Sharing ideas on
school-based management

FROM LEFT: Ms Mantariga Witoonchat, Dr Kerri Briggs, Vincent McDonnell

International conferences remain one of the most efficient venues for gathering new ideas. Recently, Thailand played host to one such conference. Focusing on the decentralisation of administrative authority from the national government to the schools – a concept often referred to as “school-based management” (SBM) – it drew participants from throughout Asia and, in some cases, beyond.

At the conference, the learning post took the opportunity to discuss SBM with three participants with very different perspectives. Taken together, they are an excellent example of the value of sharing experiences toward the common goal of promoting educational excellence.

Dr Kerri Briggs

Dr Kerri Briggs has spent the last two years as a special assistant in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, US Department of Education. Interestingly, her position at the centre of US government actually removes her from much of the action in US education.

“The American system is quite a bit different in structure from the Thai system in that the role of the federal government is far more limited in the US than it is here in Thailand,” Dr Briggs explains.

“The federal government provides less than ten percent of the funding for American education. The states really are the ones that are driving what gets taught, assessed, learned as well as how teachers are selected and trained.”

There are advantages working at the national level, however. One of the biggest is the broad perspective it provides. This has allowed Dr Briggs and her colleagues to carry out a study examining the consequences of school-based management in a wide variety of settings.

“We looked at different districts that were working with SBM to see what the successful schools had come up with to make it worthwhile,” Dr Briggs relates. “We found that there were a number of really important elements.

“First was the idea of a vision. In the early days this was really something simple, like a one- or two-sentence mission statement. This has now evolved into something much more comprehensive in terms of curriculum standards – defining what schools want their students to learn in reading, math, science and social studies. This vision of what they want for their students drives all their efforts in SBM and it operates as a framework for decision-making.”

Another key variable, according to Dr Briggs, is leadership. “You’ve got to have a principal who knows how to make the system work,” she says. “In addition to that, you want teachers to be involved at the school level using their own expertise and knowledge to help make school decisions.”

Finding good principals is a big challenge and training programmes are a necessity she adds. “We’re not going to have super-hero principals in every school, so you’ve got to find a way to train principals and give them the skills they need in order to be good principals.”

Schools must also have good access to information on their students and be able to use that information to make decisions, Dr Briggs says. “In the US, information has tended to be from student achievement assessments given on a yearly basis, or from assessments given at the school level. If the school finds that third-grade reading scores are slipping, then they can take action to improve their reading instruction.”

Teacher knowledge is also a crucial element to a school’s ability to implement the changes required by a SBM system, Dr Briggs says. “The capacity to change practices at the school-level rests a lot on its teachers and their professional capacity to make decisions, to develop curriculum, to help other teachers to become better teachers and to be involved at the decision-making at the school level.

“Here, outside resources can be helpful. There are a number of state and national networks for teachers, professional networks where they can get additional training, learn from their colleagues about good practice. That’s true of principals as well,” she says.

Finally, says Dr Briggs, “one of the aspects of school-based management where it worked well was the amount of authority and the types of authority schools were given. In situations where schools only had limited authority, you weren’t going to find that it changed the school much because there wasn’t much for them to do. But in schools where you found they had authority to choose curriculum, develop instruction and to focus on the budget and redirect funds where they needed to be directed, that’s where you saw it making a bigger difference,” she says.

“With increased authority also comes increased accountability,” Dr Briggs stresses. Under the Bush administration’s new “no child left behind” legislation, schools that continually under-perform are subject to consequences.

“It opens up opportunities for students to be able to go to another school under certain conditions or to get private tutoring. At the same time, schools that are determined to be in need of improvement are given additional resources through federal and state resources,” Dr Briggs explains.

Vincent McDonnell

Vincent McDonnell is no stranger to under-performing schools. In the year 2000, the British government tapped him to take over one of the country’s most troubled school districts, the Islington borough of south London.

“In England, we have an external body, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) that inspects the quality of education that’s provided in our schools,” McDonnell explains by way of background.

“Ofsted ranks their judgments from one to seven. When they concluded their inspection of Islington, they ranked it as a seven – right at the bottom. Islington was described as the worst education authority in the country at that time.”

The situation was so bad, says McDonnell, the government resorted to an option not available here in Thailand.

“The government felt that not only was the service very poor, but they didn’t see within the education service the capacity to sort itself out. So the judgment was made that they would let the contract to a private company to come in and run the service and turn it around.”

The company was Cambridge Education Associates (CEA) which, in turn, asked McDonnell, who was the chief educational and school director in another part of London at the time, to head this very demanding project.

McDonnell found the job to be both a challenge and an opportunity. “Because we were a private provider and we didn’t have to work within the constraints of public sector appointments, I was actually able to go to people who I knew and say to them, ‘I’m going to run Islington for the next few years. Do you fancy coming along and working with me?’

“So I handpicked three people to come and work with me and we became the new management team.”

Together, McDonnell and his team were in charge of 70 schools, administering a budget of about £65 million (4.4 billion baht) a year.

A group of Thai school principals share ideas with Mr McDonnell.

One of their first jobs was to give the district something that had been almost totally missing under the previous administration: a sense of vision.

“What was wrong was that the central management team didn’t really know where they were going. As a consequence, they were offering no clear sense of vision and purpose to the school community of where they were going together. It was a bit like an organisation without a clear leader.

“What they needed was somebody who had the arrogance of their own self-belief to come along and say to them all, ‘OK everybody, this is the direction we’re going. If you think that’s the right direction and you’re happy to join in, that’s fine. Please do. If you don’t like the direction we’re going in, then that’s fine too. It’s your choice.’

“What we didn’t do was go around and sack everybody. But in the end, what did happen was the whole of the top level of the management team left.”

The transformation of the district under the new team was rapid and dramatic. Within two years, Islington was acknowledged to be among the top ten most improved educational authorities in England.

Like Dr Briggs, McDonnell stresses the importance of information collection and availability for analysis in improving school performance. His team quickly set up a sophisticated information database that gave school administrators instant access to a wealth of data that they had never had before.

“Once a school’s young people have taken the national tests, we will give back to them, name by name, how their pupils have done,” Vincent explains. “We can then profile their school against schools of a similar nature in the area. We can profile their school within the district. We can profile their school nationally.

“This enables us to change the conversation from ‘what if’ to factual reality. It enables us to get down to where a school was successful and where individual schools have more need. It raises the awareness of everybody in terms of pupil data, pupil analysis and school analysis.”

The Islington experience also offers an excellent confirmation of Dr Briggs’ observation of how important it is to give local administrations adequate authority over their resources. “It was the most wonderful opportunity,” McDonnell says of his situation. “It was truly magical.

“Because we were a private sector company, we didn’t have the restrictions of local government practice, so every day, right then and there, we could take whatever decision we needed to take for the good of the young people in the school.”

McDonnell, whose trip to Thailand was sponsored by the British Council, spent much of his time here holding in-service training sessions with local principals. He says he found the principals a receptive and inquisitive audience, despite significant differences between the educational systems in the two countries.

One of the messages he left with them was of universal relevance. “I believe that a successful school really turns on the skills of the head and his management team,” he says.

“I’ve seen beautiful brand-new schools that aren’t being as successful as they should be because the skills of the management team aren’t right. And equally you can go to inner city schools facing some of the worst challenges and they sing. And I think it’s to do with the belief and commitment of the head teacher and the senior management team.”

Ms Mantariga Witoonchat

Ultimately, education succeeds or fails at the grassroots level and that is where Ms Mantariga Witoonchat has spent her entire career. She began teaching at the tender age of 17 at a small private school named Meanprasatwittaya, becoming its principal three years later, a position she still holds after almost 30 years.

As the chief administrator of a private school, Ms Mantariga has practiced school-based management from the very beginning.

“Meanprasatwittaya was originally established by the community, though not officially according to the law,” Ms Mantariga explains. “The school was administered by a committee from a foundation, but the foundation at that time had still not been formally registered.

“After I became principal I promised the committee members at that time that we would make this a good school in the future. Profit should not be a consideration since the school is really a part of the community,” she relates.

“Each year we came up with a budget. At the beginning, 40 percent of the money we received came from the government. We had to get the rest from parents.

“In 1984, we thought that if our school was to develop, we should make it official. We should establish a registered foundation with the proper procedures and regulations. That meant there had to be elections each four years for committee members with half the committee coming up for election every two years. We also needed to produce detailed reports on the money we collected and spent and we needed a clear statement of purpose.”

For Ms Mantariga that purpose included relentless innovation in teaching methodology, faculty development and parental involvement. Inspired by her educational visits abroad, she became one of the country’s first advocates of a learner-centred approach to instruction.

How she instituted that approach at Meanprasatwittaya could be a model for schools throughout the country.

“We began at the kindergarten level and when that was firmly established we decided it should not just end there but we should extend it to primary school as well. So Meanprasatwittaya really began to experiment with learner-centred education before the reform movement began,” Ms Mantariga relates.

Implementing the change was not without obstacles, however. “Before we instituted the changes, we asked the parents, the children and the teachers about 20 questions about how they felt. Did they want to make the change? About 80 percent of the children were in favour and the parents by about an equal amount. However, about 70 percent of the teachers were not in favour.

“The teachers were relatively inexperienced and their ideas were quite conservative,” Ms Mantariga recalls. “So we brought in experts from many different countries to help train them.”

No one was forced to adopt the new approach and the methodology was introduced on a voluntary basis. Initially, volunteers were found for one class at each kindergarten and primary level – a total of nine classrooms.

After that, things moved more quickly than expected, in large part due to pressures from parents.

“Initially, our plan was to go for one year before having other classes change over,” Ms Mantariga relates, “but after six months, teachers from other classes said they wanted to change as well because they were coming under pressure from parents who were asking why their children weren’t learning in the same way as the other classes.

“‘This class is learning that way, why isn’t your class?’ they asked. ‘This class has educational games and why doesn’t yours?’ So the teachers came to me and requested change.”

The parental pressure was not all that surprising given the effort Ms Mantariga had put into keeping parents informed. “We had gone into an offensive mode, going beyond our teachers and reaching out into the community,” Ms Mantariga recalls.

“The students were already receptive to change, but if the parents were not, they might take their children out of our school. This was a constant worry at that time because no other schools had implemented such a programme.

“We had parents attend workshops (using new methodology) without telling them the purpose. We then had them reflect on what they had learned and pointed out that this is how their children learned at school.”

Meanprasatwittaya has flourished under the new system with enrolment rising from about 100 students and six teachers shortly after Ms Mantariga became principal to about 1300 students and 100 teachers at present. The learning post will be taking a closer look at this school in the not-to-distant future.