What are teaching schools for?

In 1916, R G Collingwood was working as a civil servant in the War Office. Each day, his walk to work took him past the Albert Memorial:

Everything about it was visibly misshapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous; for a time I could not bear to look at it, and passed by with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness I forced myself to look, and face day by day the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it? … What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what he had done and what he had tried to do? Had he tried to produce a beautiful thing … If so he had of course failed. But had he perhaps been trying to produce something different? If so he might possibly have succeeded … Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did?

I gradually came to realize that I began by observing that you cannot find out what a man means simply by studying his spoken or written statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer (Collingwood, 1936).

The idea of teaching schools has developed quickly, and in this piece I try to answer Collingwood’s question in relation to them: what is the problem to which teaching schools are the answer. One of the iron laws of education policy is that almost any initiative is laden, like an over-decorated Christmas tree, with far greater expectations than it can bear, so that it crashes to the ground, toppling under the weight of the final addition. A good recent example is the national Key Stage 3 strategy, which began life as a means to consolidate the then observed gains of the primary literacy and numeracy strategies, became the national secondary strategy before it had established itself as the Key Stage 3 strategy, and then became a repository for any secondary curriculum or pedagogy intervention (National Strategies, 2011). In 2010, the Coalition government not only abandoned the policy and its funding streams but also excised it from the DfE website. There is an almost moral tale here: few policy interventions really embed themselves.

The idea of teaching schools is frequently traced back to thinking undertaken about ten years ago by George Berwick for the Cabinet Office (Matthews and Berwick, 2013). At that stage, the idea was an argument by analogy – and an argument by analogy that reveals some of the weaknesses in the designation. The analogy was with teaching hospitals. Teaching hospitals are hospitals which in addition to providing patient care also undertake substantial teaching activities, by virtue of their close relationship with university medical schools. By extension, the case exists for the development of schools which in addition to their responsibilities for pupils undertake wider training functions. Arguments by analogy are, as any philosopher will confirm, always relatively weak: they are only as strong as the underlying analogy. In this instance, there are several obvious problems. Whilst the addition of teaching to hospitals is an additional function, all schools, by definition, teach. In the long run this may prove to be a problem for the idea of teaching schools – an idea which nonetheless, if properly developed and grown, does have enormous potential. A second weakness in the analogy is that teaching hospitals derive their teaching function not from their own activity but from their close – often wholly subsidiary – relationship with a university medical school. University College Hospital is a teaching hospital because of its relationship with the University College Medical School. There were other models and ideas open to the early development of teaching schools. In North America, professional development schools attracted attention in the 1990s and Linda Darling-Hammond – perhaps the most articulate thinker in North America on the development of the teaching profession – described their potential (Darling-Hammond, 1994). In England, from 1999, the government had developed and designated training schools as an additional specialist designation. The training school initiative was never formally evaluated, and I have not mapped out the relationship between currently designated teaching schools and previously designated training schools. Training schools had a twin focus on ITE and CPD, and, inevitably, developed that focus differently.

The idea of teaching schools developed strongly in London, and then more generally in City Challenge, which placed a premium on developing school-to-school support as a school improvement device, and, particularly, head teacher to head teacher support. The evidence, including from Merryn Hutchings’ evaluation of city challenge, is that school-to-school support, and especially from successful to less successful schools, played an important part in the successes of city challenge: eradicating much poor performance and moving more schools on a journey to good and beyond (Hutchings, 2013). The idea of school-to-school support as a – perhaps the – principal vehicle for improving struggling schools became firmly entrenched in the development of teaching schools, and the first director of the national teaching schools programme had been a distinguished senior figure in the city challenge programme.

Teaching schools developed rapidly after the 2010 White Paper on The Importance of Teaching (DfE, 2010). Teaching school designation would constitute an elite designation: in order to qualify for designation, schools would need to demonstrate both that they were outstanding, including an outstanding designation in teaching and learning, and had a track record of collaborative work. It was from early work on designation, in order to give some shape to the programme, that the idea of the key responsibilities of teaching schools − the so-called big six – emerged: the six core priorities (Table 1).

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Table 1.

The ‘big six’ priorities for teaching schools.

1. play a greater role in training new entrants to the profession

2. lead peer-to-peer professional and leadership development

3. identify and develop leadership potential

4. provide support for other schools

5. designate and broker specialist leaders of education (SLEs)

6. research and development

Teaching schools have been charged with a series of functions and responsibilities without a clear articulation of what they are for: the big six is a list of things teaching schools do rather than what they are for. Some of them – for example, the designation of specialist leaders of education – look suspiciously like a vehicle for the delivery of a policy priority rather than a thought-through role in pursuit of an idea. Moreover, in other respects, there are already instances of hanging more decorations on the Christmas tree. In 2012, the DfE, under some pressure on cultural education, released a small pot of money and announced that it would be funnelled through teaching schools (DfE, 2012). I am sure that some teaching schools are excellent at working with museums, but because this has never been a quality criterion there is no reason to suppose that teaching schools will be any better at working with museums than any other schools, nor any more effective at spending the money.

The underlying conception of teaching schools was that schools are better able to lead the work of other schools than agencies outside schools. In this sense, teaching schools emerge from a concern with professional and system leadership. They are a vehicle by which schools can lead the education system. Of course, there are limits on the extent to which schools can lead the system: schools can lead aspects of the system, and might be able to lead professional development and thinking. But they find strategic planning of the system difficult and, like hospitals, find research and development a difficult area of work. Nonetheless, one of the things which teaching schools are for is a recognition of the role of professionals in leading the system. Much of the thinking on what a school-led system might look like has been undertaken in a series of thoughtful and compelling pieces of work for the national college by David Hargreaves, sketching out with some sophistication how school-led systems can develop (Hargreaves, 2012). Equally, Judy Sebba’s work on joint practice development demonstrates a clear intellectual basis for thinking hard about how practice can and does develop, showing that conventional approaches to dissemination of ‘good practices’ are of limited impact in genuinely driving professional development (Sebba et al., 2010). It makes sense to put schools in the lead on improving practices in other schools and it makes equal sense to put outstanding schools in the lead, even if one of the characteristics of ‘outstanding’ practice is a recognition of the limits on our own practices.

A second function of teaching schools is more ideological. Teaching schools are a response to autonomy, or, put more starkly, to autarchy − to the idea that it is schools, and schools alone, which form the core of the education system. If schools are to lead professional development, school improvement, leadership development, teacher education, research and development, then in each of these instances they are occupying territory which others have previously occupied. In some instances, the role of teaching schools is to undertake work which has been abandoned by others – the effective collapse of local authority improvement services. In others, the encouragement to autonomy is more sharply drawn – teaching schools are now being encouraged, either overtly or implicitly, to establish themselves as accredited providers of teacher education. This is a view of a fractured education system in which connectivity is strong within teaching school alliances – some of which map onto academy chains – but weak between teaching school alliances. The alliance has its professional development plan, its leadership plan and so on. The pace of development of teaching schools – 100 rising quickly to 500 and perhaps beyond – implies a future in which all schools are in teaching school alliances and each alliance is a vehicle for the delivery of the big six and beyond. It is possible to envisage a future in which ideas and practice move relatively easily within the alliance but not beyond it. The enthusiasm for some academy chains to use their teaching schools to train teachers for the group, using the pedagogic models and ideas of the group, is an indication of the potential long-term fracturing. Collaboration here becomes a mechanism for fracturing.

Toby Greany has suggested that there are four different narratives which underpin the development of teaching schools: world class reform, market based reform, freedom to teach, and system leadership (Greany, 2014). As Greany says, the first three approaches might support an improving system, but not a self-improving system. They might make schools responsible for their own improvement, but they will not foster the sharing of expertise, capacity and learning or the better use of evidence, all of which are necessary to a self-improving system. Moreover, in all of these, the role of accountability in these models will tend to become over-dominant and punitive, setting up unrealistic expectations for what self-improvement can achieve. There are tensions at the heart of the development of teaching schools: are teaching schools a public good, working for the system as a whole, or are they market traders, selling and buying services and dependent on their ability to buy and sell services for the maintenance of their alliance. It is not clear how far teaching schools are accountable for the improvement they support – or fail to support – across the system, nor about how teaching schools become not beacons for improvement but islands of excellence. Without a clearer balance between accountability and development, between public good and private purpose, it is unlikely that these tensions can be resolved.

There is a deeper challenge for education and for the schooling system which teaching schools might address. Education has never had a problem with innovation. But education has always had a problem with dissemination – or, to use a more modish phrase, with knowledge mobilization and knowledge management, with mainstreaming and scaling innovation, and with securing the widespread adoption of effective practices. Teaching schools could make a significant contribution to improved knowledge mobilization and innovation mainstreaming in education. The idea of schools leading the system is a powerful one − the idea of locating innovation close to implementation, which is radically different from the research and implementation approaches of the 1960s and 1970s and different again from the centralized innovation of the 1990s. Teaching schools have the potential to make a significant step forward, but they also face serious challenges. The first is to do with their positioning in relation to innovation. Innovation is always a ‘plus’ word for education: who would want to oppose innovation? But innovation, as Sandra Nutley hints, has some different meanings (Nutley et al., 2013): there is consensual innovation, contentious innovation and paradigm-challenging innovation. Where and how teaching schools position themselves is important. It is arguable that already successful schools, at a time of rapid change, may have a predisposition towards consensual innovation, but it is not clear that consensual innovation is needed.

Work on knowledge mobilization has often stressed the importance of agencies and organizations which can play an explicitly knowledge mobilization role, and who are structured to secure the results of such a role. In medicine, that role is clearly located in the research community. Teaching hospitals play a critical role in anchoring the research community in practice-based institutions – though the practical divide between practitioners and researchers is often greater than is sometimes presented. It is not clear that the task of knowledge mobilization can be discharged solely by practitioners. The experience of highly devolved and autonomous schools systems is that knowledge mobilization can be more, rather than less, difficult in devolved structures. Teaching schools – rightly – had to identify strategic partners, but at the moment we know relatively little about how those partnerships are working out. If they become wholly transactional and marketized, it may be more difficult to realize their potential.

In practice we know a good deal about effective knowledge mobilization strategies. We understand that knowledge mobilization is difficult. We understand that there is a need to focus carefully not only on stages of the process but on the distinctions between them. We understand that different aspects of the process are undertaken in different organizations under different circumstances. Carol Campbell’s account of this is clear and helpful, and we understand the need actively to manage the knowledge mobilization process in the simply stated steps – finding useful knowledge – which includes finding and isolating it, understanding it and, because it is rarely straightforward, sharing it and using it (Campbell, 2011; Campbell and Levin, 2009).

I posed the question, ‘What are teaching schools for?’, and began with Collingwood’s astringent reminder that in order to understand an answer to that question we need to understand the question to which teaching schools are the answer. My conclusion is that teaching schools are an answer to several questions − a question about professional leadership, a question about highly devolved school structures and, for me, a deeper question about knowledge mobilization in education. I am optimistic that teaching schools can make a difference. I am pessimistic about the extent to which the leadership and policy dimensions of teaching schools have been thought through. I am pessimistic about politicians loading teaching schools with too many expectations. As Collingwood understood, it is very easy to produce a grotesque monstrosity where a thing of beauty might have been intended.

How can an optimistic outcome be secured? It is, I think, about focusing not on the functions of teaching schools but on their purpose, and engaging them and others with the difficult underlying educational challenges about how practice develops and how knowledge, which is notoriously sticky in education, can be unstuck and moved around the system.