Memoria descriptiva de arquitectura

% of pupils who sat the Primary School Leaving Exam and achieved eligibility for secondary school by ethnic group

Source: Singapore Ministry of Education

65

70

75

80

85

90

95

100

freedom in classroom practice, and gave principals decision rights on school management matters. It introduced school clusters19 _{to create a peer-based} forum for school leadership development and the sharing of effective teaching and learning practices across schools. It also changed its school inspection model, replacing the previous highly centralized model with a more collaborative one focused on self-assessment and quality assurance.

Throughout the latter period, Singapore worked intensively on strengthening the caliber of its teachers and principals so that they could make the best use of their greater freedoms.

It established a system that accommodated three career tracks (Leadership, Teaching, and Senior Specialist), narrowed recruitment into teaching to the top one-third of each graduating cohort, expanded professional development to one hundred hours per year, and creating mentorship pairings for school leaders. More recently it has focused

on strengthening the networks of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in schools that encourage teachers to collaborate with one other in reviewing and improving their classroom practice. In the words of one system leader, “As the skills of our educators rose, we needed to change our approach in how we managed them. We could no longer prescribe what they did, we had to treat them like professionals who had good judgment, knew their students well, and who could make their own decisions.”

Singapore’s experience focuses us on a second important question about control: whether the degree of prescription and flexibility within a school system can or should vary within that system. The answer is that it can: there are examples in our sample in which the school system has given more attention to scripting its low-performing schools while providing more flexibility to the higher performing ones. England, when on the fair to good journey in 1996, launched a literacy and numeracy program, tightening guidance over classroom practice. The system cascaded improvement targets to each school and mandated that every day every student should be given a “literacy hour” and a “daily maths lesson,” and provided teachers with models of literacy and numeracy instruction that they were expected to

use if they could not demonstrate higher

performance on their own. High-performing schools that were already exceeding minimum proficiency targets were exempt from this prescription. Similarly, Western Cape, during its poor to fair journey, gave higher performing schools more freedom; while lower-performing schools were required to follow the guided literacy programme, higher-performing schools were exempt. In the words of one WCED system leader, “We cannot support all our schools deeply. If a school is doing well — in the seventies or more — we really pay very little attention to it except to learn what it is doing. They have more freedoms.”

This correlation between system performance and the degree of central control over the school system has parallels to lean operations. A given production system must combine inputs and process in order to produce output. When input quality is low, the production system must have tight processes in order to deliver a quality output. Conversely, when input quality is high, the production system can loosen the processes to produce the same output. More specifically, across all sectors to which lean operations approaches are applied, there are two steps: first one must stabilise the system, then second, shift it into continuous improvement. The objective of stabilising is to quickly arrest a system in crisis and achieve an immediate step- change in performance to a uniform adequate level. Intervention at this stage requires tighter central process control, with scripted standard operating procedures, “back to basics” simplification of production processes, the creation of reliable data on system performance, tighter governance, such as regular reporting and performance reviews, and re-establishing a shared sense of purpose that is cascaded through all levels of the system. All of these interventions reflect the observations we made of school systems that have improved from poor to fair to good performance levels.

Once stabilised, systems then shift to continuous improvement. In contrast to stabilising, the objective of continuous improvement is to build ever-higher excellence through cultivating consistent and incremental frontline-led improvement. Frontline managers are empowered as agents of change, with daily team huddles, feedback sessions, and formal

mechanisms for the system to collect, evaluate, and disseminate innovation that occurs in the front line. As a result, when a breakthrough is achieved, it quickly sets a new standard to be maintained across the system. Talent development also becomes more collaborative and based on apprenticeship. For example, many lean systems introduce “quality circles” as forums for talent development. More robust performance management systems also become important for creating transparency throughout the system, and enable quick identification of upward or downward spikes in performance. These performance management systems are reinforced by incentives that are relevant to the sector and job functions within it. These interventions mirror the observations we made of school systems that have moved from good towards excellence.

The high degree of resonance between our

observations of school system improvement and lean operations raises the potential for school systems to learn from lean/ systems. Our intent here is not to imply that school systems are manufacturing processes but to indicate and appreciate that systems in other domains also alter their processes based on their input characteristics. The data pattern of our research shows that our sample school systems fully recognized the caliber and needs of their teachers and principals at each performance journey stage, and varied their approach accordingly, in order to achieve improvement.