No progress without parents

Booked your holiday yet?

If you have children in school you may want to cancel your plans and set aside some quality time to be involved in a quick consultation this August.  This week the Conservative Party announced that if they get into power after the next election they will pass legislation which will allow many schools to become Academies by September of this year.  Talk about hitting the ground running!  “Unless we act now our children will lose out in the global race for knowledge.” panted Michael Gove hotfoot from the glassy classrooms of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney.

Sometimes it feels as if, in the quest for education reform, we and our children have got caught up in a the great caucus race in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  You remember:  all participants have to run in circles until  an arbitrary end is called and everyone is declared a winner; Alice has to give prizes to them all, and being declared a winner too she is solemnly awarded back her own thimble.  Sounds like the way education reforms work to me!

If they win the election Mr Gove expects a new Education Act to become law by the end of July.  Stop and catch your breath Michael.   Didn’t you say something a few weeks ago about the importance of involving parents in decision-making in schools?  I assume you would want them to be involved in a decision which will “free” their child’s schools from “political control” and allow them to” take over” other schools not to mention totally change their governance and accountability arrangements.  I trust you will be following the widely recognised good practice guidelines for public consultation: twelve weeks minimum and ideally not over a holiday period.  Mmmm, not sure 31 days in August (including a bank holiday) quite fits the bill but  I know heads and governors are always looking for more to do in the summer holidays.

Progressive or just depressing?

So if this is what the Conservatives are planning to do to help our benighted children keep up to speed in the global race, what are other lot up to? February saw the launch of the Progressive Education Network with a suitably schooly presentation at the House of Commons: many, many teachers sitting neatly in rows – a few recalcitrant trouble-makers chatting at the back – while a string of other teachers (and teachers turned politicians – eek!) demonstrated their enthusiasm for our schools as they are.  Their launch document set out their stall:  ”It is our conviction that what is needed now is to deepen the partnership between schools, government and local communities, not to put it aside and replace it with a complete change of direction.”

It is good to know that politicians and teachers are kissing and making up (or at least some of them are) but I can’t help thinking they don’t really want “local communities” or parents anywhere near this special relationship.  In the first forty-five minutes of this inaugural meeting the word “parent” was not mentioned.  A quick speed read of the 12 page closely- typed manifesto revealed that the”P” word did not appear once so I grabbed the mike and asked them where parents were in their thinking.  The bad boys at the back pricked up their ears ready for a fight – but it was not to be.  There was much nodding and smiling at me and some thinly veiled irritation that a parent had found her way past security and into the staffroom.  I don’t know if they had been forwarned that one of us (Them?) had got in but the party line seemed to be that schools were now terribly good at involving parents – we only had to look at the Building Schools for the Future programme to see just how good.  Then they went back to talking about how much schools and teachers are valued by their communities.  It was tempting to ask them how they knew but I think I might have been given a detention.

It is depressing to see that something proudly calling itself “progressive” should be so unthinkingly reinforcing the outdated notion that public services should continue to be controlled by politicians and professionals even in the face of increasing evidence that educational attainment depends more than anything else on getting families involved in their children’s lives at school.  The recent Marmot Strategic Review of Health Inequalities Post 2010, states that “evidence on the most important factors influencing educational attainment suggest that it is families, rather than schools that have the most influence.  Closer links between schools, the family and local communities are needed”.   Certainly we need to find the right  balance between politicians and professionals but there is a third leg to this stool that schools ignore at their peril.

It is great if it really is the case that “communities” (students, parents and local people) are being allowed to have a say in what their new school buildings look like but this matters far less than how they get involved in what goes on inside those buildings and what their children bring with them when they come home.

A consultation post-script

A fourteen year old child I know well was recently asked, as part of a school-wide exercise,  to come up with a name for their new dining room (recently built as part of Building Schools for the Future).  Here is her response:

Suggested name for the dining hall:  ”Dining Hall”

Reason for suggesting the name:  ”So people know what it is and don’t get confused looking for a place with a silly name.  Everyone will call it the dining hall anyway”.

I doubt she will be winning the £50 voucher but look forward nonetheless to hearing the outcome of this particular consultation exercise.

The November Newsletter

Dread Moment, Dead Time – the Roots of Laughter and the Prompt to Action

I was in the queue at the Post Office – two positions open for business; 12 people in the queue; having to pay £5 for special delivery because of strike. The message on the QTV? ‘The only real laughter comes from despair’ attributed to Groucho Marx. Nothing could have better fitted the mood of existential gloom at the prospect of 20 minutes queuing while South London people sort out their complicated lives clutching half-filled-in forms and expired passports. None were laughing. It was the most apposite message I have ever seen on that medium but the best was yet to come two seconds later with the name and location of a photocopying shop new to me and just up the road. The ad worked – 20 minutes later I was in there and their sales figures leapt up by 0.72p.

Partners’ Prose

Schools

Of course had I been connected to the internet. the time in the queue would pass in a flash because I could read the Partners’ blog entries in October and November. Caroline Millar sends politicians to stand in the corner for wilfully getting the important Cambridge Review wrong.

It seems to be open season on schools and the question of how they should be run and who should run them. Caroline documents the candidates in some detail in the following terms:

“whether it be local authorities, faith groups, used car salesmen or aspirational lasagna-eating anxiety-monkeys who are running the schools of the future, it should be a requirement for all of them to demonstrate that they know what their pupils, parents and local communities think of them and to show that they are responsive to their needs.”

Read the full post to see where they all come from.

Governance

Val Moore updates us with tales of a Norwegian state pension fund seeking to persuade large American concerns of the advisability of separating the post of chief executive from that of chairman – a central tenet as it happens of Policy Governance®. Val had recently attended one of a series of workshops being run by Caroline Oliver and the UK Policy Governance Association and this separation of function and titles still seems to be causing problems for many organisations.

Val wrote

“Many of these organisations are struggling to see the unique role of the Chairman and Board and want to avoid that well known situation where the Board usurp the role of the Executives and the Executives second guess the Board.  Policy Governance separates the two roles and maintains that the Chairman and the Board are ‘owners one step down’ and not ‘management one step up’.  This thinking frees the Board to concentrate on the ‘ends’ or goals of the organisation and to allow the CEO and executive team to work out the ‘means’.”

Politicians’ promises and social care

Ends and means were very much part of Andrew Craig’s piece musing on how strange it was

“that with little over a month to go for people to have their say about the government’s social care proposals for England, the Prime Minister pulled a monster rabbit out of his capacious hat which made roadkill of the consultation process.  Mr Brown pre-empted discussion by giving a personal care pledge to adults under 65 -  later clarified as also extending to younger disabled people aged 18-64 needing personal care at home.  That’s a lot of people and a awful lot of bawbees, Gordon, even if the Government is still around after 2010.”

If the consultation is to have any useful effect, it should provide some insights into what Andrew identified as the three main issues around social care:-

• First and foremost, we need one, integrated system of health and social care not two
• Second, the social care debate must be widened to include younger adults with disabilities and chronic conditions and people who care for them
• Third, while raising the universal standard of social care we must reclaim the Beveridge principle of individual initiative to make extra provision.

Complaints – Opening Up on Complainant Satisfaction

Back to where we started with a moment of existential despair in a Post Office queue – the mood seems right when comtemplating the Kafka-esque world of a complaint about service at our bank. We take a look  at the experience of having a problem with banks, specs and teeth – and no the NHS does not feature in any of them. The world of the banking back office and that modern contradiction in terms ‘the customer service team’ – neither a team or much to do with service -  and how best intentions and efforts can still go wrong even when all are trying harder than Avis.

But we finish on a good note – if you have a complaint about your private dentist’s service, find your way to the Dental Complaints Service and your complaint stands a good chance of getting sorted according to some new data. Well done Derek.

Never mind the quality, feel the blazer

His vision for schools?…..

Or his?

All of a sudden everybody seems to be interested in schools, with the two main parties slugging it out over who can be the more Dickensian whilst a major academic review of primary education (the Cambridge Review) is briskly dismissed by the Secretary of State for being out of date because the team had the audacity to spend six years on their research rather than six minutes on Google. Politicians and journalists of all hues seem to have decided that the only things parents are interested in and the only things that make schools “good” are uniform, rigorous discipline applied to (other people’s) children, vigorous teaching of the 3 Rs and shiny new buildings.  Oddly they seem to be promising to free schools and teachers from any sort of central government or local authority control whilst simultaneously banging the drum about how they intend to get a tighter grip on them.  Behind all the rhetoric there is little clarity as to how schools can be freed from the red tape whilst remaining accountable to both tax payers and parents.

Fancy running a school anyone?

For the last couple of years it has been hard to open a newspaper without seeing a photo of a Labour party politician lurking in the playgrounds of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney surrounded by a rainbow nation of manically grinning young people in their Billy Bunter blazers (designed by Jasper Conran no less – see photos above).  Recently the Conservatives have joined them.  The so-called Opposition, rather than attacking this symbol of New Labour, has decided that Mossbourne is the best thing since the Chalet School.  In his speech to the Tory conference earlier this month shadow schools minister Michael Gove praised the school’s head: first and foremost for insisting on “a proper uniform – with blazer and tie”.  The Conservatives have been reported as wanting to put a “rocket booster” under the Academies programme and to “dramatically accelerate the number of academies” with the addition of all sorts of new schools run by pretty much anyone who fancies it (and presumably find someone famous to design the uniform).   They are even offering £5k per child per year to anyone who will take the pesky brats off their hands.

One of Michael Gove’s favourite claims is that he will empower parents by allowing them to set up their own schools.  A new charity called the New Schools Network has appeared on the scene last week, allegedly thought up over lasagna at a west London dinner party.   Luckily the people round the table had a few friends in high places and managed to set up the organisation now headed by a former advisor to Boris Johnson in some nice offices in Queen Anne’s Walk.  According to the Sunday Times, most of the dinner guests that night either had children who were not yet of school age or had so far only tried the private sector.  But no matter! It is easy to see the attraction of taking your £5k per child and setting up a small and caring school for your own child (perhaps with an unusual blazer) modelled on something Swedish (or possibly Canadian) and “Free” (whatever that means) but I cannot be the only person who hears loud alarm bells ringing at the thought of state schools being set up and run by the sort of parents who want to set up and run schools for their own children.  How long is it going to be before the majority of parents find that the only “choice” on offer is between the Academy run by the Creationists, the “Free” school run by Blair and Lucy (yes really, these are the names of the most recent contributers to the New Schools Network website), or the “sink” school with all the kids in it that no-one else can be bothered with?

Putting schools (not children) to the test

The trouble is that in all this flurry of excitement about giving parents more “choice”, both parties seem to have entirely lost sight of the need to make sure that all schools are accountable to children, parents and society as a whole. SATs and league tables are being demonised because of the destructive effect they have on children’s experience in schools but this is in part at least because the current system fails to distinguish between the need to assess children for the purposes of ensuring their individual educational needs are met and the need to assess the overall performance of children in order to allow the school to demonstrate that it is doing its job properly.  The Cambridge Review makes a very clear and important distinction between testing for attainment and testing for accountablity and it is one that politicians could do with getting their heads around.

If we believe that all children are entitled to a decent education then what we need is a school system in which all children stand a decent chance of going to a decent school.  Parents and society in general need to know that schools are working to roughly the same agenda and are of roughly the same standard.  This year’s GCSE results show that whilst some Academies have undoubtedly produced better results than the schools they have replaced, a third are still failing to meet the government’s minimum target for GCSE results. Perhaps Blair and Lucy’s school will be exactly what we all want for our children – but how will we know?

Whose schools are they anyway?

One way to ensure that there is a degree of accountability in schools whoever is running them is to insist that users of the service (young people, their families, employers) are able to hold the service providers to account.  Whatever Michael Gove says, we can safely assume that beyond the lasagna-scented streets of West London and Bristol there will not be that many parents wanting to set up and run their own schools.  And anyway, you should not have to be running a public service to have some say about what it looks like and how it operates.  It is simply not enough to have a few spaces (often unfilled) for parents on your governing body and to write the occasional letter to parents telling them what your have done to their children.  SATs results may be of some use to schools but they tell you as a parent little about what actually goes on in the school and nothing whatsoever about how your child is doing, or will do, or whether they are getting what they need from their school.

Over and over again research shows that one of the key factors which influences success at school is the degree to which parents are engaged with their child’s schooling and it is good to see that the the government is taking steps to enable parents to do this better by improving how schools report and talk to parents.  Yet many schools are at best clueless about how to get parents involved whilst others actively (albeit sometimes unwittingly) drive parents away by simultaneously bullying and patronising them. Sometimes of course parents can be the bullies and their children the aggressors. Anger and fear on both sides are not mentioned in the new Parent Guarantee but perhaps they should be since together they guarantee a dysfunctional school.

Could do better

It seems unlikely that any future government is going to tackle the thorny issue of who should be allowed to run our schools and many may question the creation of a pseudo market economy within the state school system.  However, whether it be local authorities, faith groups, used car salesmen or aspirational lasagna-eating anxiety-monkeys who are running the schools of the future, it should be a requirement for all of them to demonstrate that they know what their pupils, parents and local communities think of them and to show that they are responsive to their needs.  This means a major shift in the way that schools and teachers relate to the outside world.  Some schools know what they have to do and are already doing it.   But there are many others which have lessons to learn and really need to try harder.

Bumper June Crop of MAC Musings

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Ruminant Rumblings

It has been a bumper month for the public engagement debate across a wide range of participatory and management issues. We have sought inspiration for better management practice from an annual ritual in the Swiss Alps where cows battle out issues of hierarchy and succession in what we might call a ritualised ruminant rumble (to borrow the rather ancient gang fight vocab of West Side Story) complete with combat footage video. This piece brought out the worst in partner-originated puns.

Participation by Invitation Only – a discredited approach

Management issues were at the heart of Caroline’s accusation that parent power was nothing more than a piece of populist spin. The model of ‘trouble-shooting’ management embodied in an Interim Executive Board does not seek to engage parents. Instead they seem to favour the traditional ‘expert’ management style – taking the hard decisions quickly unencumbered by the burdensome baggage of external consultation. This executive pays little heed to the necessity of communicating what it is doing to parents and even as it moves to appoint a new governing body, the Board deploys the discredited practice of participation by invitation only whereby a small number chosen from the ranks of teachers and parents and a member from that most nebulous of concepts – the local community – are invited to take their place at top table. And invitations as we know can be withdrawn.

NHS Market Stimulation – new competencies needed

Andrew Craig has a different emphasis in his piece on market making in healthcare. This is a new competency for the NHS and unsurprisingly they are not yet very good at using their purchasing position within the economic framework of the NHS to get better value for patients. All are having to learn very quickly on the job as they look to managing their budgets in anticipation of them becoming subject to the new constraints on public expenditure. The debate on the positive contribution that markets may make is a theme of the current Reith lectures where Sandel tells us that there are instrinsic values in human activity where a purely economic approach does not work. The NHS will perhaps always be a battlefield between these two ideas in a context of political management.

Morality and Economics – a Reithian debate

I have touched in a previous newsletter about the deficiences in the consumerist model in those contexts where the citizen interest has to be invoked to make provision work for all sectors of societies. I wonder if this Reithian debate will form any part of Richard Thomas’s agenda as he becomes the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Management of Consumers’ Association. We marked Richard’s departure from the post of Information Commissioner and summarised the interesting debates we heard at a farewell conference in May 2009 – Jack Straw was moved to deny that the Government was using Orwell’s 1984 as a manual of statecraft. The mixture of the economic and the moral is particularly volatile in the arena of public privacy and data protection where a technology is evolving at light speed while the debate on public morality and efficiency and of course now national security and personal safety moves at its traditional pace as lots of people try and make up their minds about difficult topics.

Sarah’s Story and decency, fear and distress

An example of the controversy that can arise from sincerely held differences of opinion in the public arena came with an Advertising Standards Authority decision about five complaints received about the short film ‘Sarah’s Story’ made by the Motor Neurone Disease Association on the grounds that its violent images as Sarah is possessed by MND on the grounds that it offended against the Code clauses relating to decency, fear and distress. The ASA decided that the content was justified given the nature of the disease.

Please comment if any of the above resonates with you. We look forward in particular to hearing from Swiss dairy farmers.

Parent power – just another piece of populist spin?

And their parents?

A few weeks ago Gordon Brown declared that he wanted to make schools more accountable to parents. The National Union of Teachers spat back that this was just a bit of “populist spin”.  After all, they argued in their press release, “Schools already work with parents and governors to ensure that information is fully available to the local community”.  As my kids would say, “Yeh, sure.”

Some sorts of information, it would appear, are rather more available to parents than others however.  My daughters’ school is currently being run by one of the government’s newest beasts, the Interim Executive Board, an unelected and apparently entirely unaccountable group of “experienced educationalists” which replaced the governing body when the school went into Special Measures a year ago.  It took the Parent Forum seven months to get our lovely shiny IEB to agree to “publish” its minutes. Publish in this context means sticking them on a notice board inside the school where parents seldom tread and refusing to put them on the school website.  And funnily enough, despite massive changes taking place in the school every week, the minutes say little more than the date of the meeting and who was there and are posted approximately six weeks after the event.

Now they are setting up a “shadow governing body” for an unlimited timespan.  At last, we thought, a chance for parents to stand to be elected as governors and have some say in what it going on.  We had been promised elections a few months ago, but now we are told that the new governing body will be made up of the same old “experienced educationalists” plus three hand-picked new members: a parent, a member of staff and someone from the local community.  No elected trouble-makers here please.

But this worrying lack of stakeholder accountability extends well beyond Schools Causing Concern, such as ours where some might argue you need emergency measures to deal with emergency situations.  In her column last week in the Education Guardian, Fiona Millar describes how, despite massive protests from parents and other local people in the London Borough of Camden, the local authority has decided to go ahead with an Academy run by a “preferred sponsor” (preferred by the local authority that is).  What worries her is that the legislation around Academies means that their governing bodies can be entirely dominated by the sponsor, whether it be a creationist accountancy firm or a used car salesman with a side interest in selling cigarettes to young women in developing countries.

She writes: “Meanwhile, the academies experiment is still being rolled out with a vengeance, and is making a nonsense of local community empowerment. The wholly controlled governing bodies put in place by the sponsors are often fronts for more shadowy charitable trusts that make the real decisions – such as appointment of the head – from headquarters that are often hundreds of miles from the schools they control.”

The Conservatives have been a bit vague so far about what sort of schools they want to have in the future but they seem to be quite taken with the idea of parents running schools themselves following what is described attractively as a Swedish model.  A recent MORI poll however suggests that this is not really what most parents want.  Only 11% of parents thought parents themselves were the best people to run schools preferring local authorities (39%) or teachers (32%).  7% said they would definitely get involved in setting up a school if they could.  Another 36% said they might help.  A reality check based on our own experience and other research reminds us that the good intentions expressed in a questionnaire are not a reliable guide to who will actually turn up on the night.  But if they did build the school and the people came, how accountable would this small band be to everyone else in the local community?

Coming up to Easter Newsletter

No sooner had we posted our article about users reclaiming their own data for their own uses than Gordon Brown got in on the act with their publication on working together – see the quote below:-

Enabling patients to have their say

Patients can already view comparative information about a range of healthcare services online at the NHS Choices website. Patients can make their own comments, observations and suggestions about hospital services and allow these to be visible to other patients. Often the best way for people to understand whether a service is right for them is to see what other similar users thought of that service. This is the experience of millions of customers who use Amazon.com or iTunes, and while these are for simpler, less important services like books or music, the same principle of valuing the opinions and views of others applies in the decisions we make around our health and care as well. Around 10,000 such comments have been posted since the launch of NHS Choices in 2007. During 2009 the ability to make this kind of comment will be extended from hospitals to include GP practices, and over time we expect patients to be able to make comments on and review all NHS services through the NHS Choices website. At the same time, payment to hospitals for services is being linked to patient-reported experiences and outcomes as one way of driving improved quality and patient-focus across the NHS. And we will see the quantity of this payment linked to outcomes increasing year-on-year as quality measurement improves and commissioners focus on ever higher outcomes.

PG – new project, new book

A recent Val Moore blog post logged two recent developments in the introduction of Policy Governance© into the UK with a second NHS Trust taking up the approach. For those who want to understand and learn more about this particular approach to PG, Caroline Oliver founder member of the International Policy Governance Association as well as current Chair of the UKPGA has just written Getting Started with Policy Governance – bringing purpose, integrity and efficiency to your Board ( pub Jossey-Bass January 2009).  This is essential reading for any Board member who wants to “up their game” and is the ideal follow up to John Carver’s Boards that Make a Difference Jossey-Bass 2006 which is the “bible” for policy governance. Check the UKPGA site and Caroline’s own site for more information.

MND Association heard

More evidence of Government valuing the work we do with clients comes with the following news from the Motor Neurone Disease Association – namely the announcement of an offer of £120k from the Third Sector Investment Programme in response to their Year of Care application. This is exactly the amount the Association requested for the three years to 2012 with the first tranche of £50k to be received in April 2009 subject to agreement of terms.

This award was made from the Innovation, Excellence & Service Development Fund and this approval is confirmation of the Association’s excellent contribution for people with MND. Hooray again (and sometimes we think we should just dedicate this whole blog to MND). We started this month by writing about an amazing piece of persuasive cinema ‘Mugged by MND’ and if you have not watched it on You Tube you should.

Whose Schools?

Back to our knitting with another Millar’s tale about parent participation in schools and how the definition of ‘good’ parents fostered by teachers was at some variance with a more modern view of parents having a real say – whose schools are they anyway? asks Caroline.

Lost your Larry, dear?

We have mentioned the Millar family (en passant) in the blog and Caroline’s daughters are our embryonic young digital natives panel. Caroline’s husband Tom Piper makes his living in an entirely separate sphere and so has not been mentioned. We make an exception to congratulate him (en passant) on the award of a ‘Larry’ – I think we have got the thesp speak right for the Laurence Olivier Awards – for his work on the costumes of the RSC history plays. The celebrations were not at all dampened by the fact that no sooner had Tom and his colleague Emma received the award than it was lost. All ransom demands received will be passed on.

Whose schools are they anyway?

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Whose service?

There has been a whole lot of very interesting debate over the last few years about who the health service belongs to but what I’d really like to know is, who does the education service belongs to?  I recently contributed to a government review of governance in schools (supposed to be published in October 2008 but still eagerly awaited).  I was there to put forward the case for parental involvement but met with a depressingly familiar reaction from the teaching professionals:  just who do these parents think they are ?

Who’s baking, who’s being heard?

Most schools will tell you they work hard to involve parents.  But scratch below the surface and you will find that many are adhering to a conveniently self-serving model of parental involvement where in fact parents do most of the work.  An “involved” parent is one who gets their child to school on time, helps with homework, encourages respect for teachers, bakes cakes for Parent Teacher Association events and turns up to parent evenings i.e a parent who is seen but not heard.  Have a look at the average home school agreement and you will get the message “parents and their children must….(do what the school says)” , “the school will…(do what it likes)”.

But the government is now seeking to give parents much greater influence in what happens in schools.  Since May 2007 all schools have had a duty to take account of the views of parents and are encouraged to set up Parent Councils to help them to do so.   They even produced a useful, if poorly publicised, toolkit to help them to do it. But as yet, there has been no research into how many schools have set up Parent Councils or similar parent-led bodies or what, if anything, their impact has been.  Are schools really beginning to take account of parental views or is it still the case that teacher (or the local authority) knows best?

Whose Views?

Some people argue that having parents on governing bodies ticks the box as far as parental involvement in decision-making is concerned.  This might work if anyone was at all clear about the role of parent governors. They are elected, but what is their role: to represent the forty or so parents who voted for them, to represent all parents, or simply to be themselves?  Do they really know what other parents think and if so, how?  Does the presence of parent governors mean that schools are absolved of their responsibility to find out for themselves what the generality of parents think or want?  And we should not forget that many schools struggle to find any parents who are willing or able to sit on their governing body at all (and having spent four years as a governor myself I could suggest a few reasons why that might be).

Who’s Sorry Now?

Over the past three and a half years I have been closely involved in setting up and running a parent-led Forum at my daughters’ school.  We had some successes but overall we felt that no-one appeared to be interested in our experiences or those of our children and that the school saw no real reason to respond to our concerns.  Last February we asked parents to identify the top ten areas where we felt things needed to improve.  They were all the same things we had been complaining about since the Forum’s very first meeting. Once again the school ignored us.  A few days later the Ofsted inspectors arrived and wrote a damning report which (surprise, surprise) identified all the same failings that the parents had been rabbitting on about for years (plus a few more that we could feel but not quite put our unprofessional fingers on).

When a school is in “Special Measures” it can seek the Secretary of State’s permission to get rid of the governing body (in many schools the only place where parents can have their voices heard on matters of strategy) and replace it with something called an Interim Executive Board (IEB).  This is what has happened in my daughters’ school  and in our case the chair and the majority of the membership was made up of paid staff from the local authority – the very local authority that had got us into this mess in the first place.  There is no requirement to include parents on the IEB or even for it to listen to parents and yet the IEB has all the same powers as a properly constituted governing body.  They can change pretty much anything they like and even, as in my daughters’ school, appoint a new Head Teacher without consulting anyone.

In whose name?

Anyone who knows anything about what happens when a school “fails” its OFSTED inspection, will tell you that what follows is a period of huge stress and anxiety for everyone involved – including parents - and yet at this very time when major change is taking place, parents can be effectively cut out of the process.   Our Parent Forum had to ask numerous times over a period of several months before the IEB even agreed to publish its minutes and we have not seen them yet although it is almost a year since the governing body was taken over and then disbanded.  We have also been asking to see a plan for the future of our school – what is going to change? why? when? and how will we know whether the raft of changes and new initiatives has made a difference?  No sign of that yet either although according to the school it was drawn up last July and they have been working to it since then.

The government is talking about streamlining governance arrangements in schools which probably means small governing bodies with people appointed for their skills rather than being elected by staff or parents. Pretty much like our IEB.  In governance terms this makes a lot of sense, creating small focussed and professional bodies with the skills to run these important institutions properly.  But our experience of such a body shows that little importance seems to be put on hearing the voice of parents – which is strange. These days, a skill set that does not include the techniques of gathering and acting on user and stakeholder opinion can be dismissed as dangerously introverted and incomplete. It is an old-fashioned management concept that refuses to share power and sees the participative approach as a threat to the quality of decision-making.

Whose Schools? (See where we started)

One way to address this might be to make Parent Councils or similar bodies compulsory in all schools and require governing bodies to listen to them.  Properly run and resourced Parent Councils, perhaps with their own dedicated staff, would foster new dialogues between parents and school senior managers and governors.  Institutional changes aside, we need to bring about a change in the culture of our schools and local authorities so that they understand that they are running schools for the benefit of children, their families and wider society and that they will only succeed in doing this when they by working in meaningful partnership with parents and carers and hearing what they say.

November’s Newsletter: No downturn here – M-A-C blogging team’s creative outputs breaks all records

10 posts since 30th September represents an all-time record as M-A-C engages with the issues and causes dear to our collective and individual hearts.

Our first ever post back in 2003 was about our central interest – user involvement. A theme echoed in this month’s output with Andrew’s post Engagement isn’t enough. Two posts later, we were taking a look at Ann Abraham’s approach to her then quite new job as Health Ombudsman. Complaints and the way they are managed and treated and what they mean for the organisations trying to deal with them are another abiding interest – see the piece on 24th looking at how common themes can emerge from different surveys of the complainant/ customer experience.

It is not all about the familiar themes – since 2003 we have broadened our interests to embrace two new areas – Policy Governance and parental involvement in schools. In the case of the model developed by John and Miriam Carver, Policy Governance® has taken a while to get off the ground in the UK. Most of the work and case histories reflected US practice and we have not had a good UK example of how this approach to corporate governance can help organisations here. Now the Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have led the way for others to follow. Val Moore reported on this on 27th October.

Finally, Caroline Millar reports on how the new models of participation – involvement, engagement – are impacting schools, parents and teachers. Her piece focuses on the consultation on complaint handling in schools and how parental problems are handled (or not).

We call ourselves a consultancy that specialises in the user interest. What keeps us interested and involved and in business, is how that interest can manifest itself in so many different contexts while the principles underlying best practice can be so similar. Different diagnoses, different solutions but underpinning them all are the common questions – what do users think of this? Has anyone asked them? Has anyone listened? Has anyone done anything with what they have heard? What happens when people have a problem? Easy really.

The final question that comes up when looking back over 5 years – has anything changed?  Well Andrew inspired us all with a 2006 look at what the NHS will be like by 2015. We are almost halfway there and what has come true? Well the Department of Health seems to see things the Andrew Craig way. Allowing people to pay for their drugs was something Andrew took a look at in March this year when he pointed out that ‘topping up’ was something that Beveridge seemed to have explicitly anticipated when he wrote about the State leaving “room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual”.  As far as the management ethos of the NHS as a whole is concerned, we will wait and see how PG will change all that.

In the meantime, it is still worth repeating a little Olympic-flavoured M-A-C joke from 28th November 2006 -

A parable of NHS reforms

(Elements are borrowed from several sources and sexed up a bit by us)

An NHS rowing team raced against a Japanese team. There were eight people in each team, of similar fitness, but the Japanese team won by a mile. How could this have happened asked John Reid? Top NHS management established a committee of analysts, which reported that the Japanese had seven rowers and one captain, whereas the NHS has seven captains and one rower. The experts called for restructuring of the NHS team. The new team comprised four captains, two service managers, and a director who also did the rowing. After a second lost race to the Japanese, the single rower was dismissed on the grounds of incompetence, and the management team received a bonus for strong leadership. A new NHS boat is currently being designed , but is reported to be running behind delivery schedule due to IT problems.

Let us see what has changed by the Olympic year of 2012 assuming we have not had to make a choice before then between funding bread and circuses or the NHS.

Schools need lessons in complaint handling

When I first became a school governor six years ago, I was taken aback to discover that the thing which the school called its “complaints policy” (when they actually managed to locate a dusty photocopy at the back of a filing cabinet) was something which would barely be worthy of the name in most other public or private sector organisations. 

A leap too far

It told you to complain to the Head, then complain to the Chair of Governors and then escalate your problem to the Secretary of State – definitely a leap too far. This long-winded, defensive document conveyed the clear message to parents that there was no real point in complaining but if they insisted on doing so then they could not expect anyone to make it easy for them. Behind it lay the depressing fact that beyond the governing body there really was nowhere to take their complaint and whatever they did, nothing much was likely to come of it.

No wonder few complain

Under current arrangements local authorities can get involved (if they want) but they don’t actually have any power to require action by the school and no express legal role in considering complaints. The Secretary of State’s hands are tied too and there are very few circumstances in which he or she can intervene. Small wonder few people complain.  We know that many people believe that it would make no difference to anything if they complained about health and social care services. If parents of school children were to be asked the same question I suspect an even higher percentage would give the same answer.

Hip! Hip! Hooray! for DCSF

So it is pleasing to see that finally the Department for Children, Schools and Families has decided to address this issue and issue a consultation document seeking views on its proposals for what looks to be a much improved approach to complaints. It is also pleasing to see that the department explicitly refers to the need to learn lessons from other areas of government such as health and local authorities.

The Children’s Plan  explains what the department is trying to achieve:

“Parents’ complaints will be managed in straightforward and open way and as many issues as possible will be resolved quickly. Parents, particularly those who may not be so readily engaged, will understand the route to follow when they have a complaint. We will review what more can be done to streamline and strengthen these arrangements” (paragraph 3.2).

The first main proposal in the consultation is that efforts should be made to ensure a quick and effective response to complaints within schools supported by an effective system of local mediation if complainants remain unhappy once the issue has gone to the governing body. This sounds like a good idea but the consultation document rather amusingly (and with a terse nod towards those scary teachers’ unions) suggests that this should be done without imposing “any additional burdens on school staff, leaders or governing bodies.” This seems fairly unrealistic.

At the moment schools may be recording complaints (although unlike other sectors they are not formally recorded, analysed or reported anywhere). Good schools will certainly give parents the time of day and have a chat about their concerns but knowing that the complaint is never likely to be escalated and that if it is, it will never get anywhere, means that there is no real incentive for schools to handle complaints properly or provide any effective redress. If they were to start doing it properly there would inevitably be implications in terms of data recording; reviewing and tightening up other areas of school administration; training staff and governors and taking time to talk to people. Not to mention the fact that they might even have to change the way they do things in response to complaints. Real and ongoing input will be required, so schools and governors should not be encouraged to bury their heads in the sand and think they can just get away with ticking a few boxes.

The second major proposal is for an independent complaints review service, probably hosted by the local government ombudsman. We will be taking a longer look at the implications of this – the LGO does not have the same powers as other Ombudsmen such as the Health or the Financial Services Ombudsman  to force compliance and can only name and shame.

Unified Data available to all

One thing which is not mentioned in the consultation document is whether there should be processes for collecting and analysing complaint data at a local or national level. It happens in the health service; the police and utility companies have to do it. But it is a peculiar feature of English and Welsh state schools that they seem to be left to get on with it without taxpayers being given much meaningful information about what is really going on behind the school walls. As we are all perhaps all beginning to realise, SATs don’t tell us much.   “Choice” may be the government’s current mantra for parents but how can parents make informed choices with so little meaningful information available to them?  No wonder they end up relying on school gate gossip.  Ofsted reports can be useful but are often so infrequent as to completely fail to notice when schools nosedive into chaos and there are really very few other measures of their effectiveness or user satisfaction. Other public services such as local government and the health service are inspected and judged year after year and required, as part of this process, to provide copious amounts of data including data about complaints. So maybe this is something that needs to be added in order to provide some real accountablity to parents and taxpayers.

Things may be about to change. It is time for schools to sit up straight and pay attention.

MAC will be drafting a full response to the consultation in time for the 21 November deadline. Meanwhile let us know what you think.

July Newsletter: New Look, Same Passions

Our passions remains the same but we have clothed our mix of news and views in new clothes knitted together with Wordpress which Dan Wardle of Surveylab our adviser in these matters assures us will bring the blog into the world of Web 2.0.

On www.publicinvolvement.org.uk recently…

A MP has asked why we are all so miserable? Are we becoming a nation of miserabilists never happier than when whingeing? We take a look at the latest Annual Report from the Financial Services Ombudsman for some facts and figures on the nation’s complaint behaviour in the markets he covers. The principle of being fair to consumers is all the rage in regulatory circles and we look at the new laws banning unfair practices backed by new OFT research that tells us that ‘consumer detriment’ costs us as consumers over £6billion pounds a year. We join up our learning on complaints with our thinking on user engagement and ask – are they linked?. Can the complainant become the engaged user for the longer term?

Finally just to keep give you a chance to tell us your experience, there is a mini-survey for parents of school age children to complete about what they did when they had a problem with the children’s school.

Have a good summer.