Laurie O’Donnell

The managment and leadership literature often presents a real the challenge to the public sector reader. You often have to plough through assertions about the primacy of the profit motive, increasing shareholder value and the assumption that the prime motivator for staff is ‘financial compensation’. When the public sector gets a mention there is often a strong implication the quality of management and leadership is inferior to that in the private sector.

I can tell you how delighted I was to read Jim Collins‘ latest monograph on ‘Good to Great and the Social Sectors’.
‘Good to Great‘ is an excellent read and currently my favourite management book. Collins’ social sector monograph is a response to ‘Good to Great’ not quite fitting with the reality of the not-for-profit, voluntary and public sectors and I think adds considerable insight and value to this excellent book. The quote on the back page is great:

‘We must reject the idea – well intentioned, but dead wrong – that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses – like most of anything else in life – fall somewhere between mediocre and good. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors’.

Collins goes on to argue that the private sector leaders of the future will have many of the characteristics today’s public sector leaders. Better able to deal with complexity and adaptive change in environments where power is often dispersed.

A very worthwhile event and a great use of my time. I spend too much time in the Dundee-Glasgow-Edinburgh triangle and this was a superb opportunity to take a look at strategic developments in the UK and beyond. We already know that we need to get better at fostering innovation and creativity in our schools and I took a lot away from my day in London.
Highlights
Tessa Jowell, DCMS
Education is fundamental to our future success. Creative industries are crucial. High margin, high value, high skill industries to be fostered; low margin, low value, low skill will be increasingly moved offshore.

Esko Aho, former PM and President of Finland (now in charge of Finnish equivalent of NESTA) – Inspirational presentation
Advantage to small countries (Singapore, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Finland) used to having to adapt rather than being in control. Innovation defined as the opposite of imitation. R&D as process of transferring money to knowledge; innovation process of transferring knowledge to money (and welfare, health etc). Strategy for the future to include : creating a market for innovative products (US & Japan lead in this), providing resources for innovation/innovators, structural mobility (shifting from old to new) and positive attitudes to entrepreneurial activity. We are still using new technology to do old things. Those countries making the most innovative use of ICT will win the global competition.

Roundtable discussion chaired by Johnathan Freedland of the Guardian
Great contributions and a good discussion. General view is that UK is doing well in terms of innovation – but could do much better. World becoming increasingly complex. Contrast between ‘over-regulated’ UK/Europe and the freedom to innovate in the US. Attitudes to risk/failure also significantly different. Role of education continues to provoke controversy. We need excellence in engineering, maths, science but also creativity. Need education to support market drivers, ie we need a well educated public to use innovative products and services. Role of government also controversial: get out of the way or create the conducive conditions?

On the early train to Glasgow this morning (0636 from Broughty Ferry) but flying down to London this evening to attend a conference on Tuesday organised by NESTA. The event is called Making Innovation Flourish.

The programme interesting with sessions looking at both the wider context of innovation (global economic trends) and the necessary preconditions (skills, attitudes, funding etc).

Speakers include a former Prime Minister and President of Finland and Rt Hon Tessa Jowell from the DCMS.

Some of the questions being asked are ‘If the UK is so bad at innovation, Why are we so rich?’ (are we so rich?), ‘Creative Industries: Does Size Matter?’ (important question for our Online Service which has grown in size and is increasingly a creative industry in its own right) and ‘What are the skills and attitudes required for future innovators?’ (major challenge for our new Curriculum for Excellence).

Hope to blogs over the next couple of days and reflect on what I got out of the event. Will it good use of my time? Let’s hope so!

I had a really good day last Thursday visiting two schools just north of Dundee: Webster’s High School, Kirriemuir in Angus and Blairgowrie High in Perth and Kinross.

I spent the morning with Eric Summers, headteacher of Webster’s High and a group of his staff including Anne Collins, Bob Pond and Peter Flood. We had a wide ranging discussion covering everything from Glow and Curriculum for Excellence to the implications of Howard Gardner’s latest work for the teaching of content. The school is very much a Burgh school with very strong links into a community that includes the Angus Glens.

The school has made a considerable investment in ICT and Eric thinks that the introduction of a digital projector into every classroom has had a bigger effect on improving learning and teaching in the school than any courses or resources that the staff of the school have had access to in recent years.
Webster’s has a strong ethos which is wrapped around four key development themes: effective learning and teaching, values, health and global education.
I also got some very useful (and positive) feedback on developments within LTS. Our Leadership for Learning Masterclass programme and the LTS Online Service were picked out as being of particular importance.

I left Webster’s with a number of actions to follow up and a copy of the excellent book on study skills written by Eric and his depute M-C McInally [Study Skills and Strategies, McInally & Summers, Leckie & Leckie, 2005].

In the afternoon I met with John Fyffe, headteacher of Blairgowrie High. Again our discussion was wide ranging and covering similar themes to my conversations in the morning.

Blairgowrie is also a Burgh school serving the town and a large area of eastern Perthshire. Last year the school was successful in its bid to become a School of Ambition with a proposal entitled ‘More Choice, More Chance’.

John, just like Eric, is passionate about learning and not short of ambition for the school or for the community that he serves. Developing rural skills, making more learning available online and establishing a new centre to strengthen the links between the school, FE and community learning are the amonst the key priorities that John has established for the school.
The feeback on the progress being made by LTS was also useful and John described the LTS Online Service as ‘fantastic’ and ‘an essential resource for his school.’

I felt really inspired by my day. In the world of formal education it is headteachers, teachers and schools that make a real difference to the lives of young people. The job of organisations like LTS is to make sure that we work with schools to ensure that the curriculum, assessment, support, resources etc are the best they can be. I left feeling encouraged that the key developments within my remit of technology and learning are just what these schools are looking for. We just need to make sure that we continue to seek feedback and involve as many schools (and as early) as we can in piloting new developments. We also need to make sure that we capture all of the passion and enthusiasm that I found on my visits and make sure we deliver the world class service these schools deserve.

0530
Alarm goes off. Not travelling to Glasgow today so can sleep a little longer.
0615
Shower, breakfast then clear kitchen for builders to knock wall down.
0820
Amy to school with cello.
0845
Julie to school, Moira to the MS centre & then buy special light bulbs for the bathroom on the way to work.
0915
Parking at the office is a nightmare. Work all morning in our Dundee office. Catch-up with staff, email blitz, phonecalls, paperwork and work on strategy documentation.
Meeting with media education group to discuss connections with Curriculum for Excellence
More email and phonecalls. Discussions around corporate blogging policy [more of this later]. Chase up a couple of HR issues. Plan visits to Webster’s High School, Kirriemuir and Blairgowrie High on Thursday. Plan visit to Welsh Assembly next month. Discussion with BBC about branding for Jam in Scotland.
1430
Pick up Moira in the car.
1500
Meeting with Principal of University of Abertay, Bernard King, to discuss developments and areas of mutual interest including computer games for learning. Tour of new ‘White Space’ area of university. Stunning!
1645
Telephone call to Brian Johnston of KPMG to discuss work in relation to our ICT strategy and governance arrangements.
1715
Bought two new watch straps before taking the bus home.
1800
Home. Made evening meal. Cleaned house after wall demolition. Watched 20 minutes of Celtic v Benfica (good result for Scottish football). Sat with Amy as she did her science homework. Listened to Julie singing songs. Caught up on some more emails. Walked the dog. Wrote this blog.

2315
Tired and off to bed. Early rise as I’m back to Glasgow again in the morning.

Freakonomics by Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner (borrowed from Emma Walsh, Technical Development Manager at LTS).

Levitt is an economist and Dubner is a journalist. Levitt specialises in asking off the wall questions and then exploring the data to see what patterns emerge and then seeking interpreations, correlations etc.

The book is presented as a challenge to ‘conventional wisdom’ [more on this concept developed by J K Galbriath later] and although I am not convinced by all of Levitt’s conclusions the book is well written, easy to access, good fun and well worth reading.
One of my favourite chapters asks the queston ‘why do drug dealers still live with their moms?’. The answer is quite simple the wage structure of a drug gang mirrors that of a corporation, i.e. most of the workers (teenage drug dealers) were paid around $3.30 an hour whilst the gang leader earned in excess of $100k per year.

I have been following Don Ledingham’s blog over the past couple of weeks as he explores the concept of accountability. Well worth a read (see link on the right hand nav). I commented this evening and want to explore this theme further myself over the next few weeks.

My comment was:

‘Enjoying your in depth exploration of the concept of accountability. When I was doing my MEd Prof Ruth Jonathan at Edinburgh Uni considered the concept of accountability under the headings: ‘To whom?’, ‘For what?’ and ‘How is the account rendered?’.

In education the ‘to whom’ is inherently complex – the learners, society, professional peers, employers, the government & parents.

The ‘for what’ is similarly complex – exam results, inputs (teaching), maintaining professional standards, transmission of culture, economic development …

The ‘how’ really needs to follow on from the ‘to whom’ and the ‘for what’.

I think we need to recapture some lost ground across the public sector as whole and confidently assert a new model of accountability. A model that recognises complexity, promotes excellence and is robust enough to secure the confidence of a plurality of interests. The time for this might be right as there is an increasing recognition that the public sector is over-regulated and that whilst regulation might be good for ensuring adherence to minimum standards it is hopeless when it comes to the dissemination and development of effective practice.

I have started to blog again and hope to explore some of this ground in the future.’

I don’t get out very often enough to the pictures and I really enjoy watching movies at home. Recently I watched one of my favourites, the 1962 adapatation of Harper’s Lee Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ with Gregory Peck in the Oscar winning role as the lawyer Atticus Finch. Great story and a fantastic portrait of the US of the 1930s with a strong message that still has a resonance today (the definition of a classic?).

To paraphrase Atticus Finch you never really know someone until you have stood in their shoes and walked around in them.

Purpose of this blog? No single purpose but rather multipurpose.

First and foremost I will use it as a journal and try to make a weekly entry focussing on how LTS is taking forward the learning and technology agenda in Scotland through the two main programmes we are managing – Glow and the Schools ICT Programme (formerly NGfL). I will probably make this my contribution to the LTS Corporate Management Team blog as well. I hope that over time I can start to provide some insights into how LTS works for my colleagues and for an external audience.

Secondly, I hope to take the opportunity to reflect on some broader education issues and how these impact on Scottish Education and LTS.

Thirdly, I want to pick up some more random stuff on movies, music, culture, news, websites, books, friends, places etc.

At the moment I am working with my LTS colleagues Graham Wilson and Scott Ogilvie to improve the look and functionality of my blog. I hope to be able to establish a template that makes it easy for large numbers of my colleagues to blog.

I started a blog last year but didn’t sustain it – a combination of (in reverse order) a poor user interface for the blog software we were using, no clearly thought out purpose for keeping it, a new laptop and a failure to commit the time to maintain and develop it. Since then I have been reading and enjoying lots of blogs, and even commenting on them now and again. I have been encouraged (and given some practical help) by my colleague John Connell to start my own blog again. So here goes.

When I look at the blogs that are out there it is clear that a lot of ground is already being covered very well.

Don Ledingham is doing a great job in East Lothian using his blog to think aloud and to open up a window into his thinking on the future of education. I want to come back to the East Lothian wiki he has established to on Xtreme Learning soon.

Many of my colleagues at LTS are now regular bloggers

Ewan McIntosh should also be commended on his work in raising the profile of Web 2.0 tools to enhance learning. Ewan is currently on secondment to LTS but remains based with his employer East Lothian under the leadership of Don Ledingham.

Derek Robertson is another LTS blogger, based in our Dundee office, working on our strategy for computer games and learning.

Allan Ogg works in the LTS corporate ICT team and has a technology blog that I use to keep up to date with applications for the Mac.

Nova Stephenson works on the LTS Online Service on the content side and is an avid blogger.

Jim Buchan works on the LTS management of Glow.

Andrew Brown is working for LTS on new technologies for learning.
John Connell former SSDN/Glow Programme Director with LTS and now our Learning Futures Strategist has become a great blogger and leads our Web 2.0 strategy. Special thanks to John for helping me to set up this blog in Wordpress.