From improving one school in the 1980s, we helped transform London’s education system. Here we explain how it began.

The next series of articles describe how we used the effective knowledge management approach to school improvement to transform schools. We start at the beginning of our work in this important area of education.

I first became directly involved in school transformation as a deputy head in the mid 1980s when I was in charge of the upper school in a very challenging outer London secondary school. I worked hard with my colleagues to improve the performance of our 600 students aged 14-16.  We focused on achieving consistency in the quality of teaching and learning, student assessment and target setting and preparing the pupils for their public examinations. This five-year period coincided with my own research into school improvement, which later formed the basis for my PhD.

When I became head teacher in the early 1990s I set about transforming my school to the extent that in 1998 it became one of the first boys’ secondary schools in England to be rated outstanding by OFSTED. I built upon my previous experience and the additional knowledge I had gained from my studies, which had identified collaboration as a key component of school improvement.  We placed considerable emphasis on:

  • Ensuring positive engagement with our students in their learning.
  • Introducing concepts such as the banking of learning currency – if you can do it once you can do it again – and the six week cycle.
  • Differentiating our approach depending upon our evaluation of the student’s motivation to learn.

By using action research to determine what we did next, without realising it the outline of a theory of action was already emerging. By assessing performance and providing targets, we were being clear about what our students and their teachers were trying to achieve – the school’s espoused theory – and where we were now. We used a collaborative approach to determining what we should do next to close any gaps – double loop learning. By using this approach, which allowed us to access the wisdom of all the teachers to determine what we should do next, we achieved consistent improvement.

As our improvement became more widely known, other schools became interested in what we were doing. However it seemed that the context we were working in made them unwilling to learn from us. We were after all a predominately white working-class boys’ secondary school in outer London, with an intake whose socioeconomic background was average for the country. Ex-students of the school included David Bowie and Peter Frampton. What could an inner city mixed low socioeconomic secondary school, let alone a rural primary school, learn from us?  As we would now say, our place was the barrier to knowledge transfer.

So after our ‘outstanding’ OFSTED we were very surprised to be contacted by George Gyte the Director of Education for Greenwich Local Education Authority who enquired if we would be interested in helping with school transformation. The authority was in the South East of London and predominantly served a low socioeconomic catchment.

I explained our difficulties in working with other schools and so initially, in order to give the work every chance to succeed, he determined that we work with a secondary boys school. The school, however, served a catchment with considerable ethnic differences to our own and was far more deprived. So although we had overcome the contextual barrier of gender, we had a significant potential barrier of place to overcome if we were to successfully share our knowledge with them. The school had been rated Good by OFSTED but was now regarded as underperforming.

So we took this challenge head-on and worked with the staff of the school, in particular the leadership, to identify the strategies they were successfully using to address the contextual issues their students presented rather than adopting our own. The long-serving head teacher had just retired and had been replaced by the deputy head teacher, John Collins, who had been for many years a highly successful science teacher in the school. OFSTED had judged his teaching as outstanding and his students’ examination results were amongst the best nationally for students from a similar background. When we spoke to him we soon realised that he had adapted his teaching, as with all outstanding teachers, to take into account the time and place of the students. However, as deputy he had continued to teach some examination classes but unfortunately spent the rest of the time dealing with the outcomes of those who, unlike him, could not.

Our team quickly realised that he had the knowledge to solve the problem and if we could give him the skills and opportunity to make it explicit and share it with his colleagues, we could start the transformation.  When we approached him with this idea, he like many outstanding teachers we have encountered in similar circumstances:

  • Was reluctant to be identified in this way.
  • Rarely made his work explicit.
  • Was inaccessible as a role model.
  • Had not developed the skills to share his knowledge with his colleagues.

So we set about transforming the situation, helping him to capture and share his knowledge and getting him to open his classroom to his colleagues. Once this work started, it soon emerged that he was not the only member of staff with this invaluable skill set.  A small team was formed which helped drive the initiative to switch the role of leadership from predominantly dealing with the outcomes of poor teaching to improving teaching and learning. In other words, moving leadership and management from a reactive to a proactive approach.

We will continue this brief history in the next article.

Take care and stay safe

George