Helen Timperley Partnership: Focusing the relationship on ... · Viviane Robinson and others is a...

Partnership: Focusing the relationship on the task of school improvement is

a significant book which will be of interest to anyone who is in a leadership

or governance role in education. The topic is of critical importance to schools,

government agencies, and communities.

The authors suggest that the strength of partnerships lies in the ability of the

partners to integrate relationship and task dimensions in a way that enables

the partners to work together and learn from one another. They illustrate their

theory through examples of different partnerships in the context of a New

Zealand initiative for school improvement. They discuss: parental involvement;

boards of trustees and school professionals; the difference between partnership

and consultation; and partnership between early childhood and new entrant

teachers. They provide a conceptual framework for successful partnerships

that will inform policy, practice, and research. Theirs is a valuable step along

the way to understanding the nature of partnership and its potential to

contribute to school improvement.

Helen Timperley, senior lecturer in the School of Education at Auckland

University, and Viviane Robinson, associate professor in the School of

Education at the University of Auckland, are co-leaders of the research

evaluation of the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s initiative to strengthen

education in Mangere and Otara (SEMO).

Partnership: Focusing the Relationship on the Task of School Improvem

entH

elen Timperley

Viviane Robinson

200838-Partnership Text-NZCER 31/7/02, 1:08 AM1

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NEW ZEALAND COUNCIL FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

PO Box 3237, Wellington, New Zealand

© Helen Timperley, Viviane Robinson, 2002

ISBN 1–877293–09–1

All rights reserved

Distributed by NZCER Distribution ServicesPO Box 3237, Wellington, New Zealandwww.nzcer.org.nz


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Contents

Acknowledgments 5

Preface 7

Chapter One: The Nature Of Partnership 9

The Qualities of Partnerships 15The Task 16Partnership Responsibilities 18Working Together 20Mutual Accountability 21Sharing Power 23

Research Contexts 25

Chapter Two: The New Zealand Educational Context and PartnershipIntervention Strategies 33

Research Context and Approach 41

Research Findings 47The First Intervention Phase 47The Second Intervention Phase 54

Discussion 60

Chapter Three: Sharing Information: School Reports to Parents 63


Research Findings 66Schools’ Reporting Practices 66Explanations for Current Practice 72

Discussion 76


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Chapter Four: Power and Expertise: Parent Governors and Professionals 79


Research Findings 83Trustees as Partners 84Trustees’ Role in Monitoring Educational Achievement 86

Discussion 93

Chapter Five: Partnership and Consultation: Deciding Schooling Structures 97

Research Context and Approach 98The Presenting Problem: Two Middle School Applications 99

Research Approach 102

Research Findings 103Phase One: A Consultative Approach to Problem Solving 103Phase Two: A Partnership Approach to Problem Solving 106Conditions that Facilitate the Task of Inter-school Problem Solving 111

Discussion 118

Chapter Six: A Partnership with an Unclear Task:Transitioning Children from Early Childhood Education to Schools 121


Research Findings 128Partnership Relationships and Responsibilities 128Expectations of Partners 129Satisfaction with Current Transition Arrangements 132Programme Knowledge 135Sharing Information on Individual Children 136

Discussion 138

Chapter Seven:Implications of the Studies for Educational Partnerships 141

Relationship Issues 142

Becoming Task Focused 145

The State as a Partner in a Self-governingSystem with Failing Schools 147

Epilogue 151

References 154


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E nga mana, e nga iwi katoaTena koutou, tena koutouTena koutou katoaTalofa lava, Malo e lelei,Taloha ni, Kia orana,Kakalofa lahi atu

This book is the result of the contribution of many different people.First of all, we wish to acknowledge the chairpersons of the boards oftrustees, principals, senior staff and teachers in the Mangere and Otaraschools who took part in our studies. These schools have taken on newand significant challenges, and have shown the courage to have theirpractice examined and critiqued by researchers. Their openness shouldbe celebrated by the New Zealand education community, because it isfrom them that we learn how to cater more effectively for the needs ofstudents in communities like Mangere and Otara.

We also wish to acknowledge the Ministry of Education for severalreasons. Not only has it funded the project on which this book is based,but Ministry staff have spent many hours debating the ideas, informingus about the very real constraints under which they work, and allowingus to observe and critique their practice. Their openness to new ideasand willingness to learn have impressed us.

Acknowledgments


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Our job as evaluators of the Ministry’s work in Mangere and Otarais still incomplete, and we look forward to serving those schools andcommunities further in the coming year.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the efficient and careful workdone by Irene Fung in referencing this volume. We also thank AlisonCarew for her very thorough editing of the text, and Bev Webber atNZCER for her encouraging and timely support.


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Partnership: Focusing the relationship on the task of school improvement is asignificant book which will be of interest to anyone who is in aleadership or governance role in education. The authors suggest thatthe strength of partnerships lies in the ability of the partners to integratethe relationship and task dimensions in a way that enables them towork together and learn from one another. They illustrate their theorythrough examples of different partnerships in the context of a NewZealand initiative for school improvement. They discuss: parentalinvolvement; boards of trustees and school professionals; the differencebetween partnership and consultation; and partnership between earlychildhood and new entrant teachers. The authors provide a conceptualframework for successful partnerships that will inform policy, practice,and research. Theirs is a valuable step along the way to understandingthe nature of partnership and its potential to contribute to schoolimprovement.

Formative research, such as that undertaken by Helen Timperley,Viviane Robinson and others is a vital component in assisting schoolingimprovement projects to achieve their goals. The research feedbackhas been invaluable to the Ministry of Education’s staff working in theStrengthening Education in Mangere and Otara project (SEMO), andto the schools and communities of Mangere and Otara. The work has

Preface


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additionally informed Ministry of Education thinking around keyissues in schooling improvement, particularly in developingpartnerships with communities and schools that are based on raisingstudent achievement levels.

The SEMO project was set up to assist the Mangere and Otaracommunities and their schools to increase student achievement througha three-way partnership between the Ministry of Education, thecommunities, and their schools. Early key components of the initiativeincluded programmes, based in schools and early childhood settings,to involve parents in the improvement of children’s literacy learning.Subsequently, there was an additional focus on the analysis and use ofstudent achievement data to enhance school and community efforts toimprove student achievement.

Data gathered by Viviane Robinson and Helen Timperley for theirfirst two SEMO research reports are reported as part of this book.Because the research is formative, and the SEMO project is ongoing, itis important to note that the information contained in this bookdescribes issues and situations that occurred as part of the earlydevelopment phase of SEMO. The Ministry and schools are happy forthe learnings from the initial phase to be shared more widely as theyfeel that the SEMO development processes have implications for otherschools and schooling improvement projects. The findings reportedare not intended to be a final description of the SEMO initiative butrather they document and elaborate on key milestones along the wayto achieving sustainable school improvement through partnership. TheMinistry of Education and schools in Mangere and Otara point outthat as a result of the SEMO initiatives, and the findings from theformative research, the SEMO schools continue to develop. Theseongoing developments are explained further in the epilogue to thisbook.


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In numerous countries, the language of partnership has permeated stateinitiatives to improve the quality of education offered in schools. Soprevalent is the idea that, in the words of Rhodes (1997), partnershiphas become ‘the policy makers’ obsession’ (p.47). If one were to believemuch of the rhetoric, partnerships between state bureaucracies, schools,universities, businesses and communities will make a majorcontribution to solving our current educational problems.

Partnerships are seen to be relevant to participants at all levels ofthe education system, including state policy-makers, administratorsand teachers. In Britain, for example, the Director General of Schools,David Normington, has urged departmental bureaucrats to seethemselves as partners in a joint educational endeavour, rather thanthe ultimate authority in educational matters:

It is part of the job of the modern civil service to connect with theworld it serves, to hear what it is really like at the sharp end and tobring that understanding of the practicalities back into the policyprocess....Specifically, to consider: what is it all for, how it fits togetherand how we, as partners, need to respond to the pressures of thatfast moving agenda. (Normington, 1999, p.8)

Schools, the other former bastions of educational authority, aresimilarly encouraged to join with others to achieve their educationalmission:

CHAPTER ONE

The Nature Of Partnership


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Since 1984...more complex and formal education partnerships haveflourished across the United States. Despite earlier doubts thatpartnerships might be just another ‘fad,’ there has been sustainedbusiness, community, and family interest in collaboration over thelong term based on the growing realization that improved teachingand learning nationwide are difficult, enormous undertakings, whichschools cannot accomplish alone. (U.S. Department of Education,2000, p.2)

These two quotes illustrate the broad rationales offered in discussionsabout partnership. In the first, partnership is employed to advance apolitical and social policy agenda of enhancing democratic participationand responsiveness. Partnership is seen as a new form of governancewhich provides an alternative to marketisation or paternalisticbureaucracies by bringing together a range of providers and interestgroups to tackle intransigent issues (Huxham, 1996). While some whopromote this view emphasise the enhancement of problem-solvingcapacity (Wood and Gray, 1991), others are more concerned aboutcreating a stronger democracy. Anderson (1998), for example, arguesthat participatory discourse taps into feelings that run deep in theAmerican psyche; those feelings have also become hegemonic aroundthe world as reforms in highly centralised educational systems fromBuenos Aires to Budapest bring large doses of administrativedecentralisation, and participation by parents, teachers andcommunities. Such discourse has struck a chord with those seekingmore direct involvement in a participatory democracy based on apolitics of social equality.

The second quote has a more functional rationale and is typical ofthose who focus on school performance and on students and theirachievement. Beare (1993), for example, claims that ‘one of the strongestreasons for building a partnership between school and home came fromthose studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s which showed howpowerfully home backgrounds determined school achievement’(p.207). Partnership has since been enshrined in the United Statesgovernment’s Goals 2000 statement that ‘every school will promote


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partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participationin promoting the social, emotional and academic growth of children’(U.S. Department of Education, 1994). These policy-makers aresupported by researchers who base their arguments on internationaldata which indicate that partnerships between schools and parentsresult in improved academic achievement (Haynes and Ben-Avie, 1996;Sanders and Epstein, 1998; Shartrand, Weiss, Kreider and Lopez, 1997;Street, 1998). These researchers are less concerned with issues of powerand democracy than their social theorist colleagues.

The differences between these rationales for partnership areimportant, because the rationales become the criteria against whichtheir respective adherents evaluate the processes and outcomes ofpartnership. If partnerships are designed to empower parents througha strong democracy based on a politics of social equality, as proposedby those adopting a social theory perspective, then the criterion forjudging the partnership becomes the extent to which these things havehappened. Most research that emanates from this tradition is highlycritical of partnership processes because equality between partners israrely achieved. Fine (1997), for example, condemned the parent-schoolpartnership arrangements in three studies in the United States becausethe partnerships were not ‘power-neutral’. She expressed concern thatthe discourse of parent empowerment and involvement had become a‘promiscuous’ invitation to parents to fix the deficit-ridden sphere ofpublic education. A similar theme is evident in the work of Vincentand Tomlinson (1997), which demonstrates that schools used therhetoric of home-school partnerships as a mechanism to control ratherthan empower parents and their children.

A similar lack of success has been reported on partnerships designedto address intransigent problems. Gray (1989), for example, describeshow a partnership between business, government and schools in NewYork, which was designed to reduce unemployment, foundered becausethe partners worked from different causal assumptions, misunderstoodeach others’ perspectives, and failed to create an administrativestructure to manage the process.


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In contrast, those who focus on outcomes of improved schoolperformance and student achievement are typically more enthusiasticabout what partnerships have delivered. The United States Departmentof Education’s (2000) guidelines for developing partnerships claim that‘research tells us that effective partnerships – no matter how modest –can demonstrate results’. Presumably the ‘results’ are defined in termsof the document’s title: ‘Investing in Partnerships for Student Success’.Similarly, the United States National Education Goals Panel (1998)states: ‘Research on the impact of parent involvement in a child’sacademic well-being is conclusive. Students whose parents are involvedin school have higher achievement, better behaviour and moremotivation than other students (p.1). Little has changed in the advocacyfor partnership by these researchers and policy-makers since Bastianiconcluded in 1987 that: ‘Partnership is a term widely used throughoutthe education service, to cover a range of situations and circumstances.Its use, or over use, is more often than not uncritical, implying that it ishighly desirable, unproblematic and easily attainable’ (p.103).

So how should we judge the success or otherwise of this majorinternational commitment to partnership as a way to improve thequality of schooling? To answer this question, we have drawn on theliteratures on participation, collaboration, and partnership. Partnershiphas largely evolved from an earlier movement towards increased citizenparticipation in education. The underpinning rationales are similar,and the longer history of research on participation has resulted in amore sophisticated theoretical literature. One example of this evolutionis the decentralisation of governance responsibilities from central stateagencies to schools. Decentralisation began in many countries as effortsto increase citizen participation in bureaucratic governance structures(Beare, 1993; Beattie, 1985; Vincent, 1996). The number of schools forwhich each governance body was responsible typically decreased, andwhere it was reduced to the level of the individual school, the languageof partnership rather than participation became more evident. NewZealand, one of the first countries to make the move to site-basedmanagement, gave expression to strong democratic and communitarian


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sentiments by organising its administrative arrangements as ‘apartnership between the professionals and the particular communityin which it is located’ (Taskforce to Review Education Administration,1988, p.43). Similarly, in Australia, the Department of Education (1998a,1998b) describes school governance arrangements as a series of crucialpartnerships between the principal and the council president, betweenall members of the school council, between the school council and thewider community, and between the school council and the Departmentof Education.

Critique of these arrangements has largely focused on concerns aboutthe nature and extent of participation by the non-professional partner.Anderson (1998), for example, writes: ‘there are signs that theparticipatory reform movement in education is running into problems.For example, several case studies have suggested that sharedgovernance structures may not result in significant participation indecisions’ (p.572).

Partnerships between teachers and parents, typically justified interms of improving student achievement rather than promotingdemocratic participation, also have their origins in the literature onparticipation. In reality, authors describing partnership from thisperspective often fail to distinguish between partnership andparticipation in their discussion of the rationale and form of these twotypes of relationship (Chrispeels, 1996; Eccles and Harold, 1996; Epstein,1996; Haynes and Ben-Avie, 1996; Sanders and Epstein, 1998; Street,1998). The terms ‘partnership’ and ‘participation’ are frequently usedinterchangeably, or appear to be equivalent to collaboration (Chrispeels,1996), involvement (Haynes and Ben-Avie, 1996; Shartrand et al., 1997;Street, 1998) or developing home-school links (Eccles and Harold, 1996).

The literatures on participation and partnership both pursue thethemes of social democracy and student outcomes separately, withneither addressing the questions of their interrelationship or what itmight take to achieve both objectives. Those with a social theoryperspective tend to treat partnership and participation as a uni-dimensional concept, with their analyses primarily focused on the


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power relationships between the partners (Anderson, 1998; Malen,1999). Unfortunately, the way power is shared does not predicteducational outcomes. Those concerned about student achievementare typically less interested in power issues and more focused onenticing sometimes reluctant parents to collaborate with teachers inschool activities. Unfortunately, parents often fail to participate becausethey feel powerless.

The literature on collaboration typically does not explicitly addresseither of these themes, but uses instead theories of organisationalprocess to discuss factors that may limit or facilitate the commitmentof collaborators to a common agenda and actions (Crowson and Boyd,1995; Eisenberg, 1995; Gray, 1995). The literature typically asks questionssuch as: Do partners share key assumptions and use a commonlanguage? Do organisational incentives reward autonomy orcollaboration? Compounding the problem of these separate themes isthe problem of language. What is a partnership? Within just one page,Lowndes and Skelcher (1998) variously refer to it as an organisationalstructure, a collaborative relationship, a working arrangement and astrategy (p.314).

Part of the difficulty in achieving coherence in either the concept orthe terminology is that none of these literatures adequately addressesthe multidimensional nature of partnership. The basis of our argumentin this book is that partnerships are about relationships that include,but are not exclusively determined by, the way in which power isdistributed or organisational incentives operate. Those relationshipsevolve as the partnership develops, and to a large extent determine itssuccess. However, partnerships are also formed for the purpose ofachieving particular tasks or outcomes, such as improving studentsuccess or solving difficult problems. In the absence of a task, there islittle motivation for the participants to act in partnership. We proposethat if partnerships are to realise their potential benefits, both therelationship and task dimensions need to be integrated in ways thatestablish processes for the partners to work together and to learn fromone another about how to achieve the task. The challenge we have set


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ourselves is to provide a theory of partnership that integrates andelaborates these different dimensions, while addressing the substantialdifficulties involved in achieving such integration. We develop andillustrate this theory with five examples of empirical research.

In undertaking this task, we are not assuming that partnerships willcure the problems that currently beset our educational institutions. Wedo propose, however, that efficient partnerships increase opportunitiesto advance common interests and to learn from others’ expertise, toprovide mutual support, and to increase commitment to a particular setof decisions. Most important is the potential to achieve outcomes superiorto those that can be achieved when working alone. There are, however,costs that must be weighed against the benefits. Working in partnershipwith others usually incurs transaction costs (House, 1996), increasedsurveillance of one’s activities (Crozier, 1998), a loss of autonomy(Eisenberg, 1995), and increased environmental turbulence anduncertainty (Crowson and Boyd, 1995).

For those who wish to work in partnership, we hope this book willprovide a conceptual framework and some empirical examples thatwill help to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs. For thosewho are conducting research on partnership, we offer a set of conceptualtools which we hope will be useful in guiding your analyses.

The Qualities of Partnerships

Partnerships have both generic and context-specific qualities. In thegeneric sense, we propose that entities are in partnership when theyeach accept some responsibility for a problem, issue or task, andestablish processes for accomplishing the task that promote learning,mutual accountability and shared power over relevant decisions.

How each of the elements of this definition is enacted depends onthe particular context. Participants in any partnership must negotiatethe minefield of what the task might be, the responsibilities each mightassume, the processes they might use to work together, how they willbe mutually accountable, and how they will share power. Theseelements are fundamental to the multidimensional nature of


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partnership, and are likely to determine the success of any partnershiparrangement. In the following sections we discuss each of them further.

The Task

The task the partnership is designed to achieve provides the motivationfor the participants to act in partnership. It also provides non-arbitraryconstraints on how the partnership is conducted, because differentpartnership processes will have different consequences for the task.All other decisions – such as the partners’ relative responsibilities, howpower might be shared, and who is accountable for what – can be made,in principle, by discussing their implications for task success. The taskcan only serve this function, however, if the partners have a sharedunderstanding of its properties; otherwise each will make arbitrarydecisions based on their individual and private interpretations. Insaying that, however, we acknowledge that the parameters of mostcomplex tasks are not fully knowable in advance. The nature of thetask will depend on the way the problem is formulated, and theimplications of various formulations will emerge as new playersbecome involved and new strands of task activity are undertaken. Theemergent nature of task design suggests that understandings of thetask are always partial, evolving and incompletely shared. Nonetheless,if such understandings, however partial, are made explicit, decisionsabout partnership processes are more likely to serve the task dimensionof partnership. One barrier to achieving shared understanding is thatimplicit definitions of the task may not be made explicit and broughtinto better alignment. For example, at the end of a five-year initiativeto increase parent-school collaboration in 70 schools in the UK, Edwardsand Warin (1999) found it difficult to discern what exactly the schoolswanted the parents to contribute, and for what purpose.

In other situations, one partner may be clear about the task but failto share their definition with the other partner. Anderson (1998) arguesthat the task of many participation initiatives is to increase institutionallegitimacy. If this were the case, the institutional partner would beunlikely to make the task explicit to the non-institutional partner. Ware


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(1994) describes such partnerships as public relations exercises,incorporating legitimating rituals and a parody of collaboration.

The connections between the partnership relationship and the taskalso add complexity to defining the task. Partnerships always involverelationships, but these may feature more or less prominently in theaccomplishment of the task. At times, the relationship evolves alongsidethe task; but in other circumstances, improving the relationship betweenthe partners is the task. For example, lay and professional governorswho find themselves in constant conflict may need to work on theirrelationships before they can begin to tackle their more substantivegovernance responsibilities. If relationships are particularly strained, itmay be difficult for the partners to be explicit about the task of improvingrelationships. They may therefore embed this task in another which isless threatening, but around which some level of co-operation can beachieved. While this strategy may reduce feelings of threat andembarrassment, it is likely to create ambiguity and confusion about taskdefinition. Is the explicit task the real one, or is the unstated task ofimproving relationships more important?

Defining the role of each partner is also important. In schoolgovernance partnerships, for example, the legitimate business of theparental or community partner has been a source of contention(Bacharach, Bamberger, Conley and Bauer, 1990; Malen, 1999; Robinsonand Timperley, 1996). Should such governors restrict themselves topizza sales and building maintenance, as many do, or should their roleinclude curriculum and organisational decisions? Our answer dependson the task the governance partnership is designed to achieve. In NewZealand, the governance body of each school is responsible forcurriculum delivery, personnel management and school finances, soall these tasks are relevant to the partnership. Anderson (1998)advocates an even broader task for citizen participation in governance,one that encompasses the constitution of a democratic citizenry andredistributive justice for disenfranchised groups. To accomplish thesetasks, the citizen partners would need the capacity to influence boththe individual institution and the education system itself.


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Partnership Responsibilities

In our definition of partnership, we suggest that the partners mustaccept some level of responsibility for the task to be accomplished.Typically, not every decision relevant to the task is within the partners’control, because complex tasks, such as those found in education, arenested within a set of other tasks that are controlled by entities outsidethe relevant partnership. Improving educational achievement, forexample, is influenced by many different factors, and the spheres withinwhich any set of partners is able to operate are inevitably limited. Hencethe partners need to identify their overlapping spheres of influence(Epstein, 1996) and their responsibilities within that sphere, whilerecognising that other constraints also impinge on how theirresponsibilities might be enacted. For example, in a teacher/parentpartnership, it may be decided that the teacher’s responsibility is toset and mark homework and the parents’ responsibility is to provide aspace and time for the student to complete the homework. Theseresponsibilities, however, have to be set within the broader context offamily resources and school policies. Is there a suitable space at home?Do school policies support teachers in their task? If one partnermisunderstands the external constraints, they may become cynicalabout the other partner’s commitment to taking responsibility for thetask and the feasibility of the partnership itself.

Shared responsibility for a task does not mean that everything has tobe done together. Shared tasks can be accomplished with either high orlow levels of interaction between the partners. The partners may agreeon an overarching framework of task responsibilities and work relativelyindependently to achieve them. Such ‘thin’ partnerships are an advantagewhere one partner is likely to find more intensive interactionsburdensome, or where partners want to minimise the transaction costsof partnership. ‘Dense’ partnerships, on the other hand, involve littledelegated authority and thus commit partners to a much closer workingrelationship on a higher proportion of task-relevant decisions. While thisarrangement incurs much higher transaction costs, it offers more potentialfor reciprocal influence and increased understanding.


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Broader societal and institutional norms may also affect the wayresponsibilities are adopted within a particular partnership.Partnerships between parents and professionals on school governanceboards, for example, were designed to give parents more say indecision-making. Malen and Ogawa (1988), however, reported thatparent governors often experienced difficulty in adopting their fullresponsibilities because their new roles violated the accepted normsthat had previously underpinned parent/professional relationships.It was the principal’s job, not that of the parent governors, to makedecisions. It was the parents’ job to provide support or, as Beattie (1985)so graphically described it, to provide the raw material for the school.Anderson (1998) argues that changes to traditional power structuresare unlikely to be accomplished in the absence of an explicit process torestructure the social ground in a way that puts parents in the decision-making role. Otherwise, the old rules, norms and identities continueto regulate social interactions.

Acceptance of responsibility also depends on how tasks are defined.When a task is poorly defined or the partners define it differently, theyare likely to make different assumptions about their responsibilitieswithin it. For example, parents in low-income groups sometimesconsider that the task of educating their children belongs to the schooland is not one they should assume. For these parents, being inpartnership with teachers to improve educational outcomes makes littlesense beyond having their children clean, fed and ready to attendschool. If they were to adopt additional educational roles, then theseresponsibilities and their implications for the partnership would needto be negotiated between the partners.

An added complication arises when organisational structures andresponsibilities are changed in order to redistribute power more equally,and partners are expected to take responsibility for new tasks for whichthey do not have the expertise. Research into the restructuring oforganisations shows that devolving power is insufficient as a means toimprove organisational performance, unless those empowered aretrained for their new decision-making roles and have the necessary


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expertise and information to undertake them (Wohlstetter, Smyer andMohrman, 1994). Hargreaves (1984) graphically described theconsequences of reshaping the school curriculum when teachersengaged in a new participatory initiative for which they did not havesufficient expertise. They struggled with the task and failed to achieveit because they relied exclusively on their own classroom experience,which proved inadequate to deal with broad questions about the natureand purposes of education and the place of the school curriculum inthe community. The phrase ‘pooled ignorance’ which arose from thisresearch now permeates much of the literature on participation. Thesame issues may arise with parents in new governance or educationalroles. Those who have been excluded from such roles in the past areunlikely to have the expertise to undertake them in the future. We donot wish to imply that partners with insufficient expertise shouldcontinue to be excluded from participating, thus precluding them fromacquiring that expertise, nor that they do not have other expertise tooffer. Rather, we are suggesting that partners need to take sharedresponsibility for learning the skills required to accomplish the tasksuccessfully.

Working Together

In our definition of partnership, the words ‘promote learning, mutualaccountability and shared power’ draw attention to the nature of therelationship. Relationships evolve as the task is accomplished, andmuch of the partnership literature focuses on the quality of thatrelationship in terms of respect and trust (Australia Department ofEducation, 1998a, 1998b; Holowinsky, 1997; Shartrand et al., 1997). Ouremphasis on the integration of the task and relationship dimensions ofpartnership means that we do not assume that increased trust andrespect are valuable in themselves, for such gains may be made in waysthat do not serve the requirements of the task. For example, the researchon interpersonal process is full of descriptions of how trust may involvean implicit agreement to avoid issues of threat or embarrassment(Argyris, 1993). If dealing with such issues is crucial to progress on the


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task, then increased trust of this type is counter-productive. Partnersmay enjoy working together and report improved relationships; butunless the quality of their working together is critically examined, onecannot assume that those improvements will serve the partnership task(Beare, 1993; Hargreaves, 1984; Timperley and Robinson, 1998).

On the other hand, it is unlikely that the task will be achieved to thesatisfaction of both partners if one feels disrespected or mistrusted.Our notion of respect includes opportunities for partners to learn fromone another when delineating and carrying out the task. Much of theliterature implies that partnerships increase opportunities to learnbecause more diverse information and expertise is available than isthe case when partners work alone. In Britain, for example, citizenparticipation was encouraged to help bureaucrats and professionalsdefine the educational task in more responsive and realistic ways(Normington, 1999). In Australia, Caldwell and Spinks (1992) refer tothe ‘desirability, whenever possible, of parents and teachers learningtogether’ (p.134).

In order to learn from such diversity, partners must seek informationabout each other’s perspectives and adopt a critical stance towardstheir own views (Timperley and Robinson, 1998). Partners may fail todo this because they have entered into the partnership for non-learningreasons (Anderson, 1998; Fine, 1997); alternatively, one partner who isunaware of their own biases and dominance may define the task andprocess on their own terms and disregard the others’ views (Lipman,1997).

Mutual Accountability

In the 1960s, initiatives to increase community and parentalparticipation in education were designed in part to make educationprofessionals and officials more responsive and accountable to otherswith a legitimate interest. Initially, the focus was on the bureaucracy.For example, in his analysis of the early reforms in New York, Rogers(1968) stated that: ‘Parents and other interested citizens...face a large,amorphous, distant bureaucracy that seldom responds to citizen


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demands....Many parents feel they are dealing with a facelessbureaucracy which is not accountable to the public’ (p.218). Morerecently, schools have been under pressure to increase theiraccountability, in order to create a ‘better alignment between publicaspirations and the purposes schools strive to achieve’ (Leithwood andEarl, 2000).

Most writing on accountability assumes a hierarchical relationshipbetween a delegated person and an authority to whom that delegatedperson is accountable. The latter’s obligation to answer to the authoritystems from the authority’s need to know that appropriate aims arebeing pursued in an appropriate manner (Gabbard, 2000). Within themore bilateral relationship of a partnership, the requirement foraccountability still stems from the other party’s need to know; but whateach partner needs to know, the manner in which it is reported, andthe circumstances under which each is accountable are determined bynegotiation between the partners rather than by the authority alone.

Fundamental to our concept of partnership is the notion thataccountability encompasses both progress towards achieving the taskand the quality of the relationship. What an accountability arrangementmight look like, however, will depend on the context of the partnership.It might include ‘giving a report, furnishing a justifying analysis orexplanation, providing a statement or explanation of one’s conduct,offering a statement or exposition of reasons, causes, grounds, ormotives, or simply providing a statement of facts or events’ (Leithwoodand Earl, 2000). In a ‘dense’ partnership arrangement, where bothpartners have equal responsibility for most decisions and the task iscomplex, accountability is likely to include many of the above elements.On the other hand, if the partnership is much ‘thinner’ and the partnersare operating relatively independently within an agreed framework, itmay be sufficient for each partner to provide a description of progresstowards completion of the task.

While a partnership is based on mutual accountability, each partneris often subject to multiple external accountabilities as well. Althoughthese can be supportive of the partnership, frequently they are not.


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Crowson and Boyd (1995) describe how the provision of integratedsocial services for children on school sites in the United Sates is typicallydefeated by the intractable rules and regulations of the partners’ homeinstitutions, which work against the sharing of power and authoritywith others. These initiatives typically fragment, with school guidancecounsellors, social workers, teachers and others all working on theirown ‘turf’ rather than contributing to a fully integrated service. Theauthors suggest that if such collaborative ventures are to be successful,incentive structures need to be aligned to joint goals rather than theseparate interests of each organisation.

Sharing Power

Issues relating to power underpin the difference between those whoadopt a political or social theory perspective on partnership and thosewho adopt an outcomes-oriented perspective. Researchers writing onboth sides of this divide virtually ignore the other’s findings. Thosewho take a political or sociological stance ‘focus on the processesthrough which individuals and groups acquire power and influencedecisions’ (Malen, 1999, p.210). Most empirical research arising fromthis position concludes that power is rarely equal within educationalpartnerships, and that partnership is more likely to be a device throughwhich the dominant partner maintains control through the co-optionof the other partner’s support (Lareau, 1996; Malen, 1999). Vincent andTomlinson (1997), for example, conclude from their research:

A closer examination of the issues of partnership by educationprofessionals reveals an implicit marginalizing and controlling ofparents, aspects of the relationship which are masked by warmreferences to consensus and congeniality. The reality is that the parentis co-opted to help achieve the purposes and resolve the problems ofthe school without any real participation in the definition anddiagnoses of those purposes and problems. (p.366)

Policy-makers, practitioners and researchers who are concernedabout school and student outcomes usually define partnership in termsof participation and involvement rather than power. Holowinsky (1997),


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for example, writes that partnerships ‘can be defined, in a broad sense,as cooperation and team work of those interested in mutual goals’.Partnership models stemming from this position are frequentlystructural and activity-driven, such as the three-tier model describedby Haynes and Ben-Avie (1996). The tiers are defined as generalparticipation, helping in classrooms and participating in schoolplanning and management. Rather than focus on power issues, muchof this literature is about getting reluctant parents more involved inthe school. Street (1998), for example, describes secondary schoolparents as being resistant to becoming involved in their children’seducation, and suggests ways in which schools can be more inventivein communicating with and engaging parents. According to thesemodels, it is the school personnel who determine the appropriateparental role and are responsible for getting it right, with parents beingthe passive recipients of their efforts (Keith, 1999).

We argue that both positions have an important contribution to maketo a concept of partnership, but that neither addresses the full range ofrelevant issues. Those who focus on outcomes help to keep taskdemands to the forefront. Power issues are important, however, and toignore them is to ignore an essential element of the relationship. Theassumption that power should be equal is more problematic. Todd andHiggins (1998) argue that in any given situation a complex powerhierarchy is likely to be operating. Parents and teachers, for example,are both powerful and powerless in different ways. While teachersmight determine what happens in the classroom, parents can withdrawtheir children from school and thus deny teachers the students to teach.Moreover, equal power is rarely possible among partners who havedifferent roles, interests, time available, expertise and legalresponsibilities. Todd and Higgins’ concept of ‘joint endeavour’ is morelikely to assist partners to recognise and utilise these differences inaccomplishing a task than is an insistence on equal power.

Although power is likely to be unequal in relation to specific taskdecisions, we propose that equality is important when negotiating howthe power is to be shared. Achieving such equality, however, is often a


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complex process. First, the evolving nature of the relationship meansthat the power balance also changes, and what is appropriate at onetime may not be appropriate at another. Second, the micro-politicswithin a partnership can lead to inequalities in negotiating power.Malen (1999) identifies both the visible and subtle strategies that areused to acquire power and influence decisions in such circumstances.The less obvious strategies include pre-structuring the scope andcontent of participation, and controlling who is permitted to participateand what the partners get to deliberate. ‘These more subtle sides ofpower are manifest in the suppression of dissent, the confinement ofagendas to “safe” issues, the manipulation of symbols, and the“suffocation of benefits and privileges”’ (p.210). In addition to the issuesraised by Malen, our concern with such processes is their impact onlearning and on the quality of decisions about the task.

Research Contexts

A desire to improve the quality of education has underpinned much ofthe advocacy for partnership (e.g., Giddens, 1998; Normington, 1999;Rogers and Chung, 1983). More recently, partnerships to improveeducation have taken the form of initiatives to improve particularschools. Legislative changes in Chicago in 1995, for example, requiredtargeted schools to engage one of several external partners to help themimprove instruction and student achievement (Wong, 2000).

Partnership is seen as an alternative to the failures of previousintervention strategies that involved the state either ‘taking over’schools or ‘handing over’ resources to schools to support self-identifiedneeds. The ‘take over’ approach has rarely proved successful in bringingabout sustainable change because it ignores the ‘black box’ of localpractices, beliefs and traditions (McLaughlin, 1990); moreover, suchinitiatives at the school level usually fail to develop the capacity neededto sustain their own improvements (Hatch, 1998). The alternativeapproach of ‘handing over’ resources usually fails to challenge theinstitutional norms that maintain the dysfunctional status quo(Anderson, 1998), and staff often waste time reinventing wheels (Hatch,


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1998). Partnership can avoid the negative consequences of these twoapproaches by combining the efforts of everyone involved, and jointlydetermining the task and how it can best be achieved.

In this book we examine five different partnerships in the context ofa New Zealand initiative for school improvement. In 1996 nearly halfof the 35 schools in the Auckland suburbs of Mangere and Otara wereevaluated by the national audit and review agency, the EducationReview Office (ERO), as offering an inadequate education (EducationReview Office, 1996). ERO raised concerns about governance,management, teaching quality, and student achievement. The Ministryof Education, rather than a local or regional body, assumedresponsibility for the intervention because there is no administrativestructure between the individual school and the central Ministry. Priorto 1989, the New Zealand education system had a typically bureaucraticstructure of national and district administration. In 1989 district officeswere abolished and much of the operational decision-making wasdevolved to individual schools, which are governed by locally electedboards of trustees (New Zealand Government, 1989). The majority ofboard members are representatives elected by the parents, togetherwith the principal and a staff representative. The board is responsiblefor operational decisions relating to finances, personnel managementand curriculum delivery. The number of decisions taken at the schoollevel by boards of trustees as a percentage of all decisions taken ineducation is higher for New Zealand than for any other OECD countryexcept Ireland (Education Review Office, 1994).

This administrative structure ruled out a Ministry of Education ‘take-over’ of financial, personnel or curriculum decisions because that typeof intervention was perceived to be inconsistent with the self-governingprinciples enshrined in the 1989 legislation (Smith, 1997). Partnershipwas adopted as the preferred approach, because the Ministry wishedto work co-operatively with the schools and their communities.

At the time of this research Mangere and Otara were among thepoorest communities in the country, and comprised mostly Maori andimmigrants from several Pacific nations, including Samoa, Tonga, Niue


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and the Cook Islands. Student achievement levels were low, and sotoo was the parents’ confidence in many of the schools. This wasindicated by the fact that 70 percent of Year 9-13 students in Otara choseto attend schools in other suburbs, even though the parents had tomeet the transport costs.

The authors were contracted by the Ministry of Education toundertake a process evaluation of the initiatives. The studies of fivedifferent partnerships described in this book are the result of three years’intensive research into their progress. A range of methodologies wasused to analyse the partnerships, including observations of meetings,interviews, written surveys, analysis of documents, and monthlymeetings with Ministry personnel who were responsible for bothfunding and implementing the initiatives. The specific researchquestions that guided the research and the methodologies used for eachpartnership context are described in each chapter.

In Chapter Two we provide the background and context for theinitiatives, and explain the relevance of New Zealand’s experience witheducational partnerships to other countries. The population of NewZealand is roughly equivalent to that of the median American stateand bigger than that of most Australian states, with the Ministry ofEducation being functionally equivalent to state departments ofeducation in those countries (Fiske and Ladd, 2000). The problems facedby the Ministry are similar to those faced by these other jurisdictions.Those most relevant to this book are failing schools and persistentlylow levels of achievement in some student populations.

In the remainder of Chapter Two we analyse the first of our fivepartnerships. The analysis focuses on the balance between therelationship and task demands in a partnership between the Ministryof Education intervention team and the schools. The self-managementpolicy context, coupled with declining community confidence in theschools, led the Ministry to emphasise the value of local solutions tolocal problems, and to give priority to building confidence andimproving relationships between the Ministry, the schools and thecommunities.


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Initially, the Ministry placed few restrictions on how schools couldspend their additional money. The tasks the Ministry wished to achieve,which were promoting school self-review and improving educationalquality, were embedded within the positive relationship messages andthe funding application process. Levels of confidence and ownershipbecame the touchstone against which progress was judged. For manyschools, the quality of the partnership equated with the amount ofmoney they received from the Ministry. Not surprisingly, the schoolsmisunderstood the Ministry’s formulation of the task, which was theimprovement of educational quality through self-review.

Gradually, the intervention team became more explicit about theself-review requirements that were attached to the additional funding.Many schools resented what they perceived to be Ministry intrusioninto their autonomy, and felt that the previously benign partnershiphad evolved into a hierarchical relationship with the Ministrydictating the terms. Although it is tempting to analyse this partnershipin terms of how the power was distributed, a second phase a yearlater showed that it was not power that was the deciding factor inhow most schools judged the quality of the partnership. Theirevaluations were based more on their perceptions of the honesty ofstatements by state officials about the quality of their schooling andof the work required to improve it.

In the second phase, when the schools had to reapply for theirfunding, the intervention team was more explicit about the taskrequirements and their funding priorities. The partnership relationshipwas determined by the amount of support that each school needed toachieve particular educational goals. Although this phase was far moreintrusive than the first, more school leaders were positive about theirrelationship with the intervention team because they perceived theMinistry partner as being more open about the task and what wasrequired to achieve it.

Chapter Three examines the second of our partnerships – thatbetween parents and schools, and the extent to which they workedtogether to promote learning about the task of improving student


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achievement. The Ministry’s initiatives were designed to strengthenthis partnership by requiring each school to involve the parents morefully in their children’s literacy. The way in which most schoolsconstructed this partnership was similar to that described in much ofthe literature on parent-school partnerships, in that its goal was toincrease parental participation in the school.

We focus our analysis on the extent to which the information sharedbetween teachers and parents about individual children in their schoolreports promoted mutual learning about the task of improving literacyachievement. Reporting to parents was a context common to all schools,and an activity in which nearly all parents participated. In most schools,the reporting process did not fulfil our conditions for partnership. Thiswas because the exercise involved legitimation rituals designed todevelop positive relationships rather than the communication of validinformation from which the partners could learn about how to improveachievement. Most teachers reported inflated achievement levels andfailed to be explicit about the standards used to evaluate studentachievement. For example, descriptors such as ‘Excellent’ could referto how the child’s achievement compared with others nationally, withothers in the school, or with others in the class; or it could simply bethe teacher ’s perception of the child’s potential. The inaccurateinformation obscured the achievement problem and made it difficultfor teachers and parents to hold one another mutually accountable fortheir part in addressing the issue. Many parents believed that theirlow-achieving children were progressing satisfactorily, and wereshocked when they failed national examinations at Year 11.

Chapter Four focuses on issues of responsibility, accountability andexpertise within the third of our partnership contexts – that betweenboards of trustees, representing the community, and schoolprofessionals. In New Zealand, each school is governed as ‘apartnership between the professionals and the particular communityin which it is located; and the mechanism for such a partnership is aBoard of Trustees’ (Taskforce to Review Education Administration,1988, p.43). The governance responsibilities of boards include


30

educational oversight of curriculum delivery and student achievement.The ERO report (Education Review Office, 1996) on the two suburbsnoted that many boards did not fulfil their roles but relied on theprofessionals to undertake many administrative and decision-makingtasks. The difficulties that parent trustees experience in exercising thesetypes of responsibility are well documented internationally, the causeof the problem being that the governance partnership is typicallydominated by the professionals (Malen, 1999). Not so well documentedor discussed is the expertise that boards require to undertake such arole, and its implications for the way the partners exercise their variousresponsibilities and accountabilities.

In this chapter, we report an interview survey of board chairpersonsconducted two years after the initiatives started and ten years afterboards of trustees were established. As part of their submission foradditional funding, all boards were required to report on theachievement of their students. When asked to interpret the achievementdata included in the documents they had signed, few were able to doso. This raises the question of how partners can be mutually accountableif one partner does not have the expertise to hold the other to accounton key tasks. We are not suggesting that the citizen partner should berelieved of this responsibility, nor that they do not have other expertiseto offer. Rather, we are suggesting that expertise should not be assumed,and that the partnership negotiation should include a consideration ofthe impact of each partner’s expertise on the exercise of mutualaccountability.

Chapter Five analyses the difference between partnership andconsultation. As Lewis (1948) wrote over 50 years ago in his book aboutpartnership: ‘The subject of this book includes many matters that attheir cores are easy to distinguish but at their edges melt into severalothers so that they are difficult to keep apart’ (p.vii). Two of thesematters with ‘melting edges’ are partnership and consultation. In thefourth of our partnership studies, we discuss the implications ofpartnership and consultation for the key issues of who should beinvolved in task-relevant decisions and how they should be involved.


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The context was the decision about the number and type of schoolsrequired in Otara. The high number of students choosing schoolsoutside the area had created fierce competition between the schoolsand threatened the viability of some. The Ministry’s initial approachto the problem was to employ two consultants who sought the viewsof the affected schools and their communities. Each group put forwarda solution that satisfied their particular interests. Despite the best effortsof the consultants to find a compromise solution, theirrecommendations were unanimously rejected by those who had beenconsulted because they failed to satisfy the parochial interests of eachparty. Under this consultation model, responsibility for finding thecommon ground rested solely with the Ministry and their consultants.

In the subsequent attempt to solve the problem, the Ministry formeda relatively ‘thin’ partnership with all the board chairpersons of thelocal schools. Over the next year, this forum put aside parochialinterests, obtained information on the quality of the competing schools,discussed the merits of various school types, and formulated arecommendation. We argue that the recommendation was accepted bythe government, the communities and most of the schools because thepartnership process, unlike the consultation process, had required thoseinvolved to take responsibility for solving the whole problem, ratherthan for advocating their own interests.

The final partnership study examines the consequences for apartnership when the stated task is to improve relationships but thepartners are unclear about the educational purpose. One major concernexpressed about education in Mangere and Otara was the poor literacyskills that children possessed when they started school. One solutionwas to create partnerships between the schools and their local earlychildhood education centres, many of which had no contact with oneanother. Extra funding was provided to allow teachers from both sectorsto develop better relationships. Although most teachers in both sectorsrated their relationships with one another as being fairly strong, bothgroups remained highly dissatisfied with the arrangements fortransition to school. Few adjusted their practice to develop better


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educational pathways for the transitioning children. This was becausethe task the partnership was designed to achieve, and the educationalrationale underpinning it, were never made explicit. The teachers basedtheir positive rating of the relationship on the greater frequency ofcontact, not on the way that contact had helped to solve problems withthe transition arrangements. This study illustrates the point thatpartnership is unlikely to solve a substantive problem if the partnershipis formulated as a means to improving relationships.

Our analysis of these different partnership contexts highlights theimportance of the various dimensions of our definition. In the mostsuccessful partnerships, the partners negotiated how the power wasto be shared, developed a working relationship that promoted mutuallearning, and focused on the task. Other partnerships failed to meetone or more of these conditions and resulted in unsatisfactory taskaccomplishment and/or strained relationships. When we asked ourparticipants what partnership meant to them, they usually talked inrelationship terms. In this, they had much in common with most of theresearch literature. Satisfaction with that relationship, however, wasstrongly influenced by the extent of mutual understanding about thetask and whether progress was made towards achieving it. Whetherpartnership is described as an organisational structure, a collaborativerelationship, a working arrangement, or a strategy (Lowndes andSkelcher, 1998), its multidimensional qualities must be addressed if itis to be effective in addressing difficult educational problems in waysthat respect the participants, value their contribution, and accomplishimportant tasks. Partnership is not a tidy concept, but as Rhodes (1997)points out: ‘Messy problems demand messy solutions’ (p.xv). We hopein this book to be more specific about what it takes for partnershiparrangements to be effective in solving the messy problems of schoolimprovement and increasing the quality of education.


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Although New Zealand is a small country, its educational experienceshave relevance to many other education systems. The population isroughly equivalent to that of the median American state and largerthan that of most Australian states, with the state having constitutionalresponsibility for education in both those countries (Fiske and Ladd,2000). In addition, New Zealand faces many of the educational issuesthat are common to other countries. Those most relevant to this bookare failing schools with alienated, low-achieving, urban minoritypopulations.

Maori, New Zealand’s indigenous people, comprise 20 percent ofthe school population, and mirror the social statistics of many colonisedpeople in terms of low educational achievement, poor health and highunemployment (Ministry of Education, 2000a). Britain was the colonialpower, with migration beginning in the nineteenth century. The Britishbrought with them models of government, law, public service, and aneducation system. Although the British dominated the immigrationstatistics, minorities from many other nations have always arrived aswell. From the 1950s onwards significant numbers came from the smallPacific Island nations of Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Niueand Tokelau, and in 1997 they made up 6 percent of the population(Statistics New Zealand, 1997). Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city,

CHAPTER TWO

The New Zealand EducationalContext and PartnershipIntervention Strategies


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has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world.Immigrants from the Pacific Island nations typically came to NewZealand seeking better living conditions and improved educationalopportunities for their children. Many of their aspirations have notbeen realised, and their educational, health and employment statisticsare similar to those for Maori.

The basis of the state school system was established with the passingof the Education Act of 1877 (Bowen, 1877) when primary schoolingbecame free and compulsory. Initially, much of the responsibility forrunning schools lay with regional boards of education, but increasinglythe central Department of Education took over most of their functions.By the 1980s, the Department owned most of the property of publicschools, determined the national curriculum, dispersed operating fundsto the regional boards, negotiated staff salaries and regulated teachertraining. The ten regional boards appointed principals and teachers,and purchased relevant equipment and services on behalf of the schoolsin the district. Accountability was exercised through departmentalinspectors whose responsibilities included the grading of teachers andschools. The results of these gradings were normally kept within theeducation system and were not available to parents or otherstakeholders. Inspectors also performed various informal roles, suchas offering advice to principals and defusing potential problems, inthe course of their other duties. Secondary schools had more operationalautonomy than primary schools, to the extent that boards of governorsfor each school appointed their own teachers and administrators.However, most of the schools’ operational decisions, including thepurchase of equipment, building design and decoration, were made atdepartmental level. Administratively, the system had becomecumbersome in the extreme (Butterworth and Butterworth, 1998).

An additional concern was the unresponsiveness of the system tochanging local needs and the new economic imperatives of deregulationand globalisation. The term ‘provider capture’ was used to describe aneducation system that was perceived to focus more on serving theinterests of the teacher unions and departmental officials than the


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recipients of the service – that is, the community, the parents and thestudents (The Treasury, 1987).

In 1984, in response to a major economic crisis in the country, thenewly elected Labour government began to radically restructure thepublic service. The spotlight did not turn to education until 1987, whena task force was established to review the administration of the stateeducation system. Its recommendations, most of which were includedin legislation passed in 1989, were to abolish all levels of districtadministration and convert the central Department of Education intoa downsized Ministry, whose primary role was to give policy adviceto the Minister of Education. A high level of operational autonomywas devolved to the schools (Taskforce to Review EducationAdministration, 1988). At this time, decentralisation of decision-makingwas gaining popularity in many countries (Beattie, 1989; Rogers andChung, 1983), but nowhere had it been taken to the extremes of therestructured New Zealand system.

A central tenet of the task force’s recommendations was that eachschool be administered as ‘a partnership between the professionals andthe particular community in which it is located’, the mechanism forsuch a partnership being a board of trustees (Taskforce to ReviewEducation Administration, 1988, p.43). The significance of the changeis described by Fiske and Ladd (2000):

In 1989 New Zealand embarked on what is arguably the mostthorough and dramatic transformation of a state system ofcompulsory education ever undertaken by an industrializedcountry…Virtually overnight, legal responsibility for governing andmanaging New Zealand’s state schools shifted from professionalbureaucrats to boards dominated by lay volunteers, and one of theworld’s most highly controlled public educational systems becameone of the most decentralized. (p.3)

The majority of trustees were representatives elected by the parents(one of whom acted as chairperson), together with the principal, a staffrepresentative, and an optional student representative for secondaryschools. Boards could co-opt further trustees to make their membership


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more representative of its community (New Zealand Government,1989). By requiring that the chairperson and the majority of trusteeswere parents, the legislators hoped to address concerns about ‘providercapture’. Under Section 75 of the Education Act 1989, boards of trusteeswere charged with the governance and management of their schools:‘Except to the extent that any enactment or the general law of NewZealand provides otherwise, a school’s board has complete discretionto control the management of the school as it thinks fit.’

The responsibilities of the new boards were considerable. From beingresponsible for ordering chalk and toilet paper, boards now had tomanage a large operational budget, hire and fire staff, maintainbuildings and grounds, and put in place an array of policies rangingfrom curriculum delivery and assessment to student safety.

Despite the devolution of many operational responsibilities, theMinistry of Education retained significant power by establishing theparameters within which schools were required to operate. Thisretention of some central control was designed to ensure accountabilityand cost effectiveness, establish consistency between schools, maintainminimum standards of quality in the delivery of education, and ensureits educational objectives were met (Education Review Office, 1995,p.5). The primary mechanisms through which this was achieved werethe national curriculum statements and the national education andadministration guidelines.

New Zealand’s long tradition of having a national curriculum meantthat one was in place in 1989. Responsibility for defining the curriculumwas not devolved to boards of trustees but was retained by the state,with progressive revisions being made throughout the 1990s. Therevised product did not tightly specify what must be taught, but ratherconsisted of a set of curriculum statements in each of seven essentiallearning areas for all students – Language and Languages, Mathematics,Science, Technology, Social Sciences, The Arts, and Health and PhysicalWell-being (Ministry of Education, 1993a).

In addition, boards of trustees were required to meet NationalEducation Guidelines that were initially written in 1990 and revised in


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1993. They provided a set of overarching principles and an outline ofrequirements in areas such as curriculum, equity, obligations to Maori,personnel, finance and property (Ministry of Education, 1993b, 1997a).An additional set of National Administration Guidelines (Ministry ofEducation, 1999, 2000b) provided a set of principles for governance andmanagement practices. Neither set of guidelines specified how theserequirements were to be met, and there was considerable scope withinthem for boards and staff to develop systems that would meet both centralrequirements and local needs.

The task force had also recommended that parents be provided witha greater choice of schools (Taskforce to Review EducationAdministration, 1988). The Labour government’s initial approach wascautious, with the primary concern being to ensure that children hadthe right to attend their neighbourhood school. In 1991 the newly electedNational government abolished school enrolment zones and parents weregiven the right to choose which school their child would attend(Education Amendment, 1991). Zoning had been depicted as aprotectionist device in that it allowed schools to keep their market shareregardless of parental preference (The Treasury, 1987). Unless they wereovercrowded, all state schools were obliged to accept students whoapplied for a place. Whether a school was overcrowded was determinedby negotiations between the Ministry and the school. Once a school wasdeclared overcrowded, it could introduce an enrolment scheme which,subject to the provisions of the Race Relations Act 1971 and the HumanRights Act 1993, specified the basis on which it would accept students.This meant that popular schools could effectively choose their students,while unpopular schools were obliged to accept all comers.

While schools were now required to be more responsive andaccountable to their communities, the legislation did not require schoolsto provide any outcome measures, such as data on student achievement,which parents could use to hold the schools to account. At primarylevel (Years 1 to 8), what was assessed and how it was assessed wasleft to the discretion of the individual school. At secondary level (Years9 to 13), most students sat a national public examination at the end of


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Year 11, with additional national qualifications being available througha mix of school-based assessments and public examinations at Years12 and 13. However, these assessments and examinations werevoluntary, and many low-achieving students did not take them.

Accountability was mainly exercised through a new independentaudit and review body, the Education Review Office. Teams ofreviewers visited each school about once every three years and issuedpublic reports outlining the school’s strengths and identifying areasthat needed to be addressed. Unlike the old inspectorate, ERO focusedon the school’s management systems because it did not have the powerto evaluate individual teachers or assess student achievement. Since1989 ERO reports have evolved through various formats, and in 1998they became an accountability report with the stated purpose ofassisting schools to improve the quality of education, with an emphasison their own self-review programmes as required under the NationalAdministration Guidelines (Ministry of Education, 1997b).

In 1996 the Education Review Office went beyond its mandatedfunction of reporting on individual schools, and began to report onwider structural problems within the education system. The first of itsreports on the quality of schooling in particular areas triggered theinterventions that are the focus of this book (Education Review Office,1996). The report identified that many of the schools in the suburbs ofMangere and Otara were in serious trouble, with 42 percent of thoseevaluated performing very poorly or under-performing, and 27 percentbeing in the highest category of risk.

Mangere and Otara form part of New Zealand’s largest urbanisedregion of 1.1 million people, generally referred to as Auckland, althoughAuckland City itself is only one of the four cities that make up theregion. Auckland is culturally diverse, with a multiplicity of ethnicgroups, the main ones being European (63.0%), Maori (9.8%), PacificIsland nations (12.9%) and Asian (13.4%) (Statistics New Zealand, 2001).

The families in Mangere and Otara have some of the lowest incomesin the country, with 95 percent being predominantly of Maori or PacificIsland ethnicity. Many of the Pacific Island families had immigrated to


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New Zealand to seek a better education for their children, but it wasbecoming increasingly apparent that their ambitions were not beingrealised, with few of their children passing public examinations in Years11 to 13. Many parents had lost confidence in the local schools, anddespite their low incomes 70 percent of them chose to pay the transportcosts of sending their sons and daughters to secondary schools outsidethe district. This lack of confidence threatened the viability of somelocal schools.

The 1996 ERO report provided a major challenge to the Ministry ofEducation because the Education Act 1989 was underpinned by a strongcommitment to local self-management. This precluded direct stateintervention in governance or management, beyond what the schoolagreed to, unless current practice violated statutory regulation orthreatened the viability of the school. In such cases, the Ministryappointed a commissioner to replace the board of trustees until newelections could be held. Until 1994 the Ministry had no other mechanismto assist or coerce individual schools to change their practice, even if itwas judged wanting. In 1994, with an increasing number of schoolsrequiring commissioners, a structure was established within theMinistry of Education for supporting schools in trouble. As one Ministryofficial explained:

It wasn’t until 1994 that there was some sort of acknowledgementfrom the government that there was a role for the Ministry inproviding a safety net for trying to minimise the number ofcommissioners in place...[Previously,] as a Ministry person, I was toldnot to intervene.

Prior to the 1996 ERO report on Mangere and Otara, school supportwas focused on individual schools. The identification of district-widefailure provided a new challenge. The ERO report focused primarilyon serious problems with school governance, including trustees whodid not exercise their governance responsibilities because they lackedsufficient understanding of the role and the technical knowledge ormanagement skills to undertake it. Concerns about professionalcompetence were spelled out less clearly, but were summarised as a


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‘high incidence of poor management and teacher performance in asignificant percentage of the schools’ (Education Review Office, 1996,p.18). Recommendations included exit incentives for poorly performingteaching staff, coupled with recruitment incentives to replace them,and the establishment of a resource centre to advise on the managementof human resources, curriculum, finances and property.

The Ministry faced a complex and difficult decision. Responsibilitiesfor governance and management had been devolved to local control.The ERO report forced the Ministry to address an issue of systemicrather than individual school failure, and there was little internationalresearch or policy development to provide assistance. Although therewas an extensive literature on school improvement, there was littlethat had been proven to make a difference across a variety of contexts,and the specific challenges of intervening in self-governing schoolswere not addressed in the literature.

One policy option would have been to allow the schools to fail andthen to close them. The social and capital costs of doing so would not,however, have been politically acceptable. An alternative policyresponse to school failure is to increase central control. The problemsassociated with this course of action are well documented. Centralcontrol is rarely successful in bringing about sustainable change becauseit tends to ignore the ‘black box’ of local practices, beliefs and traditions(McLaughlin, 1990). In addition, those involved at the school level areunlikely to develop the sense of ownership necessary to implementchange (Datnow, 2000) or the capacity needed to sustain theimprovement effort (Hatch, 1998). Even more important for the Ministrywas the concern that such a move would weaken rather than strengthenthe school’s capacity for self-management (Smith, 1997). Thoseresponsible within the Ministry therefore rejected ERO’srecommendations for central intervention in matters of staffrecruitment, competence and curriculum delivery, because they sawthis approach as inconsistent with the self-governing principlesenshrined in the 1989 legislation (Smith, 1997).

A third option is to encourage schools to identify their development


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needs and then to provide the additional funding to help them meetthose needs. The advantage of this approach is that schools are likelyto develop both the local capacity and sense of ownership that arecrucial to successful reform (McLaughlin, 1990). The disadvantage isthat self-identified solutions may not challenge the institutional normsthat maintain the dysfunctional status quo (Anderson, 1998), and staffmay waste time reinventing wheels (Hatch, 1998). Datnow (1999)identified that when schools in the United States were free to choosetheir own improvement strategies, their preferences were for a tolerablecourse of action that modelled the reform choices of other schools andfitted with, rather than challenged, current practice.

So how was the Ministry to strengthen self-management whilechallenging its dysfunctional aspects? The Ministry decided to intervenethrough partnerships with the schools and their communities. It wasbelieved that the combined resources of all three parties would contributeto an effective and sustainable improvement effort (Annan, 1999). Atthis time, little guidance was available from the research or policyliterature on how such a partnership might operate, because partnershipis a relatively recent policy strategy in many education systems (Crozier,1998). The little literature that was available typically focused on thespecific context of home-school relationships (e.g., Bastiani, 1987).

In the remainder of this chapter we analyse the Ministry’s approachto developing partnerships in 26 of the schools in the two suburbs.The two research questions focused on how the relationship and taskdimensions of partnership evolved (see Chapter One), and theimplications of that evolution for the task of improving the quality ofeducation in the two suburbs. The first question examined the processesthat were established for sharing power and working together. Thesecond question examined the implications of those processes forachieving the task.

Research Context and Approach

The target schools in the initiative were 22 state primary schools (Years1 to 6 or 1 to 8), three intermediate schools (Years 7 and 8) and one


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middle school (Years 7 to 10). The schools varied in size from a largeprimary school catering for 667 students and a small intermediateschool catering for 199 students. Fourteen schools were in Mangereand twelve in Otara. The secondary schools were not included becausethey had been participating in an alternative initiative for two years.Although the 1996 ERO report had identified that more than 40 percentof the schools offered an inadequate education, the specific schoolsthat were causing concern were not identified. The Ministry had noindependent information about the quality of education in those schoolsbecause this responsibility had been devolved to boards of trustees in1989, and New Zealand has no system of national assessment at primaryschool level. At this time, the Ministry’s main concern was the decliningenrolments in intermediate, middle and secondary schools, this beingone of the few statistics it collected.

During the first six months of the initiative, a five-member Ministryteam was appointed jointly by the Ministry and a group of school andcommunity representatives. The team comprised a co-ordinator (aformer school principal) and four others with a mix of school andcommunity knowledge and expertise. The team focused on consultingthe communities and the schools about their perception of the problemsand their priorities for intervention. The team undertook a ‘needsanalysis’ in each school, which consisted of asking the principal whatwas needed to improve the quality of education. In addition, theysponsored a series of meetings attended by both school and communitypersonnel, and held individual interviews with community members.As a result of this consultation, a generic project called ‘Communitiesin schools via literacy’ was developed. The emphasis was on thecommunity because the consultation process had identified that thecommunity wished to be more involved in the schools. Moreover,community confidence in many schools was so low that 70 percent ofthe secondary students (Years 9 to 13) in one of the districts attendedschools outside the district. Literacy was to be the focus of thecommunity involvement because at each of the consultation meetingsconcerns were expressed about the low literacy achievement of the


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ConsultationPhase

PartnershipPhase One

TABLE 2.1

Summary of Data Collection over the Phases of the Initiative

Phases FrequenciesData SourcesTypes of Data Collection

Meeting observations Community/Ministryof Education 9

Document analysis Background policypapers

Education Review Office reports

Interviews School principals 6

Ministry of Educationofficials 16

Community leaders 5

Questionnaire survey School principals 26

Community leaders 33

Verification of theanalysis Meetings 3

Meeting observations Ministry of Education/schools 26

District principals’association 7

Ministry of Education 10

Community meetings 8

Document analysis Education ReviewOffice reports

Schools’ initial fundingapplications

Interviews School personnel 32


Community leaders 6

Questionnaire survey Schools 24



44

students. Although no public data were available on literacy standardsin the primary schools, pass rates in public examinations at secondaryschool level were very low.

In the first intervention phase following this consultation, each schoolwas invited to develop a submission for a project that involved thecommunity in a literacy-related activity in the school. Typically, theseprojects were funded after several rounds of negotiation with theintervention team. The second phase of the intervention began withthe renegotiation of the funded projects, as information on the impactof the first phase became available.

The authors, who were contracted by the Ministry to complete aprocess evaluation of the initiatives, tracked their development andimpact over a period of two and a half years. Data were obtainedthrough a number of different methods, which are summarised in Table2.1. Observation of a series of community meetings held by theintervention team and analysing documents from both the EducationReview Office and the Ministry of Education provided an

Phases FrequenciesData SourcesTypes of Data Collection

Meeting observations Ministry of Education/schools 26

District principals’associations 5

Ministry of Education 10

Document analysisEducation ReviewOffice reports

Schools’ second yearfunding applications

Interviews School personnel 23


Questionnaire survey Schools 19


PartnershipPhase Two


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understanding of the background to the initiatives and the consultationprocess. Interviews with Ministry of Education, Education ReviewOffice, school and community personnel clarified the rationaleunderpinning the initiatives. A questionnaire sent to school principalsand community leaders, asking about their knowledge of the initiativesand their confidence in various aspects of the Ministry’s work, providedinsights into relationships between the Ministry and the schools.Feedback meetings with the Ministry and the two local principals’associations provided verification of our analysis.

The evolving partnership arrangements were studied through twophases by observing a range of meetings, and by analysing ERO reportson individual schools and Ministry documents relating to the schools’submissions for and monitoring of additional funding. Monthlymeetings between the researchers, the intervention team and theMinistry officials responsible for the initiatives helped to clarify therationale for the Ministry’s approach. Observations of meetingsbetween nine of the schools and Ministry officials during thesubmission, monitoring and renegotiation process highlighted theschools’ perspective. Six of these schools were considered by theMinistry to be most at risk, and the other three were seen as offering amore adequate education. The observations were followed up byinterviews with Ministry officials, principals, project leaders, boardchairpersons and community representatives. In addition, interviewson specific issues were conducted with principals and/or projectleaders in 24 of the participating schools in Phase One and 16 schoolsin Phase Two.

All of the interviews focused on the participants’ theories ofintervention and theories of partnership. By ‘theories of intervention’we mean the actions taken, the beliefs and contextual issuesunderpinning those actions, and the anticipated consequences(Robinson, 1993). By ‘theories of partnership’ we refer to beliefs aboutthe nature of partnership in general and the quality of this one inparticular. In addition to the interviews, a survey was conducted ineach of the two phases of the intervention. Respondents included school


46

Legislative

School self-management

FIGURE 2.1

The Ministry of Education’s theory of intervention in Phase One

Desired Educational Outcomes

Self-management will be strengthened

Schools will undertakedata-based self-review

Parent and communityparticipation in schoolswill increase

Community and schoolconfidence will improve

Schools will developownership of andconfidence in the reformprocess

Desired Intermediary Outcomes

Literacy achievement will improve

Requires a data-basedschool review of literacyprovision

Directs funding towardscommunity involvementin schools, with a focuson literacy

The Ministry

Asks schools to developtheir own projects andappoint consultants

Intervention Strategies

Context

Quality

Education Review Officereport identifiesproblems with quality ofeducation

Relationships

Strained relationshipsbetween schools,Ministry andcommunities. Ministrywished to motivate apartnership

�

�

�


47

principals, board chairpersons and project leaders in each school. Inthe Phase One survey, respondents were asked to rate the extent towhich they felt they had ownership of their projects, and theirconfidence that the projects would deliver the desired outcomes. ThePhase Two survey included similar questions about confidence andownership, and also asked about any changes to the projects and aboutthe purpose of the initiatives.

At the end of each phase, we sought verification of our analysis ofthe participants’ theories of intervention and partnership from anadvisory group of five principals from the two districts, the principals’associations and relevant Ministry officials.

Research Findings

For each intervention phase, we report how the partners perceived therelationship and the implications this had for the task of improvingthe quality of education in the participating schools.

The First Intervention Phase

Figure 2.1 is a diagram summarising the theory of intervention thatunderpinned the Ministry’s approach to the initiatives. In this firstphase, various contextual factors shaped the partnership. The first wasa commitment to strengthening the schools’ self-managementcapabilities. For the Ministry, this meant avoiding direct interventionin the schools’ operational autonomy. The right of schools to managetheir own operations was not only respected by the Ministry but alsodefended strongly by the schools. When the co-ordinator of theinitiatives suggested to one principal that the school employ aconsultant to assist with serious governance and managementproblems, the reply was: ‘I’m happy to receive advice, but I don’t wantanyone telling us what to do.’The second factor was the strained relationships between the schools,the Ministry and the communities. The fragility of the relationshipsbetween the Ministry and the schools was reflected in the survey ofschools conducted during the consultation phase. Confidence in the


48

Ministry to deliver resources on time, in ways that were responsive toconcerns, or likely to provide an adequate return on effort, was ratedbetween 3.5 and 3.7 on a seven-point scale. The descriptor associatedwith a rating of 3 was ‘little confidence’.

Relationships between the community and the schools were alsostrained. At community meetings held at this time, variouscondemnatory remarks were made about the local schools. One person,for example, announced: ‘We are here because the schools have failed.We need to do away with the traditional education approach.’

Rather than perceiving this kind of challenge as legitimate, many ofthe schools felt quite negative towards those expressing suchsentiments. As one principal put it:

At the initial meetings we were led to believe that it was going to becommunity driven. These groups came out and they said…howterrible schools were and they were allowed to say that…They ledus on a merry dance and it was a very uncomfortable dance for a lotof principals.

The history of school self-management and strained relationshipsbetween the Ministry, the schools, and the community meant that schoolleaders felt little enthusiasm for the proposed partnership. What theywanted from the Ministry was not partnership but empowerment, bywhich they meant the right of schools to determine how they would spendthe additional funding. As one principal stated: ‘In the past the Ministryalways dumped on [the district]….[I believed] that here for once was anintervention and support for [the district] which would achieve its statedobjective of empowerment – of schools and the community.’

Faced with these contextual conditions, and the need to respondpositively to the 1996 ERO report, the Ministry adopted the interventionstrategies identified in Figure 2.1. Schools had maximum freedom todefine how they might strengthen the education they offered, withinthe overarching framework of a generic, Ministry-funded project called‘Communities in Schools via Literacy’. This did not mean that theMinistry intervention team was passive. Rather, it was very active inassisting the schools to formulate their projects, and frequently


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challenged their ideas. As a result of this process, eight schools withweak governance and management systems agreed to engage theservices of a consultant. Consistent with self-management policy, theschools appointed their own consultants.

The Ministry was also seeking to introduce strategies that wouldimpact more directly on the quality of schooling in the district. In itsapplication for additional funding, each school was required to providea data-based analysis of its literacy provision. This included a visionfor the school, the identification of any discrepancies between the visionand the literacy achievement of the students, and a review of theprogrammes that were offered. The power of this kind of internal reviewprocess to increase schools’ capacity to improve the quality of educationhas been demonstrated by many researchers (Newmann, King andRigdon, 1997; Stoll, 1999). In addition to this internal review, theintervention team monitored each school’s project through milestonereports, and the Education Review Office was contracted by theMinistry to provide an independent audit of each project, including itsmanagement.

The Ministry hoped that these strategies would result in theintermediary outcomes identified in Figure 2.1. It was believed thatallowing schools to develop their own projects respected their operationalautonomy, and prompted feelings of ownership of the improvementprocess. When asked to identify the Ministry’s priorities for the initiatives,one official responded: ‘If there has to be a priority, then it would be onthe side of school confidence and security. [Ownership is] critical, critical.Without [the school] owning the task, commitment reduces.’

The overarching project, ‘Communities in Schools via Literacy’, wasdesigned to increase parent and community participation in the schools,and the confidence of the community in the schools. These intermediaryoutcomes were not considered by the Ministry to be an end inthemselves, but rather a means to achieving the goals of strengtheningthe self-management of schools and improving the literacy achievementof students. How this might be accomplished was neither articulatedby the Ministry nor discussed with the schools.


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PHASE ONE: The Partnership Relationship

Despite the care with which the Ministry set about the interventionprocess, only one of the nine schools we focused on perceived therelationship to be one of partnership, with another being equivocal.The schools agreed with the Ministry’s strategies of asking them todevelop their own projects and appoint their own consultants, becausethe need to respect self-management and promote confidence andownership were accepted by both partners as a given. As one principalexplained, the projects offered an opportunity to deliver somethingnew, and this would improve confidence: ‘I think confidence goes withdelivery…that’s where your confidence comes from.’

But the Ministry wished to make a difference to the quality ofeducation, and sought to do so by requiring schools to show evidence ofdata-based self-review in their application. This type of review, however,was new to most of the schools, and the Ministry’s insistence on itsimportance was not well understood. The language used was unfamiliar,and few school leaders had attempted the type of data-based analysisthat was now being required. As a result, eight of the nine schoolsperceived the application process to be a bureaucratic requirement theyhad to meet in order to access the additional funding they believed wasrightfully theirs. The renegotiation process frustrated many of the schools,who saw it as inconsistent with their understanding of partnership.

We report some of the principals’ reactions to the different phases ofthe initiative through the story of Alex, who experienced theintervention like this:

We were told to come up with a project so we had to sit down andthink. Some of the senior management went off-site for a Saturdayand we brainstormed and developed our ideas of what we wantedto do. And this is where we felt it wasn’t a partnership. We’d comeup with our project, I got my ‘brains trust’ to write it but we felt weweren’t listened to. We got a D-fail. It wasn’t written how everybodywanted it written. We were told that people in the Ministry andTreasury wouldn’t be able to read it. But then when we wrote it inthat way, we couldn’t really read it.


51

We checked with other principals and project leaders to see whethertheir experience of the process was similar to Alex’s. Seven of our nineschools strongly identified with his story, while one was ambivalentand one disagreed. In the latter school, the principal was non-committalbecause he was not closely involved in the initiatives, but the projectleader had a more positive perception of the relationship with theMinistry and found that the submission process challenged hereducational ideas and practices. She explained:

I saw it as a partnership. Right from the beginning [the Ministry co-ordinator] challenged us. He kept asking us to justify what we didand that made us think what we needed to do. He was alwaysavailable, weekends, evenings.

The monitoring process was seen by all the schools as an imposition.Under ‘milestone’ reporting, each school was required to enter monthlyupdates on expenditure, and the intervention team visited regularlyto determine whether the funding had been spent as specified. Alexexperienced the process as follows:

Milestones. I’ve spent $18,000 on such and such and then they justtick that off. What we’re not being monitored for, or given any ideaabout, is whether we are on the right track. Like, what we think iswonderful is not making any difference. We are collecting masses ofachievement data but what we’d love is to know if we’re making adifference. My cry is, ‘Have we wasted that money?’

At this time, the Ministry restricted its monitoring to financial mattersand did not monitor whether the projects were producing the desiredoutcome of improving literacy achievement. Monitoring educationaloutcomes was seen to be a school responsibility.

Despite the Ministry’s efforts to respect the self-governing status ofschools, its intervention was perceived in most cases to be a series ofimposed bureaucratic requirements. Alex and two other principals inour nine schools were looking to the Ministry to be a partner ineducational matters. Five others believed it was inappropriate for theMinistry to adopt such a role, and preferred it to remain distant from


52

educational matters. They saw the submission, renegotiation, andmonitoring requirements as excessively bureaucratic and lackingeducational purpose. The one project leader who felt strongly that therelationship was one of partnership did so because the submissionprocess had challenged her educational ideas and practices. However,she too complained about the monitoring processes.

PHASE ONE: Achieving the Task

In such a complex intervention, it is difficult to determine what constitutesthe task or its success. As we indicated in Figure 2.1, there were threetypes of task to be accomplished – the intervention strategies, the desiredintermediary outcomes, and the desired educational outcomes. TheMinistry did not articulate how the strategies would result in each levelof outcome, although most schools understood the relationship betweendeveloping projects, creating a sense of ownership and increasingconfidence. How these processes were to strengthen self-managementand improve literacy achievement was not made explicit.

All of the schools achieved the first of the two tasks identified asintervention strategies in Figure 2.1. Projects were developed aroundthe concept of community involvement, with a focus on literacy.However, their completion of the data-based needs analysis was poor,because it was an unfamiliar process for most schools and its rationaleand language were poorly understood. Three of our nine schools saw itas a ‘Treasury requirement’ to access the funding, and as having little todo with education. One of these schools reported that the needs analysistook 240 hours to complete. Our inspection of the initial submissions forfunding confirmed that only one of our nine schools had adequatelydocumented a literacy need, directly connected that need to anintervention, and identified an appropriate outcome measure againstwhich progress could be evaluated. When project leaders were asked torate the extent to which their understanding of their school’s needs hadchanged during the writing of their funding submission, the averageresponse fell between ‘exactly the same’ and ‘mostly the same’.

The intermediary tasks of developing ownership and confidencewere also largely achieved (see Table 2.2). In the questionnaire


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conducted during this phase, participants indicated high levels ofownership of their projects and confidence that they would improveliteracy achievement, school management and relationships betweenthe school and the community.

TABLE 2.2

Average Ratings1 of School Principals, Teachers and Project Leaders onthe Achievement of Intermediary Process Tasks

Tasks Phase One (n = 38) Phase Two2 (n = 33)

Ownership of projects 8.1 6.8

Confidence in improvingmanagement 7.6 7.0

Confidence in improving studentliteracy achievement 7.6 7.6

Confidence in improvingrelationships between the schooland the community 7.4 7.2

NOTE 1: A ten-point scale was used, with 1 representing ‘No sense of ownership / not at allconfident’ and 10 representing ‘strong sense of ownership / very confident’.

NOTE 2: Results of a t-test for paired samples indicate no significant difference in any ratings atp < .05.

While the ratings in Table 2.2 indicate a clear belief that the projectswould be effective, how these intermediary outcomes would result inschool improvement was not discussed between the schools and theMinistry during this phase. One problem was that although 21 schoolshad nominated programmes that were already operating in otherschools in the districts, none had been evaluated in terms of their impacton student achievement. A second problem was that only six of theproposed projects involved any analysis of the quality of the school’scurrent literacy teaching.

Another problem was that some of the projects were additional tothe regular classroom programme. Research on school improvementsuggests that initiatives that have this ‘add on’ quality are unlikely toproduce sustainable changes in school self-management and literacyachievement. In her review of school interventions, McLaughlin (1990)


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concluded that special projects aimed at discrete elements of the schoolsystem usually bypass the systemic and interconnected conditions thatinfluence classroom practice. Similarly, Bryk (1999) identified from hiswork in Chicago that additional programmes created issues of co-ordination and organisational integration: ‘As a result, schools becamemore complex and not very robust organizations’ (p.73). Although weagree, as do many others (e.g., Hatch, 1998), that the intermediaryprocesses are important in achieving the educational tasks (Figure 2.1),the causal links between them are tenuous. What was missing in thisfirst phase was a dialogue between the partners about the assumptionsunderpinning those causal links, and how they applied to theachievement of the educational tasks.

The Second Intervention Phase

The second phase involved renegotiating the funding for each schoolfor the second year. Although the Ministry intended the interventionprocess to be an evolving one, this renegotiation came as a surprise tomost school leaders, who thought that the funding was assured for atwo-year period. In this phase, the intervention team took a muchstronger advocacy role for the achievement of particular tasks byarticulating their beliefs about the characteristics of strong schools. Thesecharacteristics formed the criteria against which the quality of eachschool’s proposal was judged. They included a focus on studentachievement, a strong working relationship with the community,professional development based on a needs analysis, and organisationalgrowth based on cycles of planning, implementation, and evaluation(Annan, 1999). The intervention team explained the meaning of thecriteria to each school, and asked the school leaders how their projectswould meet the criteria or what changes would be needed in the secondyear in order for them to do so. The schools now had a much clearerunderstanding of the outcomes the Ministry wanted to achieve. Part ofthe Ministry’s new advocacy role included a proposal for district-wideprofessional development in the analysis and use of student achievementdata. Schools could choose whether to be involved in this programme.


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In the first phase, the Ministry had largely handed over the definitionof the task to the schools; but in this second phase it took a muchstronger role in identifying the tasks to be achieved. There were twomain reasons for this change of stance. First, the intervention team hadbetter information on each school’s operations as a result of negotiatingand monitoring the first-year projects. When the initiative began, theMinistry’s information on the schools was limited to the 1996 EROreport, which did not identify the schools that were offering aninadequate education, and to the views of the schools and theircommunities on what was needed. The Ministry’s new informationwas supplemented by detailed ERO reports on the progress of eachschool’s project. These reports identified specific problems the schoolsneeded to address, and were used as the basis for revision to the second-year proposals. The second reason for the change was concern aboutthe overall impact of the initiatives on the quality of education providedin the two districts. Our research team had reported its own perspectiveon the progress of the initiatives, and expressed concern that mostprojects focused on peripheral rather than central practices (Timperley,Robinson and Bullard, 1999).

The changes were not adopted lightly by the Ministry’s interventionteam because they demanded a very different partnership relationshipwith the schools. A new line was being drawn between the perceivedright of schools to have operational autonomy and the need to make adifference to the quality of education offered in the two districts. Theprocess for appointing governance and management consultantsillustrates the tensions involved. In the first phase, schools appointedtheir own consultants; in the second phase, they were appointed jointlyby the schools and the co-ordinator of the initiatives. The issues debatedwithin the Ministry included: ‘Did more direct Ministry involvementundermine self-management rather than strengthening it in keepingwith the aims of the initiatives?’; and ‘What were the implications forthe state’s responsibility and risk, should the consultants not performto the satisfaction of the Board?’ These issues had to be weighed againstthe greater risk of failing to make a difference.


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PHASE TWO: The Partnership Relationship

Although the Ministry’s new role was not negotiated directly with theschool partners, six of our nine schools told us they accepted it andsaw it as being closer to a partnership. As in Phase One, all continuedto find the monitoring system unnecessarily cumbersome. Therelationship felt more like a partnership because the schools had a betterunderstanding of the rationale underpinning the Ministry’s actions.Alex, for example, faced two issues in this second phase, one relatingto management and the other to the operation of his first-year project.The project had involved withdrawing the more able students fromthe regular classroom programme and giving them specialist teaching.The co-ordinator of the initiatives was concerned that the withdrawalprogramme was not having an impact on regular classroom teachingand learning. Alex found the renegotiation process uncomfortable, butchallenging and useful:

We got quite a shock when we had to reapply and rewrite and redo allthose sorts of things. I’d had this teacher released to do our project,but now all of a sudden we were told the [withdrawal] programmewe were running is supposed to be run in the classroom. We had beenexpected to turn things around when we didn’t really know what waswrong in the first place. We didn’t quite understand and of course wegot prickly – people talked about failing and we sort of thought weweren’t failing. Then [an intervention team member] came in andsmoothed things down. We started to feel that the partnership came. Iunderstand now that we maybe have to drop something. [The co-ordinator] did challenge us and challenged us in a way that my projectleader said, ‘Well, we’re going to beat the buggers’. It was more or lessinferred that we wouldn’t get the money [for Year Two] unless we hadPatricia [a consultant] helping us with monitoring. I objected becauseI’d never met the lady. It’s been the best thing that was pushed on me.She’s monitoring what we’re doing and she’s also my mentor.

For me, a partnership [means] being honest and pragmatic and up-front. For example, one day [in Phase One] the co-ordinator said,‘Perhaps Julia [a consultant] could do something for you’, and I said,


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‘What for? I mean, is there something wrong?’ It wasn’t a partnershipbefore because I didn’t know what the problem was and who wasdoing the deciding. In a partnership there should be honesty aboutwhat’s going to happen.

The significance of Alex’s story, and others like it, was that theintervention team’s incursions into his operational autonomy felt morelike a partnership than had the hands-off role the Ministry adopted inthe earlier phase. Alex’s reaction was similar to that of the project leaderin Phase One who saw the relationship as a partnership in which hereducational thinking and practice were challenged in an open and up-front way.

Given the ten-year history of school self-management in New Zealandand the specific context of Phase One of the intervention, it waspredictable that some of the principals would not be enthusiastic aboutthe new roles and arrangements. Three of our nine schools felt that theintervention team had encroached on their right to define their ownprojects. In a letter of complaint to the Minister of Education in August1999, the Mangere Principals’ Association expressed concern that ‘therole of the facilitator [had] shifted from facilitator to director’. Theassociation requested that a way forward be identified ‘to further enhancestudent achievement in such a way as to affirm the role of the school inthe decision making’. The principals had neither realised, nor agreed,that acceptance of the additional funding meant a reduction in theircontrol over their projects or their schools. Although the schools wereable to continue with the substantive content of their original projects,the intervention team’s new style of challenge was seen as a ‘take-over’of their autonomy and, as such, was resented.

Despite the Ministry’s new approach and the objections of someparticipants, the levels of project ownership and confidence remainedfairly steady. In the case of school personnel who completed bothquestionnaires, there was no significant difference between their PhaseOne and Phase Two ratings for project ownership or confidence thatthe projects would improve management, student literacy achievement,and relationships between the school and the community (Table 2.2).


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PHASE TWO: Achieving the Task

Although the renegotiation of projects in Phase Two was constrainedby commitments made during Phase One, 60 percent of the schoolschanged their projects. In each case, the changes were designed to havemore direct impact on classroom teaching and management practices.Three schools, for example, agreed to drop parts of their originalproposals because they believed more focus on a single aspect waslikely to have greater impact on teaching practices and studentachievement. One project leader, whose school had become intensivelyinvolved in a whole-school development process designed to improvethe teaching of children from non-English-speaking backgrounds(NESB), wrote in the Phase Two questionnaire:

We were opting for [a social skills programme]. Changed tocontinuing with our NESB contract. The contract involves whole-school philosophy, methodology and community involvement. Even2 years is only a beginning. One year would be flirting, 2 years comingto grips, 3 years embracing, 4 years RESULTS.

While few other participants were as enthusiastic as this, there wasclear evidence that their understanding of their school’s needs hadchanged since the intervention began. The average rating in Phase Twofor the extent to which their understanding had changed sincesubmitting their first proposal was between ‘Mostly the same’ and‘Some differences’, while the average rating in Phase One for changedunderstanding during the submission process had been between‘Exactly the same’ and ‘Mostly the same’. This is a significant difference(t = 4.265, p < .01).

In addition, there was a change in perception among the schools asa whole about the purpose of the initiatives. In the Phase Twoquestionnaire, respondents were asked to indicate for Phases One andTwo what they believed the initiatives to be about (see Table 2.3). Thechange in ratings between the two phases indicated a shift in perception,towards a greater understanding that the initiatives were about helpingschools to undertake self-review (t = 2.58, p < .05). However, the


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perception that the initiatives were designed to provide money toschools to complete a project still had a rating slightly above ‘Neitheragree nor disagree’. This suggests that schools’ understanding of theimportance of examining their own practices was still tentative.

During this phase the biggest indicator of change was the willingnessof schools to take part in a Ministry-initiated contract for professionaldevelopment in analysing and using student achievement data forschool improvement. Twenty-four of the 26 schools said they wantedto be included in the contract, having recognised the need to conductthis kind of analysis. During Phase One, only one of our nine schoolshad any understanding of the requirements of this task, with othersbelieving it was a waste of time.

Overall, we have interpreted the changes between the two phasesas indicating a shift towards the desired educational outcome ofstrengthening self-management, as identified in Figure 2.1. Schoolswere making changes to their projects to focus more on the corefunctions of teaching and learning, with more schools recognising theimportance of self-review and making a commitment to becoming moreskilled in this process.

TABLE 2.3

Average Ratings1 of Principals, Teachers and Project Leaders on Beliefsabout the Purpose of the Initiatives

Beliefs Phase One (n = 33) Phase Two (n = 33)

I thought [the initiative] was about 4.9 4.12

providing more money to schools toenable them to do the things theythink best

I thought [the initiative] was about 3.9 4.92

helping schools undertake schoolself-review

NOTE 1: A seven-point scale was used, with 1 representing ‘Strongly disagree’, 4 representing‘Neither agree nor disagree’, and 7 representing ‘Strongly agree’.

NOTE 2: p < .05.


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The goal of improving literacy achievement, also identified in Figure2.1, was impossible to ascertain. Despite relatively high ratings ofconfidence that the projects would be effective in this area, the lack ofdata made it impossible to assess their impact. Some schools reportedachievement data in their applications for continued funding in PhaseTwo. The way the data were presented served to highlight the need forprofessional development in the analysis and use of studentachievement data for review purposes. Most of the data showed theprogress of individual students, without reference to expected progressover the same period or comparison with others not involved in theprogramme. For example, one school which employed a specialistreading teacher with its additional funding provided a single readingscore for each child, accompanied by a comment such as, ‘Knows whatto do with unknown word but not an established response’. The overallimpact of the programme was evaluated in the following comment:‘All children have displayed improvement in reading level except forH. Children are using the strategies of re-running but are not confidentabout reading on.’ Such data and comments give no indication ofexpected reading levels or comparative progress with other childrennot included in the programme.

Discussion

Undertaking school improvement in partnership with 26 schools andtheir communities is a formidable task. The context in which thepartnership was attempted made the task even more difficult, becausemany school leaders believed that a policy of school self-managementrequired the hand-over of resources to enable schools to meet theirunchallenged educational priorities.

The Ministry faced three tasks that were potentially in tension withone another. The first was to respect the schools’ right to operationalautonomy, in accordance with the principles of self-management; thesecond was to improve relationships; and the third was to make adifference to the quality of education in the two districts. Given thatthe theory and practice of self-management in New Zealand had a


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longer history and was more developed than that of partnership, it isnot surprising that the Ministry initially designed the partnershipaccording to self-management principles. Similarly, the emphasis onthe relationship rather than the task dimension of partnership wasconsistent with the priority that relationships are given in thepartnership literature. In fact, little is said in the literature about theachievement of the educational tasks that various partnerships areformed to address (e.g., McGowan and Powell, 1996; Peters et al., 1999).

It could be argued that respecting autonomy and prioritisingrelationships were appropriate because they developed the positiverelationships necessary for tackling the complex task of schoolimprovement. In Chapter One we took an alternative view, arguingthat the educational task itself should be used to motivate thepartnership and to regulate the relationship. In this context, the differentperspectives of each partner would be negotiated and resolvedaccording to their likely impact on task success. When partners holddifferent expectations, as they did at the beginning of the Mangere/Otara initiative, this approach does not avoid conflict, but it doesprovide opportunities for the conflict to be resolved in terms ofaccomplishing the task.

We acknowledge that in some situations the relationships are toostrained for the partners to work on a major educational task. In thiscase, improving relationships may become the task, and how to achieveit becomes the joint responsibility of the partners. They may choose tobegin by working together on a relatively minor or short-termeducational task. As the relationship evolved, so would the significanceof the tasks that are tackled. Attempting to solve relationship problemsby working on major educational tasks is liable to compromise theachievement of the task, because decisions are likely to be determinedmore by their impact on the relationship than by their impact on tasksuccess.

Tasks can be defined in many different ways. In education, tasks areoften defined at the level of ownership, participation and confidence,without making explicit the assumptions about how these qualities


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impact on educational outcomes. The focus on the intermediaryprocesses in Phase One of the Mangere/Otara initiative was oneexample of this approach. The New Zealand Ministry of Education,however, is not alone in defining tasks in these terms. Edwards andWarin (1999), for example, note that partnership initiatives betweenparents and schools are usually evaluated in terms of participation ratesrather than the educational outcomes the participation is designed toachieve. If assumptions about how one impacts on the other are notmade explicit, processes such as confidence and participation may beperceived as ends in themselves. The more explicit stance taken by theMinistry in Phase Two, by articulating desired outcomes in terms ofthe characteristics of a strong school, and asking schools to explainhow their projects would achieve those outcomes, focused each school’sproject more directly on the educational goals.

As a result of this greater explicitness, and the educational challengesassociated with the renegotiation process, more schools perceived therelationship to be one of partnership than had been the case in theearlier phase. More principals reported that they had a betterunderstanding of the Ministry’s position and were challenged by theprocess. They did not always like it, but more of them trusted it becausethey understood it. Some continued to object to the intrusions into theirautonomy. Overall, however, the more intrusive approach not only ledto more people having better perceptions of the partnership, but alsowas more successful in developing strategies that were likely to improvethe quality of education offered in the two districts.


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One of the few requirements the Ministry of Education imposed onthe schools if they were to access additional funding was to increasethe involvement of parents and the community in the school. Thisrequirement was in keeping with the way the intervention itself wasframed – as a partnership between the Ministry, the schools and thecommunity (Annan, 1999). It was assumed that greater parental andcommunity involvement would improve children’s achievement.

While many schools reported that few parents were involved in thelife of the school, and that this was of concern, they also reported thatbetween 80 and 95 percent of parents came to parent interviews to discusstheir child’s school report. New Zealand schools are required to reportto parents, but precisely what that entails is largely left to the individualschool. There is, however, an expectation that schools develop profilesof individual student achievement in each curriculum learning area, theseprofiles being designed to ‘inform teachers about each student’s learningand development and provide the basis for feedback to students andparents’ (Ministry of Education, 1993a, p.24). Most schools in the initiativemet their obligations through twice-yearly written reports and a mid-year interview when parents could discuss their child’s progress withthe class teacher. Reports typically presented information about bothacademic and social aspects of a child’s progress at school.

Sharing Information:School Reports to Parents

CHAPTER THREE


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Internationally, more has been written about the parent-schoolpartnership than about any other partnership relationship in education,because it is believed to be fundamental to promoting children’sachievement. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United Statesgovernment’s Goals 2000, which includes the statement that ‘every schoolwill promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement andparticipation in promoting the social, emotional and academic growthof children’ (US Department of Education, 1994). The concern of muchof this literature is how to get parents involved (Street, 1998). In theMangere/Otara initiative, the high levels of parental participation inthe reporting process allowed us to put this particular issue to one sideand focus on what occurred when the parents did participate.

Researchers who incline towards a sociological critique of the parent-school partnership are typically unenthusiastic about its various formsbecause of concerns about the school’s domination of the partnership.Anderson (1998) and Ware (1994) both argue that the purpose of manyparticipation initiatives is to increase the school’s institutionallegitimacy by engaging in public relations exercises which are a parodyof collaboration. Others describe how schools control the partnershipprocess in ways that actually disempower parents (Fine, 1997; Vincentand Tomlinson, 1997). Apart from the obvious issues of inequality whichthese authors articulate so clearly, we consider that one of the potentialundesirable outcomes of such legitimation rituals is the reduction inopportunities for each partner to learn more about how to promotechildren’s achievement. Increasing opportunities to learn about taskssuch as improving achievement is fundamental to our advocacy ofpartnership. Schools seeking to increase their institutional legitimacyare unlikely to seek parents’ views on how to raise student achievement.

The reporting context provided the ideal opportunity to study thepossibilities for teachers and parents to learn from each other abouthow to promote student achievement. The required content of theschool report is an individual student’s learning and development(Ministry of Education, 1993a, p.24). Given this context, we consideredthat accurate information about the student’s achievement was an


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essential condition for partnership learning. In the absence of suchinformation, it is difficult to identify problems of mutual concern andto decide how each partner might improve the situation.

We propose that a second condition for learning about how to achievea task, such as improving achievement, is for the partners to have a sharedunderstanding of what is desirable. This condition would enable themto detect gaps between the current reality of the child’s achievementand each partner’s aspirations for that achievement. In the reportingcontext, this shared understanding implies identification and acceptanceof standards against which a child’s current performance can beevaluated. By holding such standards openly, teachers and parents canappreciate each other’s aspirations and expectations, and learn how todevelop and report on standards to which all are committed.

It has been well documented that the Maori and Pacific Islandfamilies that make up the majority of the population in the two suburbsstudied want their children to enter occupations that require successin national examinations and tertiary-level study (Nash, 1993; Smithet al., 1997). If Maori and Pacific Island families are to be partners withteachers in helping their children fulfil these aspirations, they neednational benchmarks against which to assess their progress.

Accurate reporting against valued standards also allows mutualaccountabilities to be established between the partners. Whileaccountability for outcomes is a vexed issue in education, in that therelationship between inputs and outcomes is highly complex,accountability for agreed contributions to working towards thoseoutcomes is less contentious. If, during the reporting process, each partnercommits to particular actions that are mutually supportive andinterdependent, then such mutual accountabilities can contribute to thetask of improving achievement.


In this study, we examine how the eleven schools that agreed toparticipate reported to parents on their children’s progress. The researchquestions asked: Did the schools report the children’s achievement clearly


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and accurately? What were the standards against which achievementwas evaluated? Were the standards transparent and mutually agreed?Ten primary schools (Years 1 to 6) and one middle school (Years 7 to10) provided copies of their reporting policies and their school reportson a sample of students. The letters A to K in Table 3.1 identifies theseschools. In most cases, the sample included the reports on two high,two middle and two low achieving students in whichever of Years 4, 6,7, or 10 were appropriate for the particular school.

Our analysis of the written reports focused on how studentachievement was described, with particular attention given to theevaluative standards that had been employed. Instructions to teacherson how to report student achievement were identified from the schools’policy documents on reporting to parents. We interviewed up to fivestaff members in each school. In the interviews, we asked about thepurpose of their reporting process, the nature of the interviewsconducted with parents, and the standards used to judge studentachievement. In two schools (C and D) we also attended a reportevening, where we asked parents what they learned from the reportsabout their child’s achievement and about the standards they thoughtwere used to judge that achievement. The validity of our descriptionand explanation of the two schools’ reporting practices were checkedby inviting feedback on our early findings from meetings of the twolocal principals’ associations.

Research Findings

In this section, we examine the extent to which the current reportingpractices of the eleven schools met the conditions of providing accurateinformation on children’s achievement, including how thatachievement compared with a mutually accepted standard.

Schools’ Reporting Practices

The New Zealand curriculum provides broad guidelines to schoolsfor reporting, in the form of key objectives in each of seven essentiallearning areas or subjects. Ten of our eleven schools reported the


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Ratings: Always, usually, sometimes, Curriculum levels, readingnot yet (against objectives) age (stated on report)

Ratings: Above average, average, Teacher decidesbelow average

Ratings: Excellent, very good, Class referencedsatisfactory, improving, needsimproving

Ratings: Achieved high standard, Referenced to each child’ssteady progress made, limited perceived potentialachievement

Descriptive achievement comments. Teacher decidesRatings: Excellent, very good, good,room for improvement

Descriptive achievement comments Not applicablewith some evaluations – no ratings

Descriptive achievement comments Referenced to each child’s- no achievement ratings perceived potential

Descriptive achievement comments. Referenced to each child’sProgress ratings of A, B, C perceived potential(intermittently used)

No achievement comments or ratings Not applicable(effort only)

Ratings: Excellent, very good, average, Teacher decidesbelow average

Curriculum level specified Curriculum levels, readingage (stated on report)

TABLE 3.1

Descriptors of Achievement Used in Schools’ Reports

School Evaluative Categories Basis of Evaluative Standard

K(middleschool)

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

students’ achievement in each of these learning areas. The eleventhschool (I) reported the children’s level of effort in each learning area,and gave no information on achievement (Table 3.1).

Many of the ten schools that reported on achievement providedseparate information for the various strands that made up a learningarea. English, for example, was usually separated into listening and


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speaking, viewing and presenting, writing, and reading, in line with thestrands used in the national curriculum documents. Some schoolsreported more specifically by describing achievement against two or threekey objectives, such as ‘Writes imaginative stories’, ‘Uses adjectivescorrectly’, ‘Writes instructions accurately’. As New Zealand curriculumdocuments encourage teacher-made rather than standardised lessonobjectives, these descriptors varied across the schools.

In their policy documents, many of the schools noted the importanceof accurate information in reporting to parents. School I (ironicallyenough, the school that did not report on achievement at all) stated inits policy document on the objectives of reporting: ‘Reports give clear,honest, and accurate accounts of children’s progress, achievements,and attitudes’. Similarly, School F’s policy on reporting stated:‘Reporting to parents is keeping parents informed as to the progress,achievements, strengths, and weaknesses of their children’.

Both the descriptions and evaluations of student achievement arerelevant to this discussion of the accuracy of the written reports. Fourof the eleven schools (E to H) provided a description of some aspectsof the students’ achievement, using summary comments such as ‘Verygood use of descriptive words in her story writing’, ‘Stories of goodlength’, and ‘Much more careful about proof reading’. The limiteddescriptive information provided on reports needs to be understoodin the context of other opportunities (including follow-up reportinterviews) for parents to see the assessments and work samples onwhich such evaluative comments are based. We were unable to test theaccuracy of the teachers’ descriptive and evaluative comments bymatching an identified student’s reports against their teacher’s actualclassroom assessment records; however, we argue subsequently thatthere were far more serious threats to the accuracy of reporting thanthe teachers’ ability to describe achievement accurately and the parents’opportunities to access such information.

All ten schools that reported on achievement provided someevaluative comment or rating of either achievement level or progress.The seven schools that provided an evaluative rating used a variety of


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scale descriptors. For example, a middle level of achievement wasvariously described as ‘Average’, ‘Usually’, ‘Satisfactory’, ‘Steadyprogress made’, and ‘Good’ (Table 3.1).

Given that parents’ evaluation of their child’s achievement isdependent on the teachers’ evaluation, it is crucial that we examinethe validity and transparency of teachers’ judgments. Our first concernabout validity was the distribution of the evaluative ratings. Acrossthe ten schools that reported on achievement, there was no clearassociation between a school’s evaluative ratings and their nominationof children as low, medium or high achieving. The lowest achievementcategories were rarely used for any child. For example, in a reportprovided by School D, a low achieving child received 23 ticks in the‘Achieved high standard’ column, fourteen ticks in the ‘Steady progressmade’ column, and no ticks in the ‘limited achievement’ column. Theparents we interviewed at School D said that they believed the standardapplied was a national one. If the report indicated that their child was‘achieving to a high standard’ then, as one parent expressed it, ‘Thatmeans he is achieving as well as others of the same age.’

Our second concern was a lack of transparency about the standardor benchmark used to judge a child’s achievement. Only two schools(A and K) told parents the standard that had been used. Their reportsdescribed, in an easily interpreted form, both the level on the nationalcurriculum at which the child was working, and the child’s readingage. In the remaining schools, parents were in no position to judgewhether they agreed with the standard the teacher was using, or withthe way it was being applied to their child. In the next section, wepursue the validity of teachers’ judgments by discussing the implicitstandards that teachers used to evaluate their students.

Use of an Appropriate Standard

In our discussion of the conditions needed to promote learning withinthe parent-teacher partnership, we emphasised the role of evaluativestandards. Such standards are important because they enable gaps to bedetected between what has been and what should have been achieved.


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Unless parents have considerable knowledge of the New Zealandcurriculum, it is hard for them to detect such gaps from descriptions orfirst-hand observations of their children’s work. Since most parents lackthis knowledge base, they are dependent on teachers to communicatethe curricular standards that are appropriate for their child.

None of the schools’ policies on reporting discussed the standardagainst which teachers were to evaluate achievement, so it was notsurprising that in some cases (Schools B, E and J), individual classteachers decided what was appropriate. The acting principal of SchoolB frankly admitted he was not sure how teachers reported:

Researcher: So when you’ve got a tick here that says‘Average’, what does that mean? Compared towhom? How is that determined?

Acting Principal: That’s in the teacher’s opinion. You know what,I’m not sure whether that means ‘average’ as faras the class goes, or ‘average’ as far as theteacher ’s perception of what the nationalaverage is. I don’t know.

Researcher: There’s quite a big difference.Acting Principal: Oh, too right there is. There’s a huge difference.

I have a feeling that it’s the teacher’s impressionof the national average. I would hope it wouldbe. But you see, after teachers have been herefor a while, your perception…

Researcher: …changes.Acting Principal: It does, it does.

Schools A and K used a national standard, at least for reading. SchoolC used a class- or department-based comparison, which meant that‘excellent’ was awarded for students in the top reading or subject group,even though the whole class or cohort might be achieving at one totwo years behind the national levels. Finally, Schools D, G and Hclaimed that they evaluated a child’s achievement against the teacher’sperception of their potential. If the teacher judged the child to havelow potential, but believed the child was doing as well as could be


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expected, then an ‘Excellent’ was awarded. The assistant principal ofSchool D explained this self-referenced process as follows:

Researcher: So if you’ve got a student who you feel is notachieving at the national average…

Assistant Principal: Not achieving to their potential. We don’tcompare to national; it’s their potential. No, wehave not been honest with them as compared tothe national averages because otherwise we’dbe saying to so many of the parents, that yourkid’s below, below, below…We have a lot thatwe consider average doing well, but theyprobably are below but we say they are doingwell, for us here.

Examples of reports provided by this school showed that somechildren who were achieving poorly in relation to the national cohortreceived a majority of ‘achieved high standard’ ratings in their report.

When we asked parents at School C what they thought their child’sachievement ratings meant, about half said they understood it reflectedtheir child’s standing in relation to the rest of the class, while the restbelieved their child had been compared to all children of their age. Allthe parents interviewed at that school (n = 14) said they would prefercomparisons with national standards, although about half said thatadditional locally based standards would be helpful. Similarly, manyof the parents we interviewed at School D (n = 11) believed that thestandard applied was a national one, and therefore that their child wasachieving at a much higher level than was really the case. The onlyteacher we asked about this issue was puzzled by the parents’perceptions:

Assistant Principal: You know, when they say that, do they reallythink that?...I think they would know - I thinkthey would…

Researcher: If the teacher at the school says they’re doingwell, then would you disbelieve that?

Assistant Principal: But they also know they’re in Mangere and they


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are very aware of Mangere, I mean goodness, thenewspapers make it quite clear - as opposed toother areas, so I think they do know. When wesay ‘doing well’, we mean ‘doing well for here’.

Three important points can be drawn from the above quotes. First,the authority to determine what standard is appropriate is vested in theschool and teachers, who have, on the whole, preferred individual orclass-based standards over national ones. The people for whom thereports are intended have little say in this aspect of schools’ reportingpolicies. Second, as the standard that schools are using to judgeachievement is not made explicit on the reports, they are highly likely tobe misinterpreted by parents as indicating higher levels of achievementthan is in fact the case. Third, the omission of the standard from thewritten report makes it less likely to be the subject of debate betweenparents and teachers. In short, both the teachers’ rejection of the moredemanding national standard and the parents’ lack of awareness of thisrejection reduce the likelihood that gaps between the current and desiredachievement levels of their children will be detected. The informationprovided on the report does not enable parents to make an independentassessment of the validity of the teacher’s evaluation of their child.

Explanations for Current Practice

We believe it is important to examine the reasons for schools’ currentreporting practices. Otherwise it would be easy to condemn the schoolsfor being unconcerned about parents’ views, when in reality almostthe opposite is the case. Some schools in our survey had changed theirreports to be more responsive to parents’ wishes. As the principal ofSchool C (which used class-referenced ratings of ‘excellent’, ‘very good’etc) explained:

The old reports just had blank spaces. The parents desperately wantedthese sorts of ratings. They wanted some evaluative judgment thatthey could compare their children against. They got very veryfrustrated at being told their children are wonderful at this and theycan do that. So we designed this [new report] with that in mind.


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For other schools the explanation lies in the teachers’ strong desireto be positive, which is deeply rooted in the culture of the schools andreinforced by their policies. Many of the policy documents on reportinghad a positive focus. Earlier we quoted a statement in School I’s policydocument on reporting, which began: ‘Reports give clear, honest, andaccurate accounts…’ This statement was followed by: ‘Reports arepositive and helpful.’ However, the desire to be positive inhibits thecommunication of frank and accurate messages, especially when theteacher anticipates that the parents will view a more honest messageas negative. The principal and deputy principal at School J describedthe dilemma as follows:

Researcher: Okay, a question to both of you. You know thatfor some of your students when they arrive [inNew Entrants], they will not have a whole set ofskills that middle-class teachers can just take forgranted. So you may be starting a year or soback, in terms of pre-school, in terms ofdelivering what’s needed. Do you tell yourparents that?

Deputy Principal: No…Researcher: Now why don’t you tell them?Deputy Principal: I suppose it’s a self-esteem thing for the children.

And I suppose I’ve always taken the childrenfrom where they’re at and accepted them wherethey’re at. [My attitude is] now let’s get on withit and do it from here. So, no, we haven’t [toldthe parents] and that’s what I think we have toaddress…

Principal: What about the self-esteem, the feeling ofsecurity when the parents arrive. I think we haveto foster that first before we do [tell them thefacts].

Researcher: That’s the bind, isn’t it?Deputy Principal: And the child, if the child feels secure that Mum


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is on his side, I think learning comes. But when[the norm’s] out there, it’s isolated and a littledivorced from the norms of the parents andbeing there. This is one aspect that I personallyfeel that we foster here before any learning takesplace. We foster the being safe, being secure,being happy before kids start the learningprocess.

Principal: Self-esteem is so important.

For these school leaders, communicating positive messages toparents means not discussing the entry level of their child. The aim isto build the confidence of the parents and the self-esteem and securityof the child to a level where learning can begin. While this approach iswell-intentioned, it is nonetheless manipulative and patronising. Thatapproach is also evident in the following comments on report eveningsby the deputy principal of School D: ‘It’s our job to make the parentsfeel a million dollars. It’s the human face that’s important. No one feelsthreatened – that’s what we do well. It’s what’s not done well atsecondary school.’

As long as a school believes that ‘being positive’ means tellingchildren and parents only the good news, it will be unable to benchmarkits report ratings against an explicit standard, as there will always bechildren who do not reach the standard. We suggest that, in such cases,‘being positive’ should mean avoiding blame, sharing responsibilityfor understanding the gap and attempting to close it, andcommunicating with honesty and empathy.

The economic and social circumstances of families also contributedto the reporting practices of schools in the study. The educationalresources in many families were limited, which meant that if parentswere to develop a partnership with teachers to promote mutuallearning, schools had to educate them about the curriculum, and buildbridges between the culture of the school and home.

Student safety was also a concern in some schools. Several principalsand teachers recounted incidents where students had been beaten by


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parents or caregivers after they received a negative school report.However, they acknowledged that the risk applied to only one or twochildren, and said they had procedures for preventing such treatment,such as inviting parents to discuss their child’s report at school ratherthan sending it home. The safety issue did not appear to be as powerfulan explanation of current reporting practices as was first indicated.

Many of the schools expressed a related concern that unreasonableexpectations could be placed on individual children as a result of unfaircomparisons with other students. Nearly all of the schools drewattention to this possibility in their documentation for teachers and/orparents. For example, reports sent out by School G included thefollowing note to parents: ‘Children’s natural abilities and levels ofattainment vary. This report is specific to your child and it would beunwise to compare the report with that of another.’ If explicit standardsare to be used, the possibility that parents may develop unreasonableexpectations of their child is something that the school needs to managecarefully. Crucial to this process is quality dialogue between teacherand parents as to what might constitute reasonable expectations foreach child. All schools in the study held parent interviews at least oncea year. We suggest that this is the appropriate context for reachingshared expectations for individual students.

In summary, the emphasis on positive reporting reduced the risksto parents and children of communicating messages that could evokenegative feelings, whether they be anger or loss of confidence and self-esteem. Furthermore, these reporting strategies also reduced the risksto schools and teachers of negative consequences, ranging from parentalcriticism to non-enrolment of children. To understand these risks, weneed a brief reminder of the political context of our sample schools.The two communities were stressed by poverty and undermined bynegative media reports on the quality of schooling in the area. Thelatest wave of publicity was triggered by the release of a report by theEducation Review Office (1996), which was highly critical of thegovernance, management and curriculum delivery of many of theschools. Some professionals and community leaders reacted by being


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determinedly positive about the schools and the rich cultural traditionsof their communities.

The public image of our sample schools was crucial to their survival,under the government’s policy of parental choice which triggered fiercecompetition for students in some parts of the two suburbs.Approximately 70 percent of the high school students in Otara bypassedthe local state high schools for religious or state schools in neighbouringsuburbs. There was some evidence that this trend was creeping downthe age-range to affect primary and middle schools, although roll trendswere very variable in the latter. In this context, it was understandablethat the leaders of our sample schools were very conscious of theenrolment implications of reporting against rigorous and explicitstandards. As one principal put it: ‘It’s quite unprofessional really, butI would be a fool to report against national standards if theneighbouring schools used local ones.’

In summary, the reporting practices we have described are explainedby the educators’ desire to be positive, which in turn is motivated bothby their concern for the self-esteem of students and families, and bytheir desire to build community confidence in their school.

Discussion

School reports that compared children’s achievement with theirperceived potential or with the level of their classmates did not tellparents how their children were progressing towards the nationallybenchmarked aspirations they held for them (Nash, 1993; Smith et al.,1997). Mutual learning about how to reach those standards is retardedif achievement is not evaluated against a measure relevant to thoseaspirations. Nor is mutual accountability possible because it is unclearwhether current achievement is adequate or how it relates to what isdesired.

This study supports the concerns of researchers who have portrayedthe parent-school partnership as fundamentally flawed as a result ofpower imbalances between the partners (Anderson, 1998; Fine, 1997;Vincent and Tomlinson, 1997; Ware, 1994). However, we wish to take a


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more empathetic view of the schools’ role, because in doing so we findthe way forward becomes more apparent. Advocating for alternativesbecomes mere rhetoric if one does not understand and address theforces that sustain the status quo.

None of the schools in the study intended to mislead parents. Rather,two very powerful forces shaped the reporting practices: the need toprotect parents and their children from the knowledge that the child’sachievement in most cases was below national standards; and the needto protect the school from a mobile population that might well criticiseand desert the school if actual achievement levels were made public.These forces combined to ensure that, as far as possible, reportingmessages were positive. Such messages were also consistent with adeep-rooted desire within the schools’ culture to be positive aboutschooling in the area in general.

We argue that the cycle can be broken only by bringing the parentpartner into the decision-making process on how to report and whatstandards to report against. Part of the reason for the positive bias ofreports was that school leaders believed they knew what parentswanted (i.e., to hear good news about their child), and perceived themto be relatively uninformed about the curriculum. The omission ofparents from the decision-making process is not restricted to the schoolsin this study (Peddie, 2000). Educators also debate the issue amongthemselves (Bishop, 1996), but so far, in New Zealand at least, the debatehas not included the families most affected by the outcomes.

Engaging in such a debate about reporting standards requires aredefinition of the partnership relationship that appears to be implicitin the actions of those involved in this study. If schools and parents areto work in partnership, it is the responsibility of both partners to decidewhich issues are relevant to the partnership and how the tasks involvedcan best be accomplished. If the parent partner becomes part of thedecision-making process on reporting standards, accuracy ofinformation is likely to replace positivity and protection as the guidingprinciples of reporting.


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The decentralisation of educational decision-making to localadministrative structures is usually associated with increasing citizenparticipation in schooling (Beare, 1993; Beattie, 1985; Vincent, 1996).Anderson (1998) argues that the decentralisation movement aroundthe world has struck a chord with those seeking more directinvolvement in a participatory democracy based on a politics of socialequality. When the individual school became the unit to which decision-making was devolved, as in New Zealand, the language of participationbecame the language of partnership. In New Zealand, the mechanismfor this partnership was the board of trustees (Taskforce to ReviewEducation Administration, 1988, p.43).

New Zealand’s boards of trustees were not only to make operationaldecisions, but also to influence the school’s character and to exercisecontrol over its governance. Smelt (1998) differentiates betweenadministrative decentralisation and political decentralisation associatedwith governance. The former produces self-managing schools, whichhave the flexibility to take certain decisions locally but whose staff areaccountable to and employed by the school system. The latter producesself-governing schools, where the governing body employs staff andis accountable to parents or the school community. In most countries,

Power and Expertise:Parent Governors and Professionals

CHAPTER FOUR


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what has occurred in recent years is administrative decentralisation,leading to self-managing schools. New Zealand is distinctive inpursuing self-governing schools (p.20).

In 1994, in a report to the Ministry on the performance of boards oftrustees, the Education Review Office outlined the scope of thegovernance tasks required of them:

Boards are responsible for enacting centrally determined legislative,regulatory and other requirements. They are responsible for ensuringthat the views and interests of the community that the school servesare reflected in the decisions they take. They are accountable to boththe Crown [the government] and their local electoralcommunity…The Board is responsible for ensuring that the principal,as Chief Executive, manages the school effectively and in accordancewith national requirements and local objectives. This means that eventhough it may exercise its right to delegate responsibilities to theprincipal or other employees, the Board itself remains accountable.The Board is also the employer of the principal and all other staff inthe school, and must meet the responsibilities that come with such arole. (Education Review Office, 1994, p.4)

International research on the decentralisation of school control hasfocused primarily on issues of power and equality between parentalgovernors and school professionals. In most cases, the literature iscritical of these structures because equality between the partners andmeaningful participation by the parental partner are rarely achieved.For example, Anderson (1998) writes: ‘…there are signs that theparticipatory reform movement in education is running into problems.Several case studies have suggested that shared governance structuresmay not result in significant participation in decisions [by the parentgovernors].’ Malen and Ogawa (1988) explain this problem in terms ofthe traditional conceptualisations of parental roles in education systems.New governance roles violated the accepted norm that it was theprincipal’s job, not that of the parent governors, to make decisions. Itwas the parents’ job to support the principals in those decisions.


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Vincent and Tomlinson (1997) take an even stronger stance in theircritique of parental involvement in the United Kingdom:

A closer examination of the issues of ‘partnership’ by educationprofessionals reveals an implicit marginalizing and controlling ofparents, aspects of the relationship which are masked by warmreferences to consensus and congeniality. The reality is that the parentis co-opted to help achieve the purposes and resolve the problems ofthe school without any real participation in the definition anddiagnoses of those purposes and problems. (p.366)

The New Zealand government in 1989 demonstrated somecognisance of these issues by ensuring that parent representatives werein the majority on boards of trustees and that one took the position ofchairperson. Principals were directly accountable to the chair througha mandated annual performance appraisal. Seven years after thislegislation was enacted, the Education Review Office (1996) report thattriggered the Ministry’s intervention in Mangere and Otara made itclear that many trustees were failing to exercise their governanceresponsibilities:

A major factor in this [school] failure is the inability of trustees tounderstand and undertake their governance role effectively. Even ina school that appears to be performing adequately, the governanceperformance of trustees may be masked by the principal’s assumingmost of the administrative tasks and decision-making tasks associatedwith various governance roles. (p.8)

In this chapter, we explore the reasons why this situation had arisen.Was it because the principals usurped the trustees’ role, or did the boardmembers themselves conceptualise their role as doing no more thanthe principal’s bidding? A third possibility we considered was the issueof expertise. The legislation, while vesting considerable power in theboard, also assumed a high level of financial, educational andorganisational expertise. Being assigned power and responsibility maybe an insufficient condition for exercising that power if those involveddo not have the expertise to do so.


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This study took place two years after the Ministry began its interventionin Mangere and Otara. By this time, considerable resources had beencommitted to improving the quality of governance, or the quality ofthe relationship between governors and senior management, in twelveschools that were deemed to be at particular risk.1 In addition, theMinistry required boards to be involved in the funding applicationprocess, and the board chairpersons signed each school’s applicationand the subsequent contract with the Ministry (see Chapter Two).

In this study we addressed four specific research questions. The firsttwo concerned the trustees’ conceptualisation of their partnership withthe professionals, and asked: What do trustees mean by partnership?How do they rate the quality of their partnership with principals andteachers? The third and fourth questions focused on the specifics ofthe trustees’ role, and how trustees exercised their responsibilitieswithin that role. The questions were: What are the trustees’ attitudestowards monitoring the achievement of their students? What is theircapacity to hold the professionals accountable for that achievement?The context for these questions was the trustees’ role in monitoringstudent achievement, because this was central to their educationalresponsibilities. It was also likely to be a contested role, in thatresponsibility for student achievement was traditionally seen asbelonging to the professionals.

Research Participants

Twenty-four of the 28 eligible trustees were interviewed. We wereunable to make adequate contact with the chairpersons of three schoolsin Mangere, and a fourth school in Otara withdrew its informationafter the chairperson and principal decided it was too sensitive. Theethnicity of all those we interviewed was either Maori or one of thePacific Island nations. Four of the 24 trustees were not currently the

1 In the first two years of the intervention, twelve schools received external contracts worth a totalof $NZ229,000 for assistance with governance, governance-management relations or financialmanagement.


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chairperson of their board, but were interviewed because they had aleadership role in relation to the Ministry’s initiatives. They all hadconsiderable experience as trustees, reporting an average of 5.5 yearsas board members and 4.1 years as chairperson. Seven had been trusteessince the system began in 1989.

Research Procedures

A semi-structured interview was developed in conjunction with a Maorischool leader and members of the Ministry of Education responsiblefor the interventions. The interview was designed to gauge trusteeopinions and understandings in three areas that were important to theinterventions. In the first section we asked respondents what it meantto them to be a partner with teachers and the principal, and whetherthey considered their relationship with staff to be a partnership. Weanalysed the responses by referring to our definition of partnership inChapter One, in which we drew a distinction between the ‘relationship’and ‘task’ dimensions.

In the second and third sections, we asked respondents about theirunderstandings of and attitudes towards the school-wide assessmentof student achievement. Both rating scales and open-ended questionswere used in each of the three sections, so that qualitative andquantitative data could be cross-checked.

The interviews, which took approximately one hour, were conductedby three different people and were tape-recorded and transcribed. Inan effort to avoid selective bias in the qualitative analysis, separateelectronic files were created of all the responses to each open-endedquestion so that the views of all 24 respondents could be easilyreviewed. In selecting quotes we indicate both typical and atypicalresponse patterns.

Research Findings

The findings of the study are presented in two sections, covering thenature and quality of the board-staff partnership, and the board’s rolein the school-wide monitoring of student achievement.


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Trustees as Partners

In Chapter One we argued that partnership has both a task and arelationship dimension. The task dimension indicates that partnershipsare purposeful, while the relationship dimension refers to the qualitiesof shared power and reciprocal influence. In the following section wecompare this concept of partnership with that held by the trusteesthemselves. What did they understand by ‘partnership’, and to whatextent did they see themselves as working in such a relationship withtheir principal and teachers?

When asked to describe what partnership meant to them, mosttrustees referred to the relationship qualities of communication andteamwork. In a partnership, communication was open, people listenedto one another, and everything was put on the table so there were nosecrets. Teamwork involved sharing and working towards commongoals. Such relationships were established by parents being aroundthe school so that the partners got to know one another. Some trusteesbelieved that if the partners had a common vision, such as ‘workingfor the betterment of the children’, they could disagree about how toachieve it without damaging their relationship.

The task dimension of partnership was less prominent in theresponses than the relationship dimension, and was described in verygeneral terms. The following quote was typical of the relative emphasison ‘relationship’ and ‘task’:

Chair: As the chairperson…I have a very goodrelationship with the principal and the teachers.I have no personal issue with any of them.

Researcher: So what does being a partner mean? Does itmean having a good relationship?

Chair: Yeah, having a good relationship with schooland principal and staff, all staff…So yes, I cansay I do have a good relationship with them…

Researcher: Are there any other aspects of what it means tobe a partner?


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Chair: I think working together for the good of thechildren, you know, sort of working together.

In cases where more specific ‘task’ contributions were described,they included the formulation of policy and the mediation ofcommunity perspectives to staff:

Researcher: The next area I want to ask you about ispartnership…The first question is: as a boardmember, what does it mean to you to be a partnerwith teachers and the principal?

Chair: When I first came on board, I thought that was areally hard role because...I wasn’t aware of whatgovernance meant, and so being a board memberand having done some reading in the area of whatdoes it mean to be...a chairperson of the boardand reading a whole lot of things, the partnershipand the role of working alongside of teachers andprincipal initially, for me, was not difficult but itwas a new role. I’d never been in that positionbefore. Now that I’ve been part of the school foreleven months, I think it’s brilliant. I think it’sgreat. It’s finding out about a whole lot of things.What’s happening in the school, curriculum,behaviour stuff with children, getting involvedin the community with parents and so on…

Researcher: So does your background experience cover thattoo?

Chair: Yeah.Researcher: That helps you?Chair: The networking in the community – because I’ve

had contact for a long time with the community,so yeah, that’s kind of made it easier…thepartnership, and the working alongside ofteachers. I mean, new teachers are coming in allthe time, and even though I’m really busy, I still


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make a point of trying to drop in to the schoolevery week – maybe a couple of times, three timesa week. And just get to talk with the teachersabout how things are going. Talking with theprincipal. And yeah, some of the kids too, andthat’s been brilliant.

While two or three trustees did refer to the differing expertise ofstaff and trustees, none implied that the professionals had usurped theboard’s responsibilities. Nor did they refer to any educationalresponsibilities. We explore these issues in the next section, onmonitoring student achievement.

Once the respondents had described what they meant by apartnership, we asked them to what extent they were able to workwith their principal and teachers in such a role. Most trustees describeda very high level of partnership, with the average rating being 8.13 ona ten-point scale.2

It appears from these findings that if principals were taking overthe legitimate responsibilities of boards of trustees, as implied in the1996 ERO report, then the trustees in our study were happy with thisstate of affairs.

Trustees’ Role in Monitoring Educational Achievement

We turn now to the trustees’ role in monitoring the educationalachievement of students, and their expertise in doing so. We askedspecifically about literacy because the focus of the intervention was toincrease community involvement in literacy activities. Did the trusteesbelieve that monitoring the literacy achievement of students was anappropriate role for them? We then asked a series of questions on theform in which the trustees wanted achievement to be reported, withparticular emphasis on the use of local or national standards. In thecourse of our work, many principals had told us that it wasinappropriate to report against national standards, because this would

2 A score of 1 indicated ‘I don’t have a partnership…’ and a score of 10 indicated ‘I have a verystrong partnership…’.


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undermine the confidence of the parents and the community (seeChapter Three). We wanted to know if trustees shared this view. Finally,we asked about the information that trustees were given on studentachievement, their skills and understandings to monitor thatachievement, and their confidence in doing so.

Our first three questions assessed the attitudes of trustees towardstheir monitoring role (Table 4.1). There was little doubt in their mindsthat it was their job to know about the quality of literacy programmes,to know about the results of those programmes, and to raise anyconcerns they had with the principal.

The trustees also had firm views on the importance of measuringachievement against a standard or target level, and on the type of

TABLE 4.1

Trustees’ Beliefs about Monitoring Literacy Teaching and Learning (n = 23)

Beliefs Mean Ratings

It is my job to…

Ask the principal about the quality of literacy programmes 6.43

Know how well students are achieving in literacy 6.48

Tell the principal about any concerns I have aboutliteracy teaching 6.09

NOTE: The table shows mean ratings on a seven-point scale, with 1 indicating ‘Strongly disagree’with the statement, 4 indicating ‘neither agree nor disagree’, and 7 indicating ‘Strongly agree’.

TABLE 4.2

Trustees’ Beliefs about Standards of Comparison for LiteracyAchievement (n = 23)Beliefs Mean Ratings

‘Literacy achievement should be measured against a standard’ 6.26

‘The standard of comparison should be local’ 2.74

‘The standard of comparison should be national’ 6.09

NOTE: The table shows mean ratings on a seven-point scale, with 1 indicating ‘Strongly disagree’with the statement, 4 indicating ‘neither agree nor disagree’, and 7 indicating ‘strongly agree’.


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standard they believed to be appropriate (Table 4.2). There was far moresupport for a national standard than for a local standard (i.e.,comparison with similar schools in the two suburbs).

Despite their strong support for national standards, respondentswere aware of the complex issues involved in their use. One chairpersonmade the point that national comparisons would have to be handledcarefully in the context of fierce competition between local schools.

Chair: It’s so big an issue and…we want to moveforward for our children…I don’t know what theanswer is. But there’s got to be something wherewe’re making parents aware…but I don’t knowhow to do it...I’d like my sons – when they gettheir reports, and their percentages and howthey’re going at school – I’d like to see it on anational scale, but we’ve got to think of theschool, the teachers, the competitiveness – it’sso wide.

Others were unequivocal in their support for national standards toevaluate the achievement of students in their school.

Chair: Yeah, because these children have over a numberof years been behind schools in other areas ofNew Zealand, and I strongly believe that they’reas bright as any other kids in the world and…weshouldn’t be making comparisons just amongstourselves, but nationally, and even world-wide,as our kids can achieve as well as any others.

However, three of the trustees disagreed strongly with the conceptof a national standard of comparison for their students. One believedthat both national and local comparisons were unfair because theydisregarded differences in children’s backgrounds.

Researcher: The last question is: ‘Should the standard ofcomparison for our children be the achievementof all New Zealand children of similar age?’

Chair: I don’t like [national standards] because then


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you’re actually being disrespectful of people’sabilities. You know, you’re saying those fromlower socio economic areas should [achieve] ashigh as those from a higher [area], like you’recomparing Mangere with [a high socio-economic suburb]. The ability is not there – youcan’t beat [that fact]. But you can identify it.

Another trustee believed that each school should set its ownstandards, and then see how that compares with the government’sobjectives.

Chair: I think that the standard…should be set basedon individual schools rather than area – that itshould be set by each school. And what theteachers and management team [are] able to passon to their kids. Otherwise…the governmentmight have a standard that they want all of usto achieve, and while it is good to have thatobjective…I think it’s up to the individual schoolto say ‘this is the standard that we can manage’and we slowly build that standard. If we hit themark the government has set, well and good. Ifnot, then we have to sit down and ask somequestions – and so I think it comes back to thewhole aspect of our expectation and adjustingour expectation and being able to improveslowly the literacy level, or whatever level ofeducation that our children are receiving andachieving.

However, if trustees are to monitor curriculum delivery, they needto not only accept this role, but also to have the information and skillsto carry it out. What information on student achievement in literacydid they receive from their staff, and how well did they understand it?We asked the trustees to recall whether they had seen aggregated dataon their students’ achievement, both before and after the school


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prepared its application for funding for its project. These two referencepoints enabled us to judge whether the application process, which hadrequired staff to involve trustees in data-based decisions about literacyneeds, had increased the reported access of trustees to informationabout achievement levels in the school. The results are presented inthe form of a matrix (Table 4.3).

TABLE 4.3

Number of Trustees Reporting Access to Achievement Information (n = 19)

After submission

Before submission Yes No Total

Yes 9 1 10

No 4 5 9

Total 13 6 19

Table 4.3 shows that of the nineteen schools for whom completeinformation was available, ten reported that their board had seen dataon students’ literacy achievement before being asked to present suchdata as part of their application for funding. When respondents wereasked if they had seen data on students’ literacy achievement since thesubmission, four who had not previously received information reportedthat they now did. While it is not possible to identify the cause of thesereported shifts, the focus on achievement data in the submission processmay have been a contributing factor. Five of the respondents, however,indicated that they did not receive any achievement information, evenafter the submission process.

We assessed the trustees’ understanding of the achievement data theyreceived by asking them to explain the graphs and tables on literacyachievement that were part of their school’s funding application. Intheory, the trustees should have had an opportunity to discuss the datawith the staff responsible for preparing the school’s application,particularly as they were its main signatory. In fact, of the twenty trusteeswhose schools had included such data with their submission, seventeenindicated, when shown the data, that they had seen it before.


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All twenty trustees were then asked to interpret the graph or tablesubmitted by their school. As the quality of their interpretation is likelyto be a function of both the quality of the data presentation and theirknowledge and skill in this area, we present these results in the formof a matrix (Table 4.4). An independent person coded the quality ofeach school’s data and of the trustee’s interpretation. Four criteria wereused to judge the quality of data presentation: whether the sample wasrepresentative of the cohort being assessed, and large enough to enableinferences to be drawn about the cohort; whether progress was trackedover time or a comparison made with a second cohort; whether theachievement of the cohort was evaluated against an external standard;and whether the data were presented in a way that was clear to thosenot involved in its preparation. Since the data varied across schools,and some criteria did not apply to every data set, the final rating ofpresentation quality was made holistically by rating those presentationsthat satisfied most criteria as high quality, and those that satisfiedprogressively fewer criteria as moderate and low quality. The overallquality of data presentation was moderate to high, with only twoschools scoring ‘low’ on this dimension.

TABLE 4.4

Trustees’ Interpretation of their School’s Achievement Data by Quality ofData Presentation (n = 16)

Quality of Interpretation

Quality of Presentation Low Medium High Total

Low 2 - - 2

Medium 3 2 1 6

High 7 - 1 8

Total 12 2 2 16

The same criteria were used to judge each trustee’s interpretation oftheir school’s data. Table 4.4 shows that many trustees had considerabledifficulty interpreting the data, even when the table or graph was of


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high quality. In a few cases, the trustees did not attempt aninterpretation; and where they did make such an attempt, their mostcommon difficulty was in understanding the labels used to identifythe components of tables or graphs. For example, some believed thatan axis labelled ‘frequency’ referred to the number of times that wordswere read, or the number of words read, rather than the number ofchildren who achieved at a certain level. In conclusion, the data stronglysuggest that the board chairpersons of most of these schools did nothave the skills needed to make independent data-based judgments aboutthe achievement levels of their students. The final section of this chapterwill discuss whether those skills are needed to carry out the educationalaccountability roles required of trustees.

Finally, after the trustees had explained their school’s achievementdata, we asked them to rate their level of confidence in theirunderstanding of ‘this type of data’, and to explain their rating. On aten-point scale, with 10 being ‘very confident’, the average rating was7.0. The apparent mismatch between the high ratings of some trusteesand the difficulty they had experienced, just minutes before, ininterpreting such data, led us to question whether this rating had beenunderstood as we intended. The first possibility is that trustees werenot rating their ability to understand such data on their own, but theirability to understand it in the social context of discussions withprofessionals and board colleagues. In other words, they were confidentthat they could understand such information if it were explained tothem. This was clearly the case with one chairperson who rated hisconfidence level as 10.

Chair: I’d say ten – but virtually, I understand themvery well. Because actually what we do is weask [the teachers] questions, as well you know,after presenting the reports…and then what I dois really go through: why this? why that? And,you know, how can we get improvements?

Assuming this interpretation is correct, it is still not clear why theconfidence ratings were so high, given that in most cases the data that


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trustees had struggled to explain had been discussed with staff and fellowtrustees. A second possibility is that trustees see their own understandingas reflecting a collective process of explanation and discussion, and hencemay see a low rating of their own confidence as indicating disrespect fortheir colleagues. In other words, our question about individual confidencemay have been mismatched to a collective culture in which such ratingsimply confidence in one’s colleagues. This interpretation seems to explainone chairperson’s response to our question:

Researcher: I’m just asking you the question about howconfident you feel about your understanding ofthe data that is given to you on studentachievement.

Chair: Oh yeah. Seven, I suppose…Researcher: Can you explain to me why you’ve given it a

seven [out of ten]?Chair: It is because the principal gets their reports back

and then we talk. I mean…I’m only just oneperson. I’ve got to work with a team.

Researcher: Yeah. And it sounds like you’ve //Chair: And if I’m confident of my principal and my

board members, I’ve got no problem.

A third possibility was suggested to us by the Maori chairpersonwho assisted with the study. In her view, our respondents rated theirown confidence in relation to the levels they attributed to their fellowtrustees. It followed from their role as board leaders that they weremore confident than many of their colleagues. Even if they did notfully understand the material, their status required them to be confidentand to ask questions of the professionals.

Discussion

This study produced some clear findings on how the trustees perceivedtheir partnership role. First, when they think about the partnershipwith their teachers and principal, they think primarily about the quality


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of the relationships, and on the whole they judge them to be verypositive. Their responses throughout the interview fitted closely withTodd and Higgins’ (1998) concept of partnership as a ‘joint endeavour’.Early in the interview, the trustees spoke of ‘teamwork’ and ‘workingtogether’. Later, when talking about the achievement data, manydescribed their responsibilities in terms of a collective that includedthe professionals.

It is worth noting that a national survey of trustees (Wylie, 1997)found the same emphasis on teamwork and relationships. When askedabout the key ingredients in a good board of trustees, 78 percent of therespondents mentioned teamwork, good communication and goodworking relations. In contrast, only one to two percent mentioned theimportance of good information systems (p.3).

While our respondents gave high priority to relationships, the tasksinvolved were not so prominent. Tasks were weakly defined andexpressed in general terms, such as ‘working together for the children’.When asked specifically, the trustees did accept their responsibility tooversee literacy teaching and learning in their school, although nonehad mentioned this in response to the more open-ended questions. Theyagreed it was their job to know what was happening, to ask questions,and to express any concerns to their principal. However, they did notsee it as their job to exercise their educational accountability roleindependently of assistance from and support for the professionals, andindeed, most were unable to do so.

These findings can be interpreted in various ways. If one were toadopt a ‘power’ perspective, the data could be interpreted as theprofessionals either withholding achievement information fromtrustees, or reporting in obscure and inappropriate ways so that boardmembers gained only limited understanding. Either way, the trusteesremained dependent on the professionals to carry out theirresponsibilities. However, this interpretation does not fit with otherdata. In an earlier survey of school practices in the collection andcollation of student achievement data (Timperley et al., 1999), we foundthat many schools did not have adequate systems for undertaking this


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demanding task. Rather than the problem being the withholding ofinformation, it was the absence of information. In New Zealand at thistime, there was no national requirement or assistance for schools tocollect standardised achievement data.

A much stronger explanation is that the tasks of boards of trusteesare both weakly defined and highly complex. As the Education ReviewOffice (1994) pointed out:

The legislation is not specific about the powers and duties of Boardsof Trustees. Neither does it provide much guidance about thosepowers and duties ascribed to the Board and those of its ChiefExecutive, the school principal. There is an implicit requirement inthe legislation for Boards to define their own role, particularly inrelation to that of the principal. Boards of Trustees define and exercisetheir governance role in relation to their responsibilities, requirementsand relationships, and to the particular way these are manifest ineach individual school. (p.4)

The tasks are complex both in their range and in the high levels ofexpertise required for each one. For example, the tables and graphs weasked board chairpersons to interpret employed a range of measures,including reading levels, stanines, quartiles, and level scores. Tointerpret the data, they would need to know about these measures,and be able to make statistical assumptions about normal curves,standard deviations, trends and group comparisons. Yet this was onlyone of a complex set of tasks, including financial, personnel andproperty management. Research by Wohlstetter, Smyer, and Mohrman(1994) into restructuring organisations shows that devolving power isan insufficient condition for improving organisational performanceunless those empowered are trained for their new decision-makingroles and have the necessary expertise and information to undertakethem. The same principle applies to restructuring governance roles inschools.

The highly devolved management and governance structures in NewZealand education left minimal support for boards to exercise theirnew roles. Although various bodies offer guidance to boards (e.g., the


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State Services Commission, School Trustees Association, and privateconsultants), it is up to each school to identify its own needs and seekthe required expertise, and to develop its own infrastructure. It is hardlysurprising that a follow-up report on Mangere and Otara by theEducation Review Office (1999) indicated that some boards of trusteesstill had problems in understanding and exercising their governanceroles (p.2). We think there are serious questions to be addressed aboutthe reasonableness or appropriateness of a governance model that hassuch high expectations of parental trustees in the absence of many ofthe support systems required to meet them.

We are not suggesting that responsibility for monitoring educationalachievement, or any other core governance function, should be removedfrom boards of trustees. There are sound democratic and educationalreasons for involving parents in core educational tasks. Rather, we aresuggesting that the tasks be more clearly defined, and that systems beput in place to ensure that both principals and trustees develop a clearerunderstanding of their role and the expertise required to undertake it.


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In the Ministry pamphlet to launch the initiatives in Mangere and Otara,the decline in enrolments in local schools was described as follows:

The intermediate and secondary schools in Mangere and Otara showan overall decrease in roll size over the period 1991-1995. The rate ofthis roll decrease is higher than anywhere else in New Zealandirrespective of location or decile rating. At a time when most otherschools in Auckland have been growing significantly, this was aconcern. (Ministry of Education, 1997c)

The problem was particularly acute in Otara, where approximately70 percent of secondary school students bypassed local state schoolsto enrol in schools in neighbouring suburbs. Enrolment levels atprimary and intermediate schools were much more uneven, but therewas concern that the community’s loss of confidence in its high schoolshad already affected enrolments at some of these schools.

The exodus of Otara students to schools outside the suburb createdsignificant problems for individual schools, the local community andthe Ministry of Education. Since school resourcing, including thenumber of staff and the principal’s salary, was tied to enrolmentnumbers, some Otara schools risked a spiral of decline in which cut-backs in curriculum and staffing would further reduce theattractiveness of the school. The response of many Otara schools was

Partnership and Consultation:Deciding Schooling Structures

CHAPTER FIVE


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to intensify efforts to market themselves and recruit students. As aconsequence, inter-school competition was intense, and in some casesrelations between neighbouring principals were strained. Moreover,the attempts of individual schools to solve their own enrolmentproblems made it more difficult to solve the wider problem ofdeveloping a coherent and high quality network of Otara schools.

Without outside intervention to address the community’s concerns,Otara was in danger of losing one of its two high schools. In addition,the public nature of the inter-school squabbles led some Otara familiesto question whether their school leaders had the motivation to solvethe problem in the interest of the whole community.

The aim of this chapter is to describe and evaluate the Ministry ofEducation’s attempts to resolve the problem by involving the localschools and community in the process. In its first consultative approach,the Ministry took full responsibility by setting the procedural rules,and employing two facilitators to consult the affected schools andrecommend a solution. When their compromise solution was rejectedby all those who had been consulted, the Ministry advised the Ministernot to act on the recommendations. A second approach, involvingpartnership with the community rather than consultation, was theninitiated. A forum was created whereby those who had an interest inthe problem could take more responsibility for its resolution, inpartnership with the Ministry. We argue that this second attempt wasmore successful because the structure of the partnership fostered a senseof shared responsibility for the problem, and the process requiredtransparency and mutual accountability. In addition, more commonground was established in the second phase of the partnership, becausethe problem was formulated in terms of educational quality as well asschool viability.


There is increasing recognition in both New Zealand and overseas thatsome educational problems cannot be adequately solved at the levelof the single self-governing or self-managing school. A more collective


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approach is needed if such issues as enrolment policy and school choice,property utilisation and educational transitions are to be addressed inways that serve a wider set of interests than those of the individualschool (Smelt, 1998).

The New Zealand educational system provides few incentives forits self-governing schools to adopt a more collective approach. Thegovernance arrangements established by the Education Act 1989created political constituencies around each school, with each board oftrustees keen to establish a distinctive identity and to demonstrate itsknowledge of, and responsiveness to, the parents of its enrolledstudents. The single-school governance model also established a cultureof autonomy, in which school leaders expect to have control over theirown school and no responsibility (unless they choose to assume it) forthe wider implications of their operations.

How, in such an environment, can one foster a more collectiveapproach? What sort of social arrangement can help schools to worktogether, especially in cases where they perceive their own interests tobe in conflict with those of their neighbours? These questions areimportant for any system that devolves governance and managementto the unit of the individual school.

THE PRESENTING PROBLEM: Two Middle School Applications

The Education Act 1989 allows New Zealand schools, after completingappropriate procedures, to apply to the Minister of Education for achange in the range of student year levels it caters for (known as a ‘changeof class’). The issue that triggered the two problem-solving attemptsanalysed here was the application by two Otara intermediate schools(Years 7–8) to the Minister of Education to become middle schools (Years7–10). The parents of the two schools, who had been extensively consultedby the school leaders, believed that their children would be better servedby being taught in their present intermediate school than in a local highschool. Some of their concerns related to their child’s ‘readiness’ for anyhigh school, while others related to their perceptions of lax disciplineand poor academic standards in the two local high schools.


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In Otara there are seventeen state schools, including two high schools,one middle school, two intermediate schools (the applicants for thechange of class), and twelve primary schools (Years 0–6). The viabilityof the two high schools, already threatened by the loss of students toschools outside the area, had been further put at risk by the retention ofYear 9 and 10 students by the two applicant schools. As a result of aloophole in the Education Act, the two schools were already operatingas de facto middle schools. Rather than risk a high-profile conflict withthe parents and staff of the two schools, the Ministry of Education allowedthe retention to continue while the formal approval processes went ahead.

The applications were highly controversial, and came to symbolisemany of the tensions inherent in New Zealand’s policy of school self-management. On the one hand, the two applicant schools defendedtheir actions by appealing to principles of self-management andresponsiveness to their school community. They argued that theirparents had demonstrated, through surveys, attendance at numerousmeetings and the enrolment of their children, that they fully supporteda change of class. Some of the leaders of neighbouring school, however,were suspicious of their colleagues’ motives, and suggested privatelythat the applications were driven by roll numbers and a desire toincrease staffing and salaries. In fact, one of the applicant principalswas disarmingly frank about the policy incentives. Our field notessummarised the conversation as follows:

[The principal said that] the notion of the professionals co-operating[between schools] was ‘pie in the sky’ because not only theTomorrow’s Schools policy, but also so many aspects of their role asschool leaders, depended on the number of enrolled students. Thesize of the school determines his salary. How much more competitivecan you get than that? And in a community which is at the bottom ofthe barrel, that competition becomes particularly fierce.

The Ministry of Education, on the other hand, did not want asuccession of individual schools applying for a change of class. Nor, inthe case of the current applications, did it want to make decisions thatwould create downstream problems for other schools. It was also


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conscious that demographic projections showed that Otara would needtwo high schools if policies on parental choice were changed to limitthe ability of students to gain entry to high schools in neighbouringsuburbs (Friesen and Benseman, 1998). Sections 154 and 157 of theEducation Act 1989 required the Minister of Education to make change-of-class decisions after a process of consultation with the board oftrustees of the applicant school and with the boards of all state schoolswhose roll was likely to be affected. Ministry of Education officialswere responsible for carrying out this consultation and for making arecommendation to the Minister. Their procedures and processes, whichcould be conducted by professional facilitators, were shaped by recentcourt decisions which had clarified who should be consulted, theinformation that should be made available, and the time frames thatwere considered reasonable. Although the law required all affectedparties to be consulted, the question of how much weight to give theopinions of the applicant school’s immediate community, comparedwith those of other schools and the wider public, remained contentious.Many school leaders questioned the relevance of the wider communityto the decision-making process.

As well as being required to consult widely, the Ministry wanted toembed the decisions on the two intermediate schools in the widercontext of achieving a coherent plan for schooling in Otara. TheMinistry’s goal, therefore, was to make recommendations to theMinister on both the change-of-class applications and, more generally,on options for strengthening education provision in relation to thenumber, types, and sizes of schools in the area. Many communityleaders also favoured this broader formulation, their concern being toincrease confidence in all the local schools so that more of the childrenof Otara would be schooled in the area.

In this chapter, we examine the formulation of these recommenda-tions. We were interested in how the consultation and partnershipphases of the decision-making process were organised, and whetherthat organisation facilitated the development of a structure to whichall were committed and which had as its basis the improvement ofeducational quality.


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Research Approach

The study describes and evaluates two attempts to makerecommendations to the Minister on the structure of schooling in Otara,including on the issue of new middle schools. We obtained data on thefirst consultation phase by analysing official documents and thefacilitators’ records, attending public meetings and interviewing thefacilitators, school leaders and Ministry personnel. School leaders’perspectives on schooling in Otara were also gauged from the records ofa second Ministry official who had independently interviewed the boardchairpersons and principals of all Otara schools and sent a copy of hisnotes to one of the professional facilitators.

Our data on the second partnership phase was gained by analysingofficial documents, and attending the meetings of stakeholders fromwhich the Otara Boards Forum emerged, and then the twenty meetingsof the Forum itself. Records of the meetings included the agenda,minutes, and the researchers’ field notes; for about half the meetings,these were supplemented by transcriptions of the tape-recordedproceedings. Twelve members of the Forum were also interviewedindividually. The open-ended questions focused on their experienceof the Forum and how it changed over time; how they perceived therole of the Ministry; their opinion on the exclusion of the principals;the impact of the Forum on them as chairpersons; and the future of theForum. All those who participated in the study provided writtenconsent. Data analysis involved a thorough reading of the transcriptsand field notes, identifying relevant themes, and coding most of thefield notes and interviews to those themes.

The validity of the findings was enhanced by asking those whoparticipated for feedback on the drafts. The Ministry officials who ledthe initiatives, the facilitators of Phases One and Two, a group of Otaraprincipals, and two Forum members have all commented on drafts ofthis chapter.


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Research Findings

The findings of the consultative and partnership phases are presentedin this section, together with an analysis of the conditions that facilitateinter-school problem-solving efforts.

PHASE ONE: A Consultative Approach to Problem Solving

In October 1997, the Ministry of Education appointed two facilitators togather information from the Otara community and formulate a plan forthe effective provision of schooling in the suburb. It also invitednominations from interested community and educational leaders for anAdvisory Group to assist the facilitators. The brief under which theywere appointed set out the Ministry’s requirements for the Otara Plan.It was to reflect community views on the most appropriate structures tomeet the educational needs of the area; to provide an effective Maorieducation option; to provide effectively for Pacific Island students; andto make best use of existing educational resources in the area. Thefacilitators were charged with consulting local schools and a range ofsector groups and communities, and with delivering a report within sixmonths of their appointment.

In sixteen separate meetings with principals and board members, thefacilitators listened to the strategic plans of individual schools, to theirviews on what was important to local parents, to their evaluations of thelocal high schools (which, with one exception, were negative), and tosome of the conditions they thought should be met by the proposedOtara Plan. In meetings with board members and principals of the twohigh schools, the facilitators sought their opinions on the two middle-school applications, their understanding of the reasons for their ownfalling roll, and their plans for the future. Three public meetings werealso held, each of which attracted fewer than twenty people. While thefacilitators learned the views of their informants, they did not engagethem further by exploring their implications for other schools, or disclosetheir own opinions. In other words, they did not challenge participantsto consider the wider implications of their views. The structure of thisconsultation process is summarised in Figure 5.1.


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FIGURE 5.1

A consultative approach to problem solving

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On the question of middle schools, the facilitators recommended acompromise, suggesting that the Minister approve Year 9 but not Year10 teaching at both intermediate schools. In addition, they suggestedthat two ‘clusters’ of neighbouring schools be created by combiningtheir boards of trustees, so that costs, student transitions and strategicplanning could be better managed and co-ordinated. The Ministry’sprocesses required that a second round of consultation be conductedwith affected partners after the release of a draft report. The submissionson the draft indicated that it was rejected by every group thatresponded. The recommendations were clearly seen as reflecting theviews of the facilitators rather than those of the stakeholders. The OtaraPrincipals’ Association wrote to the Minister saying that it did notsupport the report as a package, and that:

There is extreme opposition to the proposed concept of combinedBoards of Trustees – individual school communities would notnecessarily be represented and could well end up with no input intothe way their local school is governed. Where this issue has beendiscussed with current Boards of Trustees members, the feeling hasbeen one of dismay that a ‘Super Board’ would become responsiblefor ‘their’ school.

Reporting to the Ministry on the negative reaction to the draft, thenew facilitator summarised his round of post-report consultations asfollows: ‘[There was] very little indication that people were preparedto put the overall needs of Otara before the individual needs of theirparticular school. Most looked at the recommendations in terms of howthey would affect their school.’ The negative reaction was inevitable,because the stakeholders had borne no responsibility for the area-wideproblem the facilitators were charged with resolving. That responsibilityhad been borne by the Ministry, through the facilitators. The problemcould not be dropped, however. The middle-school applications werebecoming a political embarrassment; certainty was needed for theaffected schools and their communities; and the law required that thedecision be made through a process of consultation with all affectedparties.


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PHASE TWO: A Partnership Approach to Problem Solving

The second attempt to resolve the problem began with another seriesof meetings of stakeholders, for which the Ministry of Educationemployed a professional facilitator. A subgroup was formed to developa decision-making process, and at one of its meetings the boardchairperson of a local school expressed his passion for the localcommunity and its capacity to make decisions about its owneducational future. The researchers recorded his plea as follows:

Let’s fix our problems ourselves. It’s time for us to grab the problemby the horns. I believe we have the ability to fix it for ourselves. Ithasn’t worked, what the Ministry has done. They don’t know us,those outsiders’; it’s time for us to do it.

A high school principal picked up on his message, asking whether itwould be possible to have the community make the decision. Thesubgroup began to brainstorm the structures and processes throughwhich the board chairpersons, as representatives of the localcommunity, could take responsibility for the decision in a way thatserved the whole community. Some members were concerned aboutthe potential conflict between each chairperson’s interests in the single-school community they were elected to represent, and the interests ofthe wider Otara community. We summarised the discussion as follows:

The group then spent quite a long time discussing whether or not theBoard chairpersons would be in a conflict of interest position. In comingtogether, they might come up with a decision that was counter to whattheir own school had wanted. And in thrashing that through, [acommunity leader] explained that part of the reasoning behind havingall 18 or so board chairpersons in the Otara area involved was thatthere were 13 primary schools who didn’t have a vested interest, tothe extent that the middle schools and the colleges did. Many of thoseboard chairpersons would have children who had gone out of the areaas well, so they could talk about why they had done that.

By the end of the meeting, the subgroup had decided to recommendto the full group of stakeholders that the elected chairpersons of the


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boards of trustees of all local schools be brought together in an OtaraBoards Forum to formulate a recommendation to the Minister. It wantedthe Forum to have a secretariat chosen by its members and funded bythe Ministry of Education, whose role would be to advise the Forumwhen invited to do so. At this stage, the plan was for the boardchairpersons to take sole responsibility for formulating a plan forschooling in Otara. They did not want partnership with the Ministrybecause they saw its earlier efforts as having disempowered thecommunity, and they believed the Ministry was likely to fail again.

The subgroup’s recommendations were further refined at a fullmeeting of the stakeholders, where considerable time was spentdebating the Ministry’s role in the Forum. The Ministry officials presentexplained that they should not be excluded from the Forum becausethey were required to represent the Crown’s interests by informingthe group of its legal and financial obligations. The sooner these wereknown to the Forum, the sooner its members could take them intoaccount in their deliberations. The meeting then decided thatmembership of the Forum should not be open to Ministry staff, butthat the Forum should work in partnership with the Ministry in makingthe decision.

The Forum was officially recognised in a contractual agreement withthe Ministry which required it to provide a report on appropriatestructures for schooling in Otara, including a recommendation on thetwo middle-school applications. (The structural arrangements for thePhase Two process are summarised in Figure 5.2.) As in Phase One,the recommendations were to be acceptable to the community; but inaddition, they were to be formulated in the light of an evaluation ofthe quality of Year 9 and 10 provision in the two applicant schools, inthe two high schools, and in the existing middle school. Ministryofficials had advised the Minister to include this additional requirementafter concern had been expressed that the community lackedindependent information on which to base its preferences. Four of thefive principals whose schools would be evaluated objected to therequirement, believing it would cause further unnecessary delay,


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increase inter-school rivalry, and attract more negative publicity to thecommunity. The fifth principal challenged her colleagues to see it asan opportunity to promote the five schools. The Minister’s decision tointroduce the criterion of educational quality marked a change fromprevious applications for a change of class, which had been decidedalmost entirely on the basis of parental preferences. This additionalcriterion was essential to promoting the task of improving the qualityof education in Otara.

In the following ten months, the Forum met about twenty times tolearn about and debate the issues relevant to its recommendations.One of the Ministry’s representatives attended all the meetings, andalso met with the chairperson and his deputy between meetings. Theofficial’s role was to advise the Forum and to ensure that it met itscontractual obligation to report back regularly to its constituentboards, consult with its school communities, and complete its reporton time. Invited speakers briefed the Forum on local demographicprojections, school achievement levels, and the types of schoolingthat were being advocated as suitable for the area. The principals ofthe two local high schools and the two intermediate schools applyingfor middle-school status also addressed the Forum. Each boardchairperson consulted with their own school community and reportedback to the Forum, and notices were placed in local newspapers aboutthe Forum’s work and how the public could have its say. The Forumalso made a detailed study of the five Education Review Office reportson the quality of schooling for Year 9 and 10 students in the twointermediate schools applying for middle-school status, theestablished middle school and the two high schools. While the reportson the existing middle school and two high schools were mostlypositive, the reports on the two applicant schools expressed significantconcerns about the quality of school management and curriculumdelivery to Year 9 and 10 students. The report on one applicant schoolincluded the following conclusions:

…current behaviour and curriculum management practices limit therealization of students’ social and academic potential. In addition to


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these matters, the board must also address major student safety andpersonnel management issues. It is unlikely that the board will beable to successfully address these concerns without expert assistance.

The report on the second applicant school concluded: ‘Althoughthere has been improvement in the quality of curriculum management,the overall quality of learning programmes and their delivery tostudents is variable.’

A professional facilitator appointed by the Ministry and the Forumthen designed a process to help the Forum reach its own decisions onthe middle-school applications. The preference, by a considerablemajority, was to turn down both applications. Each chairperson wasthen charged with putting the same questions before their own boardand reporting the vote in writing back to the Forum. The majority ofboards voted against the two middle-school applications, and thesevotes were recorded in the Forum’s final report. The report waspresented jointly to the Minister of Education by the partners in therecommendation: the chair and deputy chair of the Otara Boards Forum,and officials of the Ministry of Education. To those present, thecomposition of this delegation symbolised the developing partnershipbetween the Ministry and the Otara community, and the degree of localsupport for, and ownership of, the recommendations. Some weeks later,the Minister announced his decision to decline both middle-schoolapplications.

The transparency of the decision-making process, and the intenseinvolvement of local community leaders, meant that the schools andtheir communities knew how and why the decision had been made,accepted it, and started to work together more formally to improvequality and confidence in Otara schools. For example, both applicantschools removed the signage that declared them to be middle schools,and began to work with neighbouring schools to create higher qualityprogrammes and better transitions between the schools. Thepartnership process had set a precedent for problem-solving acrossschool communities, and established a structure and mechanismsthrough which further collaborative activity could be channelled.


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Conditions that Facilitate the Task of Inter-schoolProblem Solving

A comparison of the consultation and partnership phases providesvaluable insights into the conditions that are more likely to facilitatethe task of developing a plan for local schooling that meets governmentrequirements and is accepted by local communities. In the followingthree sections we explore these conditions in terms of structure, process,and problem formulation.

Structural Conditions

In the consultation phase, there was a lack of coherence between theproblem and the structure of the problem-solving process. If a problemis to become the responsibility of the community, rather than of theMinistry or just one school, then structures are needed that enablestakeholders to reach across school boundaries to share theirperspectives on the problem and to discuss how these might be takeninto account. The school-by-school interviews conducted by theMinistry facilitators (see Figure 5.1) provided no opportunities for thisto happen, because the interested parties were interacting with thefacilitators and not with each other. This arrangement reinforced ratherthan moderated the interests of individual schools. The collectiveinterest was the sole responsibility of the Ministry and its consultants.

In contrast, the partnership phase brought together all parties withan interest in the problem (see Figure 5.2). The Otara Boards Forumwas a concrete representation of the hitherto abstract idea that therewere communities of interest wider than the individual self-governingschool. The Ministry partner was in the position of guiding and advisingits community partner, rather than making decisions on its behalf.

The structure provided new opportunities for interaction betweenschool communities, which had significant implications for the flowof information. In the consultation phase, the only people who hadaccess to all the information generated were the facilitators. In thepartnership phase, by contrast, the information flowed into the Forumfrom the Ministry, individual boards and public meetings, and flowed


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from the Forum to these same groups. It is true that in Phase One thisinformation could have been mediated to the various groups by thefacilitators, but even had they done so, their third-hand reports wouldnot have been seen as trustworthy, nor been as influential, as directengagement between the stakeholders.

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 also show the changed role of the Ministry ofEducation. In the consultation phase the Ministry appointed the twofacilitators, to whom it delegated responsibility for the consultationprocess. The Ministry then kept its distance, with the facilitators reportingback to it through an Advisory Group. Paradoxically, this meant that theMinistry was remote from the problem-solving process, and thereforehad limited opportunities to learn about the problem, yet retained fullresponsibility for solving it. In Phase Two, the Ministry engaged moredirectly in the process, and shared responsibility for solving the problemby tackling it in partnership with the Forum. The Ministry wasresponsible for ensuring that the whole process and the finalrecommendations met the legal requirements, and the board chairpersonstook responsibility for consulting their own board members and thewider public. The two partners kept in very close contact.

Between the two phases there was also a substantial change in therole of school principals. In the first phase, the facilitators usually metwith the principal and one or two board members. It was widelyacknowledged that this arrangement allowed principals to stronglyadvocate the interests of their schools, and that it was difficult for laytrustees to advocate a wider community perspective. In the secondphase, the subgroup (which included two principals) recommendedthat principals be excluded from formal membership of the proposedOtara Boards Forum. In doing so, the subgroup indicated its desire togive more power to those it believed had a stronger incentive to pursuewider community interests.

One could argue that this exclusion did not foster an inter-schoolapproach, because the hearts and minds of local principals would needto be won if real progress was to be made on an area-wide strategy.While a more inclusive approach is preferable in principle, granting


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formal membership to school leaders would have achievedinclusiveness at the cost of disempowering community leaders. Theboard chairpersons, many of whom were intimidated by the formalpolicies and procedures of school governance, needed space to developtheir confidence and a collective identity, and to learn more about theissues, before engaging with principals who were far moreknowledgeable and articulate about educational matters (Bishop, 1992).If the principals had been full members of the Forum it is likely theywould have dominated the proceedings, as some did when thefacilitators in Phase One held meetings with principals and trustees ofindividual schools.

The dilemma between the need for inclusion and the risk ofdomination was resolved by inviting principals to attend Forummeetings when its members felt they were sufficiently well informedto engage with what was discussed. We checked the impact of theprincipals’ presence on group dynamics by asking the chairpersons tocompare Forum meetings that were attended by principals with thosethat were not. While they all agreed it was desirable not to have theprincipals present at the early meetings, one described it as a matter oftiming.

Researcher: When there were two or three meetings that theprofessionals came to, did that change thedynamic?

Chairperson: I don’t think it really changed it, because at thattime, we were up with the play of things. If theyhad come in really at the beginning, I think Iwould have been lost. I think a lot of us wouldhave been lost because we had to go that far tofind out exactly where we were and what it allmeant.

Another chairperson expressed concern that the principals wereexcluded for too long.

Chairperson: I actually thought it was a really, really good ideato begin with, but in hindsight, I think we should


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have brought the principals and the staff in alittle bit earlier.

Researcher: Because?Chairperson: I would have liked to have seen them brought

in. I would like to have heard their opinions. Notgiven them a vote, but I think we needed toknow exactly what was going on, even in ourown schools, and we needed to know from ateacher’s perspective where they were at. Weneeded to be able to trust the teachers and weneeded to let them know what we were doingand why we were there...

Researcher: And when the principals did join you for aboutthree meetings towards the end, what happenedthen? Were those meetings different?

Chairperson: Yes, they were different. I think a lot of boardmembers, including myself, didn’t perhaps openup to some questions that were put forward…Ifound [at] the first meeting there was twoprincipals that basically took the floor and I wasquite disappointed in them. I thought they weremore professional than that but obviously theyweren’t. I don’t think that we got an-across-the-board opinion from all the principals. I think ifwe do a project like this again in the Forum, I’dbe strongly asking that we have moreinvolvement with the staff.

While the principals were excluded from membership, they were stillable to influence the process by making submissions to the Forummeetings in person, and being present when their own board voted onthe final recommendations.

In summary, the structures that facilitated the task involved creatingconditions that required the key stakeholders to interact, selectingpeople who could set aside narrow school interests, and motivating


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those people to act as a community of interest by giving themsubstantial responsibility for finding a solution that was, as far aspossible, acceptable to all.

Process Conditions

The structural differences between the two phases meant that differentqualities of interaction emerged. These differences had importantimplications for the quality of the solution. The face-to-face interactionof the partnership phase brought greater mutual accountability, andmore integration both among the Forum members and between theForum and the Ministry officials.

In the consultation phase, participants could express their viewsconfidentially and with impunity to third-party facilitators. It was overto the facilitators to factor in the politics of inter-school competition andto determine the accuracy and completeness of the views expressed.When a participant spoke about neighbouring schools, for example, therewas no one from those schools in the room who could, through theirvery presence, if not their questions, hold the speaker accountable fortheir views. In the Forum, by contrast, the presence of representatives ofall the schools and the Ministry meant that speakers were accountablefor the accuracy and implications of their views to those who weredirectly affected by them. We know from accountability theory that suchconditions provide incentives to be thoughtful, accurate and respectfulof others (Tetlock, 1985). Those attending were much more likely to learnunder these conditions about errors of fact, about the difference betweenreputation and reality, about the complexity of the issues, and about theaccuracy of their assumptions.

If common ground was to be created among Forum members andbetween the Forum and the Ministry, they needed processes that notonly increased the accuracy of opinions but also revealed how theymight be integrated (Robinson, 1998). In the consultation phase, theabsence of a collective structure meant that the only people who hadto consider the collective implications of individual submissions werethe Ministry officials and the facilitators as their agents. Since the


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facilitators acted as conduits for the views of others, and the tensionsbetween those views had not been addressed during their variousmeetings, they and the Ministry officials bore sole responsibility forattempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. Here is how one facilitatordescribed the difficulty of the task:

There was very little choice…And it was really difficult to find someway of compromising, and in the end, the recommendations we madewere like a middle ground for all the stakeholders. And when we wentthrough our notes again, it was like, none of those recommendationscame from, well, very few of the recommendations came from thediscussions that we had. It was all much like taking into account whateverybody had said, and using a bit of sense to try and work out whatwas going to be the most sensible thing.

Problem Formulation and Task Requirements

Finally, the way in which the task or problem is formulated has an impacton whether or not the solution meets all of the task requirements. In theconsultation phase, the Ministry gave the facilitators a brief thatformulated the problem in entirely structural terms. In the partnershipphase, the Ministry added an additional constraint – decisions were tobe made about school structures, following an evaluation of the qualityof Year 9 and 10 education across the five competing providers. TheMinistry then worked with Forum members to develop a process thatprovided them with the necessary information. Since educational qualitywas valued by all the participants, this requirement provided atouchstone against which differences among them could be assessed(Walker, 1991). If they disagreed on the middle-school applications, theircompeting views could be evaluated against something they held incommon, namely their desire to improve the quality of schooling in Otara.

Moreover, all of the Forum members and Ministry officials had accessto independent information (in the Education Review Office reports),against which they could assess the alternatives. Much of theinformation previously available on the quality of education in variouslocal schools had been anecdotal, unsystematic, and provided byprofessionals in the schools themselves, who had a direct interest in


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the outcome of any parental decisions. While the independentinformation was still questioned by some Forum members, especiallythose whose schools had received negative reports, it gave participantsa way of checking the anecdotal and school-generated information onwhich school reputations had previously been based.

The educational constraint included in the second brief providedForum members with a fair and transparent basis for challenging theexpressed preferences of parents and professionals. The notion ofserving a community of parents by doing what they preferred had beenshown to be a problem because what the community preferred andwhat was of educational value were not one and the same. One Forummember described how she challenged some of the parents at her schoolabout the middle-school application.

When I went back to the school, there were difficulties, because,remember, these parents are coming from [the view that] ‘Hey, we’regoing to save money [by staying at the intermediate school] and it’sclose to home – it was just across the road from us and the kids cango together.’ But then I said to them, ‘Well look, I know where you’recoming from. I’m there myself, but what’s the point of getting yourkids together if they’re not learning’, and that was the only messagethat I was trying to emphasise for them. The most important part isfor kids to achieve better than what they’re getting now, and I knowthere was a lot of abuse and all that, but I said, ‘No, it’s the best foryour kids’. I said, ‘Hands up all the parents that want your kids todo better than what they are now’, and they all put their hands up,and I said, ‘Well, you need to take the risk to get there’...and I said,‘Look, I have to go in and find out for myself and that is your mistakebecause you can’t rely on us to go there and investigate the school.You have to go in yourself, ask questions and see for yourself andthen decide from there.’ So we had ups and downs and at the end wevoted that we want to go with the Forum’s recommendation [todecline the application].

The unquestioning acceptance of professionals’ preferences andreports was also seen as a problem by the Education Review Office,whose reports on both applicant schools made several references to


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the difference between principals’ accounts of their schools and thepractices that had actually been observed. For example, one reportstated: ‘The principal has a strongly held vision for an integratedcurriculum. However, this is not shared by all Year 9 and 10 staff [and]nor is it evident in classroom planning and practice.’ The report on theother applicant school noted: ‘Although the principal is reported tohave said that all children are on individual learning programmes, thereis no evidence to support this. Teacher planning does not includedifferentiated learning activities to meet individual student learningneeds.’

The provision of independent information challenged theassumption that educational quality in Otara could be enhanced byaccepting the unexamined preferences of educational or communityleaders. By recognising the need for independent information, spacewas created for a much more critical and transparent assessment ofthe educational implications of competing claims about how best toserve the Year 9 and 10 students of Otara.

Discussion

The partnership between the Forum and the Ministry facilitated thetask of developing a schooling structure to which all were committedand which had as its basis the improvement of educational quality inOtara. The Ministry’s initial efforts to make the decision on behalf ofthe community had failed. The constituent organisations kept theirdistance, focused on how to influence the facilitators, avoided learningabout the wider implications of their preferences, and placedresponsibility for solving the problem on the consultants. On the otherhand, it is unlikely that the Forum would have carried out the task aswell as it did if it had acted on its own. Its partnership with the Ministrymeant that Forum members were guided through the legalities, givenindependent information on educational quality, and provided withthe resources they needed to establish an appropriate decision-makingprocess.

This case suggests some of the conditions that enable partnerships


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to tackle problems that impact on many different interest groups. First,the partnership was structured in a way that allowed direct or indirectparticipation by all the affected partners. The Forum meetings broughtboard chairpersons together so that they could find out at first handhow their own school’s interests affected those of their neighbours.They learned more about the Ministry’s legal, political, financial andeducational obligations, and how these constrained the decision-making process. The parents and teachers of each local school learnedthrough their Forum representative how their own school’s interestswere linked to the interests of neighbouring schools.

Second, the partnership process motivated the participants to take awider perspective than their own self-interest and to work on theproblem in partnership with other stakeholders. Such motivation wasdeveloped by giving the partners the responsibility for formulating asolution that was, as far as possible, acceptable to all the constituents.When the problem-solving process was the responsibility of consultantsand a distant Ministry, the conditions that shaped the solution wereonly partially known to the people consulted. Such a knowledge gapinvites speculation and rumour about the reasons for therecommendations. When all the relevant stakeholders work togetherto formulate the solutions, they know how the decisions were reachedand are in a position to defend them. It is that knowledge that producesownership and commitment (Weick, 1995).

Third, the pursuit of collective interests requires critical inquiry intothe validity of claims about individual interests, so that solutions areshaped on the basis of good information about those interests and theirreciprocal implications (Argyris and Schon, 1996). The independentreports on the quality of Year 9 and 10 provision across the fiveproviders enabled Forum members to critically evaluate the applicants’claims and gave them defensible grounds for questioning theirpreferences. Without such public information, the burden of criticalinquiry is thrust back on individuals, who must generate both thegrounds to challenge the self-proclaimed interests of others, and thecourage to do so.


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From the Ministry’s perspective, the Forum was an untested andhigh-risk partner. The Forum initially rejected the idea of partnershipwith the Ministry, and wanted to work alone. The structures andprocesses that were put in place, however, ensured that the resultingdecision not only promoted learning about the task of developingschooling structures likely to enhance educational quality in Otara,but also increased the levels of trust and mutual respect.


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Ideal transition arrangements between early childhood education (ECE)centres and schools are frequently described by practitioners andresearchers in terms of a partnership between families, the primaryschool and the community’s ECE services (Mangione and Speth, 1998;Pianta, Cox, Taylor, and Early, 1999). Pianta et al. (1999), for example,advocate that transition arrangements reach out to families by creatinglinkages ahead of time between home, preschool and school. In theirsurvey of teachers of children in their first year of school in the UnitedStates, over 90 percent of respondents believed it was desirable forteachers to talk to parents and have an ‘open house’ before and afterschool, read written records from the child’s pre-school years, and sendparents letters and fliers.

Researchers’ advocacy for greater collaboration over the transitionto school is based on their changing understanding of the socialinfluences on children’s learning and development. As the focus ofdevelopmental theory has shifted from identifying maturationaldeterminants to including the influence of the social environment, thefocus of transition has shifted to creating linkages and continuitybetween the different social environments that children experience(McNaughton, 1995; Skinner, Bryant, Coffman, and Campbell, 1998).

The success or otherwise of the transition to school can have a long-

CHAPTER SIX

A Partnership with an Unclear Task:Transitioning Children from EarlyChildhood Education to Schools


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term impact on students’ grades and retention in their college education(Entwisle and Alexander, 1989; Pianta and Walsh, 1998; Ramey andRamely, 1998). Transition is a point of particular vulnerability forchildren from low socio-economic areas (Catalano and Hawkins, 1996;Felner et al., 1993) and so is especially significant for the children inthe studies reported in this book. For these students, a successfuladaptation during the transition to school is strongly mediated by theability of educational contexts to meet the learning needs of individualstudents (Eccles et al., 1993), and to create linkages and continuitybetween the children’s learning environments (O’Brien, 1991).

The principle of continuity is based on socio-cultural ideas aboutlearning (McNaughton, 1995). Educational transitions createdevelopmental transitions (Bronfenbrenner, 1992), and representmarked shifts in children’s relationships with their social environment(Miller, Brehm, and Whitehouse, 1998). The transition from earlychildhood to school typically involves a change in instructional contentand practice as the focus shifts from development to more structuredactivities and formal instruction (Pratt, 1985). Teachers in each settingselect, arrange, and deploy activities that reflect the socialisationpractices valued by that institution. In turn, children’s knowledge andlearning strategies become situated in that setting. If the new setting isvery different from the one in which knowledge has been acquired,the children may not recognise the relevance of their previouslyacquired expertise. They are more likely to perceive its relevance ifthere is sufficient similarity between the two settings for children tounderstand how the knowledge and skills developed in one can beapplied in the other. ‘The idea of matching across settings involvessharing understandings about activities and learning and teachingacross the two settings’ (McNaughton, 1998, p.35).

The concepts of continuity and match are complex, however. Adegree of discontinuity is inevitable, and may be desirable if it providesthe impetus for developmental change. Too great a discontinuity, onthe other hand, may move some children onto the trajectory of schoolfailure (Skinner et al., 1998). Adding to this complexity is the lack of


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specific data in the research literature about the critical dimensions ofcontinuity that allow children to apply their learning across settings.The literature has little to offer, as yet, beyond identifying the theoreticalmerits of the concept (McNaughton, 1998) and the difficulties inachieving it (Kagan and Neuman, 1998). Given this situation, the taskof optimising children’s development and learning across the twosettings is probably best achieved if teachers in both settings offercomplementary activities across them, as part of their professional roles(McNaughton, 1995).

According to our definition of partnership (see Chapter One), if thoseresponsible for the transition were to work in partnership, then eachpartner would accept some responsibility for developing an effectivetransition arrangement, and establish processes for working together(the relationship) in ways that create linkages and continuity betweenthe different environments that children experience (the task). Centralto this proposition is that the partners take responsibility for developinga working relationship that is focused on achieving transitionarrangements endorsed by all partners. If ECE centres, for example,perceive their responsibility as being to educate children up to fiveyears of age, and schools perceive their task as being to educate thembeyond five years, then neither is taking responsibility for the transitionand there is little point in speaking of partnership.

In this study we sought to answer the following research questions.How did the teachers conceptualise their responsibilities for developingan effective transition? How did they define their relationship withthe teachers from the other sector? In what ways did their definitionsof responsibilities and relationships influence the development oflinkages and continuity for the children who crossed between theirdifferent educational environments?


In New Zealand, the ECE sector caters for children up to five yearswith formal schooling beginning for nearly all children on their fifthbirthday. A nationally implemented but non-mandatory curriculum


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reflects the recognition that early childhood provision is educational.The curriculum establishes pedagogical practices specific to this sector,and reflects a constructivist and holistic view of early developmentand the learning needs of children before formal schooling.

ECE centres are typically established by community groups andreceive government funding if they meet health and safety requirementsand offer programmes consistent with the early childhood curriculum.Attendance is voluntary, and parents are frequently asked tosupplement government funding with a donation. As a result of theircommunity origins, most centres are sited separately from schools andtheir diversity reflects community preferences. The ECE centres in thisstudy, for example, included day-care centres, pre-schools, playgroups,kindergartens,1 and language ‘nests’ in which the medium ofinstruction is the children’s first language rather than English. Theselanguages included Maori, Samoan, Tongan and Niuean. This diversitymeans that any one school may be receiving children from a variety ofECE institutions.

The School and Early Childhood Sample

The survey was conducted six months after an initiative was announcedto improve the links between ECE centres and schools in Mangere andOtara. The twenty schools and 27 ECE centres participating in the studywere selected on the basis that they had agreed to be involved in theinitiative. All the schools involved in the initiative took part in theresearch. The ECE centres were nominated by the schools as being thecentres most of their children had transitioned from. All the centresapproached by the research team agreed to take part in the study. Thesampling strategy enabled us to match the interview responses in theschools with those in the ECE centres to which they referred.

The final sample reflected the diversity of ECE provision in the twodistricts. It comprised eight kindergartens, ten language nests offeringfour different languages (Maori, Samoan, Tongan and Niuean) and nineothers who variously described themselves as pre-schools, day-care

1 In New Zealand, kindergartens are part of the ECE sector and cater for children aged 3-5 years.


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centres, family service centres and playgroups. On average, 47 childrenwere enrolled in each centre, with about half this number being betweenthe ages of four and five. All centres had one large room catering forchildren aged three to five, and held most of their sessions in this room.Some had smaller rooms to which they withdrew their four-year-oldchildren for periods of 30 to 60 minutes for more formal instructionduring the day.

The Participants

In each school and early childhood centre we interviewed the personresponsible for implementing the initiative, and invariably this personwas responsible for the transition. In schools, this person was usuallya senior teacher who in many cases was the Year 1 teacher. If not, theYear 1 teacher was included in the interview, with their responses beingtreated as representing the school’s view. In the early childhood centrethe person we interviewed was typically the centre manager.

The Interview

The interview was semi-structured with a single set of questions forall interviewees. Follow-up questions were used to probe the answers,where appropriate, to gain a deeper understanding of the interviewee’sbeliefs and practices.

The main interviewer was a Maori/Pacific Island teacher withexperience in both the school and ECE sectors. A second Maoriinterviewer with early childhood experience interviewed some of theECE teachers. One of the researchers trained both of them in interviewprotocols and the meaning of each question, in terms of its theoreticalimplications. The first three interviews were tape-recorded andobserved by one of the researchers, who gave feedback after eachinterview. All subsequent interviews were tape-recorded andtranscribed. Answers that required coding were coded separately byone of the researchers and an independent person. The consistency ofratings between the coders averaged 92 percent. In cases where theydisagreed, they discussed the matter and reached agreement on themost appropriate coding.


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FIGURE 6.1

Transition as a partnership between early childhood centres and schools

The interview questions were designed to probe how the teachersconceptualised the transition, and how this impacted on their transitionpractices. The key constructs on which we based the interview aresummarised in Figure 6.1. Fundamental to our definition of partnershipis that both partners accept some responsibility for the transition andhave a working relationship that is focused on achieving a transitionarrangement endorsed by both partners. Ideally, we anticipated thatteachers from both sectors, through this relationship, would developshared expectations about the transition and express satisfaction withthe transition relationships. Hence the first set of questions asked aboutrelationships and opportunities to develop them through visits anddiscussions; how responsibilities were shared; what each institutiondid to facilitate the transition; and their expectations of the other partnerin this matter.

Partners share responsibility for an effective transition

Shared responsibility is recognised in a working relationshipin which the partners have:

Shared expectationsabout the transition

Knowledge of eachother’s programmes

Shared informationabout individualchildren

Mutual satisfaction with transitionarrangements is achieved betweenthe partners

Settings are sufficientlycomplementary for children torecognise their skills and knowledgein both settings


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Early childhoodteachers have limitedinformation on whichto build effectivetransition practices

FIGURE 6.2

Perceptions of transition arrangements

Expectations in facilitating the transition

Most schools believe that:

• The early childhood educationcentres should prepare children forlearning at school by familiarisingthem with appropriate routines andexpected behaviours

• Schools should (but frequentlydo not) offer pre-enrolment visits

Most early childhood teachersbelieve that:

• They should prepare children byteaching developmentallyappropriate numeracy and literacyskills

• Schools should offeropportunities for children tobecome familiar with appropriateroutines and expected behaviours

High levels of dissatisfaction with the currenttransition arrangements

Little commitment to:

• Learning about each other’s programmes

• Obtaining records of children’s learning

Children may havedifficulty transferringtheir skills andknowledge from onesetting to the other

Primary schoolteachers have limitedinformation on whichto build effectiveinstruction


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The next set of questions focused on the conditions likely to makethe two settings sufficiently complementary to enable the children torecognise their skills and knowledge in both settings. We proposedthat teachers who knew about the programme in the other setting, andabout children’s skills and strategies, would be able to help thosechildren who had the skills but were experiencing difficulties exhibitingthem in the new environment. These questions probed how much therespondents in each sector knew of each other’s programmes, therecords they kept on individual children, and how these records wereshared between the two sectors.

Research Findings

In the following sections, the interview responses are reportedaccording to the constructs identified in Figure 6.1. A summary of themain themes evident in our interviews is presented in Figure 6.2.

Partnership Relationships and Responsibilities

When asked about their relationship with the setting that most of theirchildren transitioned to or from, 76 percent of ECE and 63 percent ofschool respondents rated it as ‘very strong’ or ‘moderate’. Thereappeared to have been many opportunities to develop strongrelationships, because 73 percent of ECE and 79 percent of schoolrespondents said they had visited each other, and only slightly fewersaid they had discussed the transition arrangements (70 percent of ECEand 67 percent of school respondents).

When asked how responsibility for the transition should be shared,100 percent of school and 93 percent of ECE respondents describedtheir preferred arrangement in terms of collaboration or partnershipbetween the school, the ECE centre and the family. As one respondentput it: ‘It should be co-operation and everyone taking an equalresponsibility.’ This result was not unexpected, given that all theparticipants had agreed to be involved in an initiative to strengthenthe links between the two sectors.

Despite this stated preference for collaboration or partnership, only


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26 percent of ECE and 29 percent of school respondents believed thatresponsibility for transition was shared between the two sectors (seeover).

Expectations of Partners

It was clear from the interview responses that the two sectors had verydifferent expectations of how the transition should be facilitated, andthat these differences had led to dissatisfaction with the currentarrangements. Visits and opportunities for discussion had failed toresolve these differences.

Schools’ Expectations of ECE Centres

School respondents were asked what they would like ECE centres todo to facilitate the transition, while ECE respondents were asked whatthey actually did in this area (Table 6.1). Most school respondentsnominated several different tasks, the most frequent category beingestablishing routines, such as following instructions and toileting, andteaching children how to behave (61 percent). The following is a typicalresponse:

TABLE 6.1

Percentage of School and ECE Respondents Who Nominated ParticularTasks for ECE Centres to Facilitate the Transition

Task Category School Respondents ECE Respondents(n = 20) (n = 27)

Establish routines and teach childrenhow to behave 61 32

Develop familiarity with equipment 45 3

Teach children to socialise with others /develop social skills 40 15

Develop literacy / numeracy skills 31 67

Arrange visits 10 45

Develop oral language skills 10 19

Other (e.g., build confidence, familiaritywith school) 10 11


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Senior Teacher: The basics, like having a time when they realisethey have to…

Year 1 Teacher: Sit down.Senior Teacher: How did you know I was going to say that?

Which is a massive, massive thing which seemsso tiny but, you know, like a formal time…

Year 1 Teacher: But when the teacher says ‘Come and sit on themat’, the children know about it.

Senior Teacher: Which is not only for the teacher but also for thechild, because they don’t recognise that theyhave these boundaries that they have to bewithin when they come to school. Becausekindergartens are a little bit freer, as they shouldbe, but as they’re getting older, for [the children]to recognise that there are rules [which] theywould actually have to follow. I think that wouldbe a big part…

Year 1 Teacher: Add to that, things like ‘This is playtime orlunchtime’ and ‘This is the time that you eat this’and ‘You are responsible for this’.

The second most frequently nominated task was developingfamiliarity with equipment, such as paintbrushes (45 percent of schoolrespondents), while the third was teaching children to socialise withothers (40 percent). Developing literacy and numeracy skills was thefourth most frequently mentioned task (31 percent), and was nevermentioned first in a respondent’s list of tasks.

The priorities that the school respondents gave to the various taskswere different from those the ECE respondents said they gave to theiractual activities. The ECE teachers were more likely to describe theiractivities in terms of developing literacy and numeracy skills (67percent). On average, they mentioned five different literacy andnumeracy activities, compared with 2.5 for their school counterparts.It was the category they most frequently mentioned first. One teacherfrom a Maori language nest gave her list as: ‘Teach the alphabet,


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numbers, art activities, writing their name, knowing their whakapapa[ancestral lineage] and karakia [prayers].’

The second most frequently mentioned category was arranging visits(45 percent), a category rarely mentioned by the school respondents.Establishing routines and teaching children how to behave was thethird most frequent category, but unlike their school counterparts, ECEteachers never mentioned this first in their list.

ECE Centres’ Expectations of Schools

When ECE respondents were asked what they would like schools todo to facilitate transition, 48 percent said they wanted opportunitiesfor children to become familiar with school routines and expectedbehaviours through pre-enrolment visits. Most did not know if suchvisits occurred, but 27 percent expressed concern that insufficientopportunities were provided.

When school respondents were asked what they actually did tofacilitate transition, 45 percent said they had arrangements in place forpre-enrolment visits. Some who had not set up such visits believedthem to be unnecessary, as one indicated: ‘No. Nothing. Just acceptkids on enrolment and place them in the class.’ Another said: ‘Childrencome straight into the Year 1 programme. We’ll give them one day toadjust but then they’re expected to fit in with the rest.’

Discussions between teachers from the two sectors had failed toresolve the differences in their expectations, because their prioritieswere so different. As a teacher of Year one students commented, aftervisiting her local ECE centre for the first time:

I think they might be allowed to eat when they want to…[But whenthey get to school] some of them will just get up and wander off themat at all odd times and go to their bag and will want to get somethingout of their bag and eat it. And you’ve got to say, ‘No, that’s notright, you’ve got to wait till the bell rings at school. You’ll know whenit’s playtime and then you’re allowed to have it.’ So for some of themit’s a hard transition…

I find sometimes it’s easier with those children who have not had


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pre-school experience…A lot of those ones seem to settle in better.You know, they can be upset when Mum first goes home and thingslike that, but they get over that. Because of what we saw at the kindy,that the children seem to be allowed more or less to choose whatthey want to do…I think that’s the hardest part for us, because theythink they can do the same at school.

The teacher from the ECE centre in question was well aware that someteachers had negative views of the centre and what it provided forchildren.

I’m quite convinced that there are some of the teachers that think weare a baby-sitting service. I mean, they’ve not said it in as many words.But just some of the reactions I have had from some people.

Satisfaction with Current Transition Arrangements

Despite the fact that nearly all respondents described their preferredarrangement for transition in terms of collaboration or partnership,only 26 percent of school and 29 percent of ECE respondents thoughtthat responsibility for transition was shared between the two sectors(Table 6.2). Most ECE respondents felt that their sector took the mostresponsibility, either alone (44 percent) or in conjunction with families

TABLE 6.2

Current Responsibility for Preparing Children for Transition, as Perceivedby School and ECE Respondents

Perception (%) School Respondents ECE Respondents(n = 20) (n = 27)

Sector taking most responsibility

Schools 25 –

ECE centres 25 44

Responsibility shared with others

Shared between schools and ECEcentres (may include families) 26 29

Shared with families only 24 27


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(27 percent). School respondents, on the other hand, thought thatresponsibility was shared more equally, with only 49 perceiving thatschools took the most responsibility, either alone (25 percent) or inconjunction with families (24 percent). Twenty-five percent of schoolrespondents acknowledged that ECE centres took more responsibilitythan schools did, and believed this to be undesirable.

The discrepancy between their preference for shared responsibilityand their perception of unequal responsibility led to high levels ofdissatisfaction among respondents. The source of that dissatisfactiondiffered between the sectors (Table 6.3). All of the ECE respondentswanted schools and/or parents to take more responsibility. The schoolresponse was more mixed, with 77 percent wanting either ECE centresor parents to take more responsibility, and 22 percent acknowledgingthat the school sector should do more.

We were interested to know whether greater levels of satisfactionwere expressed by those who had rated their relationship with theircounterparts in the other sector as ‘very strong’, or had reported theyhad visited the other sector and discussed transition arrangements.However, there was little correspondence between strength ofrelationship and satisfaction with transition arrangements. Of the fifteenECE respondents who described the relationship as ‘very strong’, only

TABLE 6.3

Sources of Dissatisfaction with Current Transition Arrangements, asPerceived by School and ECE Respondents

Source of Dissatisfaction (%) School Respondents* ECE Respondents*(n = 17) (n = 21)

Group needing to take more responsibility

School 22 34

ECE centre 44 –

Parents 33 51

School and parents – 15

* 3 school and 6 ECE teachers did not answer this question.


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four rated the transition arrangements as satisfactory. Similarly, of thenine school respondents who described the relationship as ‘very strong’,only three expressed satisfaction with transition arrangements. In twocases the school was dissatisfied with its own role, but in the others itwas the role of the ECE centre that was considered unsatisfactory.

We sought an explanation for this finding by probing what ourrespondents meant by ‘a strong relationship’. They defined it moreoften in terms of the frequency of contact than the quality of that contact.For example, school respondents typically rated the relationship as‘very strong’ when the children and staff of the local ECE centreattended special school functions. Relationships defined as ‘verylimited’ were described in terms of occasional visits. Only one schoolrespondent based her rating on the quality of communication, and nonereferred to their knowledge of the other sector’s programmes orchildren. The responses of ECE staff were similar to those of the school.When asked to explain her ‘moderate’ rating, one language nest teachersaid: ‘We visit the school two times a term. The Associate Principal hasvisited us.’ Given this definition, it is not surprising that the relationshipratings were unrelated to expressions of satisfaction with the transitionarrangements.

Similarly, those schools and ECE centres who said they visited eachother and talked about transition arrangements did not necessarilyexpress satisfaction with those arrangements. Of the ECE teachers whosaid they had talked to their local school about transition, three weresatisfied and ten were dissatisfied. Four of the school respondents whohad talked to staff at their local ECE centre about transition weresatisfied and seven were dissatisfied.

Programme Knowledge

We asked our respondents about their knowledge of each other’sprogrammes because such knowledge might help teachers to developactivities that complemented those in the other sector. In both sectors,the average rating for programme knowledge was relatively low(Table 6.4).


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The average ratings of school and ECE respondents who haddescribed their relationships as ‘very strong’ were slightly higher thanthose for their sector as a whole (4.7 for school respondents and 5.5 forECE respondents). With strength of relationship being definedprimarily in terms of frequency of contact, it is not surprising that ithad little impact on programme knowledge. Respondents from oneschool and its contributing ECE centres, who all described theirrelationship as ‘moderate’ and gave average ratings for theirprogramme knowledge, gave the following answers when askedindependently about that knowledge:

Year 1 Teacher: Myself, I don’t know very much. The seniorteacher probably does, but I don’t know whatthey [do].

Senior Teacher: Not a lot. I’ve got a copy of [the early childhoodcurriculum] and I’ve flicked through it.

ECE Teacher: Well, nothing, I’d say. That’s off the top of myhead. I mean, we were trained in humandevelopment up to [age] eight, but I don’t knowany of the curriculum content of it.

Language NestTeacher: Nothing, actually, nothing.

Three school respondents were exceptions to this pattern. Theydescribed how they adjusted their programmes to facilitate thetransition, for example by initially providing a developmentalprogramme that evolved into more formal lessons. Two of these

TABLE 6.4

Schools’ and ECE Centres’ Knowledge of each other’s Programmes

Ratings Schools’ knowledge of ECE ECE centres’ knowledge ofCentre programmes (n = 20) school programmes (n = 27)

Average 4 4.6

Range 1-9 1-10

Note: A ten-point scale was used, with 1 representing ‘No knowledge’ and 10 representing ‘Agreat deal of knowledge’.


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respondents were from schools with ECE facilities on the school site.The respondents from those ECE centres described highly integratedtransition programmes, with common features established in bothsettings. The four-year-old children from one of the centres were‘integrated’ into Year 1 classes for two or three days a week. Parentsfilled out school enrolment forms at the ECE centres, receivingassistance in their own language from staff members.

The schools and ECE centres in this latter group were attempting toestablish transition practices that facilitated children’s learning acrossthe two sectors. They did this by offering complementary activitiesand programmes, with each sector making adjustments to help childrento recognise their skills and knowledge in each setting.

Sharing Information on Individual Children

Information on individual children at the time of transition would allowschool teachers to develop programmes based on each child’s currentskill levels, and to recognise when a child had specific knowledge andskills but was unable to display them in the new setting. For this tohappen, the ECE centre needs to document each child’s progress in someform. All of our ECE respondents said that they did this. Twenty of themkept individual folders with records of formal observations conductedat regular intervals. Others had more informal systems, with portfolioscontaining samples of the child’s artwork. Fourteen of the ECErespondents said that they sent information to the school via the parents,but only three schools said that they had received any such informationfor more than one child. In two of these cases, the ECE centre was in theschool grounds and portfolios of work were sent to the school with thechild. The third school received a checklist of goals the child had achieved,based on the early childhood curriculum.

The three teachers who received such information were very positiveabout its benefits, and usually mentioned the implications for theirown instructional practice. One of them explained: ‘I can just followon with what they’ve already learned, and carry on with their shapes,their alphabet and things like that.’ ECE teachers were similarly


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enthusiastic about the potential for this information to improve thechildren’s learning. In their comments, all except one focused on thisaspect, for example: ‘Teachers are able to gauge where they could fit intheir levels already from pre-enrolment visits - children could getstraight into work when starting [school].’ The remaining commentfocused on how this information might help the children’s confidence.

By contrast, six of the school respondents who did not receive orrequest information thought that such information would serve littlepurpose and might in fact disadvantage the child. For example:‘Sometimes it’s better in a way not to know because a reputation canfollow [a child] and then you have a [self-]fulfilling prophecy goingon.’ These teachers did not realise that lack of information sometimesled to a failure to recognise the children’s skills and knowledge whenthey arrived at school. Although they were not specifically asked aboutthis issue, six of the ECE respondents mentioned it as being a problem.It was a particular concern for language nest teachers, but was notrestricted to them. As one ECE teacher explained:

I mean, we’ve had things come back from the school saying that thesechildren don’t know their colours or they don’t know how to countto such-and-such, and we know full well that they do. But becausethis is an atmosphere that they are used to doing those things in, andmaybe we’re checking that they know those things in a different waythan they would do at school, they maybe are not getting the sameresults.

However, the Year 1 teacher to whom these children transitionedwas unaware of her concerns, and believed that the children had settledin reasonably well. She explained:

Very few of them are still unsettled by the end of a term at school.But that’s not the normal case. Most of them take, oh, two or threeweeks perhaps to settle into school. We try to get them to join in ourprogramme as much as possible. Some of them will come and sit onthe mat and join in right away, [but others] won’t even answer theirname on the roll for a couple of weeks. But that’s just shyness, I think.


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Discussion

The responses to our first two research questions about responsibilitiesand relationships were superficially very positive. Nearly all therespondents described their preferred transition arrangements in termsof partnership and collaboration, and most rated their relationshipswith the other sector as ‘moderate’ or ‘very strong’. Unfortunately, theseconditions were insufficient to create either shared expectations forfacilitating the transition, satisfaction with the transition arrangements,or transition arrangements that optimised children’s learning (seeFigure 6.2).

One of the reasons for this failure to develop mutually acceptablearrangements was the fact that the relationship itself was separatedfrom the purpose of working in partnership. Most of our respondentsdescribed their relationship with the other sector in terms of frequencyof contact. Hence their perceptions of the quality of the relationshipwere independent of their success in achieving transition arrangementsthat were satisfactory or educationally defensible.

The co-ordinator of the initiatives publicly presented the interventionas ‘being about building relationships’, because many of the ECE centresand schools had previously had little or no contact. However, buildingrelationships independently of accomplishing tasks can becounterproductive. Everyone met more often, but without a task focusor a strong educational reason for doing so, they failed to resolve theirfundamental differences in the interests of the transitioning children.

This issue is especially significant for the children who attended theECE centres and schools in our study. The evidence in New Zealand isthat Maori and Pacific nations children from these communities do notreceive educational provisions sufficient to guarantee nationallyexpected rates of progress (McNaughton, Phillips, and MacDondald,2000). This problem is evident in both the conventional markers ofschool literacy at the point of entry to formal schooling, and progressin school literacy once in formal instruction (Literacy Experts Group,1999). Without a deliberate design to make the settings morecomplementary, the transition to school for many Maori and Pacific


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nations children from these communities remains fraught with potentialproblems. Their relative unfamiliarity with the rules and goals ofparticipation, and the ways of using oral and written language requiredin the classroom, makes their participation in classroom activities moredifficult (McNaughton, 1995).

If the adults in the children’s different environments fail to facilitatethe linkages between those environments, the children are left tounderstand them as best as they can. Partnership must mean morethan adults talking and working together. It must also mean talkingand working together about how to achieve a well-defined andfocused task.


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Improving the quality of schooling through partnership is not an easyoption. While various writers have highlighted some of the complexitiesof the relationships that must be managed in any successful partnership,our theory of partnership also demands that progress in formulatingand achieving the partnership task must be considered. Only two ofthe five partnerships we studied – the Otara Boards Forum and thesecond year of partnership between the schools and the Ministry –met this more stringent standard. In the other three cases, theparticipants rated their relationships positively, but those relationshipshad become substitutes for the task of improving the educationalopportunities for children in the early childhood centres and schoolsthat were the focus of this reform initiative.

Given the difficulties of achieving a satisfactory partnership, oneneeds to ask whether partnership is an effective strategy for schoolimprovement. In Chapter Two we briefly outlined two traditionalapproaches to school improvement, and proposed partnership as apossible alternative. The two traditional options were ‘take-over,’ inwhich the state reduces the autonomy of the school and assumes manyof its functions, and ‘hand-over,‘ in which the school identifies its owndevelopment needs and the state provides additional funding to meetthose needs. We also outlined the limitations of both approaches in

CHAPTER SEVEN

Implications of the Studies forEducational Partnerships


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meeting the dual requirements of promoting local ownership whilesimultaneously challenging dysfunctional local practices.

An additional problem with these approaches is the domination ofthe decision-making process by a single player, which reduces theopportunities for learning how to develop an effective solution.Handing over resources to schools under-utilises the contribution ofcentral authorities, while taking over a school ignores the knowledgeof local players and the need for centrally designed initiatives to bemodified by local circumstances. Neither the central authorities northe local players have privileged access to workable and effectivesolutions to problems as complex as school improvement.

Partnership, on the other hand, increases the potential for identifyingand critiquing the assumptions of key stake-holders about the nature ofcurrent educational practices and outcomes, the cause of any difficultiesand what is required for improvement. The inclusion of multiple partnersentails a clash of perspectives, which in turn means greater transactioncosts, but it also provides opportunities to improve the theories of actionthat inform the school improvement effort (Argyris, Putnam, and Smith,1985). Differences in perspective become opportunities for a respectfulbut rigorous test of differing claims so that none are privileged, regardlessof the power of their advocates (Robinson and Walker, 1999).

In this final chapter we address three issues relating to partnershipthat have arisen from our studies. The first concerns the importance ofintegrating the relationship and task dimensions of the partnership sothat one is not sacrificed to the other. The second examines the relatedquestion of whether strong trusting relationships are a prerequisite fora strong focus on the task, and hence whether, in time, all five of ourpartnerships would have made greater progress in achieving their task.In the third issue we return to the role of the state partner in schoolimprovement in New Zealand’s system of self-governing schools.

Relationship Issues

Partners must manage a set of relationships, because being inpartnership inevitably means working with other people in some


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capacities. We suggest that if the relationship is to facilitate theachievement of tasks, it must be structured in a way that promoteslearning, mutual accountability and power-sharing. In the moresuccessful partnerships in our studies, relationship issues wereaddressed and resolved as the partnership developed. None of thepartnerships began with a set of protocols spelling out the relationshipdimensions; and even if they had, the nature of the relationship wouldstill have evolved as the partners learned more about each other andabout the task they wished to tackle together. Shifting realities demandthat opportunities to learn, mutual accountabilities and power-sharingarrangements all evolve along with the task itself.

Even our most successful and clearly structured partnership, theOtara Boards Forum, began with a vision of community responsibilityfor an apparently intractable community problem, rather than with aformal set of protocols. Initially, the Forum rejected the Ministry as apartner because it had failed so publicly in its previous attempts tosolve the problem of appropriate schooling structures for thecommunity. However, as they worked together, their mutual respectincreased, and they became more accountable to each other for theirseparate but complementary roles. The Forum could have beenconstrued as a cynical invitation to parents to fix the deficit-riddensphere of public education (Fine, 1997), or as a Ministry mechanism toachieve community compliance (Vincent and Tomlinson, 1997). Afterall, the Ministry, as the government’s bureaucratic arm, had set therules for school competition that had contributed to the initial problem,had failed to solve it in the consultation exercise, and then asked thecommunity to fix it.

Such a viewpoint is justified when the state’s embrace of localparticipation is motivated by a desire to reduce its own political andfinancial risk. In the case of the Forum, however, the state contributedboth financial and expert resources, and local participation was initiatedby a community that was passionate about improving local schooling,not by a state that was seeking to withdraw from it. The Ministrylearned from its new community partners how its previous consultation


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efforts had disempowered them; in turn, the community learned fromthe Ministry that pursuing its own uninformed preferences would notimprove local schooling. Issues of power, expertise, resourcing andaccountability were worked out in ways that produced a qualitydecision.

In our less successful partnerships, these relationship issues werenot resolved in ways that led to the task being accomplished. Forexample, even though the main focus of the initiatives was building aparent-teacher partnership to improve literacy achievement, teachersunilaterally determined the nature and quality of the informationreported to parents. The result was selective and inaccurate information,which meant that neither partner could hold the other to account forachieving the task. Like members of the Forum, both partners had avision for maximising educational opportunities for their children; butunlike the Forum members, they did not discuss what it would take toachieve such an outcome. Each partner exercised the power availableto it, in ways that failed to promote their shared educational goal.

Similarly, the ECE centres and schools in our study had notdeveloped a relationship that served their shared educationalcommitments. While rating their relationships in positive terms, therespondents had not discussed how to help children transfer theirlearning from the ECE setting to the school setting. The partners haddifferent conceptions of the transition task, and different beliefs abouthow to achieve it. With no explicit discussion of these matters, theenergy they spent on visiting each other’s facilities improved therelationships without improving the transition arrangements. Theproblem was not inequality of power, because neither partner was in aposition to exercise power directly over the other. The school and ECEteachers made independent decisions which they believed were in thebest interests of the children. Critical examination of their respectivebeliefs and expectations was not an inevitable by-product of theimproved relationships between these two groups.

In our introductory chapter, we referred to Todd and Higgins’ (1998)concept of partnership as one of ‘joint endeavour’ rather than equal


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power. They argue that a complex hierarchy of power typically operatesin any partnership, and that insisting on equality does not guaranteesuccess in the task. Our partnership between ECE centres and schoolsillustrates this point. The individual ‘power’ of each partner was notthreatened, although some autonomy would have had to be sacrificedin order to develop transition arrangements that were mutuallysatisfactory. What was more relevant in this context was the failure ofthe partners to develop a sense of ‘joint endeavour’. Each partner wasacting independently, without reference to the beliefs, preferences orpractices of the other. They were able to do so because they couldundertake their primary tasks independently of each other, and thisindependence was not challenged by the intervention team. It was notthe teachers who were disadvantaged by this failure, but thetransitioning children.

Becoming Task Focused

In our five partnership studies, the partners became task-focused todiffering extents. The Otara Boards Forum was task-focused from thebeginning, because the Forum was established for the specific purposeof resolving an urgent issue with schooling structures in the community,and because the first attempt had already failed. The partnershipbetween the schools and the Ministry of Education took about eighteenmonths to develop a focus on the task of school improvement. Duringthe year of our study, the partnership between the ECE centres andschools did not develop beyond ‘meeting together’ to a shared focuson an educational task.

It could be argued that a phase of relationship-building is a precursorto the emergence of a task focus, and that, in time, our relationship-focused partnerships would shift their attention to the substantiveissues. This is a complex area, but our studies suggest that the risks ofdelaying the task focus are as great as, or greater than, the risks oftackling sensitive tasks before sufficient mutual trust has developed.We acknowledge that there are some situations where relationshipsare too strained for the partners to work on a major educational task.


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In that case, improving relationships may become the task, and how toachieve it becomes the joint responsibility of the partners. They maychoose, for example, to work together on a relatively minor or short-term task. As the relationship evolves, so would the significance of thetasks that are tackled. In this scenario, however, the partners remainfocused on a task, but need time to accomplish it. In other situations,for example where the partners are initially strangers, our findingsindicate that the relationship should be motivated by a task focus, withthe task providing non-arbitrary constraints on how the partnership isconducted. Most members of the Otara Boards Forum, for example,did not know one another before the Forum was established. Theyfrequently spoke of the pleasure of meeting the chairpersons of otherboards for the first time. Their lack of familiarity with one another didnot stop them from focusing on the task.

On the whole, our studies suggest that relationships grew strongeras partners became clearer about why they were holding meetings,spending time together, and setting aside their numerous competingpriorities. When partners lacked a purpose, or at least lacked a publiccommitment to a shared purpose, they questioned the rationale fortheir relationship. Widening their networks, co-ordinating and makinglinks with other educational community groups and agencies, aresimply not powerful enough motives for spending time relating withone another. The best way to strengthen educational partnerships isthrough mutual recognition of progress made together on valued tasks.When the task is not made explicit, the relationship itself is threatened.

The Ministry’s evolving relationship with the schools andcommunities described in Chapter Two provides some indication ofwhat was needed to achieve a stronger task focus. A sharedunderstanding of the task was finally established when the Ministryteam outlined its beliefs about the characteristics of a strong school.Once that became the touchstone, all other decisions, such as theresponsibilities of the respective partners, could be made in light oftheir implications for task success. However, the task could serve thisfunction only when the partners learned more about how to formulate


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the task and began to understand what was required to complete it.Where such understandings were not achieved, each partner continuedto make decisions based on their own interpretation of what wasrequired, and to resent the intrusion of the other partner in what theybelieved to be their own affairs.

We suggest that these same conditions needed to apply if the otherpartnerships in our study were to become more task-focused, and thattime alone would not be sufficient to bring about this change. Ifreporting to parents, for example, were to focus on the task of raisingstudent achievement, then parents would need to know the currentachievement of their children in order to grasp the scope of theimprovement required. If parents and teachers were to be partners inthis task, quite specific conversations would need to take place abouthow each might assist the other in closing the gap between currentand desired levels of achievement. It is quite possible for parents andteachers to develop ‘good’ relationships and never hold suchconversations.

Similarly, the ECE and school-based teachers were unable to developa partnership that focused on the transition task, despite an improvedrelationship and greater familiarity with each other’s work settings.As long as the definition of the task was disconnected from beliefsabout the relationship, the partners could feel positive about thatrelationship but negative about the transition arrangements and theother’s role in facilitating them. In our definition of partnership, tasksand relationships cannot be divorced from each other.

The State as a Partner in a Self-governingSystem with Failing Schools

Our studies took place in a system of self-governing schools where thestate has very limited options for intervening in failing schools. It isvital, therefore, that the limited authority of the state is used to bothchallenge and support the schools’ own efforts to monitor and improvethe quality of their programmes. One of the themes that emerged fromour research is how easy it was for other tasks to subvert the attention


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and effort needed to achieve that goal. If state agencies such as theMinistry of Education communicate, either through words or deeds,that the task is to fill empty schools, to win community confidence, toimprove relationships, to increase parent participation or to empowerlocal groups, it risks achieving the task in ways that do not also improvethe quality of education offered to students. Our message is not thatthese are unimportant goals, but that they can too readily be achievedwithout even addressing, let alone improving, educational quality.While these other goals may be desirable in some contexts, they arenot sufficient to ensure or sustain school improvement.

In several chapters we have commented on the weight given by theMinistry of Education to procedural aspects of its partnership role. Bythis, we mean that effort is given to ensuring that financial, legal andbureaucratic requirements are understood and complied with. Whena state agency assumes such a role without adding sufficienteducational value to the partnership, its contribution is too readily seenas a set of bureaucratic intrusions. This distortion is inevitable if thereis insufficient clarity and agreement about the ultimate educationalpurpose of the requirements. Furthermore, without such clarity, it isimpossible to shape the procedures in ways that serve rather thandistract from the educational task.

There are several reasons why we believe that state agencies such asthe Ministry of Education should give more weight to the educationalvalue they can bring to their various partnerships. First, the capacityof individual schools and boards of trustees to continuously improvestudent achievement is dependent on the capacity of the whole system.The greater the systemic capacity, the lighter the burden on individualschools and boards in achieving the task. For example, if schools haveaccess to good assessment resources and accredited advisers in the areasof teaching and assessment, the capacity required in the individualschool to achieve the goal of sustainable improvement in studentachievement is far less than it would be otherwise.

A second and related reason for the state partner to be moreeducationally proactive is the sheer difficulty and scope of the task


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implied by the goal of sustainable improvement in studentachievement. One of the lasting impressions we have gained from thesepartnership studies is the enormity of the learning agenda that the NewZealand government set for each self-governing school. As that agendabecomes more focused on educational quality, educators, researchersand policy-makers will learn more about what is involved in achievingit (Robinson, 2000). Part of that learning involves setting clearereducational priorities so that educators and officials are not constantlydistracted and burdened by a proliferation of poorly targeted initiatives,projects and funding opportunities. Providing clearer policy signalsabout what is important, and databases, accredited advisory servicesand educational and financial resources that are aligned accordingly,would enhance the system’s capacity to achieve sustainableimprovements, and thus be helpful to all of the nation’s self-governingschools. It would be especially helpful to schools in low-income areas,whose teachers have a harder job promoting student achievement thanteachers in schools in higher-income areas. Students in the latter schoolshave more opportunities to learn school-related knowledge at homeas well, whereas students in schools in low-income areas are moredependent on their teachers for access to school-related knowledgeand skills. If the state can bring more educational guidance and adviceto its partnerships with self-governing schools, it will strengthen thepartnership and signal its refusal to either hand over or take overresponsibility for strong locally managed schooling.

A third reason for advocating a more substantive educational rolefor the Ministry of Education is that, by engaging in the educationaltasks with its school partners, the Ministry learns more about how toimprove systemic capacity in ways that support rather than distractfrom the core task. This does not necessarily mean a more hands-onrole for the Ministry in schools. When a school receives additionalfunding, for example, it means replacing an accounting approach thatmonitors expenditure details with an educational approach that focuseson the school’s reasoning and evidence about its current educationalquality, what is necessary to improve it, and how progress will be


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monitored and reported. We recognise that adopting this approach willreveal gaps in the infrastructure required to make it work, butacknowledging such gaps and working together to fill them is part ofwhat it means to be in partnership.

It would be wrong to infer that we are advocating substantial changesto the policy of school self-management. Rather, we are suggesting thatthe burden of self-management be reduced and resources betterdirected to improving educational quality, by having an infrastructurethat is far more proactive, both centrally and locally co-ordinated, andaligned to national educational objectives. In this scenario, the statesignals that it is assuming a partnership responsibility for improvingeducational quality by working alongside schools and communities,not only as a funder and regulator, but also as an educational partner,developing a richer infrastructure to support the effort of local schoolsand communities.


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Education interventions in Mangere and Otara have typically involvedimplementing initiatives which various participants were convincedwould make a difference. Now the focus is on testing whether thoseinitiatives to improve education have actually made a difference tostudent achievement.

This new focus on student achievement has intensified since theresearch presented in this book was completed. Old partnerships havebeen strengthened and new partnerships developed in Mangere andOtara, all with a direct focus on raising student achievement, using adiverse range of development approaches.

In this epilogue, we focus our attention on two clusters of schoolsand their communities who are working in partnership with theMinistry. The Otara Boards Forum and the Mangere Analysis and Useof Student Achievement Data (AUSAD) Management Team aredeveloping effective governance, management and teaching practicesin different ways, but both have the same end goal: significantly higherstudent achievement.

In Otara, the Ministry is continuing to support sixteen schools andtheir communities through the Otara Boards Forum. This initiativebegan with a primary focus on community involvement in decisionsabout the structure of schooling in Otara (see Chapter 5), and is now

By Brian Annan and Terry BatesMinistry of Education Schooling Improvement Co-ordinatorsin Mangere and Otara

Epilogue


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focusing on professional development. The Forum has assumedresponsibility for implementing the AUSAD initiative within Otaraschools. A joint board and professional team with a dedicated co-ordinator has assisted ten Otara schools to begin reviewing theirassessment and reporting practices. When the reviews are completed,the professional staff and parents will participate in an area-widedevelopment programme to improve teaching and reporting practices.

In Mangere, sixteen schools have entered into a partnership withthe Ministry via a professional body, the Mangere AUSAD ManagementTeam (MAMT). This initiative began with school leaders workingtogether, while co-operation between boards of trustees is justbeginning to develop. The Mangere teachers and senior managers arelearning to analyse their teaching and management practices, and tocritique and challenge each other in collegial clusters, such as thosethat have formed in the mainstream, and in the special school and itssatellite classes.

A direct focus on the needs of Maori and Pacific nations students isbeing developed through Hui Rapoi Mo Te Reo Maori and a Pacificbilingual cluster. Hui Rapoi is a cluster of Maori teachers, managersand trustees from three schools and two kura kaupapa, and is supportedby local kaumatua, Tainui elders from the local tribe or iwi, and theMinistry of Education. The Pacific bilingual cluster consists of teachersfrom the Pacific bilingual units in five schools, and is supported byPacific consultants and Ministry officials. Both clusters are developingsystems and processes that aim to improve teaching and learning intangible and measurable ways, and are leading the way in involvingparents in the task of raising student achievement.

Working across the Otara Boards Forum and the Mangere AUSADManagement Team is the initiative known as the Early ChildhoodPrimary Link. This is designed to enhance the links between earlychildhood education centres, primary schools and families, and has astrong educational focus. A recent report has demonstrated that afocused approach to literacy teaching and learning in ECE centres andschools has resulted in the literacy achievement of six-year-old children


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in Mangere and Otara closely mirroring the national profiles.In all these initiatives, the Ministry and the schools are jointly funding

professional development that is focused on making a difference.Expectations for student achievement, benchmarked to the nationalcurriculum in numeracy and literacy, are being developed in eachparticipating school. These expectations, together with accurateinformation on how well students are achieving in relation to them,will provide the basis for a review of current programmes. The reviewprocess will help to identify what is working to enhance the learningof students in Mangere and Otara, and what needs to change. Earlyresearch indicates that nearly all the people involved believe that it isthis type of initiative that will make a difference.

Some will be sceptical that, after 30 years of initiatives in Mangereand Otara, this one will make a sustainable difference to the quality ofteaching and learning. While this is a timely reminder of the complexityof achieving significant educational change, it could also be arguedthat previous efforts lacked three dimensions that are central tosustainable improvement: a focus on the core business of teaching andlearning; high-quality inquiry by practitioners into the impact of theirteaching on students; and a community-based infrastructure thatsupports teachers, boards and parents in the core business of improvingachievement.


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