Foreword

by Andreas Schleicher, Director for the OECD’s Directorate of Education and Skills (including PISA) and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary-General.

Changing school systems can be like moving graveyards: it is often hard to rely on the people out there to help, because the status quo has so many protectors. Meanwhile, the changes in our societies have vastly outpaced the structural capacity of our school systems to respond. Even the best education minister can no longer do justice to the needs of millions of students, hundreds of thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of schools. The challenge is to build on the expertise of teachers and school leaders and enlist them in the design of superior policies and practices. This is not accomplished just by letting a thousand flowers bloom; it requires a carefully crafted enabling environment around capacity, trust and accountability that can unleash teachers’ and schools’ ingenuity and build capacity for change.

Leaders who want to make forward-looking changes in their schools and school systems need to build a shared understanding and collective ownership, make the case for change, and offer support that will make change a reality. They need to focus resources, build capacity, change work organisations, and create the right policy climate with accountability measures designed to encourage innovation and development, rather than compliance. That relies on trust: trust in institutions, in educators and in students. Without trust, support for change is difficult to mobilise, particularly where short-term sacrifices are involved and long-term benefits not immediately evident. Low trust can also lead to lower rates of compliance, and in turn to more stringent and bureaucratic regulations or administrative accountability. In all public services, trust is an essential part of good governance. Successful schools will always be places where people want to work, and where their ideas can be best realised, where they are trusted and where they can put their trust.

We know still little about how trust is developed in education and sustained over time, or how it can be restored if broken. But trust cannot be legislated or mandated; that is why it is so hard to build into traditional administrative structures. Trust is always intentional; it can only be nurtured and inspired through healthy relationships and constructive transparency. At a time when command-and-control systems are weakening, building trust is essential to advance and fuel modern education systems.

Some people say one cannot give teachers and education leaders greater autonomy because they lack the capacity and expertise to deliver on it. There may be some truth in that. But simply perpetuating a prescriptive model of teaching will not produce creative teachers: those trained only to reheat pre-cooked hamburgers are unlikely to become master chefs. It is when teachers feel a sense of ownership over their classrooms and when students feel a sense of ownership over their learning that productive teaching takes place. That is the fundamental problem of systems where administrative accountability arrangements stifle autonomy, they do not generate and sustain capacity. So the answer is to strengthen trust, transparency, professional autonomy and the collaborative culture of the profession all at the same time.

Much has been written about trust, accountability and capacity in education. What Trust, Accountability, and Capacity in Education System Reform adds to the literature, beyond a comprehensive analysis of these concepts, is a systematic and insightful discussion of the interrelationships between these concepts. And it is the understanding of those interrelationships that will help policy-makers and practitioners address the some of the most persistent challenges in education: whether these concern the lack of professional agency of teachers, overburdening bureaucracy or the loss of legitimacy of public education.