How school systems get better - Minister, please read!

McKinsey have just released a follow up report for the OECD titled How the world's most improved school systems keep get better. Their 2007 report How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top was widely respected. In the new report they they did not just look at school systems at the highest levels, but good performers at each of the stages of development. For example, a school system in West Cape, South Africa is just moving out of basic standards of schooling in a very poor community.

McKinsey found that there are six common interventions that all good systems undertake.
"Our research suggests that six interventions are common to all performance stages across the entire improvement journey:

• building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals,
• assessing students,
  
• improving data systems,
• facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws,
  
• revising standards and curriculum,
• ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals.

Though these interventions occur at all performance stages, they manifest differently at each stage."

The most interesting thing to me about this report is what they say next; that the in building a basic system, central control with a strictly managed curriculum is appropriate, and when a system is moving from Good to Excellent, this central control should give way to schools and teachers having more autonomy. And this is for a very believable reason, that when a system is at the 'good' level, teachers have the necessary skills to be more autonomous.

Their message for Australia is clear, Minister, that we are at the middle to advanced levels overall, so it is not appropriate for rigid testing and comparisons of schools to be in the forefront. We should have some of that, but be focusing on building the professionalism of teachers.

The also found that spending lots of money is not necessarily a pathway to system improvement.

On the link above there is an executive report and the full report.

By they way, how well have we done the 6 steps in my experience, in SA?

• building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals - not in a systematic way, except for the occasional splurge
  
• assessing students - not in a systematic way in primary schools, until the last few years, and still focused too much on basic skills; rarely in a way that links back to item 1.
  
• improving data systems - improving in recent years, but needs much more work.
  
• facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws - quite a bit of this; got lots of policies
  
• revising standards and curriculum - not much in measurable standards, but the national curriculum is heading there, maybe?
• ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals - very little reward for teachers and principals based on actual student performance.