Your future education matters
Leading your team into continuous education and development
The end of the beginning
Photo by Gautam Arora on Unsplash
Today marks my youngest son’s final day of Nursery, Scotland’s state provided child pre-school education service for ages 3–5 years old. It will be marked by us at home as he hasn’t been able to go since March when it shut down due to Coronavirus, although the teachers have been kind enough to visit a couple of times and call and send some fun things to do at home. It’s a meaningful moment in the education path and will be followed by the start of Primary School in mid August. I’ve been pleased with the experience he has had of being around children from different socio-economic, ethnic and parenting backgrounds, and we hope he begins to understand the privileges he was born with.
This week also marks the end of the school term and six weeks of summer holidays for children and teachers. During the course of the week we were expecting more details on how children would go back to school. In England there was an attempt made to get some children back to school in June (English schools finish for the summer in mid-late July) but parent and Union pushback largely killed this as a concept. In Scotland we had a plan announced to go back with “blended learning” (50% of the time in-school, 50% being taught at home by parents & carers). Our local council decided it would aim for a ratio of 33/67 which seemed even less ambitious. What does that mean in practise — it would have meant class sizes going from 30 children to 8, and children being in school 4 days out of every 15 week days.
Within days of the plan being announced, it was scrapped. Replaced instead by 100% in-school as the virus has been contained so much that there is a strong sense that we are now in a position for children to go back to school full time in mid August and parents who have had to juggle jobs and teaching can now return to work then too.
I really feel for my friends who work in the education system at the moment. One of my friends works in a school where he is effectively leading the planning and organising of all of the contingency plans. He has had to carry a lot of stress in recent weeks, as well as long hours, staff and parent complaints and a lot of uncertainty — and then amidst all of that, to have it all thrown out the window (or at least shelved as a contingency plan) must have been really hard to experience. I’m grateful for those in the education system that devote their days to trying to grow well-rounded children who can contribute to the flourishing of society as they grow up.
I’m pleased that our children can go back to school but I’d love to see more gratitude given to those parents that have spent time educating their children in these months. Instead we regularly hear how it has damaged our children’s wellbeing, their mental health and their social skills — we’re certainly not seeing signs of that in our children. I’m grateful for the sacrifices my wife has made in our household to develop her skills, teach our children and also continue working in her job. That ends today but we have enjoyed home-school and would be minded to leverage that method to enable longer holidays and adventures in future.
How can digital learning enable the provision of greater flexibility to your workforce whilst still ensuring skills development and improved productivity?
Institutional Mindsets versus Innovative Mindsets
Photo by Gautam Krishnan on Unsplash
I, and many others across the UK it seems, have been fascinated by how challenging it has been to resolve the education challenge. At its essence the challenges seemed to come down to safety for teachers and children, creating capacity to enable social distancing and then coming up with appropriate systems and processes around that. And yet in four months, the plans seemed incomplete until the very last minute.
If education had been a business, you would have gone 1) let’s buy safety equipment and procure funding to pay for that from a bank or investors 2) let’s build capacity by renting space that is not otherwise being used (conference venues, hotels, football stadia, offices etc.) and bringing in student teachers or retired teachers and 3) copy processes and systems that have worked around the world. You would have delegated full authority to a local school level and asked what resources they needed to make it happen.
What is it that means one institution (the National Health Service) can gear up, build new hospitals, refocus operations and retrain staff but another (the Education system) struggles to know how to re-open its doors?
Is it possible that because one was a matter of life and death, it was possible for the Government to take full control of the major decisions and that all people were aligned with the same objective — to flatten the curve and save lives? Whereas in education, there are a multitude of objectives and agendas and multiple possible solutions?
When there is a clear national crisis (a natural disaster, a pandemic, a war, a collapse of financial markets etc.), institutions can bring greater resources, authority and capacity to fix a problem. In other circumstances though, the involvement of multiple stakeholders, consensual approaches and culture of risk-avoidance can lead to paralysis of decision making, wasted time and money, the status quo being maintained and cultural inertia. The “we’ve always done it that way” and “no-one will reward me for taking a risk” mantras come to the fore.
Unions can serve a great purpose. Having worked for large and small organisations, I appreciate when a Union can speak up for the individual with no real voice in the key rooms. However, the Unions can also be so politically motivated, resistant to change and prone to conflict that in a situation that requires innovation, creative thinking and radical collaboration, the culture, policies and values of the Union can be a blocking force. I think education would be better served by less Union involvement in the UK.
It is incredibly difficult as you scale your organisation not to lapse into an institutional mindset. Once you get past about 8–10 employees you require more systems and processes and the rules start to outweigh the intuition and creativity.
Cultivating an innovation mindset as an individual, as a relational network, as an organisation — the answers appear to be 1) always ask why are we doing it this way and is there a better and simpler way 2) can you break your decision making into smaller components and delegate the authority down the chain and 3) reward risk taking and innovative solutions.
You hold responsibility for your education
Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash
The saddest aspect of the education debacle has been the missed opportunity to redesign the whole offering. Whereas businesses have revisited their vision, values, mission, offering and processes to adapt to the new environment, the education system has made a plan to return to normal as safely and as carefully as it can.
So:
- If children were at home and businesses can move to remote-first as they plan to never return to the office, why didn’t we take advantage of the technology that exists and make a plan for children to be in school less?
- Why didn’t we look at the best practices around the world and radically restructure our curricula, our delivery methods, our layout of our schools?
- With remote education, you can access any educational content from anywhere in the world. What scope might there have been to build collaborative curricula, leveraging content from different education systems?
- Why didn’t we reshape the school year instead of matching an agricultural pattern of holidays in harvesting seasons but instead move to a pattern that more aligns with the working world?
- Why didn’t we recognise the mission-creep that has developed in education where teachers have become responsible for delivery of lunches to parents that can’t feed their children, where they have become social workers looking out for the welfare of the child or educating the parent on how to parent, or fundraisers because the schools are inadequately financed (or spending on the wrong things, it’s not clear to me)? Where could we have simplified, reduced, clarified to return teachers to their core responsibility?
- Where could we have become more responsive to the cultural moment and rapidly developed content to educate our children on pandemics, drug development, testing and science? Where could schools have been creating resources on the history of racism and slavery and systemic racism? Why is it that it takes years to develop a new curriculum?
- Where could the funding model have changed? Could schools have gone to a pay as you can model, or a membership model with scholarships? I strongly believe in maximising opportunity for all, and paid private schools often stand in the way of that for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. But that doesn’t mean that public resources can’t be supplemented by private gifts or payments.
The reality is that the education system in the UK is a public asset and like the NHS, is unlikely to ever be radically restructured because of the politics and institutional inertia. Some parents respond by opting out and into the private system — an option for some but not the majority.
I would argue that you hold the responsibility for your education, not the state. Continuous professional development is critical, even for children. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn learning and also have engaged with a digital course from the University of St Andrews. If you are not learning, you are going backwards on a relative basis. That is as true for your team as it is for you.
As an organisational leader, cultivate ways to help your team learn new skills (whether directly applicable or not), push your own learning as a leader and create spaces to discuss and develop those learnings. If they could learn three things over the next year that would help them be better human beings, what would that be? Why not make one a work productivity point (e.g. digital marketing), one a relational skills (e.g. how to lead your team following a crisis) and one a random skill that is for fun (e.g. how to play the bagpipes. Or, if you could learn anything for fun, what would it be?)? I am pretty certain you would see a more engaged team, a more skilled team and a higher functioning team.
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