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.