School improvement: one size fits nobody, warns leading educationist
23 April 2009
Hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted on well-meaning but misguided programmes aimed at helping England's low-achieving schools, claims one of the country's leading school improvement advisers.
The government has spent the money on initiatives that have aimed to raise the performance of "failing schools" but shown little result. These include Education Action Zones, Excellence in Cities and the current National Challenge. But the gap between the achievement of the most disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers is getting bigger despite decades of investment, Professor Alma Harris of the Institute of Education, London (IOE) will say in a lecture today (Thursday 23 April 2009).
"Most of these high-cost programmes have made no difference to performance," Professor Harris will tell teachers and school leaders at the annual lecture of the IOE's London Centre for Leadership in Learning. "This is because they have failed to take account of the context of deprivation these schools are in and adopted one-size-fits-all approaches that end up fitting no-one."
As an example, Professor Harris will refer to the National Challenge, set up in 2008 to improve the country's lowest-performing secondary schools. The government has made £400m available to raise standards in the 638 schools with the country's worst achievement records. The NASUWT, the UK's largest teachers' trade union, has recently condemned it as "unfit for purpose" and called for it to be scrapped, she will point out.
"The National Challenge is the latest in a long line of heavily funded top-down approaches destined to be unsuccessful," Professor Harris will argue, "because it is based on punitive approaches, constant scrutiny and the threat of school closures."
Professor Harris believes that such money would be better invested in the disadvantaged communities that the schools serve. "The only way to improve our most vulnerable schools is through localised approaches where ownership of the strategies resides in the schools and their communities," she will say. "We need to put resources into the hands of people who can make an immediate and lasting difference. The money is already there – it just needs to be redistributed to those who are best placed to tackle the underlying causes of failure."
She will praise the government's Every Child Matters strategy because it emphasises local delivery and services, with the best local authorities providing facilities for vulnerable children and their families. But she will warn that others still need to ensure that there is adequate front-line support for those most in need.
She will also criticise the "blame culture" of "naming and shaming" schools, usually in the most impoverished communities. "Many schools in poverty-stricken areas are under excessive scrutiny," she will say. "This type of policy punishes the disadvantaged young people they serve simply because they have a certain post-code.
"A relentless focus on schools as the problem is an abdication of responsibility for the inequalities found in our poorest communities. Blaming individuals moves us away from forms of community action, such as links between schools and local organisations – that can make a difference."
Notes for editors
Further information from Helen Green, +44 (0)20 7612 6459, h.green@ioe.ac.uk.
Education Action Zones were set up in 1988 to create partnerships between businesses, schools, local authorities and communities to raise standards in challenging areas. Each zone ran for a maximum of five years, contained 15 to 25 schools and received £1 million in funding. Excellence in Cities aimed to raise achievement and aspiration in disadvantaged areas by tackling disaffection, social exclusion, truancy and indiscipline. It ran from 1999 to 2006. The National Challenge encourages local authorities to close poorly performing schools and replace them with academies or National Challenge trust schools. It emphasises extra individual tuition in English and maths for students who need it and has received £400 million of funding.
Alma Harris is professor of educational leadership at the IOE. Her most recent book is "Distributed School Leadership: Developing tomorrow's leaders", published by Routledge in 2008.
The IOE's London Centre for Leadership in Learning provides research, training and consultancy in educational leadership and learning.
The Institute of Education is a college of the University of London, specialising in teaching, research and consultancy in education and related areas of social science and professional practice. The Institute conducts over one-third of the educational research in the UK and last year's Research Assessment Exercise judged that 35 per cent of the work it had submitted was "world leading", while much of the remainder was of international significance.