I was about halfway through my tenure as a first-time headteacher when I had a serendipitous encounter with one of the most influential pieces of education writing I have ever read.
Professor Gert Biesta’s Why ‘what works’ still won’t work: from evidence-based education to value-based education found its way onto my laptop screen at a time of significant professional challenge for me. This period would turn out to be the best professional development I have ever had, even though it nearly broke me. Biesta’s piece helped to make sense of the whirlpool of thoughts and anxieties that were swirling around my head and my stomach.
I found myself in a situation, partly of my own making, that required lots of things to be much better, quickly. The combination of being an inexperienced headteacher, with a looming inspection (having dropped from “outstanding” to “requires improvement”) and my inability to recognise that I needed support from cooler, wiser heads was a recipe for knee-jerk decision making and a lack of long-term strategic thinking.
I resorted to a heavy use of suspension to try to control deteriorating behaviour. I did this for two main reasons: the school community had been used to this under previous leadership and were frankly demanding it from me, but also because it helped me to appear tough and uncompromising when underneath I didn’t really know what to do.
Related:
The fact that behaviour was declining meant that, despite the unanimous support from the community for continued use of suspension, my tough and uncompromising approach was plainly not supportive to my colleagues or the children, as students were returning to do more of the same or worse.
The trouble with complexity reduction
Biesta’s paper struck such a chord with me because it forced me to admit to myself that I was engaging in a form of what he called complexity reduction.
Some of this is necessary to enable schools to actually function. We group children according to certain criteria, package learning up into discrete subjects, timetables, curricula and so on. But when does this drive for efficiency become overly restrictive? It is not just about what we are reducing in complexity, but also how we go about reducing it.
Take school uniforms, for example. It is something we culturally value in this country, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot get excited about haircuts or sock colour. In the drive to reduce what is acceptable in the name of high standards, we run the risk of children getting into trouble for things that do not disrupt learning and are completely normal outside of the school gates.
Biesta provoked my thinking through his description of Bruno Latour’s The Pasteurization of France in which Latour contends that “the success of Pasteur’s approach was not the result of the application of this particular technique across all farms in the French countryside” but that the world outside had to be transformed to be closer to the “laboratory conditions under which things can work and can be true”.
A no-excuses behaviour culture, the narrowing of what is defined as mainstream schooling (and the consequent ever-growing pressure on special schools and alternative providers), silent corridors, shrinking break times, or the refusal to make reasonable adjustments for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are all examples of complexity reduction that have arguably gone too far.
It is no wonder that, under the heavy accountability pressures school leaders face, some are asking themselves under what conditions they can be successful and are then changing their schools to be closer to those laboratory conditions.
But, as Bernard Andrews wrote recently, “If we treat schools as a machine for making progress, those who are atypical are spanners in the works” - and we run the risk of being left with something rather sterile.
Jarlath O’Brien works for a multi-academy trust of special schools in the south of England
