Close Contact with a Secondary Subject Leader: What Can We Learn?

Close contact with a secondary subject leader

what can we learn about school improvement?

Mervyn Flecknoe; Leeds Metropolitan University

Paper presented at BEMAS Conference, UMIST, Manchester, 17th - 19th September 1999

Contents

1. Introduction______2

2. Methodology______4

2.1 Why a case study?______4

2.2 What is the “Case” about?______4

2.3 The department and the school______4

2.4 The interviews and analysis______5

2.5 The structure of the report______5

3. Janet as a subject leader______5

3.1 Janet’s Bona Fides as an effective subject leader______5

3.1.1 Administration______6

3.1.2 Planning and vision______7

3.1.3 Monitoring______8

3.1.4 Communicating______8

3.1.5 Workload______9

3.1.6 Coaching Staff______9

3.1.7 Summary______10

4. Issue of Concern - The poor performance and absences of “B”______10

4.1 Discussion about the management of under-performance______12

5. Recommendations for further research______14

6. Bibliography______16

7. Appendix - The nodes used in the NUD*IST analysis______17

Acknowledgement

What follows is largely Janet speaking. She gave of her busy time freely to provide data for this report. For reasons of confidentiality Janet cannot be named nor even the subject of her department revealed. To Janet, who knows who she is, very many thanks.

Abstract

Interviews with Janet (not her real name), who is a head of department in a secondary school, lasted for 20 hours in total and were spread over two terms. This report uses a small percentage of the data from these interviews to demonstrate that Janet fulfilled, for all practical purposes, the requirements of the Teacher Training Agency. It is necessary to demonstrate this first to establish Janet as a credible research witness to the difficulties of middle managers in schools, so that the issues which arise about school improvement in this single case study can be seen as issues which may well generalise to many other departments throughout the country. In particular, further research is urgently required to establish whether the personnel issues which are raised here are as pertinent, as they would seem to be for Janet, to the raising of achievement in many schools.

1.Introduction

(Harris 1998) claims that little empirical study has been done about subject leaders. From the observations which she has made, in this report of eight departments in secondary schools and their leaders, she identifies four dimensions to subject leadership in the secondary school

• Bridging or brokering: the transactional use of power over others to attempt to secure working agreements, part of this is managing and allocating resources.
• Collegiality: encouraging a group of staff to cohere and to develop a group identity.
• Improvement of staff and student performances: this involves drawing upon her expert knowledge.
• Liaison or representation: this is negotiating on behalf of members and keeping them in touch as well as representing their opinions to the senior management structure.

This present report concerns the improvement of staff performance. There is a lack of rich data about how heads of department exercise this responsibility. I maintain that a combination of circumstances, which have not been effectively investigated, combine to render the effective and willing head of department unable to tackle some issues which are pertinent to school improvement.

(Brown and Rutherford 1998) have five styles which subject leaders may adopt in order to perform their role of which the following will be recognised in Janet’s repertoire from the quotations which I have reproduced:

• Servant leader: Authoritative rather than authoritarian, relying on emotional deposits to get things done
• Organisational architect: changing the way the department is organised
• Leading professional: up-to-date with new developments, concern for improving teaching and learning

None of these styles, or the other two which they identify; moral educator or social architect; would be adequate to describe what would have to be done in order to raise the achievement of some teachers. Again, how subject leaders go about raising the game of their colleagues has not been investigated in a systematic way. (Brown and Rutherford 1998) us a methodology which uses situated and contextualised perspectives on the views and actions of the head of department. They collected documentary evidence, used observations, reflected with the head of department and elicited the views of significant others. This was in 24 schools in England and represents a major step forward in the investigation of what such people do. They suggest that more detailed work needs to be done and this present report is a contribution to that work. They quote five obstacles to raising achievement:

• lack of time (and see (Earley and Fletcher-Campbell 1989))
• curriculum instability
• lack of opportunities for professional development
• lack of direction and vision from some heads
• lack of communication between the head of department and senior management teams.

This present report comments on the issues of time and the unused data in the interviews contains much about continuing professional development. However I point to a serious addition to the list which may turn out to be a fundamental obstacle to the raising of achievement.

(Metcalfe and Russell 1997) said:

Many heads of department are still uneasy with the expectation that they should comment on the quality of the teaching of department members p 11

Monitoring is becoming more common but this report will illustrate the difficulties and costs of the tensions in the relationship between colleagues which inhibit plain speaking.

(Busher and Harris 1999) talk about the cultures of departments and the key role of heads of department in creating cultures. They say:

"Their degree of involvement in strategic matters or organisation decision-making is likely to vary according to the nature of the organisation, the management approach of senior staff and the culture of the organization. ...of the confidence, expertise and skill in management exhibited by the middle manager or subject leader" p.314

There are many external factors such as the existing culture of the department and local authority[1], the support of parents, and the behaviour patterns of teachers in other departments, which also influence the creation of successful cultures. The many factors which influence the possible creation of one of the productive cultures in a department must mean that many potentially effective subject leaders do not, in fact, lead effective departments because the combination of difficulties is too great for them to over-come. Conversely, those running effective departments, whilst tempted to claim that this is owing to their leadership ability, may be merely the beneficiaries of favourable contexts. The lack of time for schools to manage and the lack of dependable management tools (such as reliable means of measuring the effectiveness of individual teachers and sanctions against ineffective teachers, should they be identified) means that the effectiveness of a department is dependent on circumstance to a large extent.

The creation of a culture is a time-consuming task and every action of the leader has an effect, sometimes unintended. A positive culture is one of the products of a successful subject leader in the standards published by the Teacher Training Agency (Agency 1998). Others have referred to it in their work; see (Bell 1992), (Buckby 1997), (Glover, Gleeson et al. 1998), (Sammons, Thomas et al. 1997), (Turner 1996; Turner and Bolam 1998).

Perhaps the most comprehensive investigation of the subject of failing teachers is by (Wragg, Haynes et al. 1999) who held interviews with 60 primary and secondary headteachers, 21 union representatives, 20 LEA advisory officers, 100 parents, 519 pupils. Questionnaires were analysed from 74 chairs of school governing bodies, 70 allegedly incompetent teachers, and the 519 pupils. This valuable and rich data completely ignored the role of subject leaders except as an instrument of coaching to improve. This seemed to be a valuable area to investigate with a case study. Some of the findings of Wragg et al. (1999) are quoted in the discussion section because they resonate with the findings of this study.

2.Methodology

2.1Why a case study?

In order to investigate the creation of departmental culture, rich data is needed. This constrains the number of subjects, or co-researchers as Janet became. I decided to mount an individual case study of a competent head of department in a disadvantageous situation which called for a change of culture. Because of the personal comments made during the interviews, I can identify neither Janet, the school, nor her subject area. The identification of any of these might lead to the others being revealed and this would prejudice future developments of the individuals concerned. I ask readers not to be too inquisitive in this matter.

2.2What is the “Case” about?

This is a case study of a head of department. I interviewed her for 20 hours over a period of two terms in 1998/9, asking on each occasion “What have you been doing since we last met?”. The agreement was that we would not discuss her work as a classroom teacher, only her work as a head of department, and in any associated roles which she might have within the school. This means that the 20 hours a week for which she teaches are excluded from our investigation which limits itself to the 2 hours which she is allocated for running the department. Readers should remember this when they are reading about her work. Also excluded from this report are

• All her discussion of the work which she does with pupils in maintaining the discipline of the school. This is considerable as the head of department is the first call for the subject teacher when difficulties are experienced.
• All her work with the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) students which could form a case study of its own.

2.3The department and the school

The agenda for the interviews was largely set by our head of department, whom I shall name “Janet”. In keeping with good research practice, the text of the interviews is available to any serious researcher wishing to make use of it. Janet is head of a unitary department, (Harris 1998) in a small, unpopular, comprehensive school, serving a council estate area, in an industrial city in the North of England. There are two other teachers in the department whom Janet chose to call “B” and “W”, and the Head teaches one period each week in the department. It has its own set of rooms and each teacher has a dedicated room for all teaching. The school was placed under special measures in 1993 and came out of special measures in 1997. Janet took her post up in 1996. Our interview data reveals what concerns her about her job and what she spends most of her time doing when she is not teaching her own classes..

2.4The interviews and analysis

The interviews were all tape recorded and transcribed with the aid of a grant from the Teacher Training Agency. The transcriptions were then analysed on NUD*IST using 31 nodes in a two tier hierarchy. The analysis was completed only after each interview had been read at least three times and notes made about the progression of ideas. The nodes are given in the appendix.

2.5The structure of the report

The quotations which are used are Janet’s actual words, but with the foibles of conversation removed and, in some instances, paragraphs condensed to enhance the meaning of the speaker. A draft of this report was given to Janet, who then made comments which were incorporated in this article. Inevitably much of this report is in Janet’s words. What follows is in two parts.

The first part (section 3) is an attempt to establish Janet as a credible research witness, someone who can inform us about the role of head of department, the subject leader in a secondary school, one of the middle management. If Janet was inadequate, she would not be such a good informant. There is a difficulty here because the Teacher Training Agency defines an effective subject leader in terms of the effect she has on parents, pupils and teachers; not on what she does and tries to affect. My proposition is that Janet does what any reasonable person could expect a head of department to do and more.

The second part (Section 4) is the exploration of one of the issues which I felt were raised by what Janet said. It is highly topical in view of what is being written currently about inadequate teachers, (Hackett 1999).

3.Janet as a subject leader

This purpose of this section is to use some of what Janet said to make a case that she is a credible research informant or witness to the profession of subject leader. Although case study is notoriously difficult to generalise from, I shall make the case that, at the very least, there is a phenomenon here which merits further study. It is possible for the reader who wishes to take Janet’s credibility for granted to begin reading at section 4. To do so would be to miss a good story and to remind ourselves of the horrendously busy life of a secondary subject leader.

3.1Janet’s Bona Fides as an effective subject leader

(Teacher Training Agency 1998) describes an effective subject leader in terms of what the effective leadership creates (p. 5). This is a change from the draft standards which specified the tasks which subject leaders were to perform. Instead of the tasks, the Agency outline four areas of concern for subject leaders. It is my initial aim to show that Janet works in all the key areas and that thus, the findings of this report about the factors which inhibit her in raising achievement are not owing to her inadequacy as a subject leader but are likely to be owing to constraints which may be experienced by other good subject leaders. The points made in this section (3) are evidenced by extensive quotations from interviews with Janet which are fully represented in my presentation to BEMAS, for the full report see www//http.lmu.ac.uk.m.flecknoe.

3.1.1Administration

Janet clearly understands the Teacher Training Agency’s definition of what a subject leader should be capable of and should do. Her own statement of her purpose could be substituted for it. She interprets her role widely, occasionally making difficult decisions to cut some item from her diary when time runs out. Her account of her work shows that a broad remit of items passes across her desk, or would do if she had one. In common with most teachers, she has no workstation to call her own except the one which she bought herself at home. Janet routinely uses her home computer for administration tasks - it is better than the machines to which she has access at school. In common with all teachers, it was bought using taxed income. There is no tax relief for purchase of equipment for teachers nor for the provision of continuing professional development. The attitude of the Inland Revenue is that if the school needs the teacher to have a computer at home, the school should provide one. At school she uses whatever space is available. Janet’s administrative responsibilities include the oversight of resources for the department and filing. Having asked about what was in all the visible filing spaces in her room, the interviewer said:

Interviewer:. So you are responsible for filing -- 32 filing cabinets drawers, three large steel filing cupboards, and three smaller wooden filing cupboards. Sounds like a part-time job for a secretary.

Janet I never had a secretary so it’s never even occurred to me that that would be something I would ask a secretary to do.

If the Teacher Training Agency hope to attract good graduates into teaching, surely something must be done to enable schools to use the professional skills of its teachers more appropriately?

She is careful about her administration of examination board work, conscious of its effects on children’s futures. A great deal of her time is spent in the organisation of testing throughout the department but that is outwith the scope of this present report.

Her work is not only appreciated by the Head and Governors of the school but she has spent a day filming for a CD to be issued by the DfEE about how schools have tackled the issue of being in special measures.

Because her school takes a high percentage of children who have special educational needs, she has a co-ordinating function with the head of that department. She has to oversee the work of classroom assistants who are deployed in the department. Janet’s responsibilities for co-ordinating with the Special Educational Needs Department also gives rise to other meetings which are fitted in at lunchtimes, Janet does not count these as meetings, just “seeing someone to fix things”.

She is concerned with the marketing effort of the school and runs an open day for the “feeder” schools each year. This is partly because she hopes to attract more pupils to what is an unpopular school in an area of over-provision, and partly to make the transfer less stressful for those who choose to come.

The appearance of the department is of importance to Janet. She has made considerable visual improvements to the area during the period of the interviews. She is also concerned with financial regularity, with the reward structure in the school, and with the effective deployment of materials for her department’s teaching.

The convention at the school is that all departmental meetings are strictly held to time with a published agenda and they are minuted; although she has tried to delegate this to one of her colleagues, this was not successful so it falls to Janet.