I don’t remember many assemblies from my childhood (I would be surprised if anyone did), but there is one that sticks in my mind.
It was a story about a school where the playground was on the roof. Every day the children would go out to the roof and happily play their games, skipping, kicking a ball around and eating their lunch on the fence-lined playground with views over the city.
Then, one day, a new headteacher arrived. He was aghast at the playground. Not that it was on the roof but that it was lined with high metal fences.
“Schools aren’t prisons!” he exclaimed and immediately had the fences taken down.
The next day the headteacher merrily made his way up to the playground on the roof, looking forward to seeing the happy faces of the newly freed children.
What he found, though, was not the children playing as they always had, but sat in the centre of the playground, away from the edge, quiet, fearful and unsure of what they now could and should do. Without the fences, they felt lost.
This story was, I’m sure, wheeled out to help explain to us why we had rules in school or why a new rule was being brought in to help keep us safe. I have been reminded of it a lot recently when thinking about the sticky issue of teacher autonomy.
More from Mark Enser:
The calls for more teacher autonomy are frequent and loud. Most often they are heard when people complain about what they see as overly prescriptive curricula and lesson plans coming from academy trusts, or from centralised assessments. Sometimes, it is teachers arguing for more autonomy around things like behaviour management approaches in their classrooms.
Whatever the issue, the message is the same: they are the professionals in the classroom and they would like to make the decisions about what happens there.
As a teacher, and an idealist, I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. But there are three questions that need to be answered first.
How much autonomy is possible?
In schools, a great deal of autonomy is always going to be limited. As a head of department, I can’t just decide that I actually need four hours a fortnight of geography in key stage three, or an extra class at GCSE, and change the timetable accordingly. As a teacher, I can’t decide to keep my class an extra five minutes so that I can finish what I want to do with them.
One thing that would be very useful for teachers is for leaders, middle and senior, to be very clear about the limits on autonomy and why they are in place. There are few things more frustrating than following an edict that feels pointless - but most professionals are happy to follow ones that they can see the purpose for.
Is it in the best interests of the child?
We have to remember that schools are there to serve children and young people. It is possible that consistency is more beneficial for them than teacher autonomy.
It is conceivable that having a common expectation for how lessons start, or a common language to talk about teaching and learning, makes it easier for pupils to learn. Reducing the need to think about what it is they are meant to be doing in each classroom and allowing them to focus on the content of the lesson.
It seems highly likely that consistency on how behaviour will be managed will make children feel safer as actions and reactions will be much more predictable. It will help build relationships as it depersonalises responses to poor behaviour. It is not the individual teacher choosing to give a sanction to you as an individual; it is that behaviour that is inevitably leading to that consequence.
Is it in the best interest of the teacher?
Finally, we return to the children huddling on the centre of the playground as we ask, is it in the best interest of teachers to remove all barriers and restrictions?
When I was visiting schools to conduct research for Ofsted’s geography subject report, one of the biggest frustrations expressed by teachers was a lack of high-quality centralised resources - not their imposition. Many teachers, especially those at the start of their careers or those changing schools or teaching a new year group or subject, are crying out for more prescription, not less.
Similarly, increasing autonomy may sound like a boon to teachers, but can lead to a lack of support to achieve expectations. For example, if there is an expectation that classrooms are calm and orderly, giving teachers absolute autonomy for behaviour may simply be cruel - expecting them to achieve something that may be very difficult without the whole-school supports and systems in place that would make their lives so much easier.
These aren’t only questions for senior leaders in school, but for heads of department and subject leads as well. The siren call of autonomy may be seductive but we risk dashing ourselves upon the rocks...Or falling off the playground roof.
Mark Enser is an author and head of department in the north west of England
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