world? While it may be different, education is not
isolated from the pressures and trends that are making themselves increasingly
evident. Education does not play in a vacuum, it
encounters local, national and global forces. Global competition has a profound
impact on the future of our children. Unless they develop high quality
thinking, problem-solving and technological skills to compete with the best in
the world, they will be competing for the low wage/low skill jobs. Also
competition among existing suppliers of education (schools, universities),
while in itself increasing, is being joined by competition from non-traditional
sources including technology. Access to high quality education via satellite
and Internet sources may challenge our traditional perception of how
individuals obtain education; schools may no longer be the prime source. The
changes that schools are having to make by adopting
marketing strategies to respond to competition. While a competitive environment
forces organizations to be able to change in response to changes in that
environment, it is also necessary to understand the nature of change itself.
Constant change, and increasingly rapid
change, can be seen to be the norm. Indeed we may be undergoing a very
fundamental change. Every few hundred years in history there occurs a sharp
transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself, its
worldview, its basic values; its social and political structures. We are
currently living through such a transformation. Knowledge is fast becoming the
sole factor of production, sidelining both capital and labor. For those of us
employed in the knowledge industry the implications are profound. Change has
become pervasive, persistent and normal. There is an accelerating rate of
technological advance. The business cycle and the economic cycle are no longer
predictable. Thus, the nature of work, the economy and employment in the future
are also uncertain. And all products have shorter life-cycle, reducing from
years to months. One of the big myths in education is that the changes
initiated in the 1980s have worked their way through the system and that we are
now in an unstable pattern for the next few years. Until now, we are facing 60%
illiterates, and less that 3% expenditures on
education and many more depressing facts. It would seem that the expectations
of customers, the nature of competition and the ongoing rate of change itself
are unlikely to leave education in a backwater. Education should be at the
forefront of society’s attempts to come to terms with this new reality. It is
difficult to imagine that education, and the nature of schooling, will not
itself have to change radically.
The verb ‘to reengineer’ takes as its
object a business process and nothing else. We reengineer how work is done, how
outputs are created from inputs. We cannot and do not reengineer organizational
unites. Reengineering would involve focusing on core processes such as the
coherence and progression of the learning processes experienced by students and
how they can be improved. This links to the well-known strategic management
maxim that ‘structure follows strategy’. In reengineering it is necessary to
focus on processes not on structures. Typically a process crosses a number of
organizational boundaries. The
primary–secondary–highersecondary–graduation–postgraduation transfer stages
present an interesting example. The weak linkages among these tiers are unable
to give clear line of action to our students.
Other key concepts involve the radical
redesign to achieve dramatic improvements. ‘Radical’ is defined as going to the
‘root of things’ and is a zero-based approach to find and treat causes of
organization ineffectiveness and not merely to treat the symptoms. ‘Redesign’
is where the old is thrown away and individuals start with the proverbial
‘clean slate’. In education, where marginal increases in funding are not going
to make significant differences to learning outputs, it is the fundamental
redesign of learning that will make the difference. Finally reengineering
involves making things dramatically better and not an incremental five per cent
better. I should like to interpret the definition of reengineering to focus on
two major concepts. One is that we focus on engineering processes in education
and the second is that we give equal importance to reengineering ‘mind-sets’ so
that the way in which individuals think about a situation and can achieve a
significant paradigm shift in their thinking is seen as a prime achievement as
well as the redesign of a core school process. Teaching is not a loose activity, it is considered a programmed and structured
activity for human engineering. In this context it is clear that, instead of
thinking about how we can and get the most out of existing structures and
resources, what is needed is breakthrough thinking. We have all been told many
times: ‘I should like to do that but we don’t have the resources.’ We wait for
a magic wand, in order to get more resources, and will do nothing until that
happens or s/he is incapable of rethinking who to tackle a particular
challenge. One reality of public finance in
We should be
ignoring ‘what is’ and concentrating on the ‘what should be’ framework for
analysis. It could be considered as planning backwards; what are the
outcomes which we want? We need to focus on what we must do as a school before
we come to worry about how to do it. Then we have to think differently about
how to do it. We cannot significantly improve the quality of our educational
institutions by simply working harder. We have to work smarter not harder, and
the smarter course involves not slicker ways of doing the same things but
fundamentally different ways of doing those things. A useful saying to remember
is that ‘sacred cows make the best burgers’. All school organizations,
mostly have things that they believe have to be done in certain ways or cannot
be changed and it is by fundamentally rethinking those core factors that we are
likely to achieve breakthrough thinking. It is clear why this should be
necessary. There has been a vast improvement in the reliability and quality of
consumer goods over the last twenty years, spearheaded by Japanese
manufacturers. We now expect new cars to be perfect and not to have to return
them for initial faults to be corrected. Yet in education, for a considerable
period of time, reports on education by Public Service Commissions (Provincial
/ Federal) have indicated a significant proportion of unsatisfactory lessons.
We need a dramatic improvement in educational standards to achieve quality in
present situations, let alone the standards which we will need to achieve in
order to meet the educational demands of the current millennium. Thus,
performance improvements to meet the challenge of the future will have to be
dramatic. The precise nature of such improvements in the school will depend in
part on whether it is going through a period of success or not. Major
improvement is critical in both cases but it is more difficult to demonstrate
when the school is perceived to be successful.
Considerable interest is being shown in
the reengineering and reinventing of education by leading thinkers and authors
in different countries. What fundamental trends can be seen as emerging across
these countries? Here are some interpretations:
·
The development of state and nation-wide schemes of study
and testing framework is providing measures of output and value-added, thus
increasing information for parental choice.
·
Relating value-added educational gains to resource levels
allows schools to be compared in terms of ‘value for money’. How can they
achieve increased performance with the same resource level?
·
Increased differentiation between schools encourages more
specialized provision.
·
Significantly enhanced levels of parental choice.
· Considerable changes in staffing patterns and arrangements,
more para-professionals, core and periphery staff,
fixed-term performance-led contracts, school-site pay bargaining.
· Radical changes in the nature of teaching and learning as
the impact of the new teaching and learning technologies gathers pace.
· Greater varieties of finance with blurring between
state-only and private-only funding of schools.
· Contracting out of educational as well as service elements
of schooling.
· A re-examination of the boundaries between different stages
of education and between education and the community.
· Redefinition of the leadership and management functions in
educational settings.
These are all trends that are apparent
now but what will be their impact in the future? How will we think of the
nature of schools and schooling? What we need to do is to think differently
about the nature of schools. While these macro trends are apparent, how do we
get this sort of thinking down to the level of the day-to-day operation of the academia. But it can be understood with the intentions to
know of it to contribute towards the noble cause of education. Once the
perspective of educational institutes being facilitators of learning and not
the sole providers of education is accepted, then a little more creative
thinking can be encouraged. Can school only be expanded by extra capital
expenditure, which produces buildings that are used? Or can different patters
of attendance for different age groups be used? Can staff have different
working hours and conditions? Can greater use be made of technology so that
learning takes place when teachers are not there? Can other educated adults be
used as coaches as well as fully trained staff? The ideas that can be generated
are many but our traditional way of thinking usually does not encompass them.
We need far more radical interpretations of possible future scenarios. Will all
the children be attending for six/five days in ten years’ time? Will
traditional libraries become information centers bringing all pupils the best
of the best all the time by using available technologies? Will the teachers
work in support teams and facilitate the access to differing learning
resources? What will the internal organization in terms of buildings look like?
Will they be the traditional classrooms of many years ago or be radically
different? Redesigning learning processes needs a radical shift in the mind-set
of our governors (Nazims of all levels) held responsible for
education. What seems clear is that, even if marginal extra resources were
available, a reduction in class size by one or two children is not going to
improve the learning process radically. In fact, more of the same instead of
radical rethinking is not going to engage those children who currently do not
actively commit to education. Different patterns of education and resource use
would seem to be the answer.
Published: The News International, September 19, 2001