Banks, Alison

Bora, Smita

Finn, Catherine

Lee, Karen

Watson, Carol

English

Digital Education Resource Archive

Two Heads Better than One?S U M M A R Y  P R A C T I T I O N E R  E N Q U I R Y  R E P O R TBuilding a cross-phase school of the futureThis report records and analyses a unique situation – theappointment of two headteachers to a innovative ‘future school’operating from one building which incorporates a public library,and adult education and community facilities, as well as anursery, a primary and a secondary school.Alison Banks, Catherine Finn, Smita Bora, Karen Lee andCarol Watson, NCSL Research Associates from Chafford HundredCampus, ThurrockA U T U M N  2 0 0 2IntroductionAs 21st century schools develop as learning organisationsand community centres of life-long learning, thetraditional autocratic headteacher model of leadershipseems increasingly inappropriate and impractical. Many schools have experimented with and developedalternative management models, most commonly basedaround a leadership team and often widening leadershipopportunities across the whole staff. These approachesare consistent with the notion of the learning school.They offer the complexity and flexibility needed to meetthe many challenges facing leaders in today’s schools. In order to investigate team leadership, we chose an in-depth study of our own organisation, rather than abroader survey. Ours was a case study in a uniquecontext, but facing issues common in all managementsituations.A unique contextChafford Hundred Campus is innovative in many respects,serving the new town of Chafford Hundred in Thurrock LEA.The building incorporates a public library, adult educationand community facilities, as well as a nursery, a primary anda secondary school. It is truly a ‘neighbourhood learningcentre’. The building incorporates a central block of sharedfacilities, including the public library, administration, staffroom, halls, cyber cafe and specialist accommodation, withseparate classroom wings for the primary and secondaryschools. Our leadership team faced the huge task of settingup this new institution, to open in September 2001. The fullresearch report documents the period of planning andopening the campus.It was unique to have a cross-phase, all-female team of five,consisting of two headteachers, two assistant headteachersand a business manager. Working together, we aimed tocreate one institution, with shared staffing and resources.Major ambitions were:to develop primary-secondary fusion, rather than liaison or co-location to maximise the learning opportunities arising from portable technologies for the campus to work in partnership with local businesses, the public library and adult education services, health and community agencies, other schools and the local community, to develop its role as a community enterprise centreAppropriate researchmethodologyWe believe that school-based, practitioner-led, action research is effective educational research. It puts the principles oflife-long learning into practice and enables teachers to realisethat they can understand and take control of change.Ultimately, the status and morale of the profession stands tobenefit greatly from practitioner research. Also, we believe,action research can be more focused, simpler, more accessibleand more immediately relevant to fellow professionals thanconventional academic research. The medium is the messageThrough carrying out school-based practitioner research, we demonstrated how the learning school should function. In our view, its focus should be teaching and learning, with a drive for constant improvement. As the leadership team,therefore, we constantly discussed and analysed our ownefforts. As befits a 21st century school, we used audio, digitaland video recording of our meetings and major events. The team agreed to keep individual learning logs. The outcomes were tested through formal and informalfeedback from parents and pupils. Our final report is in web format (www.ncsl.org.uk/researchassociates). In addition to using all this data to draw our conclusions, we promoted the notion of researching best practice throughleading by example. As intended, other teaching and supportstaff became involved and they have initiated several otherresearch studies with universities, businesses, internationalorganisations and the DfES. The ethos of the learning schoolhas already become embedded, with pupils too carrying outsurveys, preparing reports and presenting at conferences. The approaches adopted by the leadership team have beencarried through to pupils in Year 7, who have one to oneweekly reviews of their learning and who keep their ownlearning logs.In order to become learning communities, schools need totalk about learning, and young people need tobecome fluent in the language of learning. In such acommunity, tutoring for learning is integrated into the school,not an add-on. Tutoring for learning cannot fix a culturewhich does not encourage learning or learning conversations.In a learning community, all members are involved in suchconversations (Gray, 1999).The benefits of cross-phaseteam leadershipThere were many occasions when it was extremely beneficialto have five people with very different backgrounds andexperience working together. Some of the advantages ofour cross-phase team were:There is a wider range of strengths to draw on and play to. For instance, display work is a traditional strength ofprimary teachers which secondary staff can learn from; secondary specialist knowledge in areas such as music and PE may benefit primary colleagues.Everyone can develop their own specialism and expertise – a larger staff obviously provides more opportunities for individuals to pursue their own professional interests across phases.Team members can call on a variety of people for support. We held a book week, where the range ofevents was more impressive than could be achieved by a single school. Reception children visited a zoo accompanied by the Year 7 art club, who assisted them in producing art work on their return.Different approaches, drawn from different traditions and practices can be tried – such as different formats for parents’ evenings or exchanging teaching materials between schools. We discovered lots of divergent thinking arising from the synergy of cross-phase interaction and creativity in decision-making, and it was easier to adopt new approaches. For instance our working together inspired the development of an integrated Year 7 curriculum, based on good practice in Key Stage 2.There are many opportunities for personal and professional development – each of us has taken on new roles and learned far more than we believe we would have done in a conventional situation.There is an adaptability to futures thinking – we have learned to challenge all conventions and this has meant trialling many new ideas.Experimentation and change are accepted as a natural part of learning and development, not viewed as personal failure. The more risks one takes, the more likely it is that mistakes will be made, but we have accepted that a learning organisation needs to take risks in order to learn.Constantly questioning and challenging each other wasessential in setting up an innovative institution – nothing wastaken for granted. This was particularly relevant to the team’sgrowing understanding of the cultural and organisationaldifferences between primary and secondary schools, which isoften recognised but rarely confronted.Facing up to the challenges ofcross-phase teamsThe task we attempted was stressful and difficult. It would beunhelpful to others to gloss over the difficulties we faced, andour research, if it is to be useful to others, must be honestand objective. We recognised that in any team situation therewill be personality conflicts, tensions and disagreements.These are some of the challenges our team faced:There were difficulties in creating shared understanding. We found, for example, different behaviour policy expectations in different age groups and in different contexts. This meant giving time to discussion and debate,to create mutual understanding and consensus, which might not otherwise have been necessary. We had different priorities, pressures and practical requirements – for example, communication with parents is usually more face-to-face in primary and paper-based in secondary.There were difficulties drawing the  whole team together – because of the different demands within and beyond the school day at primary and secondary levels, it was rare that everyone could meet together.Experienced members of the team can feel overburdened – we discovered that a huge amount of explanation was required to work with colleagues who were placed in an unfamiliar phase.  Less experienced members can feel unsupported, inadequately trained or prepared – walking into a Year 1 class from a Year 7 class, and vice versa, can be extremely challenging.Equality in principle is hard to achieve in practice, given inequalities of pay between sectors and the traditional expectations of heads, deputies and assistants.There is a serious question mark over whether any team can function effectively with two leaders – the rarity of such situations probably says much about the drawbacks. Staff can be unsure about who to go to for decisions, and sometimes get different responses from members of the team. Conventional differences of pay, staffing structure, preparation time, daily routine, ethos and expectation between primary and secondary staff are impossible for a single institution to resolve on its own – in many ways these are different worlds. For instance, even generosity of staffing and funding cannot solve the problem ofnon-contact time for a reception class teacher whose children are very unsettled in her absence.Our cross-phase team faced the additional difficulty that two schools cannot legally function as one, so shared staffing,budgeting and planning proved extremely problematic.Although the law will now allow the campus to become oneinstitution, that does not permit the joint functioning of twoheads. In addition, like any community school, we face the challengeof staffing a 24/365 school with the majority of staff onteachers’ pay and conditions based on the formal notion of1265 hours per annum. Our experience is that this equationplaces an unreasonable and disproportionate burden onleadership team members.Key findingsIf our experience is typical, a successful cross-phase teamneeds:strategies to promote effective communicationan understanding of the difference between core and boundary activitiesstrong people management skillsvalues-driven strategic planningexternal supportPartnershipPartnership is an over-used phrase in relation to schoolmanagement, behind which may lie good intentions but littlesubstance. Our commitment was to working in partnershipwith other teams, such as the public library and adulteducation services, to deliver wide-ranging communityservices. After a few months of existence it is too early toevaluate our success in achieving that. Nonetheless we canstate that, in our experience, school leadership teams cannotsucceed in isolation and must develop new and better waysof working with other agencies.RecommendationAll-age schools, community learning centres, networkedlearning communities and federations of schools are anincreasingly important feature of education in this country.Further work is needed to help schools develop appropriatemodels for team leadership in these new contexts. Ourexperience suggests too, that these new contexts will requirefurther legislation and changes in teachers’ pay andconditions if schools are to be enabled to experiment and to develop effective new structures.ReferencesGray, J et al (1999) Improving Schools: performance andpotential, Buckingham, OUPHandy, C (1994), The Empty Raincoat, London, Hutchinson Feedback on this report to any member of the team iswelcome, through abanks@chaffordhundredcampus.thurrock.sch.ukS U M M A R Y  P R A C T I T I O N E R  E N Q U I R Y  R E P O R TResearch AssociateReports Available inAutumn 02 Two Heads Better than One? Building a cross-phaseschool of the future, Alison Banks, Catherine Finn, SmitaBora, Karen Lee and Carol Watson, Chafford Hundred Campus,Thurrock Working Smarter Together: The development of anenquiry team across 12 schools, Trish Franey, NetworkedLearning Communities Open Windows: Becoming an e-learning school,Moyra Evans, formerly Denbigh School, Milton Keynes Leading from the Classroom: The impact of the assistantheadteacher in primary schools, Peter RJ Smith,Swallowdale Primary School, Melton Mowbray Passion and Intuition: The impact of life history onleadership, Richard Parker, Lodge Park Technology College,Corby The First 100 Days: An enquiry into the first 100 days ofheadship in a failing school, Patricia Brown, SchoolDevelopment Adviser, Hertfordshire Team Talk: Sharing leadership in primary schools,Alison Kelly, Hooe Primary School, Plymouth The Intelligent Gaze: Leadership, lead learners andindividual growth – a reflective enquiry, Steve Kenning,Callington Community School, Cornwall Summary and full reports of these and previous researchassociate studies are available from the NCSL web site atwww.ncsl.org.uk/researchassociates 02A U T U M N  S U M M A R Y  P R A C T I T I O N E R  E N Q U I R Y  R E P O R TThe research summarised here is part of the NCSL ResearchAssociateship Programme, which offers an opportunity forschool leaders to contribute towards the College’s researchand development agenda. NCSL provides support for schoolleaders to undertake study, to engage in enquiry and toimpact on practice. The programme includes: Study visitsTeam enquiriesBursariesResearchers in residenceUniversity project attachmentsWe welcome enquiries about the Research AssociatesProgramme. For details, please contact Martin Coles byemailing martin.coles@ncsl.org.ukFor an information pack and application forms, please contactamanda.hatchett@ncsl.org.uk or telephone 0115 872 2040.www.ncsl.org.uk Printed on environmentally friendly paperNational College for School LeadershipTriumph RoadNottinghamNG8 1DHT: 0870 001 1155F: 0115 872 2001

Two heads better than one?: building a cross-phase school of the future

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