Template for transformation
November 2007
Merlin John
“It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,” says Damian Allen, Executive Director of Children’s Services in Knowsley, the Merseyside local authority that has become a flagship project in the first ‘wave’ of the Government’s £45 billion Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.
It’s a typically challenging aphorism from a key figure in a £150 million transformation crusade with a talented and committed LA team, high-powered private partners that include US software giant Microsoft and BSF
The lessons Allen has learned, and spends much of his time sharing, are both profound and replicable. And they lie behind his team’s conviction that the Government’s top current BSF priority should be to commit extra time and money (possibly around £1 million per project) to secure the most crucial aspect of the programme, the ‘envisioning’ and planning that can provide the kind of transformation the Government is looking for and which learners deserve. They warn of dangers if this doesn’t happen.
Knowsley is in a good position to show leadership because it started developing its transformation agenda before the advent of BSF. In fact Allen and his team drily point out that, for them, BSF is a timely funding stream for the strategy they were already putting in place.
“We already had a schools commission which recognised the need to radically reduce the number of school places,” he says. This lay behind the decision to close the borough’s 10 secondary schools and create seven new learning centres.
“We were fairly clear when we started in 2000 that we needed to improve the existing system,” he adds. “It was not delivering to children and people in terms of standard performance indicators. We were 25% five A-Cs at GCSE for instance. We are now double that at 50% six years later. So we needed to improve the existing system by getting a sense of ‘we are all in this together’ from the heads.”
Fortunately the culture among local schools was one of collaboration rather than the competition found in many other places, and the project enjoyed “strong and durable” local political support.
The Excellence in Cities initiative, started in 1999, was used to model new interventions like City Learning Centres so that the borough could work on improving its existing system and drive up standards, while simultaneously starting the local ‘stakeholder’ engagement that could lead to a true step change – transformation. “It was about how you build a culture of innovation I suppose,” explains Allen, “while at the same time you have to twin-track - impacting on the existing system to generate a level of confidence and commitment and partnership working.
“Of course this is a statement that’s easily uttered but a great deal more difficult to effect in practice. It is about relationships and we are very clear that, while we share the same moral intents and purposes as our heads, we have discretely different roles and responsibilities within the endeavour. This meant that cosy it wasn't; transparent, honest and mutually respectful it was.”
Local conditions are important. While Knowsley has its leafy ‘village’ areas, its social profile reveals the pressures on the community. According to Knowsley’s own statistics from a 2005 report, “In 1991, 44% of Knowsley children lived in households where there was no adult in employment, compared with only 19% nationally. In 2001 this had decreased to 33% in Knowsley and 18% nationally. [While] 9% of the borough’s children lived in lone-parent households in 1991 compared with 3.7% nationally, by 2001 the figures had risen to 11.8% and 6.5% respectively…” According to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (2004), Knowsley is the third most deprived district in England.
Intelligent, purposeful experiments were started which would have no compromising implications for policy if they were not successful. For example, SAM Learning, then a new online and relatively unknown revision service for students was brought in. Knowsley and SAM Learning were as much co-developers as partners, with a respected research unit, the Fischer Family Trust, analysing feedback to check for learning gains. And there were gains – between a third and half a grade in maths and science - which helped local learners and also helped SAM Learning develop a successful business.
This supported the Plus One Challenge, “a series of initiatives with a simple mantra: with effective preparation and practice, students should be able to improve their grades by at least one between their mock exams and the real things”. Allen’s team was seeking to tap into the values of young people and support them in school and the community with resources. They could sign up to the Plus One Challenge and qualify for real benefits.
“If they were committed to improve by at least one grade then they got access to a number of additional resources - incentives and rewards. For instance, if they got five A-Cs and continued onto post-16, which was another indicator, they got £50 and we still continue with that. I get letters from young people and their parents saying ‘Thank you very much’. It was a small token to give them a book voucher to enable them to meet some of the initial cost of post-16 which, for many of our young people, is a turn-off. We also gave them free access to swimming facilities and created places in the libraries for studying.” It even had its own acronyms: “WIFM (we looked at the What's In It For Me?) and CITV (Connecting Into Their Values)”.
As Knowsley Director of Special Projects Nick Page, who was then Director of Excellence for Cities, puts it: “Damian brought in a whole raft of highly focused, targeted interventions to support driving up the baseline and that enabled people like me to develop a series of wrappers where we bent existing government policies. And we had a lot of government support at that time [the early 2000s] to really push and be innovative.”
Technology was seen as engaging and liberalising so it lay behind an intense period of innovation, a series of initiatives, like the Know It All website, now part of the North West Grid for Learning. It supported learners with generic approaches to learning and revision. The CLCs provided PCs for local homes to bridge the
“People understood that ‘continue to do what you are doing and expect different outcomes’ is the definition of stupidity really. We had to try things differently and without undue risks in terms of young people's outcomes.” The aim had been a “model of replicable innovation” and achieving that allowed them to take things further.
Perhaps the most radical element was the involvement of learners and the community in developing the plans with architects, going as far as to increase the weighting of their responsibility for the final decisions for the partner contracts. Page was freed to make them real partners: “When I hear ‘We want to consult with you’, my toes curl up,” he says. “I really hate it. What we should mean is deeper engagement, co-creation. Too often, particularly in the public sector, we have a good idea, we scope it out, we build it and then we take it out for consultation with the people who are going to be affected by it. And actually all we'll do is shave the edges. What we are talking about here is far deeper and far more risky, actually getting people at the inception stage and shaping the ideas; in some sense having a wider parameter and a looser grip, if that's not contradictory.”
Learners and other stakeholders toured buildings on Merseyside, in other parts of the UK and in Scandinavia. The feedback was extremely effective and helped toughen up the process to avoid the sorts of compromises that have undermined so many other design projects. And the students even provided the presentation and voice-overs for the Knowsley DVD, demonstrating the ambitious, spacious and flexible new learning centres. It’s used across the UK and further afield and is proudly shown at public events, including those run by Microsoft (the software company says it lends its “thought leadership” to BSF projects, not that the Knowsley team needs any). “We don't just consult and engage - we get participation,” says Allen.
What Allen and his team are after is true systemic change that goes further than buildings, with innovation in both vocational offerings and a more thematic, project-based secondary curriculum to counter the negative gulf for learners leaving primaries. Most important they want to create a self-learning system, with innovation and a capacity for change built in, what they call a “template of potentiality”.
That’s why there are no headteachers but learning centre leaders whose roles include commissioning support and interventions that support all children and their families, both in school and in the community in the true spirit of Every Child Matters. It’s about “reculturing and getting a new institutional identity”, and the next development will be the creation of “cross-sector federations for system governance”.
“Our role is to create the conditions and circumstances and the resources to enable and to facilitate and empower the individual institutions, but not to see them as islands,” says Allen. “We want them to be equally excellent but we want a premium from the individual learning centre and we want a premium from the federations in which the learning centre sits, and we want a premium from the whole system in which the federations sit.”
Learning centre leaders, he says, will have “a licence to operate in that community, from the community, for the community. That is why the community's use of the facilities needs to be seen as important. So when we are selecting our learning centre leaders we are looking at those aspects of their leadership potential as well as making sure that the core business is done which is an absolute for us, particularly with core skills, maths and English being a big challenge within the borough. We want it all, that's what we are saying.”
The first learning centre opens in January 2009 and the final one in January 2010. That’s when Knowsley will get the first indications of whether it will be getting it all.
Merlin John is an editor who created and ran The TES’ Online magazine. He is now freelance and works for publications including The Guardian, and runs his own web service at www.merlinjohnonline.net .