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3 The Self-Managing School: A Matter of Being and of Becoming Allan K. Beavis Introduction The story is told of the village barber who shaves all those in the village who do not shave themselves. The question is: Does he shave himself? Thankfully, schools are not barber shops, and the issue of schools managing themselves do not encounter this same kind of problem. Or do they? Let me stand that paradoxical problem aside for the time being and tell you about City Grammar School (a hypothetical school in a hypothetical city). It was a very traditional boys' school and it only employed male staff who were called 'masters' and whom the boys addressed as 'sir'. A new headmaster, Stephen Warne, was appointed and he decided it was time to make some changes; nothing radical, but one change he wanted was for the boys to address staff by name rather than 'sir'. He decided that the best way to approach the change was to get the boys to call him Mr Warne rather than 'sir' and quietly let this filter through the school. But so entrenched was the 'sir' habit that nothing changed. The boys still called the other masters 'sir' and, only when he pulled them up, did they remember to call him Mr Warne; and other staff who he had encouraged to adopt the 'Mr' form of address did not seem to be insisting on it from the boys. It seemed to Stephen Warne that the only thing to do was to bring the subject out into the open, discuss it fully, explain why he wanted to change the style of address and then insist that everyone insist upon the new form. When he raised the subject, however, he discovered, to his dismay, that there was very strong support for a change in form of address, but the preferred new form (from the predominantly young staff) was not to be called Mr X, as he desired it to be, but the use of first names. In fact, so strong were the feelings for that change that this was the form of address 44 Allan K. Beavis that won the day and became the norm for the school! The new headmaster had managed to change the form of address within the school, but the end result was otherwise than he had intended. An Overview Throughout the 1980s, in a number of countries, including Australia, initiatives have been taken to give schools within publicly-funded centralized systems greater autonomy to make decisions over the allocation of resources. This has been viewed as enabling schools to become 'self-managing'. In particular, the appointment of school councils with representatives of the various 'constituencies' of the school (staff, pupils and community) is seen as the ideal way to maximize the benefits of self-management. I propose to argue that while such a move certainly increases the school's ability to manage itself in an ever more complex and contingent environment, the appointment of a school council is not in itself a necessary condition for self-management. All that a council may achieve is a shift in control from one level to another: albeit a more local level. To claim that this enables self-management is only valid within a particular view of schools. A view which I believe precludes a proper understanding of selfmanagement . By reference to some research into the governance of independent schools, I propose to argue that, when viewed from an alternative paradigm, schools are seen to be by nature self-managing social systems. They are social systems that are operationally closed systems and that develop for themselves an identity which they are able to maintain autonomously. Whether decisions concerning the allocation of resources are made at the level of a central bureaucracy or at a more local level, does not alter the school's essentially autonomous nature. What is important in that regard is whether the school as a whole accepts the legitimacy of those decisions. If schools are self-managing without school councils, then the question arises: Why have schools appointed councils? It is my claim that this is an evolutionary development which allows schools to operate at a level that better enables them to coordinate themselves with their everincreasingly complex environments. Management A detailed consideration of the semantics of management is not possible within the limitations of this paper. Suffice it to say that management is variously defined by writers and not at all a clearly agreed...

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