Speech
IPPN Deputy Principals’ Conference: “Leadership For An Imperfect World” 11 November 2021, Address of Harold Hislop, Chief Inspector, Department Of Education
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Go raibh maith agat, Louise [Toibin]. Táim an bhuíoch díot agus do Pháiric [Clerkin], as ucht an gcuireadh uaibh caint le bhur gcomhdháil maidin inniu. Bhain mé an-tairbhe agus an-taitneamh as an ócáid nuair a labhair mé ag an gcomhdháil seo in 2018 agus táim ag súil go mór le seisiún na maidine seo.
I am pleased to have this opportunity this morning to outline for you how we are working with schools this year and some of the key emphases in that work.
As Pairic alluded to, the last 20 months or so have been a period of challenge and learning for us all. So I’d like to reflect on that for a few minutes because it provides the content for your work and ours in the Inspectorate.
You have, no doubt, all learned a lot from the uncertainty and shifting situations we found ourselves in as you tried to sustain school communities and provide leadership as deputy principals during those extraordinary times. The need for responsive, distributed leadership, and action when there was barely time to think, was critical during this time.
Now, as you take some time at your Conference to reflect on your leadership roles as deputy principals– I am really struck by the aptness of you Conference title – Leadership in an Imperfect World.
My take-away from Páiric’s address and Steve Munby’s book about Imperfect Leadership is that we should accept that taking good or effective action now, rather than trying vainly to do the perfect thing –is more important for the young people we serve, for our colleagues and for ourselves. Striving for, or expecting to be, absolutely perfect risks disabling ourselves. It can get in the way of worthwhile development and steady progress; it can impede our decision-making. Sadly, we may sometimes dismiss our efforts as imperfect or falling far short of some particular measure of success.
Having high expectations is of course important. But is it also really important that we genuinely reflect on and celebrate the achievements that we attain as well as thinking about how we might learn from what we have done – what has worked well and what we might do differently in the future. That, for me, is the essence of genuine self-evaluation.
So, if I apply that rubric of reflection to the last 20 months in the Irish school system what could one say? I’m sure that each of us would have our own stand-out memories and learnings. What I’m going to offer this morning is simply a personal, short selection. It’s drawn from some of the evidence we have from thousands of conversations that inspectors have had with school leaders during lockdown periods and during visits to schools. I’m also reflecting on survey information that we collected from principals, teachers, students and parents during and after lockdown and re-opening periods.
For me, one of the key stand-outs from Covid has been the sheer commitment, creativity and resilience of school leaders and principals, including teaching principals, deputy principals, teachers and everyone who steps forward to take a leadership role in our schools.
Covid took away our natural environment for teaching and learning. Teaching and learning are, at their heart, a two-way conversation between pupil and teacher. Whatever we have learned from Covid, we have certainly learned that this interaction takes place most effectively in a face-to-face setting. Being cut off from that personal contact robbed school leaders, teachers and pupils of the best environment in which really effective learning takes place.
Yet despite that, you and your fellow school leaders, and the teachers you lead and work closely with, rose to the challenge of providing teaching and learning in wholly new ways. One of the most important things I want to say this morning is to acknowledge the magnificent effort that school leaders – including principals and deputy principals - made to keep learning alive for young people. Time and again, inspectors reported on the innovative and committed ways schools attempted to provide learning opportunities for young people despite the odds.
Secondly, you did this in a very challenging and uncertain context. Part of the reason for the Inspectorate’s advisory contact and conversations with all schools during Covid was to gather real-time information about the experience of school leaders and school communities so that we could feed that information to policy makers. Like many other education systems internationally, Ireland was severely challenged by the speed and impact of pandemic. Our ICT capability in schools had never been intended to deal with remote teaching and learning for all. In our primary schools, substitution provision had to be re-organised and increased significantly. Some of our school buildings were less than ideal. We all had to respond quickly to a very fluid and fast-changing situation. Our responses were not always perfect – nor could they be.
The information that inspectors collected and fed back to policy makers about such matters helped to shape the scale and nature of the packages of supports – additional teachers and substitution panels, very large amounts of additional capitation and detailed guidance – that were delivered to the school system to enable them to address some of the gaps in remote learning and, more especially, to re-open and operate schools safely.
A third takeaway for me that I think is relevant this morning is a heightened societal awareness that schools are much more than centres for academic learning. In fairness, primary teachers and all of us who work with primary schools have always appreciated that schools and the curriculum are about much more than knowledge and skills. But Covid demonstrated to everyone how much we depend on school leaders and the teams they lead for the nurturing of young people – their mental and physical welfare; their social and emotional skills; their sense of self-worth; their happiness; even their safety. Your leadership in delivering that vision in schools has been very important.
A further takeaway for me is that Covid did not impact evenly. There is no doubt that some pupils and their parents felt the impact of the loss of schooling and the loss of the personal contact with teachers more severely than others. We saw the impact of social inequity on children more clearly and more starkly than ever before. We were hugely challenged to provide appropriate supports for children with Special Educational Needs. The inspectors who conducted focus group interviews with pupils and especially with parents of children with special educational needs described some of those conversations to me as “heart-rending”. The evidence from our research – along with submissions from IPPN and other partners – played an important role in Minister Foley’s decisions to put in place much extended summer programmes in 2020 and 2021, and in shaping the CLASS packages for schools for this school year. The experience should also make us ever more determined to keep educational provision open, and especially provision for special needs and other vulnerable learners, in the event of any future emergency.
Speaking of pupils, Covid has also heightened the role that we must give to the voice and perspective of the learner. Prior to Covid, the Inspectorate had begun a major piece of work on how the perspectives of pupils, even very young pupils, could be incorporated much more meaningfully in our inspection work. We will be publishing more about that work before the end of the year. And the Covid experience has certainly demonstrated that pupils, if properly supported, can bring an important and influential perspective to policy decisions. That will challenge all of us to make sure we are creating the conditions where young people can express their views and have them heard in our deliberations at all levels – in classrooms, in schools and in wider fora.
Covid also highlighted the importance of collaboration. The last time I spoke at this Deputy Principals’ Conference, I talked about the importance of collaborative learning in schools – the importance of leading and working in professional collaboration within and between schools.
I want to pay a huge tribute to IPPN in this regard: your networks and other supports were invaluable during Covid. They facilitated a collaborative sharing of good advice; they allowed school leaders to feel less isolated; they helped principals and deputy leaders in school communities that needed assistance and where provision was challenging.
And the crisis also demonstrated that sharing problems and challenges, and finding solutions collaboratively at national level can be a powerful way to act. The Primary Forum – where stakeholders including IPPN, parents, teacher and management representatives come together with the Department and during these times with representatives of Public Health – was sought by IPPN for many years. If it hadn’t existed pre-Covid we would have had to invent it. I have long been a fan of this collaborative approach to policy making and the Minister, officials and partners used it extensively to tackle the issues we all faced. We have to keep this going in the future.
And, of, course, the IPPN’s engagement with the work of the Department’s School Leadership Working Group will continue to be critical to the various strands of that Working Group’s agenda.
Standing back and looking at the cumulative impact of the totality of the learning from Covid potentially brings with it huge implications – including implications for the range of supports required for exemplary leadership to emerge and be fostered. For deputy principals, we want to ensure that what we aspire to in terms of distributed leadership as set out in the Circular is realised as fully as possible through the potential of the Deputy to take real and meaningful leadership responsibilities in their schools.
Given that context, can I turn now to the themes and emphases in the Inspectorate’s work in the current school year? For the autumn term three themes are important in our work.
Firstly, we are continuing with a programme of Sustaining the Safe Provision of Schooling Inspections during this school year. These focus of these visits is on supporting school leaders to provide safely for teaching and learning. I’d like to emphasise the very positive findings arising from the hundreds of these visits that we have conducted since September of 2020 - (we found around 98% of primary schools fully compliant).
The SSPS visits also provide an opportunity for inspectors to engage in professional dialogue with school leaders – something greatly welcomed by school leaders and inspectors.
Secondly, during our incidental inspections this autumn, we are putting a focus on supporting school leaders in creating inclusive learning environments for all. School leaders are very much aware of the importance of children learning in an environment where they feel welcome, valued and respected for who they are. All of us have heard the heart-breaking stories of some children who are marginalised or excluded – and often these come from vulnerable cohorts – LGBTQ, travellers, children with special educational needs. None of us want this for any child.
So, during our incidental visits, we are collecting information on the implementation of anti-bullying guidelines but our focus is fundamentally about raising the consciousness of school leaders and schools about the importance of school culture and climate and having appropriate systems in place to prevent and tackle bullying. We know that dealing with bullying is not primarily about compliance with policies or checklists. While policies and systems have a role to play, our overall approach is aimed at supporting school leaders to think about and promote a positive culture for all.
Thirdly, as I have mentioned, the impact of Covid has been particularly stark for some children in our schools – including children with SEN and children who may struggle to engage with their learning in classrooms for a variety of reasons. With that in mind, we will be conducting a limited number of SEN inspections to see how children with SEN are getting on in their learning. We will also be looking at the issue of reduced timetables to ensure that they are only used in exceptional circumstances and in accordance with the relevant procedures.
From January 2022, we will be reintroducing other elements of our inspection programme in a phased way. We are committed to doing this in a phased way that is reasonable for schools, sensitive to their context, and builds on the learning we have all gained through the Covid experience.
After Christmas, we will review and expand our repertoire of inspection and advisory work gradually. Our incidental inspections, child protection and anti-Covid inspections will continue. Because of the importance of teaching and learning, we envisage at this point that we will re-introduce inspections of curricular areas – our curriculum evaluations – first, and gradually re-introduce whole-school type inspections later in the January-June period. It is in these inspections that we hope to collaborate with you in using some of the materials that we have developed to support pupils’ involvement in evaluation. We will share with you a short animated video for pupils, that we have developed in collaboration with young people, that will explain to them what we do and how inspectors will work with you and with pupils when an inspection happens. And can I emphasise that during these inspections we will reflect on how Covid has impacted upon your school; how it may have derailed your expectations and how you are working to address its negative impacts.
The revision of Looking at Our School and the compilation of a circular for the next phase of SSE was originally planned for 2020. That will now take place in Spring 2022, and I have already spoken to Páiric about IPPN’s input to that process. We will also be surveying schools about SSE as part of the consultation. Independent academic research has shown how SSE has worked in Irish schools – we want to build on that – but we want to make sure SSE is a simple and practical tool for you as school leaders. We want you to use it to set realistic and relevant ambitions for your school – not counsels of perfection!
Before I conclude, I would like to return to collaboration – and how it will feature in our work as an Inspectorate in this school year. We have, of course, already committed ourselves as an Inspectorate to working collaboratively with schools. We have always tried to carry out our advisory work and inspections in a genuinely respectful and professional way.
But we have seen a need to go further than that. When we develop new approaches to inspection, we do this working collaboratively with groups of schools and school leaders. Some of the most important and key features of the Child Protection and Safeguarding Inspections introduced in 2018/19 were suggested to us by school leaders working closely with us during the design phase. Our approach to the evaluation of remote teaching and learning was developed with school leaders and teachers – not tried out on them but built with them as partners. IPPN members have been one of our strongest partners and most valuable, constructive critics in this work. As an Inspectorate, we have public accountability functions to carry out and standards to monitor and report upon. But we also want our work in schools to be a practical help to school leaders and teachers on their improvement journey.
In this and in the coming school years, we are determined to build and strengthen our collaborative approach to school self-evaluation and inspection.
In 2022 we’d like to work collaboratively with a small number of schools to build an approach to evaluation within schools that could enhance schools’ capacity to review their own work while at the same time allow us to learn more about the challenges that school leaders and deputy leaders face as they use SSE in their schools. We don’t have a fixed idea of what that approach would entail – we want to discuss and work that out with the schools involved. But we think it would be really beneficial if leaders from the school and inspectors worked as a team to review some aspect of a school’s teaching and learning – perhaps an aspect that the school has identified as a priority for itself. And we would see any findings as belonging to the school – for its own self-evaluation.
A high expectation perhaps, but even if we achieve only some of that aim, I think it would be worthwhile. An imperfect but beneficial outcome nevertheless!
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.