Author: Rob Carpenter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Education
Details: 176pp, £19.99
ISBN: 9781472946348
How do you turn around a struggling school? It’s a question with which school leaders and policymakers have been wrestling for decades.
All too often, the default response when a school finds itself in difficulty has been to ratchet up accountability mechanisms and impose a culture of top-down compliance.
Inspectors, advisers and consultants descend upon schools in difficult circumstances promising that the secret to their improvement lies in ever-increasing amounts of monitoring, evidence-collection and data gathering.
The problem with such a hierarchical and mechanistic approach is that it can leave teachers and leaders feeling deeply disenfranchised, as school improvement becomes something that is done “unto them”, rather than owned and led by them.
In this wide-ranging and ambitious book, Rob Carpenter offers an alternative, ultimately more humane approach to school improvement. He provides a vision of school leadership that focuses primarily on people and relationships, rather than systems and structures.
Ostensibly, this is the story of how two struggling schools came together to form an unlikely partnership and supported each other to achieve transformational change for their pupils. It is the story of how one of those schools made the astonishing journey from special measures to outstanding in just 18 months.
In places, this is a deeply personal book. Carpenter provides a refreshingly honest account of the experience of leading a school that was judged to require special measures within just three weeks of his arrival. The sense of injustice and frustration at such a crushing judgement is palpable and he is candid about how vulnerable it made him feel as a previously successful school leader. The honesty and authenticity that comes through in this early section is a particular strength of the book.
However, this is far more than just a first-hand account of what was clearly a remarkable journey. Interwoven throughout the book is a stinging critique of current and previous education policy. The author outlines the number of competing policy initiatives that schools like his have had to cope with in recent years and argues with great conviction that these have hindered rather than helped them to deliver a transformational education for all children.
The current high-stakes accountability system is singled out for particular criticism and I suspect the condemnation of a system based on “proving” rather than “improving” will resonate with teachers and school leaders alike.
Carpenter’s ability to connect his own personal experience of school leadership to the wider policy landscape is impressive and adds an interesting dimension to the book. Occasionally, I found that the forays into education and social policy became a slight distraction from my desire to understand exactly how such impressive improvement had been achieved but, on balance, the book is richer for them.
For those primarily interested in discovering the secrets behind the success of these two schools, the book certainly provides a fascinating insight. Carpenter details how a strong focus on the learning environment, curriculum and improving teaching and learning all played their part in the incredible transformation that took place. He skilfully unpicks concepts such as “mastery learning” and “learning domains” and explains how they are an integral part of the work of both schools.
However, it becomes abundantly clear that it was the fundamental cultural change that took place within these communities that really underpinned their success. Carpenter himself makes clear that a shift from a toxic culture of individualism to one of open collaboration was key. He explains how, in a remarkably short space of time, teachers went from a world where they were working in isolation behind closed classroom doors, to one where they were routinely planning, teaching and learning together.
Some reading this review might think that all this talk of relationships, collaboration and feelings sounds terribly “touchy-feely” and that such an emphasis might lead to a softening of academic standards or a more laissez-faire approach to leadership. Not a bit of it. The author is clearly a firm believer in high aspirations, consistency and exceptionally high standards; a call for excellence permeates almost every chapter. One can’t help but wonder whether it is this ability to balance a demand for excellence with a deep and meaningful investment in human relationships that is the real secret to Carpenter’s success.
At a time when Ofsted are shining a spotlight on schools they judge to be “stuck” in a cycle of entrenched underperformance, it feels like there is so much to be learnt from this book both at a school and a system level. While the author is careful not to claim there is a simple blueprint that can be applied to all schools, anyone interested in the critical issue of school improvement would benefit from reflecting on the core messages that underpin Carpenter’s manifesto.
James Bowen is director of policy at the NAHT and director of NAHTEdge.
