Performance Improvement and Accountability
RECOMMENDATION 13 That
7.4 THE SCHOOL
classroom experiences - and to link teachers' professionalism to what goes on in the classroom.
The regulatory framework is not framed to take account of our analysis of improvement, accountability and professionalism. In extreme cases the Regulations pit people who should be joint partners in a positive enterprise against one another.
We believe that if a recommendation for a performance management approach which incorporates the principles set out in the previous section were to be accepted, there would be a strong case for also reviewing the current regulations governing teachers' efficiency and conduct.
RECOMMENDATION 13
7.4.1 The Better Schools Approach
The concept of self-determining, responsible schools underpinned the administrative structure recommended in the Better Schools document. This concept was seen to strike a balance between autonomy (self-determination) on the one hand and equity and accountability (responsibility) on the other hand. It was acknowledged that increased local discretion had to go hand-in-hand with increased accountability. Better Schools also specified that each school should be directly accountable both to the central office and to the local community.
The school development plan was proposed as a key improvement mechanism because it would combine curriculum planning with financial and resource management. In the school's plan, all elements of the Better Schools vision would be tailored to local improvement goals by the staff and community. Local accountability was to be assured by community participation in formal decision-making groups which would be responsible for:
• setting broad policies and priorities;
• establishing a resource management plan;
• overseeing the expenditure of funds and the use of school resources and facilities;
and
• participating in the specification of the role of the principal and advising on the selection and appointment (formal employment and payment would remain a central responsibility).
Central accountability would be assured through the proposed school district structure;
in particular, through the functions of district superintendents:
• ensuring that the Ministry's educational standards and policy goals were being met in schools;
• ensuring that resource management in schools was consistent with accepted policies and practices;
• approving school development plans; and
• being the person to whom principals were directly responsible for the efficient operation of their schools.
Superintendents, in turn, were to be directly accountable to one of four centrally-located directors of operations.
In summary, Better Schools proposed a dual system of improvement and accountability involving the local community and the central administration. The strength of this system was obviously going to depend on two things: firstly, how well the vision for school development plans could be implemented through policy, professional development and other forms of assistance; and secondly, how well the third parties to the arrangements - the school decision-making groups and the superintendents - could carry out their appointed roles.
7.4.2 Current Policies for Improvement and Accountability
Schools' improvement and accountability requirements are specified in the following Education Department documents:
• School Accountability: Policy and Guidelines (1991)
• School Development Plans: Policy and Guidelines (1989)
• School Decision Making: Policy and Guidelines (1990)
• Financial Planning and Management: Policy and Guidelines (1991).
The school accountability policy (which is amplified by several pages of guidelines) is:
• All schools will monitor their performance in relation to the purpose and performance indicators described in their School Development Plan.
• All schools are required to respond to their own performance information through their School Development Planning.
• Each principal is accountable to a District Superintendent for the performance of the school.
• Each principal is required to give an account of the performance of the school to the School Decision-making Group through the School Development Plan.
The linchpin is the school development plan: a school cannot comply with the accountability policy without one. Under the school planning policy, a plan must include:
• the purpose of the school;
• indicators of the school's performance;
• details of how the school monitors its performance;
• the school and statewide priorities currently being addressed;
• how these priorities are being addressed; and
• the current allocation of resources to ensure effective outcomes.
The policy's guidelines allow each school to develop a unique plan in keeping with local student and school needs. A school's performance information is held in its
"management information system". The guidelines state that:
A school should routinely monitor all aspects of its business. This process of monitoring is referred to as the school's management information system and is the responsibility of the principal.
(School Development Plans: Policy and Guidelines, 1989:3).
Details of the information to be held, the methods for its collection and central access to it, are not specified. The accountability policy makes no provision for connecting schools' information systems to the information requirements the system has in respect of the Financial Administration and Audit Act 1985. The legislative authority for school accountability is not referred to in the policy and guidelines. Also, we are not aware of the implications arising from the Freedom of Information Act 1993 for schools' management information systems. We suggest that these matters be referred to the Education Act Review Project.
7.4.3 Central Accountability through the District Superintendent
The district superintendent's role in accountability and improvement has two main aspects:
The first is to provide the assurance that all schools are performing effectively. The second concerns the requirement that all schools operate within Ministry policy.
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EstaЫishing the effectiveness of schools is a complex matter and requires District Superintendents to monitor the extent to which a school has responded appropriately to its own performance information. This involves an assessment of how comprehensively the school has engaged in self monitoring, how rigorously this information has been analysed, how systematically alternative strategies have been canvassed and how successfully plans for improvement have been implemented.
(School Accountability: Policy and Guidelines, 1991:7).
Each superintendent has to make a series of unaided, authoritative, qualitative judgements (about appropriateness, comprehensiveness, rigour, success, etc.) in primary and secondary schools, education support centres and community kindergartens. In addition, the superintendent must ensure:
... that a plan was developed through a process of consultation. They also need to satisfy themselves that each plan adequately incorporates Ministry policy and that it contains sufficient information on each of the key elements.
(School Development Plans: Policy and Guidelines, 1989:8).
Superintendents have been given a complex role in schools' accountability, although they have yet to be asked to exercise it to the full extent. The extent has been regulated by Memoranda of Agreement between the Education Department and the State School Teachers' Union.
In practice, the superintendents' accountability role up to 1994 has been to make qualitative judgements of the extent to which, and how well, schools across the districts have complied with the industrially-agreed timetable for implementing the Departmental policies on school development, school decision making, and financial planning and management. The information that has flowed from superintendents to the central office and then into Parliament consists of qualitative, global judgments about how schools are managing to implement each policy.
The 1994 reports on schools by superintendents, which are still under preparation, take this process a step further. Superintendents were asked to focus on the accountability process being used by principals and teachers. In particular, they were asked to make judgements of each school in terms of the extent to which:
• participative decision making is understood and practised;
• the school decision-making group is involved in decision making;
• there are processes in place that demonstrate teachers are accountable to the principal;
• the principal demonstrates accountability to the superintendent;
• the school development plan is improving the teaching-learning program; and
• student performance information is used in planning.
7.4.4 The Role of the Community in Improvement and Accountability
Each principal's formal responsibilities for involving the community in decision making are set out in School Decision Making: Policy and Guidelines (1990). The policy is that:
• Principals have the responsibility of enabling staff to participate in school decision making.
• Principals have the responsibility of enabling parents to participate in the planning process, in accordance with the Education Act Regulations.
The purpose of school decision-making groups is stated as being:
... to provide a school's staff and its community with opportunities to work together to formulate the school's educational objectives and priorities through the school development planning process ... [W]hen a School Decision-making Group is satisfied with a school's development plan, it should endorse the plan and then the principal should submit it to the District Superintendent.
(School Decision Making: Policy and Guidelines, 1990:4)
The term "accountability" is not mentioned but the notion is implied by the use of the term "satisfied". Regulation 287 of the Education Act Regulations directs the superintendent to approve the school development plan provided it is in accordance with all relevant Education Department policies. In the event that this is not so, the superintendent refers the plan back to the school for modification.
The school accountability policy (1991) gives school decision-making groups an important role. It says, in effect, that a principal is accountable for the performance of the school to the school decision-making group through the school development plan.
However, the compilation of the superintendents' judgements for 1993 indicates that local accountability is the least-well-developed connection in the whole framework.
Many school decision-making groups do not make decisions of substance - they merely endorse decisions made by the school principal and the staff and rarely determine their own decisions or initiate lines of action. Some groups were judged unrepresentative of the broad community. Also, few groups were receiving sufficient good-quality information on student performance to enable the establishment of priorities.
7.4.5 The Logic of the Current Policy
Under current policy, a school demonstrates accountability by responding appropriately to its own performance information. Superintendents judge this by talking to the principal about the school's development plan. Information about student performance is in the plan and the school's information system. The superintendent's judgement of how appropriate the plan's response is to the performance information is critical: the logic is that if schools are responding appropriately, then learning must improve.
There is some anecdotal evidence from a recent survey of secondary principals (Chadbourne and Clarke, 1994) which suggests that the logic may not yet be flowing into practice - only 36 per cent of respondents considered that school development plans contributed to improved learning. The supporting reasons, however, call into question difficulties with implementation and interpretation by teachers and principals alike, rather than the logic of the policy itself.
In the final analysis, we have concluded that the logic of the policy is strong but that it is yet to be fully tested in practice. To date, superintendents have been required mainly to make assessments of schools' performance against the benchmarks of policy implementation schedules. Superintendents reports for 1992 and 1993 indicate that information systems in schools are among the least-developed parts of the framework.
The logic of this situation is that schools' responses to their own performance information cannot be judged if fully-fledged information systems are not developed.
7.4.6 Overall Strengths of the Framework
We have concluded that the greatest strength of the current arrangements is the school development and accountability policies themselves. In our frame of reference these policies provide the necessary triggers for internal review and reflection across a school
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as a whole. Because the focus of internal review is the current and aimed-for levels of children's performance, the policies incorporate that to which a school must be responsive - the needs of its children. The policies provide for systematic deliberative decision making in areas of weakness as well as for the monitoring of those areas of the school where decision making is more routine. The policies require two sets of third- party judgements (the superintendent and the decision-making group) on the effectiveness of the school's internal reviewing. Overall, the framework has significant potential for performance improvement and represents an advance over the arrangements for internal review that existed up to the mid-1980s. We do not see a need for a new policy framework but a need to address difficulties with implementation and the weaknesses which we have detected in the light of our recommendations elsewhere in the report.
7.4.7 Current Difficulties
The main difficulties lie with interpretation and implementation of the policies. The submissions have drawn attention to a range of these, including:
• in some schools teachers have no common understanding of the purposes of the plans;
• some principals regard school development plans as useful only for highlighting the priorities used as the basis for allocating discretionary funds;
• in some secondary schools, the plans of teachers and subject departments override the school plan;
• many teachers do not see how school development plans relate to their real purpose, which is teaching;
• some principals regard the planning process as appropriate for business and industry, but inappropriate for schools; and
• some principals believe that only 15-30 per cent of the total operation is covered, because their plans focus exclusively on priorities.
Many schools experience practical difficulties associated with the technical aspects of the policies and their guidelines, particularly in the areas of indicators and the gathering and interpretation of performance information. These difficulties can be overcome by appropriate, targeted assistance and support.
We believe that difficulties associated with teachers' feelings of ownership and
"connectedness" to plans should be approached through performance management, as described earlier in this chapter.
The difficulties due to different interpretations of the scope of the policy need to be addressed quickly and decisively. It is evident from the submissions and superintendents' reports that in some schools (more so in secondary than primary, according to superintendents), the planning policy is applied only to parts - rather than the whole - of the schools' operations. These schools draw a distinction between their operational (maintenance) plans and their development plans. The Education Department must affirm that as far as accountability is concerned, it is the school development plan that is the vehicle for reporting performance of the whole school, not only parts of it. The accountability provisions in our recommendations in the areas of school governance, work organisation, finance and staffing could be compromised if uncertainty about the scope of the school development plan persists.
Currently, school development planning is mainly done on a one-year basis. Such short- term planning is inconsistent with the reality of the time it takes to effect changes and improvements in schools. Difficulties can also arise when schools change leadership.
One-year planning cycles do little to encourage incoming principals to continue the programs of their predecessors. This can be a problem if the new principals seek to take schools in radically-different directions. We believe that a rolling three-year or four-year planning cycle would overcome such problems in the future, particularly in schools with school councils or boards which develop a strong sense of ownership for their plans.
Education Act Regulation 284 (1), which specifies the timeframe for planning, specifically refers to one-year periods, although technically, it does not rule out longer timeframes. We believe the ambiguity in this Regulation should be clarified in favour of a longer timeframe.
RECOMMENDATION 14
That:
i) clear guidelines and support (hardware, software, staff and training) be provided to schools, related to the requirements to establish performance indicators and management information systems to enhance information-based decision making and outcomes reporting in schools;
ii) for the purposes of the Education Department's school accountability policy, the school development plan be clarified as including all aspects of the school's performance; and iii) school planning be done on a rolling three-year basis.