Recognizing that central government’s quest to minimize variation has led to ‘a centralized and clumsy one-size-fits-all approach that ignores local contexts’, Hargreaves sees a ‘new balance’ emerging with ‘a clear reduction in centralised action, at both national and local levels, and a matching increase in the powers and responsibilities of schools.’

He argues that schools should capitalize on this situation by forming into organic and sustainable clusters which can support each other through crises, distribute innovation by sharing the costs of new developments and transfer professional knowledge through joint mentoring, coaching and professional development. Such clusters would replace local authorities as the ‘middle tier’ between central government and individual schools.

For this to happen, schools will need to take ownership of their problems, work together to diagnose the source of those problems and devise solutions that are in their mutual interest. This requires them to ‘break free from a dependency culture in which the solutions to school problems are thought to lie somewhere beyond the schools themselves.’

Inter-school professional development could ‘reduce the need for extensive bureaucratic, top-down systems of monitoring to check on school quality’ and ‘the imposition of improvement strategies that are relatively insensitive to local context.’

‘We need,’ Hargreaves argues, ‘to go beyond the need for some very good schools to intervene in failing schools to a position where good schools can learn with and from one another so that they become great schools.’

Making a success of these arrangements will require the development of system leadership, where staff at every level ‘strive for the success of all schools and their students, not just their own.’

Leadership needs to be extended to students as well as staff, ‘because it is when people believe they are given real and regular opportunities to exercise leadership that they use their talents to the full and willingly share their knowledge and skills’.

Creating a self-improving school system and Leading a Self-improving school system by David H. Hargreaves is published by the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services can be downloaded here.

Delivering a lecture to the Oxford Education Society, he argued that central government can never manage the school system effectively. It is ‘too remote from the messy realities and complexities of the classroom and the many variables among individual children and teachers.’

‘Even at school level,’ he says, ‘a skill of the outstanding head teacher lies in deciding on what matters and to what extent it is desirable that staff should “sing from the same song sheet” and on what it is possible to encourage in individuality, professional flair and innovation.’

Central government, he says, ‘should confine itself to formulating aims at the most general level.’ The schools should determine most. Local government, though, has a strong part to play ‘in securing equity of access to schooling, in the provision of SEN services and being answerable for the standards of outcomes of the schools in their area.’

Brighouse observe that, while the 1988 Education Act increased the number of government powers from three to 250, that number has risen to 2000. Passage of the 2011 Education Bill will give the secretary of state another 50.

Decline and fall: are state schools and universities on the point of collapse? By Professor Sir Tim Brighouse can be downloaded here.

The editors Neal Lawson and Ken Spours recognise the need to ‘reduce the power of the state away from the centre so that its role in guaranteeing fairness and standards is balanced by greater powers exercised by a wider range of social partners and in localities’.

Their call is for ‘a democratising agenda that includes greater local accountability, a stronger voice for professionals organized in communities of practice, the development of inter-dependent relationships between educators and their students, and devolving responsibility to the local level so that communities have powers to actually change their localities.’

They also call for an end to the ‘chaotic and recriminatory reform process that tires teachers, puzzles parents and employers, and creates a permanent sense of discontent.’

Education for the good society: the values and principles of a new comprehensive vision, edited by Neal Lawson and Ken Spours, is published by Compass and can be downloaded here.

Millar and Wood suggest that these could best be provided by enabling schools to find ‘safe ways of sharing the views of existing parents and pupils on a wide range of issues within the school community’.

Many of the parents taking part in focus groups for the report, they say, ‘talked of their desire to hear the views of other parents, either to help them choose schools or to judge the performance of the schools their children were already attending.’

Parents rated teaching quality and the way schools managed behaviour as more important than test and exam results in how they made their judgements on schools. They wanted to know ‘whether their children were developing into well-rounded, polite, confident, respectful young people’.

In a preface, the president of Pearson UK Rod Bristow calls for ‘more dialogue between schools and parents,’ so that the latter can gain ‘a richer sense of what attending a school could mean for their child’.

A new conversation with parents: how can schools inform and listen in a digital age, a report by Fiona Millar and Gemma Wood is published by Pearson and Family Lives, and can be downloaded from here.

‘We believe,’ its report says, that ‘focusing on the symptoms of bad behaviour rather than on tackling the causes is counterproductive and will lead to greater disengagement from learning by the disadvantaged children we work with.’

Schools which ‘combine high expectations about behaviour and achievement with responding to their pupils’ needs’ are more likely to maintain good behaviour and promote engagement in learning. Their authoritative approach ensures children ‘can regulate their own behaviour without having to rely on external controls’.

Barnardo’s, the report says, ‘understands the political desire to have a firm and robust message on school behaviour and discipline. However, a ‘focus on strengthening the powers of teachers to use force, detain and search pupils without their consent, confiscate belongings and erase data’ is likely to prove counterproductive, because encourages ‘teachers to tackle the symptoms of bad behaviour and not address the causes.’

Tough love, not get tough: Responsive approaches to improving behaviour in schools by Jane Evans can be downloaded here.

Arguing that ‘pupils should be supported to the greatest extent possible to stay within mainstream schools’, the report observes that it is rare for vulnerable pupils to ‘receive appropriate support to overcome the incredibly challenging circumstances and barriers to learning’ which they face’. As a result, ‘opportunities are being missed to change lives’.

The report, which focuses on school exclusions, argues that ‘attachment and relationship issues lie at the root of many excluded and self-excluding pupils’ difficulties’. This ‘reinforces the critical importance of the quality of relationships experienced by some pupils in schools and other educational settings.;

Staff in primary and secondary schools need to be trained and equipped to deal with the issues confronting these children, providing them with the support and nurture needed to release ‘the inherent potential of those often written off by society’.

Effective conflict resolution training should be provided for headteachers and as part of initial teacher training and ongoing professional development, the reports’s authors recommend. Also, restorative approaches should be promoted in all secondary schools, and research should be conducted with respect to its use in primary schools.

‘Schools,’ say the report’s authors, ‘can only address the underlying causes of challenging behaviour and disengagement from education,’ if they ‘developed informed understanding of their pupils and individual circumstances.’

Schools need to be measured, the report says, in ways that take into account all the aspects that are valuable for a child’s rounded education, including ‘personal development, social and life skills and attitudes to learning’.

The report  condemns the ‘unscrupulous and sometimes illegal practices that some schools indulge in so as to achieve their targets. These include cutting pupils adrift on pointless part-time timetables and turning a blind eye to truancy after morning registration targets have been met.’

No Excuses: A review of educational exclusion by Adele Eastman is published by The Centre for Social Justice and can be downloaded here.

Describing successful examples of  online fora in education and business, the report’s authors argue that the key to success lies in bringing together groups of teachers with a common goal that provides a sufficiently ‘strong reason and structure for working together’. ‘The community should serve a clear, shared purpose that fulfils a need or requirement, such as collaborative enquiry focused on a specific aspect of practice.’

Online systems can draw on the increasing desire of teachers ‘to contribute their expertise just as much as they want to hear that of others’. Given this, the report’s authors write, social media has ‘the potential for vastly improving thinking and practice in the classroom through a more public and continuous reflection on progress.’

Tweeting for teachers: how can social media support professional development by Julie McCulloch, Ewan McIntosh and Tom Barrett is published by the Pearson Centre for Policy learning and can be downloaded  here.

Another student Angelique Knight said that the reason the Channel Four programme opened doors was ‘because we was finding out what we was good at, whereas in school you’ve got a really strict curriculum and the teachers have to follow it; so obviously you could be good at something but you don’t know because you don’t do them lessons in school.’

Aysha Begum felt that too many teachers held back and got defensive because they were afraid of the students. ‘I think if they’re like, just free and natural around kids, they will just warm up to you.’

Mary Beard, a classical scholar and one of the Dream School staff called for teachers to be ‘freed up’. ‘All the kids,’ she observed, ‘said that whether or not things worked for them was because they did or did not have a relationship with the teachers.’

The Dream School succeeded, she added, because it taught children how to learn. ‘The reason why these poor old teachers are so absolutely desperate is that they have got a horrible target to reach of getting however many per cent getting five A to C grades at GCSE, which is not teaching people how to learn.’

Dream School headteacher John D’Abbro said that the programme showed just how different people are in the way they learn. ‘We are all different,’ he observed, ‘and our education system needs to be flexible enough to bring out the best in all of us in whatever area our creativity lies.’

He argued for developmental psychology to be part of teacher training again. ‘It staggers me that it has been removed, and I just do not understand how you can teach unless you understand that children and adults learn at different rates and in different ways.’

‘It seems to me,’ concluded disk jockey Jazzie B, ‘like we are completely out of touch with the society that we’ve built and somehow there should be people in the educational system, maybe operating at that kind of grassroots level, to understand what is happening to some of the casualties, and therefore we should be able to put that right for the future.’

Evidence from the young people and teachers at Jamie’s Dream School to the Education Select Committee can be found here.

‘The evidence from this study,’ the report’s authors say, ‘suggests that teachers and school leaders recognise the importance of community cohesion and know that their schools work when cohesion is deeply linked in to the curriculum, learning and the school ethos. This is not least because their training and experience tells them that learning flourishes when pupils and students are engaged and empowered, content, confident and working in learning communities that exhibit the values and practices that underpin community cohesion.’

Teachers were not concerned about whether they were promoting ‘multi-culturalism’, ‘assimilation’ or ‘integration’. They simply recognized what having a school where everyone was able to get along with others, where there were respectful relationships between staff and students, and where students felt that they had some say in the running of the place, improved the quality of learning.

Schools interpreted the duty in different ways, depending upon their local context. And while some welcomed the pressure to take the duty seriously that came from knowing it would be investigated by Ofsted inspectors, most found it difficult to meet the targets set by inspectors and felt that it was necessary to take a more long-term view of the impact achieved by their actions.

The authors suggest that, if the coalition government wants to develop the Big Society, it should build on what schools are already doing to:

o      provide meaningful opportunities for young people to engage in community activities

o      develop young people’s skills and dispositions to participate constructively

School leaders, community cohesion and the Big Society: Perspective Report by Don Rowe and Nicola Horsley with Tony Thorpe and Tony Breslin is published by CfBT and can be downloaded from here.

The report talks about the need to build more social capital around children by ‘developing new norms of good neighbourliness’ and increasing the ability of children to ‘form the friendships and networks that allow them to move forward in the world.’

‘Social capital works,’ the authors say, ‘by providing children and families with constant, routine or “natural” support from friends and neighbours so that a build-up of stress, difficulty and unhappiness does not lead to crisis and the need for acute intervention.

In all the talk about community building, localism and volunteering – the flagship policies of the Big Society agenda – there is very little recognition of the value of including children and young people in the delivery of outcomes and, in the process, building the norms of mutual and reciprocal care within the community.

Schools, the report says, ‘are uniquely able to generate social capital in the way they go about their business’. They could be working systematically to facilitate connections among children, mothers, fathers, grandparents and everyone else within the community who wanted the opportunity to care for children and young people.

We should be thinking much harder, it goes on, about how we can encourage children and young people to bring their knowledge, resourcefulness, skills and willingness to engage to the task of making communities safer, and how adaptations in the way services are delivered can create extra connections between families and children.

Children and the Big Society: Backing communities to keep the next generation safe and happy, by Duncan Fisher OBE and Sandra Gruescu can be downloaded from here.