developing the whole‐school workforce in england: building cultures of engagement

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Developing the whole‐school workforcein England: building cultures ofengagementTim Simkins a , Bronwen Maxwell a & Kath Aspinwall aa Sheffield Hallam University , UKPublished online: 28 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Tim Simkins , Bronwen Maxwell & Kath Aspinwall (2009) Developing thewhole‐school workforce in England: building cultures of engagement, Professional Development inEducation, 35:3, 433-450, DOI: 10.1080/19415250902885102

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Professional Development in EducationVol. 35, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 433–450

ISSN 1941–5257 (print)/ISSN 1941–5265 (online)/09/030433–18© 2009 International Professional Development Association (IPDA)DOI: 10.1080/19415250902885102

Developing the whole-school workforce in England: building cultures of engagementTim Simkins*, Bronwen Maxwell and Kath AspinwallSheffield Hallam University, UKTaylor and FrancisRJIE_A_388682.sgm10.1080/19415250902885102Journal of In-Service Education1367-4587 (print)/1747-5082 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis0000000002009

Dramatic changes have occurred in the composition of the schools’ workforce in England over re-cent years to incorporate a much higher proportion of support staff. Consequently, policy-makersand school leaders are now placing increasing emphasis on addressing the training and developmentneeds of the whole workforce, rather than solely focusing on the professional development of teach-ers. This paper considers how some schools are endeavouring to meet these wider needs and thechallenges that they face in doing so. It draws on the evaluation of a project that engaged 45 schoolsin developing and implementing new strategies and approaches in this area. Relating the findings torecent theorising about the role of organisational cultures in facilitating or inhibiting the learning oftheir members, the paper draws out three key shared characteristics of nine schools that most suc-cessfully addressed the needs of the whole-school workforce: a culture conducive to learning for allmembers of the school community; approaches that go beyond invitation to the orchestration ofgenuine engagement; and a recognition of the complexity of staff needs and perspectives whenviewed across the workforce as a whole.

Introduction

Dramatic changes in the composition of the schools’ workforce in England overrecent years, to incorporate a much higher proportion of support staff, means thatpolicy-makers and school leaders are now placing increasing emphasis on addressingthe training and development needs of the whole workforce, rather than solely focus-ing on the professional development of teachers. Support staff undertake a wide vari-ety of roles and often bring to training and development contexts differentmotivations and learning histories from those of teachers. Consequently, meeting theneeds of the whole workforce is not a simple matter of extending existing professionaldevelopment strategies and interventions to support staff.

*Corresponding author. Centre for Education and Inclusion Research, Sheffield Hallam Univer-sity, Unit 7, Science Park, Sheffield S1 1WB, UK. Email: [email protected]

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434 T. Simkins et al.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the ways in which schools endeavour tomeet the training and development needs of the whole-school workforce, and to iden-tify the characteristics of schools that successfully meet these needs. We draw fromresearch into a project that engaged 45 schools in developing and implementing newstrategies and approaches in this area. In particular, we focus on nine schools chosento represent different phases of education, with differing catchments and of differentsizes, which our evidence showed to be most successful at genuinely meeting the needsof the whole workforce. These data are used to explore two questions. First, how didthe schools conceive and implement strategies that would genuinely meet the needsof the whole-school workforce? What were their purposes and what kinds of interven-tions did they use to pursue these? Secondly, what were the characteristics of thoseschools that were most successful in addressing seriously the issue of training anddevelopment for the whole workforce? We consider, in particular, the ways in whichrecent theorising about the role of organisational cultures in facilitating or inhibitingthe learning of their members might enhance our understanding of these questions.

The paper begins by briefly setting out the context of workforce change in Englishschools and of the project on which this paper is based, and then reviews some of thekey ideas emerging from recent thinking on the role of organisational culture inemployee learning. The paper then proceeds to report the main purposes and inter-ventions that the schools adopted. Here we present main themes drawn from cross-school findings and three holistic case studies. The case studies illustrate the complexways in which purposes interrelate and manifest themselves in particular interventions,and lead to successful outcomes. Finally we draw out three key shared characteristicsof those schools that most successfully addressed the needs of the whole-schoolworkforce.

The changing school workforce in England

Responsibility for the management of finance and other resources, including person-nel, in schools in England is highly decentralised. Schools are responsible for manag-ing all aspects of their own budgets, including staff costs, and have responsibility fordecisions about the appointment, deployment and discipline of both teachers andsupport staff. Although staff in the majority of schools remain formally the employeesof local authorities, a range of new types of publicly funded schools have been createdover the past 20 years that are themselves employers (Ball, 2008). Two major contex-tual factors have coloured the decisions that schools make about staffing in recentyears. First, the school system has seen a very significant increase in funding sinceNew Labour came to power in 1997 (Leva[ccaron] i[cacute] , 2008). This has provided the oppor-tunity for the numbers of staff all categories to increase significantly. Secondly,despite these high levels of delegation of responsibility to the school site for manyaspects of schooling, Central Government has become increasingly interventionist inits pursuit of its goals for school improvement, through a range of interventions relat-ing, among other things, to the curriculum, testing, inspection and the frameworks inwhich the workforce is managed (Whitty, 2008).

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Developing the whole-school workforce in England 435

This context has had a profound impact on the staffing profile of all state schoolsin England, which has changed dramatically in recent years. There has been, forexample, growth in the numbers of support staff (all those except teachers) by some130% from 133,000 to 305,000 over the 10-year period to 2007. In the same periodthe numbers of teachers has also risen but by the comparably small amount of 9%,from around just under 400,000 to 435,000 (DfES, 2007). A consequence of thesechanges is that whereas the pupil:teacher ratio in primary and secondary schools hasfallen by 11% and 0.6% respectively, the pupil:adult ratio has fallen by 34.2% inprimary schools and by 19.4% in secondary schools. There are now four support stafffor every five teachers in primary schools and almost one for every two teachers insecondary schools (DfES, 2007). Alongside this growth of support staff has been aburgeoning of job roles and titles in areas such as classroom support, pupil welfareand other support, administration, technical support, premises services and so on(Blatchford et al., 2006; Ofsted, 2008).

These changes reflect a number of key policy thrusts, the most important of whichare workforce reform and the Every Child Matters agenda. Workforce reform, withits emphasis on viewing and managing the school workforce as a whole, has funda-mental implications for the ways in which schools recruit, deploy, manage anddevelop all of their staff (Gunter, 2008). The Education Act 2002 gave schoolsgreater flexibility in the use of support staff in the classroom, and introduced a newframework for defining the roles of those with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) andthose without. These provisions are intended to provide safeguards over the role ofQTS staff, while opening the way for schools to deploy their staff in ways that meetthe aim of raising standards in the most cost-effective ways. They were reflected inthe national agreement, Raising Standards and Tackling Workload(DfES, 2003),between the Government, local government employers and most of the trade unions.

These developments are complemented by the Every Child Matters agenda (DfES,2004; Moss & Haydon, 2008), through which the Government has set all those whohave contact with children as part of their work the task of providing sufficientsupport for every child to be healthy and safe, to be able to enjoy and achieve, to makea positive contribution and to attain economic well-being. An important part of thisagenda is to put in place an integrated framework of qualifications for all parts of thechildren and young people’s workforce within a context where agencies such aseducation, health and social services will increasingly be expected to work together inthe provision of services.

The study

The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) has responsibility for thetraining and development of the whole-school workforce, including both teachers andsupport staff. In one of a number of responses to the changes in the school workforcedescribed above, the TDA established a ‘Testbed project’ whose purpose was to explorehow schools could best develop new strategies and approaches to meet the trainingand development needs of their whole workforces. The project involved 45 schools:

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15 primary schools, 20 secondary schools and 10 special schools and pupil referralunits. Within the broad purpose described above, schools were given a large degreeof freedom concerning their priorities, focus and the kinds of interventions that theyintroduced. Consequently, the approaches taken by schools were very varied in termsof the specific objectives they sought to achieve in their projects, the groups within thewhole-school workforce on which they focused and the approaches that they took. Inorder to ensure that lessons from the project would be more widely applicable, schoolsreceived no additional funding for their Testbed interventions, although they were ableto access funding to support activities associated with the management of the projectand they had access to a number of sources of advice. The project commenced duringthe spring term of 2006 and continued through to the end of the summer term of 2007,although in many cases the initiatives that were started during this period were plannedby schools to continue beyond the formal project termination date.

This paper is based on an evaluation of the Testbed project. It used a combined-method, multiple case-study approach. We visited the 45 schools, almost all on threeoccasions, and systematically gathered a range of qualitative and quantitative data tobuild up a rich picture of the work of each school, including group and individual inter-views with Testbed project team members, senior leaders, teaching and support staff.Documentary evidence was gathered during the visits and from other sources and aseries of case records constructed. These reports provided a powerful principal resourcefor our analysis, and a sample of these case studies will provide the data for this paper.1

Our study suggested that schools engaged with the needs of the whole-school work-force to varying degrees. Some schools focused almost entirely on those staff groupsthat work most closely with pupils, namely teachers and teaching assistants. Othersfocused on what we call the ‘wider workforce’, in other words all or most staff groupsexcept teachers. Finally, some schools took what we found to be a genuinely whole-school approach, involving both teachers and support staff, although even here someschools had not included all staff groups by the time the project ended. The nineschools whose experiences provide the basis for this paper are drawn from amongthose that we judged to have most fully addressed the ‘whole-school’ agenda andwhere this judgement was confirmed by positive responses to what the school hadachieved received from a range of stakeholder groups drawn from across the work-force. The sample has been selected to provide a range of contexts in terms of sizeand school type. The schools are presented in Table 1.

Organisational cultures for learning

Training and development activities are, at their heart, about individual, team andorganisational learning, A considerable literature has emerged in recent years concern-ing the relationship between organisations and learning. One stream focuses on ideasabout how ‘learning organisations’ learn (Senge, 1990; Pedler et al., 1991). Anotherfocuses, rather more narrowly, on the ways in which organisational arrangementsenhance or inhibit the ability of their members (whether viewed individually or asgroups) to learn. This is our focus also. There is growing literature in this area

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(Rainbird et al., 2004; Unwin et al., 2005; Raelin, 2008) that explores the issue at anumber of levels. Thus some writers emphasise the key underlying values thatinfluence attitudes and approaches to learning in an organisation (Schein, 2004),while others focus on more concrete organisational manifestations—‘affordances’ or‘invitational qualities’ (Billett, 2001)—that create the conditions for organisationalmembers to engage effectively with learning. As Billett states:

[W]orkplace readiness was central to the quality of [learning] experiences. Readiness ismore than the preparedness for guided learning to proceed. It also includes the norms andwork practices that constitute the invitational qualities for individuals to participate in andlearn through work. (2001, pp. 209–210)

Such factors may influence individual learning in a number of ways. They mayprovide access to knowledge or information; they may facilitate participation inactivities with learning potential; they may provide support and guidance to helpmake learning effective; and they may reward learning activities and outcomes(Billett, 2001; Ashton, 2004). Fuller and Unwin (2004) have developed some ofthese ideas into the concepts of ‘expansive’ and ‘restrictive’ learning environments.They identify three ways in which organisations may provide learning opportuni-ties. One involves participation in communities of practice, especially ‘opening upopportunities for learning through moving beyond a tightly situated and contextbound approach to participation’ (Fuller & Unwin, 2004, p. 134). A secondinvolves work organisation and job design, especially ‘the creation of environmentswhich allow for substantial horizontal cross-boundary activity, dialogue and prob-lem-solving’ (Fuller & Unwin, 2004, p. 136). Finally, they emphasise the impor-tance of access to knowledge-based qualifications and off-the-job learning.Boreham and Morgan (2004) explore similar territory in writing about opening upspace for generating shared meaning, reconstituting power relations to broadenaccess to knowledge and providing cultural tools to mediate learning. In sum, thesewriters’ perspective is well captured by Ashton:

Our central hypothesis is that decisions taken about the structure and functioning of theorganisation, and the design of work within it, are of fundamental importance in influencingthe extent to which individuals can participate in the process of learning. (2004, p. 45)

Table 1. The schools

School 1 A very large urban comprehensive schoolSchool 2 A very large comprehensive school serving a mixed urban/rural catchmentSchool 3 A medium-sized rural comprehensive schoolSchool 4 A small comprehensive school in an inner suburban areaSchool 5 A large primary school in an outer suburban areaSchool 6 A large primary school in an urban areaSchool 7 A very small rural primary schoolSchool 8 A secondary special school in an urban areaSchool 9 A pupil referral unit

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Underlying these arguments is a broader theme about the relationship betweenstructure and agency in the workplace. To what degree are individuals’ learning expe-riences determined by the ways in which opportunities are structured and how far arethey influenced by the perspectives and actions of those individuals themselves? Leeet al. (2004) discuss this debate and, while recognising that ‘individuals are activeagents’ whose actions can work with or against the affordances offered by theworkplace, they argue that there are typically limits to these possibilities:

Decisions to participate or not to participate in learning are not merely grounded inindividual “free will”. Decisions are themselves enabled or subject to various degrees ofconstraint through factors such as occupational positioning, one’s position within aworkplace hierarchy and also, within these, one’s gender and social class location, etc. (Leeet al., 2004, p. 29)

The last point is particularly pertinent in considering the school workforce as awhole. Billett (2001) argues that the workplace is a contested environment in whichthe affordances provided for learning are typically distributed unequally while, asnoted above, Boreham and Morgan (2004) identify power relations as a significantfactor influencing access to learning in organisations. Billett identifies a number ofdimensions of potential differentiation including employment status, status of work,workplace demarcation, gender and race. These resonate strongly when the work-forces of schools are viewed as wholes rather than simply as collections of teachers(Coldron et al., 2008).

There is a growing literature on schools as learning organisations (Aspinwall,1998), learning communities (Bolam et al., 2005) and communities of practice(Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2004), and attempts have also been made to apply toschools some of the ideas discussed earlier such as those of expansive and restric-tive learning environments (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2005). However, this litera-ture focuses almost entirely on teachers, although Aspinwall describes ‘acommitment to lifelong learning for all those within the school’ as the first of fourkey characteristics of the learning school (1998, p. 24). There is growing interestin the roles of support staff in schools, driven largely by the workforce reformagenda that was referred to earlier, but this too has its limitations. In particular, itis dominated by discussions about the role of teaching assistants, either specifi-cally (Kerry, 2005; Collins & Simco, 2006) or in terms of their changing relation-ship with teachers (Cremin et al., 2005; Wilkinson, 2005; Thompson, 2006).There is little work on the workforce as a whole, let alone on the learning anddevelopment implications of this changing workforce. This paper seeks to redressthis balance.

Whole workforce development: purposes and interventions

Project purposes

It proved possible to identify three rather different initial foci in relation to thepurposes of the projects undertaken in the schools that are considered in this paper.

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For some, the focus was primarily on establishing or enhancing training anddevelopment for specific individuals or groups. Here the assumption was that provisionwas lacking—most commonly for groups other than teachers—and, consequently,there was a need to provide a wider variety of types of training and development, orenable access to it, for a wider range of staff, both individually and for identifiedworkgroups. Secondly, some schools focused on changes to various aspects of theirorganisation and management. The aim here was to enhance the efficiency and effec-tiveness with which training and development operated, either specifically or withinthe context of the wider management of the school. For a number of schools, thisimplied reviewing processes such as induction or performance management andextending them to all staff; for others, it meant sharpening up the ways in whichkey aspects of continuing professional development, such as needs analysis weremanaged. Better management, it was argued, would enable the school to achievemore from its development activities. Finally, some schools explicitly focused onchanging or enhancing aspects of the school’s culture in relation to the whole-schoolworkforce and its training and development. The aim here was to change values,beliefs, behaviours and relationships in ways that enabled the vision for the schoolto be fully realised, and in particular to establish a greater degree of parity ofesteem among staff groups and a genuine belief that training and development werefor all.

These three broad areas of focus were reflected across all the schools andwere closely inter-related, as Figure 1 indicates. Some schools set out withobjectives focused initially at one of these levels. Others spanned two or threeof these areas from the beginning. However, whatever the starting point, theother elements almost always began to emerge as issues to be dealt with, mostparticularly the school’s existing or desired culture. In School 6, for example, aspecific intervention, such as the introduction of portfolios, soon raised manage-ment issues concerned with its implementation, such as how exactly it was tobe administered and what its relationship should be with the school’s perfor-mance review system. Then issues often arose, in an iterative way, about thepurposes of portfolios that implied a potential for their use to contribute tosome form of cultural change. Schools that had not thought of their projectsspecifically in these terms soon realised that they had cultural implications. Asone person in School 6 explained: ‘It’s only by doing something concrete thatyou can begin to see what conditions you need to create to make this projectwork and you can’t do that without looking at the culture, organisation systemsand leadership’. Another school (School 7) started by wanting to develop aformal training and development policy but soon became concerned that theneed to structure and organise might damage their existing culture, whichplaced a high value on spontaneity, flexibility and responsiveness. So, ratherthan design a new structure, they elected to find a way to make more explicitthe processes that they had developed. This produced what was essentially aflow diagram, although it incorporated some aspects of the more usual hierar-chal representation.Figure 1. Project purposes

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Types of intervention

A range of interventions was implemented by the schools to achieve their intendedpurposes. Interventions took place at three levels. Some focused on the whole staff.These included extending processes such as performance management (School 1) orinduction to all staff in ways that enhanced their development opportunities, andensuring that all were effectively engaged with whole-school activities such as staffmeetings and development days (Schools 1, 3, 4 and 5). In some cases this was facil-itated by the reorganisation of working arrangements. For example, in School 5,teaching assistants and school meals supervisors were linked to year groups whichenhanced interaction between staff groups. In School 1, all staff were placed in teamsand team leaders were identified. Each team then used self-evaluation processes toidentify their professional development needs and time was allocated for all staff toundertake development activities.

Other interventions focused on specific staff groups. For example, in School 8,weekly training sessions for welfare assistants—covering topics such as child protec-tion, pupil medication, dealing with difficult behaviour in the playground, movingand handling, signing and feeding—were implemented to improve the ways in whichthey related to and supported children. In School 5, a programme was established forschool meals supervisors. This included a morning on vision and ethos, the anti-bullying policy and healthy eating, followed by two mornings with an external trainerto develop ethos—for example, looking at the implications of scenarios in the play-ground. In School 3, support staff team leaders were offered the opportunity toundertake Institute of Leadership and Management training.

Culture

Development ofpeople

Organisation andmanagement

Figure 1. Project purposes

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Finally, some interventions were directed at individuals. For example, in School 5,processes were established for identifying the individual development needs of all staffand there was strong encouragement and support to attend courses that enhancedboth current performance and career opportunities. School 7 took a particularlybroad approach to individual development. For example a cleaner was encouraged toattend a literacy course; one teaching assistant who had never been to London wasspecifically included in a school trip there; and another was encouraged to undertakesome training in physical education in the county town to enhance her self-confidenceas well as bring some needed new skills into the school.

Three cases

While it is possible to identify examples of these varying purposes and levels of inter-vention in schools’ approaches to whole-school development, as projects developedthese often interwove in a variety of interesting ways to interact with each other andwith underlying values to produce rich developmental tapestries. The followingcontrasting brief case studies illustrate what this meant in practice.

School 1

In one large secondary school, the project was deeply embedded within, and attimes indistinguishable from, other whole-school development strategies and activi-ties. It built on the well-established self-evaluation culture, which was alreadyshared by most staff in the school. The overarching aim was to implement a modelfor linking school self-evaluation and improvement planning with performancemanagement and professional development for the whole workforce drawing explic-itly on the Boyatzis model.2 At a surface level this appears to be an example of aschool adopting an organisation and management purpose. However, from theoutset the school was strongly committed to creating a whole-school learning anddevelopment culture, and establishing an ethos across the workforce of collabora-tion, support and learning from each other. As well as embodying an underpinningbelief in the value of sharing learning within the school, this purpose was closelyaligned with a belief that, in a caring school, both staff and pupils must be caredfor, and those that are cared for will then care for others. It also aligned with otherwork the school was undertaking to create a common sense of identity. Professionaldevelopment was regarded as a very powerful tool that enabled the school to runeffectively, efficiently and harmoniously, and performance management was seen asan important mechanism to make staff feel important and feel that their skills werevalued and developed. There was recognition from the outset that individualgroups needed different forms of professional development and were at differentstarting points. Teams were used as the organising framework for implementing themodel, each reflecting on their own practices and working out how they needed tochange their roles and approaches to be most effective, and then planning thedevelopment they needed to achieve that. In some areas of the school, the project

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built on established teams; in others, teams had to be created and team leadersidentified.

By the end of the project, a culture of continuous learning, linked to self-evaluation,was evident across most teams, and the school was beginning to have the confidenceto call itself a ‘learning organisation’. Most staff were taking greater responsibility fortheir own professional development, and the culture had become more open in termsof staff being honest about training needs and asking for them to be met. Inevitablyprogress differed across teams. For example, the higher level teaching assistants metweekly, shared experiences and disseminated external training that members hadattended. In contrast, development for the science technicians and administrationstaff teams was at an earlier stage, with line management structures still being identi-fied and initial discussions about continuing professional development taking place.This is a school with improving results and with recognition for the positive impactof support staff on the pupil welfare. While it is difficult to identify cause and effect,both the senior leadership and staff believe that improvements are strongly linked toprofessional development.

School 6

In contrast, a primary school had a very specific focus. This was to ensure that all staffhad, and used, a staff development portfolio that was suited to their needs and inte-grated into the performance management/appraisal cycle. This was clearly a newinitiative, but from the beginning it was intended that all the staff would be engagedin the process in ways that would increase the shared sense of being part of a ‘wholeschool’. The head was keen that this should not be seen as another top-down initiative‘made up of the usual suspects’, and so he brought together a Testbed team with fourmembers: two teachers, one teaching assistant and one midday supervisor. He knewthat these individuals had high credibility with other staff and felt this particularcombination demonstrated the project’s commitment to whole-staff/whole-schooldevelopment. The team’s first step was to ask all the staff to complete a questionnaireabout how they thought about staff development. These were collated separately forteachers, teaching assistants, lunchtime supervisors and those holding other roles,and provided some useful guidance as to the next steps. The team then developedsome examples of possible portfolios to illustrate what could be included and askedfor feedback verbally or in writing. As a result of this process they put together sampleportfolios for all staff and these were discussed at a training and development day. Inaddition to time for staff to discuss developing their own portfolios, the opportunitywas provided for staff and the senior leadership group to develop a common under-standing of how these would be used in the context of performance management/appraisal and to raise awareness of training opportunities. The team then put the finalportfolios together for all.

The project produced some significant outcomes. For example, lunchtime super-visors found their group appraisals and the various whole-staff meetings about thedevelopment of portfolios very helpful and informative. The whole process helped

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them to understand much more clearly their own contribution to children’s develop-ment and to the workings of the school. This had been expected, but not the fact that,as a consequence, some of them volunteered to come into the classrooms to work withthe children to further increase their understanding of how they could contribute totheir learning. The team managing the project was unusual in that it did not includeanyone from the senior management team. Despite possible dangers, this was felt tohave been helpful in several ways. The team felt that they could not take anything forgranted and set out to be available, approachable and to listen carefully to any feed-back in order to help other staff to become engaged as much as possible with theproject and to feel able to influence its direction. The feedback from other staff indi-cated they were successful. Staff said that the Testbed team had worked very hard asa team, working on communication and keeping everyone informed, ‘always talkingin understandable language’. Perhaps most significantly, the support staff particularlyvalued the fact that at all times the team had taken their needs very seriously.

School 9

One primary pupil referral unit had opened relatively recently with newly appointedstaff. A great deal of emphasis had already been placed on building a culture thatvalued openness and learning, which had been extended to the Behaviour andSupport Service that was subsequently incorporated into the centre. Therefore,although there was an aspiration to help staff to be more reflective and to think morebroadly than courses, setting out to change the culture was not the primary intention.Rather, although there was a strong commitment to training and development,underpinned by a very clear philosophy, the main focus was on tightening theorganisation and administration of the wide variety of training and developmentopportunities available to staff. The intention was to produce a policy that would link,refine and further develop all the relevant elements: the School Development Plan,Performance Management and Professional Development Portfolios, the inductionprocess and the audit self-assessment instruments (which delineated a range of appro-priate competencies for different staff). By the end of the project the centre hadsuccessfully established a process that started with the identification of whole-schoolneeds to guide the appointment of new staff, and continued through the inductionprocess and onwards to match professional, personal and school needs throughoutany individual’s career in the school and beyond.

One of the first steps was to establish coaching and mentoring relationships withinthe performance management cycle for staff who met in self-selecting pairs based onfriendship. These often crossed professional boundaries. A key purpose was toprovide mutual support and feedback relating to performance management targets.In a series of staff meetings the head asked each member of staff in turn to explainbriefly a chapter from a relevant coaching resource book, which helped to spark offuseful discussions. The coaching process was also regularly reviewed throughquestionnaires. This produced positive feedback from the beginning; for example,‘It’s really good. I’m getting my performance management tasks done. It keeps you

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focused’. The general development of coaching skills and communication also provedto play a significant part in increasing mutual trust and understanding.

Significant characteristics of successful schools

The previous two sections have reported the kinds of strategies that the schools imple-mented in order to pursue the goal of whole-school development and the espousedpurposes that underpinned these strategies, illustrating these with three case studies.The cases have different emphases: an integral approach to training and developmentas part of a whole-school development strategy; the use of a particular tool—portfo-lios—to focus thinking around whole-school training and development; and theestablishment of processes, including coaching and mentoring, that linked togetherplanning, performance management and staff development. However, although theapproaches of these and the other schools in our sample differed in emphasis, they allshared certain characteristics. This section considers these characteristics in moredetail.

The importance of values and culture

First, while not all of the schools articulated their strategies in these terms, all were,among other things, clearly addressing issues relating to the school culture. For mostof the schools that most fully addressed the challenge of whole-school workforcedevelopment, a culture conducive to staff development already existed and theirprojects were designed, explicitly or implicitly, to enhance or build on this in relationto the whole-school workforce. As one person in School 9 said: ‘It’s an extension.What is new to this is doing it with someone else, joint learning’.

The most common cultural factors to emerge were consistent with those found inthe broader literature of organisational change and school improvement (for example,Rosenholtz, 1989; Stoll & Fink, 1996). They can be summarised in terms of asupportive or developmental culture where:

● people trusted the vision and purpose of the leadership;● people were open to change;● risk-taking was accepted;● there was generally an ethos of openness, participation and support;● teamwork was widely observed across the school; and● motivation and morale were high.

More specifically there were commonalities in the values and beliefs espoused bythese schools. They believed in equity in the treatment for all staff, they valued staffas much as pupils, and they believed in the importance of personal development forall as well as learning from each other. As a deputy head (School 8) said:

[The school] is a living organism and it grows and it develops … you grow and developthrough the school and the school grows with you and it’s that interaction what’s reallygood about this place and things aren’t set in stone.

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These values were demonstrated in action. For example, School 2 was full ofstories of opportunities made available to different individuals: of the cleaner whobecame a part-time technician when it was discovered she knew how to repairsewing machines; of someone who started work in school by doing a few hoursteaching first aid, became a teaching assistant in the post-16 centre and had nowachieved a Certificate in Education with the school’s support; and of the personwho, coming into school initially to calm down a relative’s child who was ‘play-ing up’, was asked whether he had ever thought about taking up this kind ofwork, and then, starting part time, he eventually became head of inclusion.Teaching assistants were encouraged to take the high level teaching assistant(HLTA) training if they so wished and there was general agreement amongst thesupport staff and teachers that in this school people are good at ‘seeing the skillswe’ve got and giving lots of praise’.

Supportive cultures of this kind took many forms depending on the particularcontext of the school, as the case studies above illustrate. However, to be effectivethese cultures needed to be reflected in strategies that enabled their underlying valuesto be translated into genuine engagement of all staff.

Orchestrating genuine engagement

In general, the cultures of the successful schools provided affordances and invita-tions for all members of the workforce, and especially for those other than teach-ers, to engage in developmental processes and activities as suggested by theliterature reviewed in the earlier ‘Organisational cultures for learning’ section.However, these schools also recognised that invitation was not enough. We havealready noted the disparity in power that typically exists among work groups inschools. Associated with these disparities are differing perceptions about thesalience of training and development to particular roles or career perspectives anddifferences in the degree to which groups’ conditions of service and work patternsfacilitate or hinder genuine participation in particular kinds of activities. In otherwords, as Billett (2001) and Lee et al. (2004) argue, the distribution of affordanceswill be determined significantly by the structuring of the workplace. Such structur-ing may not just provide or close down opportunity; it may also influence the abil-ity and willingness of individuals to exercise personal agency in pursuit ofdevelopmental goals.

Some of the other schools in the Testbed project did not seem to fully understandthese factors. For example, in some of these cases, senior staff and teacher membersof change teams made assumptions about particular staff groups that, when tested inour focus groups, proved not to stand up to examination. Such assumptions weresometimes overly negative—for example, that particular groups were not interestedin training and development when, in fact, they were if the circumstances were right.Sometimes, in contrast, they were overly positive—for example, assuming thatsupport staff were generally content with their circumstances when, in fact, they werenot. The problem in the latter case often was that support staff liked working in the

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school, found the general climate conducive and had excellent relationships withteachers. Yet this did not necessarily prevent them from feeling undervalued and thatthings happened in the school mainly on the teachers’ terms. Sometimes there weresimply misunderstandings or unrealistic assumptions about the views and expecta-tions of particular groups.

The more successful schools made no such assumptions. Rather, they started fromthe strongly value-based position that, if all staff groups were to be engaged genuinelyin development activities, they needed to be listened to and account had to be takenof the needs and concerns that were expressed. Strategies for ensuring that all staffwere listened to included the use of whole-school staff development events (School6) and of smaller team meetings that were seen by some staff as ‘safer’ environmentsfor discussion (School 1). However, it was not just about listening: action was alsocrucial. In School 2, responses to a survey of support staff’s concerns revealed thatthe support staff felt they were less well informed of what was happening in the schoolthan were the teachers. The head immediately introduced a Thursday morningsession in which he repeated all of the matters that had been discussed with teachersin their after-school staff meetings on Wednesdays. This meant that support staff didnot have to attend a meeting outside their contracted hours and was a practicalexample of the widely shared belief in this school that if a concern is raised with thishead ‘something always happens’.

This example illustrates a further point. The schools that most fully addressedthe challenge of involving the whole workforce also took seriously the needs andcircumstances of different staff groups. Examples included allocated professionaldevelopment time for all staff, payment or time off in lieu for working beyondcontracted hours on developmental activities and events, and the use of cover forsupport staff as well as for teachers to facilitate participation in training and devel-opment activities. However, the most effective strategies did not just make theengagement of the whole staff possible; they also made it meaningful through strate-gies to engage them actively in various development events. For example, in School1, where the team structure was crucial, learning support staff identified twofactors that facilitated their participation. These were having a ‘safe’ environmentwithin team meetings where they could talk about the issues they were facing andsay what development they needed, and the use of informal small group trainingthat helped keep them in their ‘comfort zone’. In School 6, the lunchtime supervi-sors found it difficult to understand why they were included in staff developmentdays. However, when they joined in a mixed staff group task to draw ‘the idealpupil’, they saw that what happened at lunchtime had a significant influence onchildren’s behaviour in the afternoon and that they had an important part to play.Finally, in School 4—whose motto was ‘For our staff, by our staff’—the ‘can do’culture of the Testbed team in encouraging and enthusing about continuingprofessional development for all staff sparked considerable spontaneous sharing oflearning. The project team took every opportunity to encourage staff to share theirexpertise and created a directory of expertise. This resulted in much informalsupport across the workforce.

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Holding multiple perspectives

Successful strategies did not just involve making invitations genuinely open to allstaff, although this was important. They also recognised the complexity of staff needsand perspectives. We showed earlier that schools implemented interventions at threedistinct levels: those aimed corporately at the school as a whole; those aimed atidentifiable staff groups within the workforce; and those directed at individuals. Theydid not assume, therefore, that the primary purpose of whole-school staff develop-ment was simply to establish shared understandings and values among all staff andtreat all staff ‘equally’, although this was important. Martin (1992, 2002) terms thisan ‘integration’ perspective, and argues that it is an important way of viewing theculture of an organisation but, taken on its own, it fails to recognise the complexity ofworkforces in terms of their differing needs and perspectives. In order to understandthis complexity, two other perspectives are relevant. The ‘differentiation’ perspectivesuggests that consensus may exist but only at lower levels of analysis labelled ‘sub-cultures’; while the ‘fragmentation’ perspective emphasises lack of consensus, even atthe group level, with individuals forming and reforming attachments based on‘transient issue-specific affinities’ (Martin, 2002, p. 120). Martin goes on to arguethat these perspectives are not alternatives, but rather complementary lenses thathighlight different aspects of the complexity which most organisations exhibit:

If one perspective seems easier to see than the others, this will be the researcher’s or thecultural member’s home perspective; the other hidden perspectives will be visible too, ifthe researcher or cultural member looks hard and in-depth. All three perspectives arerelevant any point in time. (Martin, 2002, pp. 156–157)

The school strategies that we are considering here implicitly embodied all of theseperspectives, albeit in varying mixes. Thus, as already indicated, interventions wereestablished that were designed to bring the whole workforce together and increaseinteractions among disparate groups, and policies were put in place to extend to allmembers of the workforce access to key processes such as induction, developmentalappraisal/review and staff development courses. In these senses, integration wasdeemed to be of great significance. However, it was also recognised that particulargroups of staff played their own particular roles in the school and worked in differ-ent ways and to different rhythms. Consequently it was necessary to provide differen-tiated developmental activities that were tailored to these differing needs as theexamples of welfare assistants, school meal supervisors and support staff team lead-ers identified earlier illustrate. Finally, even within these groups not all individualshad the same personal goals or ambitions (Coldron et al., 2008) and this, too,needed to be taken into account through strategies that paid careful attention toprocesses that enabled individuals to express these needs and have them respondedto seriously as the fragmentation perspective suggests. For example, in School 5,considerable emphasis was given to enabling staff to pursue qualifications relevantto their own career goals; while, in School 4, all staff were encouraged to seek outtheir own professional development opportunities and contribute to the professionaldevelopment of others.

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Beyond this, school strategies often embodied interrelationships between the threeperspectives. For example, while all staff might be granted the same entitlements—for example, to induction or appraisal—these might be operationalised in differentways for different groups, thus combining the integration and differentiation perspec-tives. Thus, in School 6, to help lunchtime supervisors feel positive about the intro-duction of a more formal appraisal system, they met in year groups with theheadteacher and head of year. In these meetings they discussed three things that weregoing well and identified the factors that contributed to this. They were then asked toidentify one thing that could be done differently and what training and developmentor resources would be needed. The lunchtime coordinator was informed of what hadhappened and followed this up with the groups, who then also discussed theseprocesses with each other at the termly lunchtime supervisors’ meeting.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the challenges that schools face when they attempt toestablish training and development strategies that genuinely encompass all membersof the school staff and not just teachers. We have argued that many of the findings ofthe general literature on workforce development can be applied to this context. Forexample, all of those schools that were judged to be particularly successful ingenuinely engaging the wider workforce in training and development activitiesexhibited many of the characteristics of ‘expansive’ learning environments (Fuller &Unwin, 2004; Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2005), and in general our evidence providespowerful support for Billett’s view that:

Establishing a workplace training system without understanding the bases of participation,such as the workplace’s readiness to encourage and support that participation may lead todisappointment for both workers and enterprises. (2001, p. 212)

Furthermore, the need for strategies to be genuinely invitational has been reaf-firmed. However, in engaging the wide range of workgroups that now make up thewhole-school workforce, the concept of invitation is insufficient. First, schools needto move beyond strategies that are merely ‘invitational’ in offering opportunities toparticipate to ones that are genuinely ‘engaging’. This means understanding andrecognising those factors that might inhibit active engagement, especially by thosegroups that are, perhaps, less central to the power structures of the school, andaddressing these directly. This involves effective communication, logistical strategiesto overcome practical constraints to participation, and, finally, the delivery ofprovision in ways that are perceived as both relevant and non-threatening. Secondly,schools need to understand that the idea of the ‘whole-school’ workforce canconstrain thinking, unless it is recognised that the ‘workforce’ is a complex conceptcomprising individuals and groups with differing experiences of, and perspectives on,both the work of the school and their own relation to it. Strategies need to addressthis complexity by developing a range of approaches that meet differing needs arisingat different levels in different ways.

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These two dimensions—genuine engagement of all groups and a recognition thatneeds and perspectives can and will differ even within a whole-school values frame-work—were two key characteristics of the cultures of the successful schools in oursample. Nevertheless, underlying these characteristics was a consistency of beliefs andvalues about the equitable treatment of staff that went deeper than mere statementsof purposes and development of strategies. It meant genuinely valuing each memberof the workforce, recognising the potential of all members of the organisation to bene-fit from developmental activities, and a commitment to the importance of enhancingcollaboration across staff work groups irrespective of task and status. This reinforcesfor us the importance of culture as an underpinning variable in enabling better under-standing of the challenges of whole-workforce development.

Notes

1. The full report is Coldwell et al. (2007). This study was undertaken with the financial supportof the TDA, but the views expressed here are those of the authors, not necessarily of the TDA.Apart from the authors, the other members of the team were Paul Close, John Coldron, MikeColdwell, Niki Elliot, Viv Garrett, Robin Smith, and Jonathan Wainwright.

2. This approach to personal development is outlined in Boyatzis (2002).

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developing the whole‐school workforce in england: building cultures of engagement

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