Participation and Democratisation in the Local School System

 

Participation and Democratisation in the Local School System

Richard Hatcher

A socialist politics of education comprises three elements: critical analysis of what exists, the elaboration of alternative policies, and a strategy for action. Its object can be divided into two broad themes. The first concerns what we can broadly call the content of education – the curriculum, pedagogy, forms of organisation etc. The second concerns how decisions are made – in other words where power lies in and over the school system. We have no shortage of critical analysis both of the content of current education policy and of the highly centralised, bureaucratic and managerialist way in which policy is devised and imposed, marginalising the voices of teachers, parents, students and citizens. In terms of alternative policies concerning content, we have some ideas about what we are fighting for. But when it comes to our alternative proposals for the democratisation of decision-making, we have little to say.

Of course, a democratic school system is impossible in a capitalist society. At the level of government, whether under Brown or Cameron, national policy will only be influenced by mass pressure. But at the level of the school and the local school system there is the possibility not just of conjunctural campaigns – whether over pay and conditions or over issues such as proposals for Academies – but also of the institutionalisation of forms of popular and professional participation in their decision-making processes. In this sense schools and local school systems can be more or less democratic – they are sites of struggle.

What I am arguing for here is that institutionalised forms of democratic participation in decision-making at school and local system levels should be part of our conception of an alternative, not just as an inspiring vision but as something which we should concretely pose today, at least as propaganda. At school level, we obviously oppose certain specific actions by headteachers (actions by teachers over TLRs is a recent example) but that doesn’t challenge the principle of hierarchical management of schools. If we have no alternative to offer to the very limited form of participation represented by school governing bodies we in effect endorse their existing role. Similarly, if we have no alternative to offer to the very limited democratic function of Local Authorities, in practice we end up simply defending them against further erosion of their role.

Why is the left’s response so limited?

Why is the left’s response limited in scope and almost entirely defensive: opposition to certain ‘control’ policies – mainly to SATs and performance management; and to private control of schools? Why has the left not put forward a radical democratic alternative? At one level it is a recognition that there is no significant popular movement demanding democracy in education. But at a deeper level I think it is the product of two historical strands of labour movement attitudes to schools: statism and syndicalism.

As educators, the dominant issue has been equality, principally in social class terms, and the dominant view has been that equality is best served by national uniformity of provision – a common educational experience in a common school system. In this perspective the principal agent of reform is government as the best guarantor of equality, exemplified by the 1944 Act and the comprehensive school. Parental and community power at the local level tends to be seen as a threat to equality, promoting local variation which reflects sectoral interests, generally those of middle class privilege.

The syndicalist strand has focused on teachers as workers, as employees, struggling over pay and conditions rather than ‘educational’ issues. Its orientation has been fighting for teachers’ independence from management, and it has therefore tended to be suspicious of notions of participation in how schools are run as inevitably incorporating teachers into management agendas. It has been equally suspicious of parental power, seen as potentially introducing reactionary policies and threatening the progressive professionalism of teachers.

Both statism and syndicalism fail to address the question of agency – of what social agents have the capacity to struggle most effectively for radical change. Statism relies on the state as the principal agent of change, albeit only if subjected to some form of mass pressure. Syndicalism tends to privilege teachers as the agent of change and to view parents and communities as, at least potentially, supporters of teachers’ campaigns rather than as active agents of resistance and change in their own right. An orientation towards local democratisation places – potentially – the whole local community at the centre of the process of opposition, resistance and alternatives. (I say potentially because the ‘local community’ is neither homogenous nor necessarily educationally progressive – a point I come back to later.) Popular social agency is the pivot which connects demands for democratisation with demands around the content of education, conceived broadly as everything from what is taught and how it is taught to how school is organised and run – two sides of the same coin.

Where power currently lies in the school system

 Before I suggest some positive policies I want to briefly say something about power in the school system today. We can summarise it as follows. The first four aspects are familiar, but the fifth is a more recent addition.

 1. Increase in centralised state power over curriculum, assessment, evaluation, even teaching methods (the strategies) – power exercised over local authorities, headteachers, teachers, students, governors, parents. Shaping actions, shaping what is thinkable, shaping identities.

2. Increase in the power of headteacher as agents of government policies – performance management.

3. Decrease in the power of local authorities – they now have almost no representative function in education, just operational functions as instruments of government policy.

4. Increase in power over schools of religious organisations and business organisations and individuals.

5. Emergence of new inter-school forms of power – federations, networks etc.

• ‘Hard’ federations, with an ‘executive head’
• Partnerships of ‘successful’ and ‘failing’ schools
• Chains of Academies
• Networks of schools led and managed by ‘system leaders’

The strengthening of managerial power at school level has been accompanied by a rhetoric of professional empowerment in the form of the promotion, by the National College among others, of ‘distributed leadership’. The contradiction is that the government-imposed coercive powers of the headteacher remain, ensuring that the ‘sharing’ of power is only delegated, revocable and restricted within management agendas (Hatcher 2005). Similarly, conscious of the negative effects of the government’s top-down ‘command and control’ standards agenda, key government advisers are now advocating networks of collaboration between schools, but the networks have to be managed by ‘system leaders’ to make sure they conform to government agendas (Hopkins 2007; Hatcher 2008).

However spurious these claims of ‘empowerment’ of teachers are, they offer us the opportunity to challenge the rhetoric with authentic proposals. Similarly, at the local system level, we can take advantage of the debate about ‘local democratic renewal’ and ‘the empowerment of citizens and communities’ which the government is promoting, concerned about voter alienation indicated by the low turnout in local elections. The measures proposed are very limited, and, interestingly, they almost entirely exclude education, but the emergence of the issue of local democracy on the policy agenda provides us with a more favourable context in which to put forward our own ideas.

 The radical democratic alternative: democracy in schools

It is often forgotten that participatory decision-making in schools was one of the original themes of the comprehensive school movement in the 1960s and 70s. For example, George Semmens, a comprehensive school headteacher, wrote in 1972 of the need for ‘democratic schools’ in which the ‘ultimate decision-making body must be the full staff meeting’, on the grounds that ‘the collective ideas, abilities and experience of a whole staff cannot but be of greater value than the ideas, abilities and experience of one person’, and that ‘teachers are more likely to give of their best if they themselves have taken part in the decisions which are arrived at’ (Semmens 1972, p18).

The best-known and most radical example is Countesthorpe College in Leicestershire in the late 1970s, where ‘the internal decisions were made effectively by teachers’ (Chessum 1989, p128).

There were no hierarchies. There were no Heads of Departments or institutionalised leaders who had final vetoes or casting votes. The general running was organised by a weekly meeting of a committee, called Standing Committee. The teaching staff were split into three groups and each group formed the membership of the committee for one third of the School year. Policy decisions were made by the Moot which was open to all. The Standing Committee elected smaller ad hoc committees to make appointments, allocate scale points, distribute capitation, etc. (p128)

Hierarchical management of schools on the British model is not universal in Europe. In a number of countries we can find models of state school organisation which do not concentrate power in the position of the headteacher. In primary schools in the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland there are no headteachers. Teachers elect a lead teacher, but he or she is a first among equals. In Spain between the end of the Franco era and 1985 the principals of schools were elected by the teachers. And in many European countries the headteacher has much more limited powers than in Britain.

The United States also provides some examples of democratic self-management of schools by teachers. The International High School in New York was founded some 20 years ago as a collaboration between the City University and the Board of Education, dedicated to providing a ‘multicultural educational environment’ for students who were recent immigrants and English language learners (Casey, 2000). ‘International High School has a long history of collaborative decision-making, with its entire faculty making all important decisions concerning its educational program.’ The school has also pioneered, in collaboration with the United Federation of Teachers, ‘a school-based staffing and transfer plan in which a school-based personnel committee, composed mostly of teachers, selects and evaluates the school’s faculty’ (p18).

Of course we are not just concerned with redistributing power within the school, among the teaching staff. There are other actors within the school – other school workers, and the school students. And beyond the school there are parents and the local community. I am not proposing a model which would restrict democratic rights in the name of a collaborative but exclusionary professionalism.

One of the most advanced experiences we can draw on is that of the ‘citizen school’ in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Gandin and Apple 2002; Hatcher 2002). I want to use it to illustrate two principles of democratic schools. The first is that the school should be run by those most involved – teachers, other school workers, students and parents. The ‘citizen schools’ are controlled by School Councils comprising 50% teachers and other staff and 50% parents and students, with one place for the headteacher. Parents and students of 12 and over can vote and be elected. The whole community – teachers, staff, students, parents – elects the principal by direct vote. The Council controls the school budget and has considerable autonomy over the curriculum within the city’s policy framework. School policy decided by teachers, parents, students and other school workers with community representatives, all elected, and with structures for deliberation and recall. In that context the school is self-managed by those who work in it, with professional issues decided collectively by the teachers.

The second principle concerns democratic curriculum and pedagogy. Popular participation only works if people feel that by participating they can achieve things. The ‘citizen school’ aims to provide an education which not only ensures students good qualifications but also meets their social interests for an ‘education for emancipation’. It does this through a thematic curriculum based on action research by teachers with students, parents and local citizens into the issues and perspectives of the local community, and linking them with ‘high culture’ and universal forms of knowledge, in order to serve the interests of oppressed and excluded groups.

As I have said, democratic decision-making and a democratic curriculum and pedagogy are two sides of the same coin, mutually constituting each other.

In the British context steps towards this approach could include:

• The right of the school staff below top management level to organise collectively as a body with rights of negotiation and influence over school policy (as the claustro in schools in Spain used to have in the period between the end of Francoism and the emergence of neo-liberalism).

• The right of schools to adopt democratic forms of management, including collective self-management without headteachers, or with an elected headteacher.
• Election of all members of school governing bodies, with structured accountability to open meetings of the school community.

A framework for local democracy in the school system

I’d like to suggest some ideas for such a framework, beginning with seven premises.

1. A framework for local democracy in the school system has to address both school and local authority levels.

2. By ‘democracy’ we mean a combination of elected representative democracy and direct deliberative participatory democracy. As the Power Inquiry stated: ‘mass deliberation in the public realm […] is an absolutely crucial process in a democratic and open society’. (Power Inquiry 2006, p159)

3. As a result of the spread of Academies, Trust schools and federations school governing bodies becoming even less effective at ensuring schools are accountable to the communities they serve (see the new research by Ranson and Crouch: Education Guardian 10-11-09).

4. Local authorities are highly undemocratic. In particular, there is little opportunity for informed deliberative public or professional participation in education policy-making.

5. In spite of the rhetoric of the Labour government about local democratic renewal and community empowerment, the result in the context of education has been the opposite.

6. There is currently a strong move, promoted by quasi-state agencies such as the National College and the SSAT, for schools to be run by a powerful managerial elite (‘system leaders’) without local accountability.

7. Moves to further undermine national pay and conditions agreements will tend to worsen them overall and increase inequality.

The case for local participatory democracy at school level

 We need to offer an alternative vision of greater local participatory democracy at school level. While being opposed to the policy of Trust schools, we should recognise that the model of governance represented by Cooperative Trusts contains positive elements which promote the participation of the whole school community in decision-making. The first, at Reddish Vale Technology College (RVTC) in Stockport, was opened in March 2008. What is most interesting about the RVTC Trust is its governance by a Forum. According to the Trust Proposal:

‘This forum will be made up from the following constituency groups:

• Learner constituency  – open to pupils
• Parent and Carer constituency – of RVTC and associated schools
• Staff constituency– open to all full time and part time staff
• Local community constituency – open to any person who lives and works in the area and who has an interest in education and training, employability and regeneration.
• Community organisations – open to statutory, voluntary or charitable organisations with a legitimate interest in education and training, employability and regeneration.

The majority of the forum would be elected members representing their constituency groups. No constituency representatives would comprise more than a third of the membership of the council and the staff constituency shall not comprise of more than one quarter of the members of the forum. In addition, the members would be able to nominate organisations which would be able to appoint a member to the forum.

Each member of the forum will have one vote on any matter. The role of the forum is to appoint and remove trustees, collaborating with the schools, service providers / users and other organisations and to make recommendations to the trustees.’ (http://www.reddish.stockport.sch.uk/about/docs/Proposal.doc)

While it is not entirely clear exactly what power the Forum has in relation to either the governing body or the Trustee Board, the power to appoint and remove trustees is significant.

We should be arguing for cooperative governance in all schools, building on and extending what is positive in the Reddish Vale model, while of course rejecting the Trust policy itself.

However, we need to come to terms with the fact that the greater the autonomy at school level the greater will be the differences between schools in the policy decisions they make. This is already the case, even with the current level of centralised government control, and the extension of local democratic participation at school level, especially if it takes place in a context of a decrease in centralised government control, will inevitably mean greater diversity of policy. This has the potential for both good and bad consequences. The danger is that it will exacerbate social inequalities. Parents and teachers of schools in middle class areas, for example, could use their enhanced decision-making powers to reinforce their schools’ privileged position. Conversely parents and teachers of a school in a poor area could orient towards a premature vocationalism.

But in my view the potential benefits of ‘bottom-up diversity’ (as against centrally driven diversity) resulting from local popular participation greatly outweigh the dangers, for two reasons.

First, because changing the present disastrous education policies requires mass popular action combining big national campaigns with local grassroots community activity at school level, and people will only get involved locally if they feel that they can influence policy and make a difference.

Second, different approaches in teaching methods, curriculum and internal regimes are necessary in order to challenge social inequality in education. The school system systematically reproduces social inequalities. Radical reforms of school can make a significant difference. The problem is that we don’t know exactly what radical reforms will make the most difference. Knowing what educational practices perpetuate class inequality isn’t the same as knowing the best way to educate working class children, or what an education in the interest of the working class might look like. There isn’t even a consensus over the best way to teach children to read and write. There will be different and legitimate views about the answers among parents, school students, teachers and other school workers, and the wider community. These debates can’t be resolved in the abstract. We need to try out a range of different approaches, evaluate them, and learn from practice. By ‘approaches’ I don’t mean just ‘techniques’, I mean above all the educational theories and philosophies on which a school’s curriculum, teaching methods and internal organisation are based.

Democracy and the local school system

 If we accept the case for democratic diversity, how can we prevent it reinforcing social inequalities? At the national level, by a framework of social justice entitlement which would guarantee certain rights and exclude certain discriminatory and oppressive practices. But that isn’t enough: it’s too general to engage with specific policies and practices at the local level. The key to this is radical democratic reforms at the level of local school systems.

Democracy at individual school level needs to be articulated with democracy at the level of the local authority area. However, the existing system of local government is a shadow of democracy, where there is virtually no opportunity for popular participation beyond voting every few years in council elections, and certainly little serious attempt at deliberative democracy. (I speak from the experience of being an NUT observer member of the toothless Education Scrutiny Committee in Birmingham, of witnessing the sham of public consultation about Birmingham’s 8 proposed Academies, and of researching how the Council in Tamworth forced through its Academy policy with little debate in Council bodies.) This represents a problem for policies and demands which limit themselves to defending the existing role of local authorities in the face of privatisation and marketisation. We need more than a defensive stance, we need an inspiring vision of a much more democratic alternative which we can credibly argue for now.

A starting point is offered by the Power Inquiry, which calls for ‘creating a structured space within which elected representatives, public officials and members of the public can speak to each other’ and recommends that ‘All public bodies should be required to meet a duty of public involvement in their decision and policy-making processes’ and that ‘Citizens should be given the right to initiate legislative processes, public inquiries and hearings into public bodies and their senior management.’

A Local Education Council

 In terms of local school systems, the key principle is of a space in each local authority area in which deliberative democracy can take place about education policy. Let us call it a Local Education Council (LEC). This would be a forum-type body open to all with an interest in education – parents, teachers, other school staff, school students, governors and citizens – though its decisions might be taken only by elected representatives of its constituents. Its purpose would be to discuss and take positions on all key policy issues. The exact relationship of this process of deliberative democracy to the forms of local representative democracy – in particular the local authority – are a matter for discussion, and the balance of forces. But as a minimum the LEC should have the right to access to information and to present proposals to meetings of the city council and its subcommittees and have its views heard and taken account of. The LEC itself could of course expand with subgroups and working groups on specific issues, and hold wider consultative events.

One vital role for the LEC would be to provide the means of dealing with the problem of greater school autonomy being used to increase inequality between schools. One of the functions of the LEC would be to discuss significant distinctive policies which a school decided it wanted to pursue, in order to decide if they posed problems for social equality and justice in terms of their impact on other schools in the area. The proposed policy would be subject to the approval of the LEC (which might set a time limit after which the policy impact was reviewed).

The LEC would also have the task of developing, perhaps in a two-year cycle, an Education Plan for the local system of schools and colleges, including what mix of pedagogic approaches etc it would want to see made available.

Parents and teachers running schools?

 In this context how should we respond to the latest proposals by Labour and the Conservatives for teachers and parents to run schools? (See the Guardian 12-11-09.) The crucial issue is whether this takes place in a free-for-all market system or in the context of democratically-planned provision across a local area. A Tory government would further reduce the powers of local authorities and increase market competition. In that context enabling parents to initiate new schools without a controlling local authority policy framework would be a recipe for further fragmentation and social inequality in education, as well as wasteful spending.  Labour’s proposals for schools to be run as ‘mutuals’ by staff and community – which reflect something of the Cooperative Trust experience – deserve our full support if they extend local democracy, but on three conditions:

1. They operate in the context of effective local democratic planning and accountability, along the lines of the LEC-local authority partnership I have outlined.

2. They operate in the context of national pay and conditions for school staff.

3. The school premises remain in the ownership of the local authority.

Of course more democratic schools and local school systems would still be subject to the dictates of government education policies, and there is no guarantee that they would respond to them by embracing progressive or radical alternatives. But the risk of self-managed incorporation is greatly outweighed by the possibility of creating more favourable conditions to challenge the dominant agenda of whichever party is in power and reinvigorate the egalitarian and emancipatory role of the school.

 

References

 Casey, L. (2000) The Charter Conundrum. Rethinking Schools 14 (3) 18-19. 

Chessum, L. (1989) A Countesthorpe tale. In C. Harber and R. Meighan (eds) The Democratic School. Ticknall, Education Now.

Gandin, L. A. and Apple, M. W. (2002) Challenging neo-liberalism, building democracy: creating the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Journal of Education Policy 17 (2) 259-279.

Hatcher, R. (2002) Participatory Democracy and Education: the experience of Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Education and Social Justice 4 (2) 47-64.

Hatcher, R. (2005) The distribution of leadership and power in schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26 (2) 253-267.

Hatcher, R. (2008) System leadership, networks and the question of power. Management in Education 22 (2) 24-30.

Hopkins, D. (2007) Every school a great school. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Power Inquiry (2006) Power to the people: an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy. York: Joseph Rowntree Trust.

Semmens, G. C. (1972) Comeback: School Democracy, Comprehensive Education 20, Spring, pp.18-19.