The Degree of Authority used in Implementing the Programme

It has already been observed that the need for a reappraisal project was largely diagnosed by senior personnel in the Inspectorate, the LEA and

the schools. The expertise of HMI on curriculum matters was attributed by them to their particular experience:

"Their writings are derived directly from that experience, not from academic sources. They do not set out to be professors of education. Accordingly their writings have no footnotes and do not mention Hirst or Peters or Bloom."

(HMI1, ppl, 2).

In the advisory service some previous knowledge of curriculum analysis had already been acquired:

"We've all written statements. That's not new to me, to write a curriculum statement, to show the intent of that area of the curriculum. I've been involved in that nationally with my own Association, no that's not new. For some it might be."

(Transcript LEA5, p5).

If procedural advice was required during the project that was generally obtained by consulting colleagues (Transcript LEA6, pl8) or HMI (LEA4, side 2, 207). Requests for other advice or support from outside agencies were not likely to be forthcoming for, according to one ex-member of the LEA Advisory service:

"Most advisers are arrogant and they are loners. They get delusions of grandeur and I know that teachers sometimes resent it. That kind of thing is very easy to fall into. You can play God and so advisers by nature don't often admit that they need help."

(LEA')-, side 2, 208-218).

The exercise therefore appeared principally to depend on the existing expertise within the Inspectorate and the advisory service. Since this was the only exercise HMI had undertaken which was not concerned with inspection (HM12, interview notes, pio) and they acknowledged that it was f o r them a new way of working (HMI3, interview notes, p 5 ), they could not reasonably be said to have had prior experience of similar types of enquiry. Nor, strictly speaking, had the LEA, although as one adviser

said:

"I don't think it brought something something so unusual to this authority, because .... most of most of the schools in the authority and most of the teachers were used to a kind of in-service training. Not that that necessarily used the same ideas, but it used ideas which were relevant to this exercise. I don't think therefore that it's been something startingly new in that sense"

(LEA3, side 1, 105-121).

The authority or leadership in the project therefore appeared to be derived from the position and expertise of both HMI and LEA personnel.

The position of the advisory staff and their multirole function have, according to Bolam, Smith and Canter (1976), been limiting factors in the contribution they could make to whole—school curriculum

change. Advisers in the present enquiry have been conscious of their role as employers and the effect this might have on staff in schools:

"One would be foolish to think it doesn't affect them, because it does, whether we like it or not. I think the important thing is for us always to remember its there and not to assume that teachers forget it. Having said that, I think we've got enough of a history or tradition of inservice training within the authority where, 1 think, with a lot of teachers the barriers have been broken down. If they've been on any of our residential courses - you can't run that kind of course without establishing a working relationship with teachers."

(LEA3, side 1, 620-652).

In fact, advisers didn't seem to see the exercise as involving any change in role on their part via a vis the schools:

"Accountability to the local authority never entered my head for a moment. No, I think it was merely a continuation of my conception of the adviser's role to a school. I conceive that largely in the supportive element with only a little emphasis on directing them towards doing something which I personally consider to be better than they are doing already. I'm very gentle on that one. I don't think it was any more difficult than

my normal relationship with them. I think they are more conscious of that than I am." (LEA2, side 1, 331-353).

Although the position of advisers in the authority m a y have exerted a considerable influence on the decision of the schools whether or not to participate in the enquiry, from the authority's point of view the autonomy of the Heads was ultimately the controlling factor which determined how the numbers of staff could be approached:

"The style was an informal approach, to go to schools and talk to the Head about it. The style of the approach to a large extent depended on the Head. I think its parallelled in a sense by the second stage. One may set a style that we think is a useful one, but you are very dependent on the way the Head operates. We stated to schools right from the beginning that schools, because they were asked to join in, didn't have to feel they'd got to. It must be their choice and they must not feel that they were doing themselves a disservice if they said 'No'. The reality of the situation is that it is

always very difficult for a school to say 'No' if an authority approaches it. Nevertheless there wasn't, from the authority, the feeling that, if a Head came back to us and said 'No' for whatever reason, we were going to look down on that school and give it a black mark. In some schools we were called back and back and back for discussion and some Heads took it that the initial discussion was very definitely to involve staff. In other schools when we went along we found the decision had already been taken. The Head informed us that they were joining in."

(LEA3, side 1, 3^8-380).

The mechanism by which the staff in the Phase 1 schools responded to the approach, however, and the influence it exerted on them varied considerably. Their comments included:

"It was sold to us by the hierarchy in the school at the time."

(Transcript G9, p i ) . "I certainly think there was a certain amount of blackmail exercised on the school - it was vague comments like general inspections might not take

place and things like this."

(Transcript Gil, pi).

"I thought it was a jolly good i d e a ... I felt we needed it."

(Transcript Tl, pp 1, 2).

"You always have this option, you know, but how viable that option is is another matter. You have the option of driving down the right hand side of the road if you want to! Not to do it would probably have been detrimental both to the department and to myself."

(Transcript T5, P 10),

This last statement should be contrasted with the following from another member of staff in the same school:

"I think schools individually should go through this process ... an exercise of this sort needs to be c o n t i n u e d ... "

(Transcript T7, pi).

In the case study school in Phase 2 the Head was clear, however, that there the staff had little choice over whether or not to participate in the enquiry:

"I would certainly think the pressure has come. We have tended to put it to them in such a way that they couldn't very well refuse. I think it had to be. We've taken a long time to think about it and talk it through and let people voice their worries, but at the end of the day X don't think they felt they held a lot of chance of saying 'No'. At the end of the day somebody has to say yea or nay. It would, I think, be a very brave staff to say unanimously 'We don't want to be involved'. The way it wan

posed to them - they were well aware that every gesture you make tells something about you and the gesture of refusing to be involved in a curriculum reappraisal exercise would tell every body that this school felt it was either doing well or else we were sticking our heads in the sand or else we were afraid of something."

(Transcript BO, pp 7« 8).

The response of one member of staff in the case study school showed how he felt the exercise had been imposed:

"I shall just indulge and take part in the thing as best I can with a certain amount of interest to the level I 've got time for...

I'm going to have a task set me, aren't I? I'm going to work at this - this is a piece of home work that's been set by 'Sir' and therefore I'm going to do it the best way I can, just like I would with any other homework and therefore I'm going to find what resources are available to me to do it with."

(B13, side 2, 100-172).

In the fixed response questionnaire used in the case study school, staff were later asked t o indicate the manner of their commitment to the enquiry by signalling the extent to which they agreed with a series of statements. From a frequency analysis of responses, a rank order was obtained for the statements. These are listed in Table 4.1, together with the level of agreement nearest to the average level of responses. The results are interesting because they do seem to fit quite well with the analysis of the mechanisms by which an individual responds to influence given by Handy (1976) and discussed earlier in Chapter III. Statement 1 shows a strong commitment to the task of reappraisal and suggests that this is independent of the enquiry, as no value judgement of the methodology is implied. Statement 2 implies that the teachers were indeed influenced by the role or position they held and that they felt that they had to comply with the demands of the enquiry, irrespective of the value they attributed to it. The fact that statement 3 also had a relatively high score suggests that their feelings about the enquiry were indeed somewhat ambivalent. This is corroborated by the very similar scores obtained for statements 5 and 6. Statement 4 is unfortunately ambiguous, as one teacher pointed out by adding the rider "so that they can suffer also".' The low scores for statements 8 and 9 would suggest that neither 'resource' nor

'expert' authority is regarded as a significant source of influence. We must therefore conclude that the main source of influence acknowledged by

Table 4.1 Mechanisms of Commitment to CRAG

Statements in Rank Order Level of Agreement

1. All schools should be reappraising their curriculum continuously. CRAG suggests a method for doing this

4: to a great extent