Evaluating the wider outcomes of schools : Complex systems modelling for leadership decisioning

A continuing challenge for the education system is how to evaluate the wider outcomes of schools. Wider measures of success - such as citizenship or lifelong learning - influence each other and emerge over time from complex interactions between students, teachers and leaders, and the wider community...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Educational management, administration & leadership administration & leadership, 2017-07, Vol.45 (4), p.719-743
Main Authors: Crick, Ruth Deakin, Barr, Steven, Green, Howard, Pedder, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic Achievement
Case Studies
Communities of Practice
Complexity
Computer Software
Correlation
Decision Making
Education systems
Educational administration
Educational improvement
Educational leadership
Elementary Secondary Education
Faculty Development
Foreign Countries
Hierarchical Linear Modeling
Instructional Leadership
Leadership
Leadership responsibility
Leadership Training
Learning Processes
Lifelong Learning
Likert Scales
Measurement Techniques
Multilevel models
Outcomes of Education
Pilot projects
Primary secondary education
School Administration
School Effectiveness
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Summary:A continuing challenge for the education system is how to evaluate the wider outcomes of schools. Wider measures of success - such as citizenship or lifelong learning - influence each other and emerge over time from complex interactions between students, teachers and leaders, and the wider community. Unless methods are found to evaluate these broader outcomes, which are able to do justice to learning and achievement as emergent properties of the learner's engagement with his or her world the education system will continue to focus on narrow measures of school effectiveness which do not properly account for complexity. In this article we describe the rationale and methodology underpinning a pilot research project that applied hierarchical process modelling to a group of schools as complex living systems, using software developed by engineers at the University of Bristol, called Perimeta. The aim was to generate a stakeholder owned systems design which was better able to account for the full range of outcomes valued by each school, and for the complex processes which facilitate or inhibit them, thus providing a more nuanced leadership decision-making analytic. The project involved three academies in the UK. [Author abstract]
ISSN:1741-1432
1741-1440
DOI:10.1177/1741143215597233