W. Edwards Deming made Japanese car plants more productive by doing something their managers found uncomfortable, which was to hand control back to the people on the line. The workers assembling the cars were best placed to see what was going wrong and how to fix it, so he gave them the authority to act, and quality rose. Schools have had the same opportunity for decades and most have not taken it.
The people who know what is best for a class of students are the teachers in front of it, and they know what is best for how the curriculum is delivered as well. That is an unfashionable thing to say in a sector that has spent twenty years building layers of oversight above the classroom, and GSE believes it anyway.
A systems approach is different from control
Heads of school carry responsibility for systems, which means setting the direction and steering effort towards what matters and away from what matters less. None of that requires a hand on every lesson. Leading the system and controlling the classroom are different jobs, and anyone who confuses them tends to do both badly.
A word to the head who was once the best teacher in the building
Many heads were the strongest curriculum and teaching expert in their school, and some still are. Driving that in the classroom is no longer their job, because that time has passed. The job now is to remember what it was like to be a good teacher who was trusted and given room to make a difference, and to build a school where the people doing that work today get the same.
This is harder than it sounds, because expertise is difficult to put down. A head who walks into a lesson and sees several things they would do differently has a choice about whether to say so, and how often, and the heads who build strong schools are sparing with it.
Fear is the most expensive thing a school can run on
Teachers are sensitive about how their teaching is evaluated, and they are right to be, since a careless judgement can follow them for years. Supervision is necessary, and what matters is whether it produces better teaching or merely compliance.
Leadership by intimidation does not work in schools, because fear in a staffroom, particularly fear about test results, produces insecurity and a great deal of time spent on activity that protects the teacher and does nothing for the student. Teachers start teaching to what is inspected and stop taking risks. They also stop saying what is going wrong, which is the information a head most needs.
What getting out of the way looks like
The phrase invites the misreading that leaders should do less, when the work is considerable and most of it consists of removing things.
It starts with protecting teachers from chaos, since late changes to the timetable, initiatives announced in August and forgotten by November, and meetings that could have been a paragraph all take time from the one thing teachers are there to do. Give them the tools they need, and ask them what those are before buying anything. Take obstacles out of their path, which usually means a leader absorbing a problem so that a teacher does not have to.
The next step is deciding what teachers are trusted to decide: how a unit is sequenced, which texts are taught, how a class is grouped, and what an assessment looks like within the standard the school has set. A school that says it trusts its teachers and then specifies all of those has handed nothing back.
Technology has recently made some of this easier, and where tools have taken planning and administration off teachers’ desks, the time has gone back into teaching, and teachers who have more balance teach better. That gain only reaches the classroom if the school lets teachers use those tools openly and decide for themselves where they help, which is the position GSE sets out in Humans in the AI Loop.
What stays with the school
Autonomy works inside a frame, and the frame belongs to the school. The standards students are expected to reach, the assessment calendar, the curriculum the school is licensed or accredited to deliver, safeguarding, and the way the school reports to parents are all settled above the classroom and should be. A teacher deciding how to teach a unit is exercising professional judgement, while a teacher deciding whether to teach it at all has been left without leadership.
The frame should be small and stable, because most of the damage done to teacher autonomy comes from frames that keep growing, where each new requirement is reasonable on its own and the total leaves no room for judgement at all.
The objection every owner raises
The usual response to this argument is to ask about the teacher who is not good enough, and it deserves a direct answer. Trusting teachers and tolerating weak teaching are different things, and a teacher who is not meeting the standard needs a clear account of the gap, real support to close it, and a date by which it has to be closed.
The mistake is to design the whole school around that teacher. Monitoring regimes built to catch the weakest member of staff are experienced by everyone else as distrust, and the strong teachers, who have the most options, are the ones who leave. Deal with underperformance as the exception it is, and lead the rest of the staff as the professionals they are.
How a school can tell whether it is working
This belief can be tested, and the evidence is already sitting in most schools.
Staff turnover is the first place to look, together with how many teachers say in the winter that they intend to leave. Research on international schools has found that the strongest predictor of a teacher leaving is whether they regard the head as supportive, which makes turnover a measure of leadership before it is a measure of pay. It belongs on the dashboard an owner sees each month.
Where leadership time goes is just as telling, and a term of leadership meeting minutes shows how much of each meeting concerned teaching and student progress and how much went on transport, events and uniform. If learning rarely reaches the agenda, the school is being administered while the teaching is left to look after itself.
It is also worth watching whether teachers say what is going wrong. Where a school runs on trust, problems surface early and from the people closest to them, whereas fear delays them until a parent raises them.
The owner’s part in this
A head can protect teacher autonomy and an owner can remove it in an afternoon. New reporting requirements imposed mid-year, a change of curriculum model announced without consultation, or a target that turns every lesson into test preparation will each land on teachers, and each tells them the trust was conditional.
Owners and boards also hold the most consequential lever of all, which is who they appoint as head. Control at the top produces a controlled staff, and the good teachers will be the first to leave because they have the most options.
Partnership, and what it is for
Accountability still matters in a school like this, and it attaches to the right thing. Listen to staff and form a real partnership around goals the whole school shares. When the culture is right, teachers hold themselves and each other to a higher standard than any inspection regime would set, because the standard is theirs.
That was Deming’s point, and it holds in a school as it did in a factory. Quality rose when the people doing the work owned it.
Read next
- Humans in the AI Loop: What Schools Owe Their Students Now. Where the recent gains in teacher workload have come from.
- School Meeting Minutes: How to Turn a Filing Requirement into Management Information. How to see where leadership time goes.
- The School Dashboard: What an Owner Should See Every Month. Staff turnover intent among the early indicators.
- Vision and Mission Integrity. Whether a school’s stated purpose shows up in what it does.
Part of GSE’s What We Believe collection.
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