The core aim of education, as I see it, is to eradicate social and economic disadvantage and ensure the success of every young person irrespective of their background. Undoubtedly education serves many other purposes – knowledge creation, citizenship development, culture transmission, economic progress – but social justice must always be at the heart of any education system. A commitment to this ‘moral purpose’ should be what motivates every school leader. The research is clear that young people who are successful educationally not only earn more and contribute to wider economic development, they are healthier, less likely to be involved in criminal activity, have better health – the list goes on. High performing schools are not just good for young people and their parents, they are good for everyone.
It is therefore vital to the educational system and society as a whole that school leadership is driven by over-arching moral principles and values guide headteachers to intentionally design their school in a way that leads to improved life chances for every pupil – irrespective of background.
If every single headteacher does this – and willingly works with colleagues in this common aim – then the whole education system will drift inevitably towards social justice and human flourishing.
The most powerful thing about the moral purpose (or ‘just cause’ as Simon Sinek calls it – but I will use the terms interchangeably here) guiding the actions and decision making of the organisation isn’t just the potential for the positive impact it has on those within the organisation and the outcomes that can be achieved. The most powerful thing about doing the right things for the right reasons is that it can impact positively on others beyond the boundary of the organisation to improve the system more widely.
As a result of an infinite mind-set, leaders are more likely to be system thinkers.
The example Sinek gives in The Infinite Game is of the American drug store chain CVS. This chain of drug stores had a moral purpose that focused on helping people to live a healthy life. However, they also sold cigarettes – something that was highly profitable for them. Their problem was that smoking could never be described as supporting healthy life choices and was clearly at odds with their moral purpose. To stop selling cigarettes would enable the organisation to honour its moral purpose – but the impact on the store’s bottom line would be significant. After much consideration the chain did decide to stop selling cigarettes – and indeed in the short term, money was lost to competitors and performance dropped against that particular measure of success. But over time a few remarkable things occurred. In relation to the drug store’s performance, the fact that they no longer sold cigarettes enabled them to focus on other areas of living a healthy life and they made some lucrative deals with other businesses that enabled them to make up on lost revenue.
But the most powerful thing was the impact this morally motivated decision had more widely. Later research showed that in areas served by the CVS drug stores the number of people who had given up smoking increased. Rather than getting cigarettes from competitors, the decision by CVS to stop selling cigarettes had acted as a motivator on people to stop smoking altogether. The moral purpose lived by this drug store chain had not only improved results in terms of their own financial bottom line – it had impacted positively on the system as a whole.
The decision to act with a clear moral purpose takes courage and as this example shows, there may well be risks to the traditional measures of success, but the benefits over time to the organisation and the system as a whole could be significant.
This is the infinite mind-set we need from our school leaders. I will explore the notion of educational system thinking in more depth in a later blog, but in essence system thinking is when leaders take a wider view of their school to see the ‘webs of interdependence’ and opportunities for sharing that exist between schools that have the potential to benefit all. It’s the rising tide that lifts all ships. In essence system thinkers are accountable for the young people in their own school, but they feel responsible for all young people and are willing to collaborate openly with other school leaders to benefit pupils in other schools.
To lead courageously – with a clear moral purpose and an intentional design that underpins all school structures – will over time not only improve outcomes for the individual school, but it will also foster system thinking and school leaders and make system wide improvements more likely.
The Finite Anchor:
Thankfully there are some excellent examples of individual schools and groups of schools that do have an absolute dedication to a moral purpose of eradicating educational disadvantage and working collaboratively with other settings – invariably these schools are led with an infinite mind-set. However, the education system as a whole remains stubbornly anchored to a very narrow concept of success that is predominately based on high stakes testing and finite thinking. While this narrow view of success is an easy way to compare schools with one another and may be beneficial to many pupils in terms of getting the results they need for the next phase of education or the world of work, it does create difficulties within the wider education system. Testing, exams, league tables and the accountability measures that result have tended to warp educational outcomes and move the focus school leaders have towards what can be easily measured – test results; and away from goals that are hard to measure – improving the life chances of all young people.
In addition to this, high test results improve the school’s – and the leader’s – reputation. Success as a leader becomes inextricably linked to high test scores. What results is an approach that very often ‘problematises’ the most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people as they are unlikely to be successful under a regime of high stakes testing. Consequently, to get the test results needed to be successful within the high stakes accountability system, these vulnerable young people can be side-lined and excluded by leaders who are not fully engaged in the moral purpose of school leadership as they focus on the finite (the winning thing) rather than the infinite (the right thing).
This is not just an issue in education. Leaders in all fields will talk of the lofty and worthy purpose / values / principles / beliefs that drive their own leadership and the behaviours of their organisation – only for their actions over time to show that, in reality, the choices they make are not ethically driven at all, but by the expedient desire to achieve results and achieve a quite narrow view of success.
It would seem that the problem deep at the heart of leadership is that leaders are not inclined to design organisations that have a moral and ethical ‘rudder’ that steers their purpose inevitably towards social justice. And why would they? There is no accountability measure in place that measures the wider concept of social justice. All that can be measured is one small part – test results.
Consequently, leaders think in terms of finite measures and design their organisations to be protected against all threats to a narrow view of successful outcomes. These threats may be external like competitors or changes in the system or internal like underperforming employees. As a result, school leaders are anchored to a finite mind-set and this leads to them being highly expedient in their behaviours. As a result, the ‘rudder’ they have steers the school towards aims that serve their own personal motivations and interests and they become reactive to circumstances rather than guided by a clear moral purpose. This narrowing of the focus on results above all else can lead to an exploitation of resources and can impact negatively on the overall outcomes that the school can achieve – for example there may be strong exam results, but high exclusions and neglect of those with a high level of need. A finite mind-set also makes the leader less ‘system focused’ and unlikely to see any benefit in collaborative work or trying to work with others have a wider impact.
So, while rigorously analysing all aspects of the institution to identify where there is underperformance, the leader with a finite mind-set focuses on short term results and expedience and ignores the fact that they are perpetuating a narrow concept of success. A compounding issue is that this type of leadership makes effective collaboration with others unlikely as sharing resources can be seen as pointless or that other schools are competitors to be ‘defeated’, not colleagues to support and learn from.
What follows are a number of blogs that explore these issues in relation to educational leadership and puts forward the idea that school leaders can ‘intentionally design’ their school to protect against the biggest threat there is to gaining ‘better’ educational outcomes for young people. The danger doesn’t come from outside the tent – it comes from the leaders own finite thinking and their stunted notion of leadership that focuses on the individual school rather than the wider system.
The Infinite Headteacher 