educentral
Turn this dramatic statement around and it suggests that if you want to make an improvement in the way your school operates, then you need to improve the administration of the school. Make the school's administration more efficient, and everything else in the school improves.
This is a radically different stance from that which has governed the approach to schooling for at least 100 years. During all this time it has been thought that the way to improve schools is through the improving of the teaching and learning on one hand and the behaviour and discipline on the other.
Why should this approach now be overturned?
Over the years change has taken place on several fronts – most notably in terms of:
• The broad vision of educationalists and commentators on how schools
should change
• The vision of the government in terms of education
• Society's expectation of what schooling should be doing in our society
• What actually happens in the classroom
• The rise of the concept of the School Administrator as an influence on the school.
We need to look very briefly at each of these in order to be able to understand why it is time for a significant change in the way schools are run, and why it is appropriate to put the school's administration at the heart of this change.
The broad vision of educationalists and commentators on how schools should change
Commentators and educationalists – that is people who do not work in schools but who have a vision of schooling that goes beyond the everyday opinions expressed in newspapers and on phone-in programmes – have always had opinions about education. Removed as they are from the everyday requirement to keep order, teach lessons, purchase products and handle the finances, they concern themselves with what schools should be doing, and how they should do it. Quite often they consider the outcome in terms of the pupils: how well they will function within our society, how much contribution they will make economically, politically, socially or artistically, how content they will be within themselves, and whether they are more likely to become hard working decent citizens, manic depressives, or criminals (to take but three outcomes).
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