The whole-school approach, one of the pillars of contemporary education governance systems, is the underlying basis for separating the educational and public administra-tion approach to decentralizaadministra-tion. One of its major implicaadministra-tions is the firm boundary between service delivery and the systemic environment of service delivery. After providing a brief outline on how the aims and goals of education are considered, as well as of the governance-relevant changes in terms of our understanding of effective learning and teaching, this chapter offers a more detailed justification for the whole-school approach.
The implications of reconsidered educational goals. The assumption that learning is the result of the work of individual teachers did not cause any organizational difficulty until factual subject knowledge was emphasized in education. However, when the cross-curricular competencies do show up on the horizon of education, especially since we determine goals in terms of competencies, it is increasingly clear that their development cannot be assigned to a specific subject of an individual teacher. For example, teachers of language and literature cannot take credit alone for the high literacy performance of students, because it’s the merit of teachers of history, math, and biology, too. It also means that the work of different teachers educating the same students may amplify (or extinguish) each other’s impact on the development of certain competencies. Obviously, the outcome of learning is the result of the entire school. The implications of this statement for school operations are tremendous.
It is not only teaching that generates learning in a school. As has already been mentioned, teaching is not the only contribution of schools to learning. Apart from providing the setting for peer group relations, the organizational aspects of “living in a school” are intentionally, but more often than not unintentionally, teaching, too. Those who are interested in the development of various areas that hardly can forced into the child-mold of a single subject find this trivial. For example, this is the case with civic education;
what a school models probably has a much deeper impact on the political socialization of students than as a subject within which various electoral system are studied.
The limits of individual methodological innovation efforts. Our contemporary un-derstanding of “good teaching” is based on the requirement of using a rich toolkit of methods for organizing learning and instruction. There are certain methods that call for
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human resources, and space in a school are often the major obstacles to any meaningful change. For example, adjusting teaching to the social nature of learning would require violating one of the traditional success criteria for teaching: a low noise level in the classroom during the lesson. Overrunning the sacred pillars of school operations (such as the length of lessons or the traditional setting of how classrooms are furnished) does not only clash with the routine of old habits but also requires a high level of cooperation from teachers; these are not things that can be changed for the sake of a teacher minority.
The limits of individual responsiveness to external expectations. We previously asked:
are individual teachers able to adjust to all of the relevant contemporary expectations towards education? The answer was no. However, schools as organizations that build on the potential of teachers to cooperate in undertaking specific roles within a joint adjust-ment effort—at least, in theory—can. Therefore, while setting certain expectations of individuals beyond their capacity to become an active part of the required organizational change is increasingly regarded as unfair, the expectations towards schools are becoming even greater. If someone “Googles” the term “whole-school approach,” he or she will get huge amount of hits starting with the “whole-school approach” to almost any aspect of education. Of course, it has serious consequences to the required competencies of teachers, too. Organizational competencies are emphasized here as equally as the mastery of the methodology of instruction.
The limits of individual learning. When pronouncing that it would be unrealistic that all teachers will catch up to the many contemporary (legitimate) external expectations towards education, we do not mean to say that teachers should not develop perpetually.
Teachers, who are in charge of supporting the learning of others, should be “lifelong learners,” too. Therefore, it is not unfair to apply the five conditions of successful learn-ing to teachers:
• Motivated learning: feedback on the results of the work, making success visible and rewarding high performance, reducing additional tasks and duties, etc.
• The individual return of learning: career progress, differentiation of compensa-tion, etc.
• Access to information: individual performance evaluation, information about learning opportunities, access to good practices, primarily to those of other teachers within the school, etc.
• Access to learning opportunities: a rich offer and easy access to learning oppor-tunities within and outside of school (in-service training and capacity building embedded into school activities), etc.
• The culture of learning: “learning-friendly school policies,” sharing of knowledge among teachers, etc.
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We will return to all of these aspects of teachers’ learning later. Here, it is important to draw attention to the fact that this (rather indicative) list does not contain anything that has something to do with the personality of the teachers. Of course, there are teachers who are more ready and able to learn than others for various individual reasons; teach-ers are as divteach-erse as students. However, the “pteach-ersonality” of the staff of schools is not a governance matter; what is relevant from a governance point of view is the fact that all the previous conditions for teachers’ learning are the features of an organization within which teachers are working together. Therefore, the primary agent that is responsible for ensuring the condition for teachers’ learning is their own institution.
Who is holding teachers accountable? As a result of the whole-school approach, indi-vidual teachers are increasingly being held accountable within quality evaluation systems.
Indeed, many contemporary quality evaluation systems have been reorganized in order to enable them to hold entire schools accountable (see Chapter 12). However, parallel to the withdrawal of state institutions from the classrooms, schools should develop those internal mechanisms that hold individual teachers accountable. Ensuring professional accountability in the relationship between the schools and their employees—in spite of the diversity of approaches and actual technical solutions—became a basic requirement for schools in almost all European countries. (As will be seen, it is definitely not the case in most South Eastern European countries.)
The poor impact of development. There is a specific type of experience that nurtured a whole-school approach long before governance and management systems took notice of the importance of realignment: that of educational development. Experts within various fields and topics of educational development readily acknowledge that schools cannot be “developed” from outside; it is only the self-guided and managed effort of the management and staff of the school that is able to change anything. In addition, individual change is limited and unsustainable. All sorts of innovations that remain isolated within the school are very limited in terms of their scope, very poor in terms of their implementation, and very short-lived. Therefore, effective development, that is the implementation of innovations of any kind, is per definition an organizational process.
All these arguments for overstepping the traditional teacher-centered approach to education drastically overwrite the very foundations of educational governance. The individual teacher is not the primary target of governance of education anymore; it is the school as an organization. Obviously, it calls for reconsidering the traditional pattern of the organizational setting of schools. Also, all the functional instruments that will be discussed in the following section should be reset accordingly over the course of decentralization.
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