Deconstructing the familiar: Making sense of the complexities of secondary schools as organisations

This paper outlines a conceptual framework for a school as an organisation. In this, there are three core elements: people (including students), power to energise or prevent action, and culture that is constructed by a community’s members to reflect its norms, values and beliefs. However in this construction some people are more influential than others. An organisation’s culture is sometimes called a micro-culture to distinguish it from national or local community cultures. The curriculum, at the core of a school’s purpose and process, is a cultural construction legitimated by the authority of those responsible for a school’s management

Values driven leadership

[From Introduction] Rational/functionalist discourses of leadership focus on what leaders do and offer explanations for the efficacy of their actions. Micro-political discourses offer insights into how leaders negotiate their aims and objectives. Ethical and moral discourses offer explanations for why leaders choose to act in certain ways. Ribbins (1999: 2) points out that values explain the why of the human enterprise. They also offer explanations for why people prefer to resist some directions in which leaders choose to take institutions, whether under pressure from external agencies or of their own volition. These three discourses interact around and through the agency of the leader as person

Leaders values and social justice: Improving teaching and learning for all

[From Introduction] Structural / functionalist discourses of leadership focus on what leaders do and offer explanations for the efficacy of their actions. Micro-political discourses offer insights into how leaders negotiate their aims and objectives. They also offer explanations for why people prefer to resist some directions in which leaders choose to take institutions, whether under pressure from external agencies or of their own volition. Ethical and moral discourses offer explanations for why leaders choose to act in certain ways. Ribbins (1999: 2) points out that values explain the why of the human enterprise. These three discourses interact around and through the agency of the leader as person

Managing exclusions in schools: in whose interests?

This paper considers briefly the policy and social contexts of student exclusions from schools and some of the common reasons for those exclusions, before moving on to explore some school policies and strategies that are used to enact exclusion and to encourage students at risk of exclusion to engage more successfully with schools. Interpreting these policies and strategies of exclusion is, however, problematic. Although they appear to foster rejection from the educational community for some young people struggling to position themselves in the organisational and social contexts which surround them, they are often portrayed as a means of promoting better general student engagement with schooling and of giving targeted help and support to particular students. Yet there are strong disciplinary elements in exclusion which tend to position the recipients as social outsiders to normal educational structures by depriving them of, through not giving full access to, the educational resources available to other students, so disadvantaging those excluded students in their struggles to gain a reasonable style of life as adults. It raises conundrums for school leaders about what values to implement and how and in whose interests, and which students’ needs should be given priority in what ways

Constructing cultures of inclusion in schools and classrooms: hearing voices, building communities for learning

[From Introduction] To cope with the tensions and the potential social conflicts that occur in school communities leaders need to listen to participants’ voices, those of students, staff, parents and school governors in particular, recognise their interests and needs, and allow them to influence the curriculum and organisational decisions that are made. The importance of students as internal actors in the construction of a school and of schooling (Day et al, 2000; Rudduck and Flutter, 2000), and recent central government policy encouraging the development of school councils, points to a reemerging awareness of the importance of encouraging students to take a responsible part in the government of their schools, an awareness that was largely extinguished in the 1980s and 1990s. School students have considerable impact on the construction of its culture (Marsh, 1997; Busher and Barker, 2003), whether or not they are commonly included in discourses about work-related interactions in schools and whether or not they are conventionally marginalised from discourses about school organisational process. Linstead (1993: 59) describes this as students helping to write the texts of schools, perceiving the construction of organisations as an intertextual process that takes place between the authors and actors of it and in it. It raises questions about how students’ acute awareness of the processes of schooling and the many insights they have of them (Rudduck and Flutter, 2000; Flutter and Rudduck, 2004) can be heard and acknowledged by staff at all levels in order to contribute positively to the development of a school

Is it Ethnography? Some students’ views of their experience of Secondary schooling in England

The study set out to investigate how official and unofficial discourses of inclusion, engagement and discipline in schools in England at present affect the ways in which students and teachers construct their various identities. The study was carried out in one Secondary school in Middle England, UK, with 36 students in Year 9 (age 13-14 years), 3 of their class teachers, and some of the senior staff of the school. In addition to observation of students’ lessons, students took photographs of their environment to situate themselves in it and provide the bases for reflexive interviews with the academic researchers. Students showed sympathy for teachers working under pressure; annoyance with other students acting in an anti-social manner; a strong sense of justice; expectation that they should be respected in the way they are treated by adults; and acceptance of the necessity of rules and punishments for rule breakers

The Project of the other: Developing inclusive learning communities in schools

This paper considers the possible nature and membership of learning communities in schools and what evidence there may be of middle leaders trying to develop and sustain learning communities with their colleagues, even though these communities encompass asymmetrical power relationships between members. Although it is argued that students and support staff are part of these learning communities, not apart from them, the limited evidence from this study does not support this. How power is used and distributed to construct collaborative cultures, and the part played by middle leaders, is central to the development of a learning community. The promotion of dialogue and consultation amongst members helps them to generate a sense of community which, in turn, enables them to tackle effectively the tasks and dilemmas facing them. Empirical evidence from a small scale study in England, UK, indicates the ways in which some middle leaders have tried to build learning communities, and their colleagues views on their efforts, while negotiating the value-laden tensions and dilemmas inherent in all middle management posts in educational organisations

Ethics of Educational Research: An agenda for discussion

[From Introduction] ‘Ethics embody individual and communal codes of conduct based upon adherence to a set of principles which may be explicit and codified or implicit, and which may be abstract and impersonal or concrete and personal’. Zimbardo (1984, cited in Cohen et al, 2000:58) Pring (2000) takes a slightly different view, drawing a distinction between ethics and morals, however the latter emerge in different situations. ‘Ethics [are] the philosophical enquiry into the basis of morals or moral judgements’ (p.141) whereas ‘morals [are] concerned with what is the right or wrong thing to do’ (idem). By focusing on the principles that might underlie the moral dimensions of educational research, rather than trying to exemplify what practical moral decisions researchers might take in particular situations, This paper tries to go beyond the ‘search for rules of conduct’ that Simons (1995: 436) pursued in order to allow researchers to defend their work in various social and political contexts. Such technicist solutions imply an autocratic style of managing research that privileges the views of some people, researchers. This view of managing has ‘at its core a set of values: a disrespectful and distrusting view of people as cogs or components in the machinery of organisations’ (Shipley and Moir, 2001: iv) or other enterprises

Using participants’ photo-narratives to elicit their perspectives on social interactions in schools.

Visual methods are well recognised as a means for capturing participants’ views of their experiences (Pink, 2001, Prosser, 2009). This paper discusses why visual methods might be used in investigating insiders’ perspectives, particularly those of school students, of their social and policy situations in schools, and how this might lead to the empowerment of marginalised insiders whose voices are often repressed by those with formal authority in institutions. In considering the different ways in which visual data may be analysed the paper focuses on the importance and richness of visual subjective data, especially when organised into narratives by participants, and points out how the cross-referencing of subjective data becomes the means of constructing the credibility of a study

Improving Schools:Developing Schools for all children

[From Introduction] This presentation focuses on Improving schools for all children. But there is a problem with the term ‘improving’ in that it assumes things are always getting better But notions of improvement are culturally located – so what is considered ‘improvement’ in one culture (and one time and space in history) may not be so considered in another. For example in the UK in the twentieth century there was a strong move to schooling which included boys and girls in the same classes in one school, whatever the age of the boys and girls. Some parents resisted this, but most parents seemed to have welcomed this, not least because it seemed to expand the educational opportunities available to girls (women). However in some parts of the world, including some countries round here, such developments would not be considered improvements