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A project of the
Annenberg Institute
for School Reform
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Lessons Learned and Shared: A UK-US Seminar on Urban School Reform
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Organization, Management, and Governance
 Leading Indicators
Human Resources
Intervention
Building Teaching and Leadership Capacity
Supporting Youth Development
Conclusions
Political Support
Coherence
Support for Pressure
Learning from Research
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A two-week celebration of "U.K. in N.Y," provided the opportunity for this seminar, held in conjunction with the fall meeting of the School Communities that Work Task Force.
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform is grateful to the British Consulate and Department for Education and Skills for their work in developing the seminar and for enabling the participation of the British delegation.
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UK LINKS
> Department for Education & Skills
> Office of Standards for Education
> Local Education Authorities
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Introduction
As School Communities that Work, a National Task Force on the Future of Urban School Districts, rethinks the design of schools and school systems, members are considering a wide range of ideas. The Task Force recognizes that the traditional district design, which has remained largely intact for nearly a century, is outmoded. At a time when there is widespread support for educating all children to high levels, there is widespread agreement that urban districts, as they are currently constituted, are incapable of achieving that goal.
What other models are possible? In an effort to learn of approaches outside the traditional U.S. system, School Communities that Work held a day-long seminar on common urban school improvement concerns in the United States and the United Kingdom. The purpose was to learn from British officials at the national and local levels about the education system in the U.K. and to draw out lessons that could be applied in the United States. At the same time, the seminar offered an opportunity for members of School Communities that Work to share with a new audience the work the Task Force is conducting and receive some constructive advice from educators who do business a little differently.
To be sure, no one would suggest that the British system has all the answers, or that it should be imported wholesale to the United States. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, the two countries' systems evolved very differently. For example, the British national government plays a much stronger role in education - some 80 percent of funding for schools comes from the national government, compared with 8 percent in the United States - than Americans would tolerate. Nevertheless, some elements of the British model may be relevant and some lessons from the British experience helpful in U.S. improvement efforts.
British educators are grappling with many of the same problems Americans are addressing, from improving the quality of teaching to holding schools accountable for results. The British experience offers ideas about how others are dealing with them. These ideas - which match the Task Force's priorities of organization, management and governance, building capacity for teaching and leadership, and supporting youth development - will be extremely valuable as School Communities that Work develops and tests its concepts, designs, and tools.
Organization, Management, and Governance
The 1988 law that transformed the education system in the United Kingdom had a profound effect on the organization, governance, and management of schools. Like similar efforts in the United States, although in many ways more dramatic, the law was aimed at loosening the reins of bureaucratic control and freeing schools to pursue their own direction, yet holding them strictly accountable for performance.
Specifically, the law established independent governing bodies for each school and granted them wide authority over personnel, finances, and other matters. Schools received funds from the national government and their local education authority (LEA) based on student enrollments, and the school governing bodies had wide latitude on how to spend it. At the same time, the 1988 law established a national curriculum and national tests, and held all schools accountable for their performance on the measures.
The effect of the law, according to Paul Lincoln, director of learning services for the Essex County Council (the equivalent of a U.S. district superintendent), was to strengthen authority at the national and school levels and decrease the authority of the local education authority (similar to a district). Yet the LEAs did not go away. Rather, they had to find a way to transform their role. Instead of regulating schools, LEAs now are responsible for providing services to schools and monitoring their performance.
In each area, the LEA functions differently than before the 1988 law. Because schools now held the purse strings, each school could decide where to purchase services. The LEA was no longer the sole provider. Forced to compete, the LEAs improved the quality of the services they provided to schools, according to Lincoln. "Having schools as customers improved the quality of services," he said. "Our services do not exist if schools do not choose to buy them. The market has driven up quality - no question about it."
Also changed was the LEAs' role in accountability. The LEAs are responsible for monitoring school performance, but the parameters for that function are set by the national government. Based on national test results, the national government sets a target for improvement nationwide. National officials then set targets for each LEA to make sure the national target is met. Local officials can challenge their targets, based on data about their own expectations for schools in the agency, but while national officials describe this process as a "negotiation," it is clear that the national officials are reluctant to allow lower targets for improvement.
Once the target for the LEAs is set, local officials must set targets for each school. Head teachers go through the same "negotiation" with LEA officials that the LEA went through with the national government. The schools, like the LEAs, are accountable for meeting their targets. If they fall short, they can be subject to direct intervention; in extreme circumstances their authority can be taken away and transferred to another organization. Currently 20 of 150 LEAs are in some form of intervention by the national government, resulting in the privatization of some LEA services, and in the most extreme cases of local intervention, two schools in Surrey have been transferred to private management.
LEA officials are careful to point out that they keep their two main functions - support and monitoring - strictly separate. "We wear two hats, and we make sure we don't wear them at the same time," said Lincoln. Richard Mills, the commissioner of education in New York State, said this separation is important because it allows schools to trust the support they receive from the LEAs. "They can be seen as wholly on the side of raising performance," he said. In the U.S., those who give the support are also those "trying to drop the hammer," Mills added.
National officials in the U.K. also point out that they balance pressure - or "challenge" - and support. "Some teachers feel there is more challenge than support. Head teachers feel that. LEAs feel that," acknowledged David Woods, the acting chief advisor to the Standards and Effectiveness Unit of the Department for Education and Skills. Yet the challenge comes from an assessment of school performance that is more comprehensive than the typical system in the United States. One key measure is performance on the national tests, which are administered at age 7, 11, and 14. The raw scores are reported on "league tables," which, like similar rankings in the United States, tend to show that schools in more affluent areas outperform those with less wealthy student populations. However, the government is shifting to a "value added" method of reporting, which may show that middle class schools are not improving as fast as other schools.
In addition to the raw scores, the government also compares school performance to that of schools with similar populations. This pairing of "statistical neighbors" helps raise expectations for performance, according to Woods. "If you would say, 'What more can we expect from children like this,' I can take you two miles down the road and show you this school - with the same indicators of poverty - with twice as high reading scores."
Leading Indicators
But the most comprehensive assessment of school performance is school inspection. While the test results document academic performance, the inspections examine the characteristics of schools that contribute to performance. In that way, they represent "leading indicators" of performance. The results are public, and schools are accountable for the findings. The inspectors publish an annual report to Parliament, and all of their documents are posted on the Internet; the Office of Standards for Education (OFSTED) Web site receives 1 million hits a week. And Her Majesty's Inspectors can designate a school as failing and subject to "special measures."
Created in 1839, inspection measures school performance on four factors: standards, quality, efficiency, and ethos. Standards measure academic performance, behavior, and attendance. Quality measures the quality of teaching and curriculum. Efficiency measures the use of resources, and the effectiveness of leadership and management. Ethos measures the spiritual, moral, and cultural development of pupils, and includes such factors as extracurricular opportunities and religious education.
Elizabeth Passmore, OFSTED's Director of Inspection, said that 'Data from OFSTED suggests that inspections may be able to pinpoint problems and point the way to improvement'. For example, among schools under "special measures," or intervention, the percentage of teacher lessons rated unsatisfactory averaged about 33 percent. After intervention, the proportion of unsatisfactory lessons dropped to 10 percent to 14 percent. A more dramatic change occurred in measures of leadership. When schools went into special measures, 86 percent were rated unsatisfactory or poor in leadership and management. After intervention, 87 percent of these schools were rated good or very good.
Could such a system work in the United States? Norm Fruchter, the director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, pointed out that New York State tried to adopt a version of school inspection in the early 1990s. But he said it fell victim to the perception that the measures were "soft" and represented attempts by schools to evade accountability for performance, even though the British system clearly includes measures of academic achievement. Anything other than test scores were viewed with suspicion, Fruchter noted, because of the long history of testing in the United States. "You can't use test scores as the measure for 75 years, and then change."
Richard Mills, the New York State commissioner, suggested that it would take at least "half a generation" before Americans are ready to accept the use of multiple measures of school performance.
Human Resources
The flip side of accountability is the autonomy to make decisions to reach performance targets, and the 1988 education reform law handed schools in the United Kingdom a great deal of autonomy, particularly in the area of human resources. Although the teaching profession is heavily unionized, the law granted head teachers and governing bodies of individual schools the authority to hire teachers. Thus schools could select the staff they wanted.
At the same time, though, the national government retained authority over compensation. Facing some of the same issues American schools are facing - shortages of teachers in specialty areas, a workforce nearing retirement age, a high turnover rate among young teachers - the national government has sought to use its power over compensation to recruit and retain high-quality teachers and school leaders.
Unlike in the United States, where salaries are a central focus of collective bargaining, base pay in the United Kingdom is set by a national pay review system. According to Anne Jackson, head of the policy innovation division at the Department for Education and Skills, the pay review sets salaries "higher than the government would recommend." But the government has also sought to institute a pay for performance system to provide bonuses for highly qualified teachers. And, as with similar plans in the United States, the proposal for pay for performance met stiff resistance from teachers unions, who argued that it would be impossible to measure effective teaching objectively and that the money would be better spent on general improvements.
But Jackson noted that the government persuaded the unions to accept the plan by pointing out that the bonuses would be on top of regular education spending, and that the plan would be voluntary. Moreover, the government instituted a professional development system alongside the bonuses to provide induction for new teachers and continued professional development for veterans.
The government also instituted a system of granting awards to successful teachers; outstanding head teachers can even gain knighthoods. Although teachers were originally cynical about such awards, many have come to agree that the awards are genuine attempts to honor teachers and teaching, according to Lincoln.
Yet teachers remain concerned about their workload, and some unions have threatened strikes if nothing is done about it. The unions have proposed a uniform 35-hour workweek, something the government opposes. The government, in turn, has commissioned a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers to analyze how teachers are spending their time and consider whether they can work more efficiently.
Intervention
As a significant part of its accountability system, the United Kingdom intervenes in low-performing schools. But the government does so under a strict principle: intervention in inverse proportion to success. That is, the national government and local education agencies provide resources to schools that are struggling, and not to schools that are succeeding, in order to bring about equity in outcomes.
This principle has ignited some opposition in communities that are not receiving additional resources, and some argue that it rewards failure. Yet local officials say the principle has enabled them to provide intensive resources to struggling schools in ways that would not be possible if they had to spread resources to all schools. Rob Briscoe, the head of numeracy services for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, said his LEA has provided intensive, year-long support for 30 to 36 schools. "We have the flexibility to work with schools in ways that are appropriate," Briscoe said. "If a school begins to sink, we can muster resources in a focused way."
The LEAs also plan to provide intensive help to struggling students as a "springboard" to enable them to keep up with their peers. The U.K. does not have a tradition of holding students back in grades, but officials said this may change as they move the national literacy and numeracy strategies into the middle grades.
Building Teaching and Leadership Capacity
In 1998 the Blair government unveiled a major strategy to improve literacy instruction in primary grades. Two years in the making, the plan was aimed at raising achievement overall and eliminating the wide disparities in instruction and achievement that had characterized schooling in the U.K. "It was a lottery," said Kevan Collins, the deputy director of the National Literacy Strategy. "You could go to one school, and have a good chance of achieving, but at another school down the street, it was a different order."
The goal of the program was ambitious: the government set a target that 80 percent of students at age 11 would reach standards on national tests by 2002; in 1996, 57 percent had met standards in reading. The Secretary of State for Education pledged to resign if the goal was not reached. (He has since moved on to another post in the government, but as of 2000, 75 percent of 11-year-olds had met standards in reading.)
The government unveiled a National Numeracy Strategy shortly afterwards, to accomplish similar improvements in mathematics instruction in the primary grades. The goal in that strategy was for 75 percent of 11-year-olds to reach standards by 2002.
The two strategies are essentially aimed at building capacity in schools. The government produced materials for teachers and distributed them to every one of the 20,000 primary schools in the country. But the biggest investment was in professional development. The government enlisted 1,000 expert teachers as consultants, who work directly with schools by providing demonstration lessons and guiding teachers on improving their practice. Although at first officials thought teachers could learn simply by observing the demonstration lessons, they found that it is more effective if teachers focus on a specific aspect of a lesson where they need help, such as questioning students or providing intervention.
The strategy also includes training for head teachers, governors, and support staff, and institutes on language arts and mathematics content, since officials found that many primary teachers lacked subject-area knowledge.
The results have been impressive. Performance has improved substantially, and the wide disparities in performance have narrowed. The lowest performing school in 2001 in reading is at the level of the median in 1998. Performance is up in mathematics as well. And in many cases, the strategies led to overall school improvement. "If it doesn't, something's wrong," said Collins. "There was a notion you could have school improvement over here and literacy development over there."
However, these improvements were not uniform. And writing performance has not improved substantially, particularly for boys.
In instituting the strategies, the government faced some opposition from teachers who felt that the strategies would take away some of their creativity and professional autonomy. And, as in the United States, some teachers felt that teaching was an art, not a science, and so a uniform strategy could never be developed.
But officials say the opposition has waned for several reasons. First, teachers saw that the materials and demonstration lessons provided frameworks, not scripts, which allowed teachers considerable flexibility in how they delivered instruction. The frameworks, which were adopted widely, established a right that every child would be entitled to a high-quality curriculum. "Once we cleared the what, we could have the most interesting discussions about how," said Collins.
In addition, teachers began to support the strategies when they saw the quality of the professional development, and, most important, the results. "People got very high-quality training, and realized this is very good," said Rob Briscoe of Tower Hamlets.
However, officials suspect that they will face resistance when they move the strategy into the middle grades. As in the United States, secondary teachers in the U.K. see themselves as subject-matter specialists and will be more reluctant than primary teachers to accept materials and lessons from the government.
In addition to the national strategies, the U.K. has also developed a number of efforts to build the capacity of educators. The government has established a national curriculum for teacher training, and inspects schools of education just as it inspects schools. In addition, the government has recently created a national college for school leaders. A virtual college - each participant receives a free laptop - the institution will prepare head teachers for a voluntary national professional qualification for leadership. Because the program is new, though, there is little evidence of its effects.
Supporting Youth Development
Although much of the United Kingdom's education system is aimed at improving teaching and academic performance, the system also includes a number of elements that attempt to address a broader set of outcomes for youth, and that engage the community in achieving those outcomes.
Parents and the community are integral parts of education in the U.K. Parents can choose any school for their children, although, as officials point out, parents do not always get their first choice. Parents and community members also sit on governing boards, which set policy for every school.
There are concerns, however, that parental preference and local autonomy may lead to a polarization among schools. This is particularly a problem because of the financing of schools: funding follows the children. As schools decline in performance, more students leave the school, which reduces the amount of resources available to the school. The school could spiral out of control. Through efforts like intervention in inverse proportion to success, the LEAs and the national government can ameliorate such problems. Yet the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged schools is a real worry in the U.K.
As part of the National Literacy and National Numeracy Strategies, education officials also launched special efforts to engage parents and community members in the projects. For example, educators forged alliances with the business community to lead a Year of Mathematics in 2000. As one example of that effort, London educators and business leaders created a "math trail" in a local park, which enables families to "see things mathematical" as they hike through the area.
In addition, educators also created a family mathematics initiative to develop mathematical understanding among parents, many of whom are not confident in their mathematics abilities. School staff and tutors trained parents in aspects related to the mathematics curriculum, to assist them in helping their children with schoolwork.
In engaging parents and the community in schools, educators in the U.K. look at a broad set of outcomes they want children to achieve. For example, the information LEAs provide to parents to help them choose schools is not limited to test scores. It also includes information on the health and social well being of schools. In addition, the reports of Her Majesty's Inspectors also examine the "ethos" of schools, to determine if schools are places where children can grow socially and morally, as well as intellectually.
Educators are also beginning to address the non-academic factors that may inhibit learning. Spurred by complaints from teachers' unions, LEAs have created programs to address the problem of disruptive students. Under the programs, teams that include teachers, paraprofessionals, and home-school workers work in partnership with the LEA and head teachers in primary schools to address issues of disruption. The LEAs also provide funds to secondary schools to create similar teams to tackle student disaffection and disruption at that level.
In addition, an initiative called Excellence in Cities has brought together a wide spectrum of social service and education agencies to address the needs of children in urban areas. The group provides mentors and learning support, and assist teachers, who, like their counterparts in the United States, often feel they are called on to be social workers as much as educators.
In some areas, communities have linked youth-service and welfare agencies to give support and advice to teenagers considered at risk. These efforts are relatively new, though, and difficult to pull off, just like similar efforts in the United States. "The trick of getting a variety of agencies to work coherently together still hurts the brain," said Lincoln of the Essex County Council.
Educators are also beginning to address some cultural factors that may influence learning. For example, the national government has set a target to increase the proportion of minority teachers from 5 percent to 7 percent. In addition, many schools with diverse populations have addressed head on the cultural issues of their own student bodies. These efforts have taken on new momentum after September 11, particularly in schools with large Muslim populations.
Conclusions
To be sure, the education system in the United Kingdom does not offer all the answers to those looking to redesign school systems in the United States. Based on its own traditions and structures, the United States will likely pursue strategies that are somewhat different from those the U.K. put in place.
Yet beyond the specifics of the reforms, the U.K. experience does offer some interesting lessons. These lessons suggest that the ways that public officials and educators went about redesigning the system may be just as important as what they accomplished. As American educators and public officials put in place structural changes to redesign the system in this country, they should consider the following characteristics of the U.K. system:
Political support.
As in the United States, political leaders in the U.K. have taken an intense and active interest in education reform in the past two decades. And in many ways they have done so for similar reasons. There is widespread agreement that student achievement should be higher, and a sense that the education professionals have been unable to solve the problem by themselves.
Yet the character of political involvement in the U.K. seems different from that of the United States. For one thing, it has been genuinely bipartisan. Much of the reform effort began in 1988, with the Thatcher government, with support from both parties. And when the Blair government took over, the new officials did not dismantle the reforms; on the contrary, they built on them. Of course, there are some differences between the parties on education - conservatives favor market approaches, liberals favor additional resources - but there has generally been bipartisan support for the reform effort so far.
In addition, the political leaders have expressed their support for the reforms in symbolic, yet meaningful ways. The Secretary of State for Education, and often, the Prime Minister, meets with every new head teacher. The Secretary of State for Education also attended a conference for the consultants who provide professional development under the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies. By contrast, noted Richard Mills, politicians in the U.S. often express their support only through "walk-ons" or "photo ops."
Coherence.
As the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies show, the U.K. started with a clear sense of what should be taught and built an entire infrastructure - materials, professional development, initial teacher preparation, leadership development - around that core curriculum. Of course, coherence is easier to achieve in a national system than it is in a system of dispersed authority, like that of the United States. But the United States has not come close to building a coherent system around core content. As Warren Simmons, the executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, noted, the dispersal of authority in the U.S. has led states to regulate everything but the core of schooling. And as Deanna Burney, a senior fellow at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, noted, many American schools are hostile to adult learning, so people are unwilling to adopt new practices.
Support with Pressure.
There is little doubt that accountability pressures are every bit as strong in the U.K. as they are in the U.S. Parents, educators, and the public are well aware of school performance, and schools face real consequences if they fail to improve. But the government has balanced the pressure with support for teachers and schools to achieve the rigorous performance targets. The National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies represent a substantial effort to provide resources and instructional support for teachers. And the principle of intervention in inverse proportion to success means that the schools that need the most help get the most help.
Officials concede that educators may feel the pressure overwhelms the support. But the support in the U.K. appears more visible than it does in the United States, where as Norm Fruchter pointed out, states set standards for performance but did not set standards for providing opportunities for students to learn.
Learning from Research.
Rather than state that it has all the answers, the national government in the U.K. has placed a lot of stock in research and evaluation to learn what is working and to change what is not. The Ontario Institute for Studies of Education is conducting an ongoing evaluation of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, and the inspection reports provide a wealth of data on the effectiveness of national programs. All of these reports are public. A National Education Research Forum has been established.
The down side to the evaluation and re-evaluation is that educators often feel the government is "moving the goal posts." But it shows that the government is committed to continuous improvement, not only in student performance, but in the system itself.
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