Mocksteds; quality assurance visits; peer reviews; health checks. Whatever you call them, they appear to be happening more than ever. The Next Big Thing. And like all Big Things in education, no-one is quite sure where they have come from and quite what purpose they serve. That is because they are many things to many people; the solution to multiple problems and the silver bullet that we hope will solve the fundamental problems of schooling. But we’re all along for the ride. If you are a teacher or school leader, you’ve probably either been subject to one or have subjected others to one recently.
Like many damaging management initiatives in education, ‘mocksteds’ became a thing as school leaders sought to emulate inspection processes due to the mistaken belief that a process designed to measure standards could also be applied to raise standards. In fact they struggle to do the former, let alone the latter.
Those more enlightened school leaders recognised quickly that such heavy-handed accountability was counterproductive so sought to soften the approach, rebranding as ‘quality assurance’ and designing methods that felt more ‘done with’ than ‘done to’. Lines of enquiry replaced quality rubrics. School Reviews Version 2.0 still helped write the SEF, but could claim to be developmental and research-informed too.
But what has supercharged school reviews is the rise of school trusts. Central teams expected to ‘know’ the quality of education provided by the schools in the trust could gather data, but nothing matches getting under the bonnet and poking around to find out what might be misfiring. Motivated also by the desire to align practices, school trusts have innovated various models of ‘peer review’ (or just senior management inspection!) to steer schools towards agreed principles, standards and practices. With multiple schools to draw expertise from, the opportunity to get staff out into other schools is too much to resist. Sharing good practice – tick. Building collegiality – tick. Aligning values – tick.
Like all Big Things, there are good intentions and merits to the emerging practices. I have taken part in versions of the school review and admit to being conflicted. On the one hand, the professional dialogue that takes place can be enriching and informative. On the other hand, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re all taking part in a ritual which, despite the pleasantries and virtue signalling, has no robust theory of change behind it.
The ritual
I have taken part in the peer review version of the ritual recently. This involved the host school and the school improvement lead from the trust identifying a domain of practice for scrutiny (e.g. Sixth Form, SEND, quality of teaching in a particular subject). A series of enquiry questions were drawn up and people with the appropriate expertise were brought in from other schools in the trust for a day to get ‘eyes on the problem’. Various activities took place which presumably afforded the reviewers the chance to gather evidence to be able to make a judgement on what they thought should be done to ‘raise standards’. At the end of an intense day, everyone involved gathered in a room to deliver their verdict (really politely and constructively, of course).
I was not provided at any point with an explicit rationale for how this activity would lead to improvements in the quality of education at the school. If I were to guess, I would say that the process was designed on the following assumptions:
- The school itself did not have the expertise within it to ‘see’ what was going on sufficiently clearly or to find a way forward.
- Importing expertise would help clarify what was going on and bring clarity.
- These imported experts would be able, following the activities they engaged in, to make valid inferences about everyday practices at the school.
- These imported experts would offer advice which would lead to greater improvement in the coming months than would have happened had they not offered this advice.
I happen to know that those whose job it was to set up these reviews had thought carefully about how the focus of these reviews should be decided upon. First, they were keen for this not to be a ‘deficit model’, in other words the trust didn’t want to focus only on the weakest areas of practice. Second, the headteachers at the schools had a significant influence on what reviews to ‘commission’. Third, the focus should be on an aspect of the school’s practice whereby improvement efforts had stalled, where previous efforts had not yielded the gains desired, or where school leaders felt they could benefit from some fresh thinking. Thought had also been given to the values upon which this ritual should be based and the potential pitfalls. As far as these things go, the reviews were quite well thought through. However, as far as I could tell, the question of how these reviews would improve things was touched upon, but never stated explicitly.
Had the assumptions been made more explicit, we would have the opportunity to test them. We might question (as we do with Ofsted inspections) the validity of the judgements the visiting experts would make. We might pause to consider what message we send the school leader whose domain is subject to the review about their insight and ability. We might take the time to test whether the model was indeed accelerating improvement in the way we hope. That is not to say that the review model would be found wanting, just that without stating our theory of change explicitly, we will never know whether it delivers the goods.
I think we should test our review rituals more carefully because I suspect the resources they require are not justified by the impact they have. In addition, I suspect that the unintended consequences of such reviews have not been fully recognised. Despite my reservations, I do believe that there is a place for peer reviews and that they could be a powerful force in building culture, improving outcomes, and achieving alignment of purpose and, where appropriate, practice.
This isn’t a ‘tear it down’ blog post. It is a ‘build it better’ one.
And I think that building a better review process starts with questioning the paradigm.
Shifting the paradigm
The origin story of school reviews makes it difficult for them to shake off the feeling that they are mini-Ofsted inspections under a different guise. A great deal of time is spent by schools and trusts trying to convince teachers that this isn’t the case. But even by defining these reviews as the antithesis of Ofsted inspections, the inspectorate is still our frame of reference. Teachers may suspect that we doth protest too much when school leaders deny the similarities.
What unites Ofsted inspections and our more collegial review models is their positivism. Positivism is the philosophical school of thought that dominated our thinking in the Western world across multiple domains during the 19th and 20th centuries, posited in its modern form by Auguste Compte. Compte’s positivism holds that we can, through reason and sensory experience, determine how things truly are. This scientific reasoning has since been applied to various fields of thought, from economics, to psychology, to political philosophy (and to education!).
You need not be a student of philosophy to recognise the positivist assumptions behind school inspection and review approaches. Both assume that there is a truth we are seeking to expose through soft-scientific methods. If we are methodical and rationale in our approach, we can acquire true understanding of what is going on and how to exercise control over this world.
But positivism has come to be intensely criticised in the last hundred years as reductionist, methodologically flawed and as leading to over-generalisations about the social world. Its rejection of other ways of knowing, such as the role played by intuition and emotions and reflection, mean that positivism cannot fully capture the complexity of humanity thought and being.
What might the ritual of peer review look like if we shift this paradigm?
Stepping into the stream
When those men and women in their suits and with their notepads arrive at a school, they are stepping into the stream of events and lived experiences of those who exist day to day in that school. For one day, they stand in the stream and in doing so become part of it (albeit for a very brief time). When they leave, what mark will they leave behind?
The stream metaphor, whilst just a metaphor, can help us reflect with humility on the impact we might reasonably expect to have as visitors to a school. Rather than the ‘privileged observer’ and ‘truth seeker’ role that a positivist paradigm would cast us in, this phenomenological perspective privileges the subjective experience of those in the school and asks that we seek to understand how the phenomena manifest not to us, but to those who will be left behind when we are gone.
A phenomenological paradigm acknowledges the complexity of schools; that they cannot be understood through brief periods of observation by outsiders. That is not to say that these perspectives are without value, just that visitors, however expert, cannot hope to see the ‘truths’ that are hidden to those within the organisation.
A phenomenological paradigm is interested in how those within the school make sense of the stream of events. Sensemaking is an act of consciousness, and consciousness drives our actions. If we want to change the course of events through our brief visits, we can only hope to do so by changing how actors make sense of the situation they are in.
A phenomenological paradigm doesn’t just pay lip-service to the values of collegiality and mutual respect: it promotes an approach whereby both parties gain insights and are better able to do their jobs as a result. The visited party has the opportunity to examine their situational awareness critically, whilst the visitors come to understand better the emergent patterns of behaviour that up until now they have only viewed from the outside.
For school trusts hoping to build a culture of trust and mutual respect, review processes must be win-win games. This requires reciprocity and well-developed norms of gift giving.
Gift giving
Gifting is a universal ritual, one so well embedded in human culture that it has been speculated as to whether it is encoded into our DNA.
Take ‘housewarming’ traditions of gift giving as an example. In the Western world, when a friend or relative moves into a new home, it is the tradition to bring housewarming gifts. These are so-called because guests would bring actual firewood to warm a newly constructed house. In France, this tradition is called pendaison de cremaillere, which translates as “hanging the chimney hook”. The chimney hook was used to hang the cooking pot over a fire in medieval houses. This would be gifted so that the communal meal could begin.
Gift giving rituals vary across the globe but there are common features. First, intention matters. Gift giving is often assumed to be altruistic, but the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who wrote the classic text ‘The Gift’ almost 100 years ago, highlights the expectation that gift giving will be reciprocal. This mutual exchange of gifts reinforces social bonds by creating an obligation. The game-theorist Robert Rider goes further and suggests that gift giving arose as a way of mitigating against conflict, what he calls a ‘socially stabilising exchange mechanism’. Gift giving may therefore be argued to be central to our moral codes (Gouldner, 1960). Gifts bind us together, create social contracts, reduce conflict, and creates a positive cycle of indebtedness.
Gifts must be valued by the recipient. They must also be handed over in the right way and received in the right way for social bonds to be maintained. These norms of behaviour vary across cultures. It may be customary to refuse the gift or to play down one’s deservedness (“Oh, you shouldn’t have”). Some playful negotiation may be required (“Surely it’s my turn to buy you a drink?”). The important thing is that the customs are observed.
I spent some time wondering what it is that is actually given or received when someone visits a school. I have often heard of people saying after school visits that they have taken away ‘nuggets’ i.e. ideas for how to make small changes in their own school. But the mutual exchange of ideas surely cannot be a very effective trust-wide improvement strategy. School trusts often use the language of ‘support and challenge’, but what does it mean to give someone support or provide challenge? Support can be lending a hand, sympathising, or giving of your time. Challenge may be criticising, questioning, or raising expectations. These may be worthwhile things to give, but they are not reciprocal and therefore cannot engage the power of gift giving rituals.
I think that a more valuable gift is insight. Insight is to offer up a perspective on what may be happening and what to do next. Whereas a positivist perspective implies the giver’s insight is superior to the receiver’s, a phenomenological perspective promotes equality of insight which lends itself better to a culture of gift giving.
What I like about the gift giving view of school visits is it helps us to be intentional about culture building. By identifying what gifts are valued and how these gifts should be given and received, we can codify norms of behaviour which reinforce social bonds and create positive cycles of indebtedness.
A gift-giving peer review model
I’d like to make all of this more concrete by modelling an approach to peer review that is phenomenological, acknowledges school complexity, privileges sense making, and embeds gift-giving rituals. I think it may have the following features:
- Some preparatory work by the ‘receivers’ whereby they reflect on how they see things e.g. how the educational problems manifest, possible causes, assumptions, model of change.
- A process by which ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’ attempt to achieve to some degree of shared situational awareness. I wrote more about this here and suggested a tool for analysis (PERO analysis).
- Tools for managing dialogue (such as Argyris’ Ladder of Inference).
- Codified gift-giving norms for sharing insights.
- A model descriptor which sets out assumptions about how the process will lead to educational improvement so that the model can be tested and developed.
One of the challenges would be that it may not be possible to know the impact of specific instances of gift giving have a meaningful impact. It may be the the efficacy of this approach may only be observable in its cultural legacy, which itself would reflect fidelity of implementation. Inevitably, the efforts of trust leaders looking to supercharge school improvement can only ever nudge the system towards desirable patterns of behaviour.
If we are to commit so much resource to school review processes, we must at least be clear about the mechanisms by which we expect these efforts to impact on the quality of education provided. What is within our gift and is this gift well received?
Matthew Evans 