Getting a buzz from the RSA Academy
A short post on my way back from the RSA Academy.
My regular reader and hammer of progressives, ‘OldAndrew’, won’t like it but, as well as core necessities like standards, discipline, and safety, what I most prize in a school is:
a) what I call – for want of a better phrase – ‘modern student centred learning’ (such as that provided by the best Opening Minds schools)
And
b) it should be an intelligent community which fosters the habits of good citizenship.
Which is why I always get a buzz from the RSA Academy. Not only are the exam results improving but exclusions and allegations of bullying are falling (the latter more or less to zero). The pupils – largely drawn from a working class community with limited parental educational attainment – are also enjoying amazing enrichment opportunities, including educational trips to South Africa and the USA, and visitors flocking in; in the last couple of weeks alone, some of our eminent RDIs have put on inspirational sessions to explain the work they do in their respective fields of design.
There is also a splendid Student Parliament. Not only has this overseen the successful policy to eradicate bullying but it has done great work with pupils from feeder primary schools. The new dimension we heard about today was student awards to teachers, developed by students, voted on by students and awarded by students. What a brilliant idea.
No wonder the most common feedback from Academy parents (most of whom went to the predecessor school) is ‘I wish it had been like this when I was a kid!’
Academies – a long journey to who knows where
I have a chequered history when it comes to Academies. When I first went into Number Ten I marginalised myself by allowing it to be known that I shared some of the concerns being expressed by the Treasury and the local government department about what was then a new policy. Picking an argument with Andrew Adonis was a fast track route to internal exile.
After the 2005 election I was in part responsible for trying to persuade Labour backbenchers to vote for the Schools Bill which established Trust schools. This time I had learnt my lesson and kept it to myself that I had some sympathy for rebel Labour MPs’ concerns, particular over school admissions.
When I arrived at the RSA, by this time more open minded about Academies, I inherited the Society’s bold (in the ‘Yes, Minister’ sense) decision to set up its own. Following through on the Trustees’ leap in the dark was a tough call but it all felt worth while when the school opened, and my faith is reconfirmed every time I visit Tipton as a governor and hear the great progress being made (and we don’t even occupy the new building until September).
Meanwhile my older son’s school was being given Academy status against the wishes of an alliance of leftists and trade unions, plus a group of middle class parents not wanting to lose the special privileges that their musically talented offspring had enjoyed in the failing predecessor school. For a while I was the chosen scapegoat with it even being rumoured that, in order to legitimatise the Academy take-over, I had used my influence in Government not only to get an unannounced OFSTED inspection of the old school but to rig its dismal report.
So I felt deeply ambivalent about yesterday’s Coalition announcement. What had reconciled me to the Academy policy was, first, the way it channelled new capital expenditure into deprived areas and second, that the extra element of diversity and innovation would be good for the system as a whole. The new policy is different in both aspects. The redistribution element has gone, indeed it must be most likely that it will be more privileged schools and sets of parents who take up the new freedoms and funding streams. Second, rather than putting grit in the oyster of the local schools system the policy is now to smash the oyster entirely.
It is up to those of us interested and involved in schools to make the best of the policy framework set by our Government. This was very much the mood of the very successful launch this week of Whole Education, an RSA sponsored alliance of organisations, interests and schools supporting a more holistic and collaborative approach to learning. But I do have doubts about whether the efforts of those committed to improvement and innovation will be helped or hindered by the new policy.
It is important, first, to recognise how much freedom ‘bog standard’ local authority schools already have. In most places successful schools are left to their own devices and have been gradually getting more freedoms from the centre in areas like the curriculum. Indeed the greatest area of extra regulation recently has been in relation to ‘safeguarding’ which is a child safety, not an education, policy. But local authorities can play a vital role in addressing problems in schools that are not succeeding or in danger of getting into trouble. Getting rid of a weak but stubborn headteacher is, for example, very difficult for a group of part time volunteer governors to accomplish and most rely heavily on the local authority to guide them through the process.
Michael Gove wants an open market in schooling, but markets only succeed if businesses are regularly allowed to fail. Children only have one education so we can’t be as relaxed about failure in schools as we might be about failure in the high street. There is absolutely no question that the combination of encouraging all manner of new entrants into school governance along with residualising the local authority role will lead to many more school failures (this is not scaremongering, it is the logical consequence of the policy). It will be interesting to see how the Coalition deals with this but my hunch is that any solution will see central government effectively taking over the oversight currently vested in councils.
The RSA is seeking to develop a stronger family of schools committed to the approach of our curriculum, Opening Minds. We are pragmatic as to whether this family might one day morph into some form of shared governance. It would be an irony if there indeed were lots of RSA Opening Minds schools, as Michael Gove has made no secret of his hostility to competency-based approaches. To be fair the new Education Secretary has always recognised the tension between his own quite prescriptive views about the curriculum and his commitment to school freedom. Intellectually such openness is commendable, in practice it may prove a harder position to sustain.
Policy design for resourcefulness
The RSA design team has been undertaking a project with the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) exploring how the police can be better at engaging and satisfying the public. Yesterday we held an event to discuss the research emerging from the project, much of it generated by work on the ground in Peterborough (this is an early example of our broader collaboration with the city).
Chief Constable Peter Neyroud is the thoughtful and articulate head of the NPIA and he provided closing remarks at the event. One of his themes was the need to move from a tokenistic, box-ticking approach to public engagement, which often features police officer turning up to virtually empty consultation meetings, to a more open, substantive and creative dialogue.
Having spent many, many years observing and participating in public engagement processes I offered the meeting what I have come to see as the key success factors for engagement.
They are:
Accessibility – engagement has to be in a form which fits with people’s lives and, if possible, it needs to feel like it could be enjoyable. A very small number of people may like nothing more than sitting in a cold church hall listening to a long and complex report from a council officer, but many more would rather do something more informal and enjoyable or simply something easier, for example on the web.
Efficacy – people need to feel they have something to offer. This is why schools – like our own Academy – find it easier to get parents involved in social and fund raising activities than in discussions about the curriculum. Most disadvantaged people have a strong sense of efficacy in their own lives (it’s not easy to live on a low income) but it declines dramatically when they engage with ‘the authorities’. So engagement needs to start with what people know and experience, not with the information or communication needs of the public agency.
Genuine choices – people need to feel that the engagement will offer them real choices either individually or collectively and that these choices will feed into decisions and actions. Otherwise engagement is either pointless or even counter-productive.
Positive sum-making engagement work is not all about the responsibility of the agencies hosting the process. It is also about offering a challenge or opportunity to those being engaged. The question being posed needs not simply to be how could the agency provide a more responsive service, but how could the authorities and citizens work more effectively together to achieve better outcomes from, what will be in the future, fixed or shrinking public spending.
This is all incredibly obvious. But how much public engagement really meets these simple success criteria? The problem often is that the policy framework is determined at the outset (often constrained by national targets on regulation) and the engagement is then tacked on.
Our design team here is working with the idea of design for resourcefulness – the issue being how can designers not just try to solve people’s problems but enable people to solve problems and create resources themselves? In many areas public policy needs more consciously to be designed with this idea in mind. How can the policy leave the space and flexibility for service users and citizens to ‘hack’ policy and redesign it for local purposes?
By the way, this is a lesson we have learnt the hard way. Our Fellowship Council (meeting for the second time today) and other active Fellows like the idea of our Fellows’ Charter but they want to open it up to much greater involvement so that what emerges has genuinely been crafted by the Fellowship itself. Of course, we have agreed and the Council will be exploring today how to make this happen.
The poor, are they always with us?
I will respond to all the comments individually, but I must start by thanking those who responded to my transparent cry for some online TLC. I like being complimented as much as the next person but more important, in the context of a busy responsible job here at the RSA, is the reassurance that my blogging isn’t entirely self indulgent.
I am currently on my way to a Governors’ meeting at the RSA Academy in Tipton. I am looking forward in particular to hearing from the head boy and girl and seeing progress on the new building. The Academy is in a disadvantaged area of a poor part of the country and one which has suffered more than most in the recession. So on the train journey up it was powerful to read the latest poverty report produced by the New Policy Institute for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The top line is that levels of poverty, unemployment and repossession have been rising, not just with the recession, but since 2004. Overall poverty levels are now back at 2000 levels, the number of people out of work and looking for a job is as high as it has been since 1997 and repossession rates are back at 1994 levels. How we respond to these figures will, of course, reflect our different beliefs and values, but I wonder whether some important changes over the last decade may shift the terms of the debate?
Those who see inequality as fair, a reflection of merit or effort may find it harder now to argue that the poor are to blame for their plight. First, surely we all accept that there are many victims – particularly among the young – of a recession caused not by the failings of the general workforce but by greed and stupidity among the rich. Second, the last decade and more has seen the gradually tightening of welfare to work rules. Hardly anyone is now exempt from the requirements to look for or prepare for work. Third, a growing constituency among those in poverty is the working poor. According to the NPI report there are now two million children living in low-income working households, the highest figure ever recorded. Yet, all this is despite the redistributive impact of Labour tax and spend policies since 1997 (to be highlighted in the next few days in a report from the 2020 Public Services Trust, based at the RSA).
All of which suggests that the debate we need about the kind of society we want, and what this means for all of us, needs to be braver and more far reaching. To make a fundamental difference may require society-wide commitment and mobilisation. As Professor Stein Ringen recently argued at the RSA, for all its efforts New Labour never explained that all of us – not just ministers and officials – would have to play a role in creating a fairer society. The biggest danger is that, having had a Government which has tried to tackle poverty and inequality, we look at the grim statistics published today and abandon the hope of progress, perhaps accepting endemically high levels of poverty as he inevitable corollary of globalisation. Whether starting from a political perspective on the right, left or the centre I hope RSA Fellows agree with me that this is a danger we should seek to counter in our lectures, our research and in the activities of our Fellows.
RSA Fellowship – matching supply to demand
The demand is there, the supply could be too, but for the RSA Fellowship to be all it could we need new skills, a different culture and examples of good practice.
I’ve just come back from 24 hours in and around Birmingham. The trip started with the West Midlands Region AGM held at the RSA Academy in Tipton. I always enjoy my visits to the Academy and the pleasure is even greater after the incredibly impressive results the students achieved in GCSE exams this year. The new school is gradually rising out of the ground and there is a great sense of excitement and ambition about the place.
About twenty five hardy souls turned up for the AGM. I don’t think anyone who has been involved in the region in recent years would say it has had the easiest of times. Difference of strategy and style have led to resignations from the committee, projects have been started and not followed through and it has even been hard to engage the regional Fellowship with the great opportunity offered by the Birmingham Book Festival (supported by the RSA and run by Jonathan Davidson FRSA). The hard work of various committee members has led to a good programme of events but these haven’t generally resulted in further activities.
The remaining members of the committee are aware of these issues and at the AGM presented a vision for the future of the region which was more ambitious and outward looking. But this was delivered and received more in hope than expectation. The idea that the RSA Fellowship can be a positive force for change is accepted, the question is how and with what human and other resources?
Then today, after the happy interlude last night of watching West Brom win at the Hawthorns and enjoying a couple of pints of black country beer, I had really constructive meetings with key people from the Birmingham business community, with the team overseeing the development of the new Birmingham Central Library, and the vice chancellor of a West Midlands university. In all these meetings there was a great appetite to work with the RSA, and genuine enthusiasm for our way of looking at the world and our priorities for action.
So the demand for the RSA to be partners, bringing our values, our expertise and our networks is great. We know as well that we have the talent in the Fellowship to be able to respond to the demand. And we know that our Fellows are the kind of people who are inclined to respond positively when they are asked to do something useful. But yet it is still hard to join the dots.
As I say, this is partly about culture. The idea that we want to empower the Fellowship is still new and most of our Fellows were not asked to join on that basis. It is also about skills. The team here is great and has developed important new ideas, for example the Fellows newsletter, but now we will all need new skills: how to assess emerging projects, to explore what support is needed from the centre, to guide and help Fellows without taking the initiative away from them. And most of all we need examples of what this means in practice: real evidence of the difference the Fellowship can make.
Of the many challenges facing the RSA over the next year or so this is the biggest and the most exciting.
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