Education Epidemic: Transforming secondary schools through innovation networks

Some extracts to give you some flavour of the contents:

• Page 10: "The tendency for reformers – in all sectors – is to rely on formal restructuring of organisational relationships: new structures, new powers and new rules to encourage higher performance. But when the most important information is often distributed very widely across sectors, communities and the wider social environment, formal structures are a limited part of the picture. In fact we need complex systems of organisation and provision to be capable of adapting as systems to new demands and new possibilities. And if they are to be embedded permanently in communities, and be genuinely responsive to them, they must be able to sustain this process of adaptation on their own."

• "The best way to spread new practices that people must choose voluntarily rather than conform to in response to central prescription is through peers. Innovations have to catch on, like best-selling books, because they seem to be what everybody is doing, or are caught from personal contact, like a virus. The irony here is that the DfES has an extremely valuable infrastructure – the regular posting of materials to every school in the country – but the content of its messages lacks credibility with practitioners. When schools want to send news of innovations to other schools, they have the credibility but not the right infrastructure, since combing through thousands of websites or reading teacher-authored articles scattered around many magazines are inefficient ways of discovering good practices. What is needed is innovation news that is credible and an infrastructure by means of which the news can travel far and quickly."

• "The government’s attempts to innovate in education have led to a series of high-profile policies which are quietly dropped later. Flagship initiatives such as education action zones and beacon schools promised to identify good practice, but failed to transfer the lessons learned within the education system. The problem is that information only flows vertically within the education system, from government department to school. But the school system will only be transformed as the government wants when knowledge is shared between schools and teachers.
  In this important pamphlet, David Hargreaves argues that government needs a strategy to enable knowledge transfer laterally within the education system. Instead of continuing to act as the hub through which all new policies are routed, the education department must enable innovation networks to develop.
  Drawing on his knowledge of network theory and emergence, Hargreaves explains how schools can be linked together so that small-scale innovations in teaching practice catch on quickly and easily.
  Hargreaves likens this approach to the peer-to-peer networks that have developed on the internet, which allow music enthusiasts to share sound files. Innovation networks within education would allow teachers to share good practice in a similar way.
  ‘Transformation requires schools to be willing to give away their innovations for free, in the hope of some return but with no guarantee. A paramount value is freedom – to create, to appropriate, and to redistribute knowledge. We need to engineer an educational epidemic which would truly qualify as a transformation.’