Multi-age organisation, complexity theory and secondary school reform

Abstract

PurposeAt a time when many education systems are grappling with the issue of school reform, there is a concern that traditional UK secondary schools are organised in a way that makes them unable to respond to increasingly complex environmental demands. This research-based paper uses complexity theory to gauge the organisational differences between (1) the traditional model of schooling based on same-age organisation and (2) a form of organisation based on multi-age tutor groups, one that schools call a vertical tutoring (VT) system. The intention is to highlight the organisational changes made by schools that choose to transition from their same-age iteration to the VT system, and expose organisational assumptions in the dominant same-age structure that may account for the failure of reform.Design/methodology/approachThe author's consultancy and research work spans two decades, and includes around 200 UK secondary schools, and others in China, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Qatar, Germany and Colombia. This conceptual paper draws on the recorded discourse and critical reflections of leadership teams during programmes of transformative learning, the process involved in the transition from one system to another. Using descriptions of school organisation abstracted from the complexity literature, differences in the two models not otherwise apparent, come into sharp focus. These not only reveal a substantive connection between organisation, complexity, and individual and organisational learning, but offer insights into the challenge of school reform.FindingsSame-age organisations act in ways that regulate and restrict the agency of participating actors (staff, students and parents). The effect is to reduce a school’s learning capacity and ability to absorb the value demand on its system. Such a system is closed and non-complex. VT schools construct an open and fluid learning system from the base, deregulating agency. By unfreezing their structure, they intervene in processes of power, necessitating the distribution of leadership to the organisational edge, a process of complexification. The form of organisation chosen by a school explains the failure of reform.Originality/valueInsights from VT schools cast considerable doubt on the viability of traditional same-age structures to serve complex societies and communities, while highlighting the critical role played by complexity theory in organisational praxis. If correct, the current emphasis on teacher “will and skill”, curricular editing, pedagogy and the “what works agenda” will be insufficient to bring about reformational change and more likely to contribute to systemic stasis.

Treatment Approaches to Speech Sound Disorders: A Scoping Review

“…Wren Y, et al in their systematic review, classified treatment strategies for speech sound disorders (SSD) into Environmental, Auditory Perceptual, Cognitive linguistic, Production and Combined. 13 Many children come to Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) with presenting complaints of speech sound errors but are bilingual or multilingual. While treating such populations, an SLP works on two or more systems of language, hence making the therapy and intervention more complex.…”

“…"bye", "shy", " hi", "Sky". 13 the target speech sound using the maximal oppositional approach and this approach is according to the hierarchy of complexity and stimulability. 14 4.…”

“…Treatment: Different strategies can be made for the treatment protocol of the child including making the choice to use a bilingual or cross-lingual approach of treatment according to the needs of child, choosing the right language in which therapy has to be provided, Strategies used when designing a treatment protocol include, identifying different ways of providing correct models for target phonemes that are exclusive to the child's language, when the Speech pathologist is unable to do so and noting if achievement generalizes across languages through the treatment procedure. speech production occurs in some syllable context Phonological contrast 13 .…”

Secondary school organisation and home–school collaboration: a tale of two systems

“…Crozier and Davies (2017) conclude that it is schools that are hard-to-reach not families but make no direct reference to (same-age) organisation as causal. If the challenge of home–school partnership is organisational (Bryk, 2010; Barnard, 2021), asking staff to work harder and training them to operate within the constraints of the same-age system will reproduce rather than change a school's existing collaborative strategies. Given that the outreach challenge of schools is to support learning, improve outcomes, and reduce inequities (Boutte and Johnson, 2014; Connors and Epstein, 1994; Hindin and Mueller, 2016; Sheriden and Kim, 2015) it is necessary to address organisational learning capacity, how the agency of participating actors is either enabled or disabled by structure.…”