I’m used to being invited to speak at conferences but last week that invitation also came with a refreshing request to pick my brains. It was refreshing because one of the things that has always puzzled me in a business and political climate obese with enthusiasts clamouring to tell teachers and schools how much employers value creativity, is just how little time real businesses devote to picking their own, or anyone else’s brains.
My experience has shown me that most business colleagues, however senior, find the idea of a blank sheet of paper genuinely terrifying. They reach for a template like a toddler grabs a frayed and threadbare rabbit. I once saw a bid response for a multi-million pound educational project written by a team working for a well-known computer company, which was actually submitted, still including large sections of the faux latin text that software companies use to fill up those blank sheets of paper. And try telling any marketing professional you have a great idea. It will be vilified, shot full of holes, or at best stolen and reworked, before you can say, “Hey guys, listen to this!”
So when I was invited to have my brains picked, I accepted cheerfully. What follows is, partly, the result.
Schools and teachers, especially in the UK and US, are going through a particularly punishing period of change in which commercial behaviour, strategy and practice are being modelled as exemplary. The burgeoning number of academies, free schools and charter schools in the US are all symptomatic of this trend. Am I really the only person to have noticed that when academies get together, they are as often as not referred to as chains rather than the less supermarket-friendly handle, multi-academy trusts?
Yet, having worked extensively in both fields, I would argue that there are profoundly significant differences between the two worlds, differences that anyone keen to drive improvements needs to be aware of. Being involved in the business of education is not the same as working for an education business. Most teachers prefer and choose the former. Even those who work in the private sector have a completely different mindset and attitude towards education than employees in an outright education business. Understanding and accepting that is where all school improvement efforts based on commercial practice or strategy of any kind should start from. The Education Funding Agency, for example, recently issued video guidance for schools to improve their financial management and achieve efficiency in using resources.
Now before readers leap headlong into the flood with me and get swept away on a tidal bore of anti-corporate rhetoric, I have no doubt that there are many things schools can learn from good, successful businesses, especially about financial probity and budgeting. Even teaching colleagues I admired and respected tended to regard things like their departmental budget as a necessary evil best left until days before the deadline or, quite often, after it. And here’s a perfect illustration of the kind of thing I mean. Working for a not-for-profit company some years ago, when I asked the team leader of a new project what the margin they were working to was, he replied baffled, “None, we’re not-for-profit!” Not for-profit quickly becomes not in business if you don’t run enough of a margin to pay your salaries, but so deeply engrained in his teaching background was the idea that education is non-commercial, he was prepared to embark on a very expensive project, blissfully unaware of the need to at least break even, or that the taxpayer was funding him. And don’t even speak to me about photocopying. I wonder how many secondary schools in the UK know how many photocopiers they actually have in the building, never mind how much they cost to run. The English department in a school where I did some supply teaching had a book cupboard stuffed to the gunwales with pristine copies of wonderful novels, thousands of pounds worth, all neatly and perfectly stacked and aligned, none of which were ever allowed out to be read…because the children would lose them.
This is what happens in schools where teachers successfully remove themselves totally from the dreary practicalities of being employed by what is in effect an SME, in favour of that far more attractive, appealing activity, teaching. The introduction of school business managers is a sensible step in the right direction but no amount of chief finance officers or accountants will make a dent on the intrinsic motivation that makes teachers prefer making children learn things to making money.
One of the most frequently quoted axioms of change management in business is the assertion that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Well I would respectfully suggest to those who came up with the strategy of encouraging, or even forcing schools and teachers to be more businesslike, that they start by understanding the culture of schools before they try to change it.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author
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