A broken education system?

During December we have given our staff "the month off" in Kathmandu! Well, a month off the usual work, and instead given them a month of personal development in which they shared different pieces of training with each other, reported on projects, and studied/discussed educational reform programmes from around the world. Part of this was studying the work of Michael Fullan who I reported as a new "hero" in a previous article.

What you will read below is a summary of an email I have received today from Ladip-ma Kirati, a 23 year old fresh education graduate who cannot find a teaching job. She spent 3 months with us as an Intern before we appointed her as an Education Assistant on a 6 months contract. She has teaching experience, she has intelligence, she has drive/determination, she is a voracious learner. As you read it remember "she cannot find a teaching job" and we at NSA are very glad of it ..... because it means WE have got her instead of a school where the Principal dumbs everything down, has no concern for educational quality or the needs of the children. Read it, judge for yourself:

Recently I have been visiting schools in Kathmandu for the general inspection of their physical infrastructures and informing the Principals about our School Development Program. While doing this I kept in mind that our SDP and its strategies is more focused on the change of the whole school and education system by trying to awaken people of their different roles and their core responsibilities. Surprisingly I found that without understanding their own major responsibilities the Principals of the schools can never LEAD or create an environment of Quality Education at their schools. Which means they will NEVER find a way of change towards development.

During my school visits and observations I could vividly see the real classroom situations and school environment as well as perceiving how the Principal responds to the program when it describes how his/ her teachers' skills could be developed. By talking face to face with them, I could see that almost all of the Principal's biggest concern is regarding the improvement of the physical environment of the school. GOD knows why are they so interested with the this only and donors giving them money to do it.  

In general, Principals just seem to enjoy playing with their title and position as well as attending seminars and receiving financial allowances.  Most of them have  no feeling of citizenship towards their schools and the children.  In the schools I visited I could see very little accountability of the Principals towards the Children and their future. They look reluctant. I think they are very good at giving speeches and making remarks and promises but very bad at fulfilling them. They have a lot more things to do rather than participating in the program which would benefit their pupils, simply because they want personal benefits for themselves.

This month we have spent 3 weeks working on our personal development as a team and this included reading, presenting, discussing articles about educational reform by Michael Fullan and I would like to relate what I have written with Professor Fullan's articles on The Power of the Principal to motivate the masses, to drive the education system in a rightful manner which is in the right direction and creating a collaborative learning environment at school. 

In conclusion, only the power of our government and the Ministry of Education can help us meet our objective but we should not compromise with our standards and criteria of the School Development Programme just to collaborate with the corrupted government officials so that our program and investment won't fail like any other NGOs' and  INGOs' in our country.

What's that smell? It's bulls**t!

If anyone has read the work of Michael Fullan you will know that he is a firm advocate of transforming whole education systems in a systemic manner with intrinsic motivation via team learning being at the centre of any strategy. He also stresses the role of the school Principal or Head Teacher as being the primary leader for such change. (You can read this particular article here).

Here at Nepal Schools Aid we are certainly followers of Fullan's ideas, but completely exasperated by their complete ineffectiveness in Nepal. How could one of the world's leading educationalists be so wrong?

Here is one small example:

Just over a week ago in Kathmandu we visited 10 public primary schools to invite them to take part in our newly launched School Development Programme. We explained that teachers would get a series of training courses to help them develop and implement a complete child centred approach in their schools, that our staff would follow up all of the training by working with teachers to help them implement what they had learned, and that after 3 months implementation they would qualify for some significant material aid from us. And by the way, all for free. I'll repeat that, all for free.

The Principals all agreed to come to a meeting to be fully briefed and to register and due to take place on Tuesday. On the Sunday before, they were all phoned and given encouraging reminders.

Tuesday arrives, all is set. Noon arrives, nobody arrives! At 12.30 pm the first one arrives and apologises for being 30 min late. At 1.00pm a second Principal arrives, also apologising for being late. We subsequently discover that of the remaining 8, that 4 just forgot, 2 had a sudden emergency (!), one was on holiday, one had "to go out of the valley". Absolutely soul destroying for our staff who do all this for free, as one of them said "Bulshitting Principals, they can all go to hell!" Nicely put girls.

Now as I said above this is but one small example. There have been more, in fact too many to mention or write about. But the fact remains that Michael Fullan's article "The Power of The Principal" is spot on, the person in such a position has a lot of power to motivate and bring about much needed change in any education system. But the converse is true; they have the power to demotivate and destroy too. 

We have many examples of bullying Principals, absentee Principals, uneducated/untrained Principals, most of whom shouldn't be in charge of anything, and certainly NOT in charge of the education of 200 primary school children.

A New Hero? And at my age too!!

We all have heroes. When I was a young postgraduate in Chemistry my hero was Isaac Newton, a proverbial giant in his own right. He didn't need "shoulders to stand on" and transformed scientific thought with his experiments, his intellect, and his single mindedness. One of his most bizarre experiments has to have been sticking a needle into his eye to examine properties of light!

Later, when I was studying psychology, I had several heroes including Ed Schein, Peter Senge and David Nadler, all associated with organisation development generally, and the latter two with systems thinking specifically. Their thinking and approaches changed my career and my life; from narrowly focused development work into wider aspects of organisation development and culture change, from being employed to being self-employed, from being told what to do into advising others into how things could be better.

We all need heroes, people we can admire, look up to, learn from.

I have just found another; Michael Fullan is a professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His website is http://www.michaelfullan.com/ and I encourage anyone seeking to understand how to transform education systems to visit it. The site is resource rich, here is someone who believes in sharing his thoughts on the widest scale; take a look at and download his articles on The Power of The Principal, Learning is The Work, Motivate The Masses, Professional Capital. The one that has interested me the most is Wrong Drivers For System Reform which seems to contain most if not all of what I presented to some senior staff at Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Kathmandu last April. Here are some extracts from what Fullan says:

"The key to system-wide success is to place educators and students at the centre. This means aligning the goals of reform and the intrinsic motivation of participants. So policies that foster strong intrinsic motivation across the whole system are required, as are strategies that develop

increased capability. Both strong motivation and enhanced skills on a large scale are required."

"Capacity building, group work and deep pedagogy, accelerated by technology, are processes that support all schools engaging in improvement of practice. Systemic means all elements of the system are interconnected and involved, day after day. Systemic is experiential not theoretical. Thus, the four wrong drivers are not ‘systemic’ by this definition."

"The solution involves using the four big effective drivers:"

1. The learning–instruction–assessment nexus.

2. Social capital to build the profession.

3. Pedagogy matches technology.

4. Systemic synergy.

"First, ensure the centrepiece of action is based on learning and instruction. Relentless development of ‘capacity building’ is the main agenda. Integral to this is commitment to the moral purpose of raising the bar and closing the gap for all students.

Second, use groups to accomplish a learning–instruction culture. Approach the solution as a social capital proposition to build the teaching profession. This requires building collaborative cultures within and across schools.

Third, power new pedagogical innovations with technology. They make education easier and more absorbing — learning and life become more seamless.

Fourth, the set of good drivers must comprise a coherent, interactive whole."

I sincerely hope that enough people are reading this in Nepal to at least give these issues some consideration. They are not just the words of an education expert, the sort of person too often appointed to advise on changing an education system. They are the words of someone who understands organisational change, systems thinking, and whole system change. As I have also consistently advised, using the wrong drivers and pulling the wrong levers will NOT lead to systemic change. But it COULD lead to systemic collapse!