NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
What Could Be Best Practice In Whole School Development (WSD)
By Roy Carr-Hill, Institute of Education, London
Ingredients of Whole School Development (WSD)It is often very hard to pin down what are the ingredients of WSD; and what makes it any different from any other general programme of school improvement e.g. Heneveld and Craig (1998)
1 Supporting Input
Parent community support
Effective support from (higher levels of) education system
Adequate material support
2 Enabling Conditions
Effective leadership
A capable teaching force
Flexibility and autonomy
High time in school
3 School Climate
High expectations from students
Positive Teacher Attitudes
Order and discipline
Organised curriculum
Rewards and incentives
4 Teaching/ learning process
High learning time
Variety in teaching strategies
Frequent homework
Frequent student assessment feedback
Evaluating any Whole School Development intervention
There are several problems with evaluating the impact of any specific programme of
impact of Whole School Development in terms of student outcomes such as
Participation
Academic Achievement
Social Skills
Economic success
In order to evaluate the impact of the added ingredient, one has to be able to collect sufficient information not only on these outcomes ? which is difficult enough (see below) - but also on the four sets of well-known ingredients (supporting input, enabling conditions, school climate, and the teaching learning process). Each of these is difficult but those in category 1 and on outcomes are especially difficult because they are not under the control of the school administration. Even in well-developed EMIS, detailed information is not collected on a routine basis about parental-community support, and adequate material support.
This is for at least three reasons;
Data confidentiality in a decentralised democracy will not allow for the collection of extensive routine data on parental and community support.
Pupil mobility between schools requires sophisticated internal tracking systems; the difficulty will be aggravated if the WSD is a success because of the inevitable inward movement of pupils from other schools
Post-school tracking systems require extensive follow up
Even where information of this kind is available ? which is very rare - there will often be a problem of the nature of the data collection. An example is the programme of Whole School Evaluations in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, where ratings are collected on a large number of school characteristics that has covered 49 schools in 5 years. Data has been collected from only a limited number of schools so that very few of the correlations are statistically significant, but all of the correlations were negative which either means that the quality of the learning environment has deteriorated over the period, or that the evaluators have become more rigorous in their assessments. The suggestion that the evaluators have become more rigorous in their assessments needs to be investigated because it throws doubt on the usefulness of the evaluations if criteria are not being applied consistently. In either case, we cannot conclude that the quality of the learning environment has improved.
Community Support
The development of linkages between schools and their communities is regarded worldwide as a crucial factor to improving teaching and learning in the classroom. Concomitant with this notion is the understanding that schools and education in general are affected by the socio-economic context. Hence, we find the development of systems to involve communities in schools in effecting whole school transformation.
But the impact of many school-community integration projects does not last much beyond the project themselves. Where they have been successful during the project phase, this termination is rather surprising, given that very few resources were required to encourage these communities to continue with the gains made during the pilot phase. All that is usually necessary is for local officials to encourage the schools to continue with the projects on the basis of the skills, information, structures and networks that were developed during the life of the pilot project. The fact that this does not happen suggests that there is a problem with the initial thesis.
Inputs and Processes
The only alternative is evaluation in terms of the items cited in 2 to 4 above; but then there is nothing specific to the WSD.
Confounding Factors
Often a Whole School Development takes place at the same time as other developments and resource inputs, where there can be steady improvements in clearing the backlogs of physical infrastructure, as well as of communications. The evidence usually has to rely on the condition of that infrastructure, including the condition of desks and seats in the classroom, the staff and learner toilets, whether or not telephones function, and the levels of security (what mechanisms exist; how many break-ins have there been); and more qualitative indicators, e.g. the arrangement of desks and seats in the classroom. All these factors are difficult to collect data upon routinely.
Improving Learner Effectiveness
The basic conditions for improving learning effectiveness in the classroom are those identified by Heneveld and Craig ? or similar lists;
School Transformation?
It is not clear what are the appropriate lessons to be drawn here. Possibly, it is because many of the schools lacked basic essentials so that the training for transformation was seen as over-theoretical and detached from real-world problems. Possibly that the bureaucratic procedures that are still in place for procuring learning and teaching support materials stifle any other initiatives. In any event, whilst the school transformation model when it is successful can provide material for very good videos, it is not clear that it can be brought in system-wide without considerable support.
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