UK Superheadism Policy: Labour's School Reform Initiative

Introduction

Throughout the world there is an emphasis placed on education, and the United Kingdom is no exception. The United Kingdom has long been revered for its educational structure. The country has consistently held that headmasters play a vital role in ensuring that educational institutions provide students with the best instruction possible. More specifically, the Labour Party has initiated a policy of superheadism. The purpose of this discussion is to describe that initiative and examine the role it plays in fostering school improvement. The essay also discusses other education initiatives introduced by the Labour Party, as well as the likely success or failure of the superheadism initiative.

According to an article in the journal Education, the superheadism initiative was brought about by the Labour Party as a response to the educational conditions it inherited from the Conservatives. When the Labour Party came into power, the educational situation in the United Kingdom was in great need of repair (Marshall, 2001). Teachers' salaries were declining and overall expenditure on education was decreasing (Marshall, 2001). For this reason, Prime Minister Tony Blair named education a top priority for the Labour Party (Marshall, 2001). Conditions at many schools were deplorable: teachers were forced to teach in overcrowded classrooms and buildings were falling into disrepair (Marshall, 2001).

Origins of the Education Problem in the United Kingdom

Marshall (2001) asserts that one of the most significant obstacles the Labour Party had to overcome was the competitive educational environment that the Conservatives had pioneered. The Conservatives supposed that the theory of market competition used in business could be applied to raise school standards in the United Kingdom, and they believed the success of such a policy could be measured through exam results. As Marshall (2001) reports: "For the first time, a stock exchange of school performance — the so-called league tables — were to be published to enable parents to trade their children against a school's future success. In the event it was shrewd investors and schools already rich in cultural capital, to use the sociologist Bourdieu's term, who profited by the system."

This system proved extremely problematic. Research by Stephen Ball, Sharon Gewirtz, and Richard Bowe brought the integrity of such a system into question, finding that "the education market privileged those parents who knew how to work the system" (Marshall, 2001). Their research discovered that some schools profited from the market rather than serving the consuming parents. As Marshall (2001) explains: "As schools grew in popularity, so they became oversubscribed, and more often than not this led to selection via the back door, either because the house prices in the catchment area became so prohibitively expensive that only the well-to-do could afford them, or because the schools themselves began to introduce screening devices through entrance tests and interviews, to ensure that only the academically able or socially adjusted gained entrance."

Over time these schools were designated as grant-maintained institutions, a label that allowed them to govern their own entrance procedures rather than being subject to local authority oversight (Marshall, 2001). Such autonomy meant they could deny certain students entrance — something local authority schools could not do — including students excluded from other schools and students with disabilities (Marshall, 2001). Grant-maintained institutions were also allocated separate government funding, and it was this structure that so badly damaged the broader school system in the United Kingdom.

This system effectively concentrated the "good" schools in wealthier neighbourhoods and the "bad" schools in poor ones (Marshall, 2001). A wide gap emerged between grant-maintained schools and those under the control of local authorities. Parents with the resources to seek out the best schools benefited, while those who could not were left to place their children in struggling institutions. Over time, this system failed to educate a large number of young people, making employment harder to find — a problem that, coupled with poverty, ultimately affects everyone.

To counter the system created by the Conservatives, the first education bill presented by the Labour Party was designed to bridge the divide between grant-maintained schools and local authority schools (Marshall, 2001). This bill returned authority over grant-maintained schools to local government. The schools were then reclassified as foundation schools, stripped of their separate funding stream, and no longer given sole authority over admissions (Marshall, 2001). As Marshall (2001) writes, local authorities "for the first time in over a decade, regained some say in the allocation of pupils to all the schools in their area. Governing bodies had once more to include local representation from the political parties."

Marshall (2001) notes that many critics opposed the initial bill because it carried the taint of privatisation, which has been shown to be ineffective in the United States and elsewhere. Privatisation is seen as detrimental because when business and education are combined, one always tends to suffer — and it is usually education. Others challenged the league tables as an inaccurate way of measuring school success. As Marshall (2001) argues: "For Labour, as with the Conservatives before them, the league tables are a key mechanism for holding schools accountable. Yet, for this to make sense as a policy, the rhetoric of any government must assume a level playing field between schools to begin with, in order to suggest that these tables accurately reflect the quality of education in these institutions. Any admittance that this is not so — that social conditions, for example, play a part — would automatically call into question the efficacy of the league tables as a measure of school performance."

The Labour Party has acknowledged that the league tables are problematic and suggested the use of value-added tables instead. Nevertheless, it continued to rely upon league table results to measure school performance.

Marshall (2001) further argues that many of the Labour Party's proposals for improving education have ignored the real issue of poverty and educational inequality. Poorly performing schools have consistently been located in the poorest areas, and there is a direct correlation between poverty and poor academic performance (Marshall, 2001). Until the issue of poverty is properly addressed, schools in economically deprived areas will continue to underperform (Marshall, 2001). Others have echoed this concern:

"It is crucial that policy makers desist from claiming that school improvement — by itself and in the absence of extra resources — can solve the problems. Whilst it may be true in 'advantaged' schools, it is certainly not true in disadvantaged schools… Whilst some schools can succeed against the odds, the possibility of their doing so, year in and year out, still appears remote, given that the long-term patterning of educational inequality has been strikingly consistent throughout the history of public education in most countries… We must be aware of the dangers of basing a national strategy for change on the efforts of outstanding individuals in exceptional circumstances (Marshall, 2001)."

The real issue in underperforming schools is closely correlated with the poverty and deprivation that many students live in. The Labour Party has attempted to address these issues through expanded breakfast and after-school programmes. However, some of the deep-seated psychological effects of poverty cannot be easily resolved. Poverty fosters resentment and a sense of victimisation. When large disparities exist between rich and poor — as they do in most nations — feelings of disenfranchisement intensify, and a school system that systematically places most poor students in poorly performing schools deepens those feelings further. Children who arrive at school feeling disenfranchised are unlikely to be effective learners. Older children who understand that wealthier peers attend far better schools may develop an inferiority complex that erodes academic motivation. As one article in the New Statesman put it: "If you bundle all the children from all the poorest families, with all the greatest social problems, from the areas with the highest crime rates, into one school, you will end up with a place in which it is pretty near impossible to teach effectively. Nearly all failing schools fit this description" (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000). Any country seeking to overcome educational failure must account for the mindset that poverty creates and how that mindset undermines the will to succeed in school.

Although poverty is the underlying issue affecting most underachieving schools, the concept of the super head was conceived as the answer to chronically failing institutions. According to Marshall (2001), the practice of recruiting exceptional headmasters to improve schools began with what was then known as the Hammersmith County School, a local authority school located in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Neighbouring schools were grant-maintained and church schools. The Hammersmith School was facing closure due to poor results and adverse OFSTED reports. Instead of closing it, however, the administration decided to reopen it under the name Phoenix High School.

To improve the school's performance, administrators brought in a headmaster with a proven record as an effective administrator: Willie Atkinson, who had served on several Labour Party advisory committees and had argued that exceptional headmasters are essential to turning around failing schools (Marshall, 2001). However, the evidence from Phoenix High School did not support his argument. As Marshall (2001) reports: "Since he took over, results at Phoenix High have never reached the levels achieved before his appointment. In 1999 only 3 per cent of pupils gained five A*–C grades at GCSE. To compare the results of this school with those of the London Oratory, where over 90 per cent of the boys achieved five A*–C grades at GCSE, as the very form of the league tables suggests we must, was and is a nonsense. Whichever way the evidence is sliced, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the biggest single factor in explaining the disparity in performance, be it of an individual school or a local authority, is the level of social deprivation of the community it serves."

Despite this evidence, the Labour Party proceeded to institutionalise the use of super heads as a strategy for improving the nation's schools (Marshall, 2001).

The Labour Party and Education Initiatives

The need for reform at educational institutions is nothing new and is generally required as society changes and grows. According to Managing Colleges and Universities: Issues for Leadership, two main views pervade educational reform: "The first is that confrontation with change and its companions, contradiction and ambiguity, is endemic to management (Quinn, 1991). The second view is that the significance of change is socially constructed, invented, or fabricated by managers and organizational participants and based upon pre-existing interpretations and understandings of organization (Hoffman et al., 2000)." Because there is often no consensus on the meaning of organisational change, reform can produce conflicting values and opinions. This dynamic is evident in the Labour Party's handling of education reform in the United Kingdom.

According to the official website of the Labour Party, education is at the forefront of the party's agenda for change in Britain (Education, 2004). The party asserts that its mission to reform the educational structure begins at the nursery school level, with free part-time nursery care for three- and four-year-old children. Since the Labour Party came to power in 1997, significant changes have occurred: marked improvements in primary school quality, increases in the number of teachers and teaching assistants, and a commitment to refurbish all secondary schools within fifteen years (Education, 2004). The party has also pledged to increase spending per pupil and to ensure that eventually half of all young people receive a university education (Education, 2004).

Among these initiatives, the Labour Party launched what became known as superheadism. The BBC reported that under this policy the finest secondary headteachers became "chief executives" and were assigned to underperforming schools, with responsibility for improving the educational environment and bringing those schools up to national standards (Mixed feelings from 'super heads', 2002). Under the initiative:

"These head teachers would take charge of 300 'advanced specialist' schools — which would be created alongside a higher target of 2,000 specialist schools by 2006. Moreover, head teachers who underachieved would lose their jobs. This tough approach would be backed by the carrot and stick of funding. A £125,000 per year 'leadership incentive grant', aimed at 1,400 inner-city schools, would only go directly to those schools with effective heads" (Top heads to be 'chief executives', 2002).

This initiative was met with both optimism and opposition. Optimists believed that placing a super head in an underperforming school would effectively eliminate poor performance, viewing weak management as the primary cause of underachievement. On the other hand, many education experts argued that the initiative was an attempt to quickly solve a problem that had taken years to develop — one that could not be sustained over time due to the human costs involved. Many parents at high-achieving schools also feared that the quality of education at their children's schools would decline as their headteachers redirected attention elsewhere.

Another major initiative designed to monitor school progress was the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), which was created to oversee teacher training. As Bell (1999) explains: "Teacher training is increasingly informed by a technical rationality based on a preoccupation with means and outputs rather than with purpose. Quality and efficiency are the dominant modes of discourse. Thus, to focus all teacher training on the improvement of classroom teaching and pupil learning with the intention of achieving specific and limited educational outcomes is to move towards post-Fordist teacher training which perpetuates the myth that teaching is a mechanistic process. This is reinforced by the frequency and nature of OFSTED inspections, which are intended to inspect quality in initial teacher training by concentrating on making judgements about the quality of training by measuring outcomes against predetermined criteria" (Bell, 1999).

Other initiatives described in the New Statesman included education action zones, specialist schools, beacon schools, and Fresh Start schools. The Fresh Start initiative involved "closing a school and then reopening it under new management and a new name — and probably new teachers, since the old staff have to reapply for their own jobs" (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000). As noted earlier, Fresh Start programmes relied on the expertise of super heads to drive improvement, and failing secondary schools were frequently threatened with Fresh Start conversion if they did not improve. However, of the ten schools initially given this treatment since the policy launched in 1997, the super heads of three had already resigned — "two running the schools with fancy names in Islington and Brighton, the third in Newcastle — had decided, after wrestling against overwhelming odds for periods of between six and 18 months, that they would be better off elsewhere" (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000).

The Labour Party also launched the city academy initiative, designed to replace failing schools with institutions "built and managed by partnerships involving the state, voluntary, church and business sponsors" (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000). City academies were intended to operate outside the control of local councils, though in practice they were likely to fall into the hands of the private sector (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000).

Some commentators argued that this type of rebranding could be effective, as it had been in the United States with magnet schools (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000). Bringing middle-class families back into inner-city schools would, in theory, attract better-qualified teachers and provide the diversity that children living in those communities need in order to thrive academically (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000).

However, such initiatives carry a significant catch. The example of King's College, Guildford — then managed by the private sector — illustrated this problem clearly. Approximately a third of the previous school's population was not admitted to other Guildford schools, and King's College itself refused to enrol those students; pupils with records of poor attendance or behavioural problems were also excluded (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000). If the school subsequently improved, that success would be attributed to private sector management rather than to the fact that the school had shed the most difficult portion of its student population. The excluded students would be absorbed by other schools, which would then become "dumping grounds" labelled as failing institutions (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000). As the article concluded: "Privately run schools do not tolerate failure — there is too much at stake. But they do not, as their propagandists would like us to believe, perform some alchemy that turns failure into success. They simply export it elsewhere" (Six Secrets of School Success, 2000).

It is clear that there are no easy answers to the problems facing inner-city schools, because those problems are multilayered. Poverty is the foundational issue from which a range of other difficulties radiate, creating a highly complex situation. Until the issues of poverty and the inability to attract a diverse student body to inner-city schools are addressed, the United Kingdom will continue to face significant challenges in education. Superheadism and school rebranding represent only two pieces of an extremely large puzzle.

Conclusion

The purpose of this discussion was to describe the superheadism initiative and examine the role it plays in fostering school improvement. The research confirms that the initiative was developed by the Labour Party to address the needs of failing schools, based on the idea that a skilled super head would allow a failing school to thrive. The initiative has generated considerable scepticism as well as optimism: many believe super heads will inevitably burn out from overwork, while others regard the policy as the only viable path to saving failing schools.