Distributed systemic leadership in Finland – the case of Tampere
1. In the year 2005 the municipality of Tampere has introduced a pilot system of
local management in education. Tampere is among
the largest of the 416 municipalities that operated in Finland at the beginning of 2007: at
the time of our visit it maintained 50 schools of basic education, 14 general upper secondary schools and a number
of vocational schools. The most important element of the new pilot system has
been the creation of a new function of areal principal or
district head in five school clusters (districts) around the city. Each of
these districts comprises 10-12 schools with a three to four thousand pupil
population. The district heads have
been selected from among the principals leading larger schools of basic
education in the five clusters, preferably from among those who had been the
most innovative in the past. They – together with a sixth person who has a
municipality-wide responsibility for special education and with some other people
from the municipal administrative staff – have become members of the municipal leadership team for basic
education, led by the head of the education department of the municipality.
While undertaking new territorial responsibilities in their respective
districts they also kept their original post of principal in their own schools.
One third of their working time was shifted from school level tasks to the new district
level ones. In order to assure the normal operation of management in their own
schools, the municipality created a vice-manager post in all of the five of
them (taken by a teacher whose teaching load has been halved).
2. The reform that Tampere introduced
in its system of educational management and leadership can be interpreted as an
answer to the challenges its schools and its broader community of inhabitants
are facing, and it seems to mirror the way Finland as a country and as a nation
tries to answer the question of how to survive and, what is more, how to move into
a better position in a rapidly changing and turbulent global environment. The
essence of this answer seems to be in a delicate and dynamic balance that Finns
try to maintain between preserving safety and taking risks, being open to the
vagueness of the future while standing stably on the ground of the well known
past, accepting change while respecting stability. This balance has been deeply
rooted in and has been reinforced by the way Finland has reformed its education
system since the seventies, maintaining a strong reform drift and the consensus
behind it even in deep economic and political crisis situations (Aho et al, 2006). The ideas behind the Tampere pilot initiative
and the way it is implemented shows a mixture of radically new ideas and the desire
of not to overturn things too quickly and too much. It is an example of quiet
change using the improvement of leadership as a major drive.
3. The capacity of the Finnish education
system to achieve a permanent improvement of teaching and learning in a climate
of sustained “pedagogical conservativism” is seen by a few prominent Finnish analysers
as one of the main keys to the success of Finland in international
measurements of student achievement (see for example Sahlberg, 2006). The dynamic
character of the balance characterising the Finish way to maintain stability
while allowing, encouraging and introducing changes and innovations, which appears
also in the Tampere’s
management reform initiative, has to be stressed particularly. This feature appears,
for instance, in the way the connection between leadership and organisation or
between leaders and the people who are led is conceived. As one of the
interviewed principals expressed: “if
there is good leadership and strategy, people feel better, and if people feel
better, leadership becomes better.” Leadership in this way of thinking is both
determining the organisational processes and is determined by them. There is a
dynamic of feedback loops that makes the whole system evolve and pushes it towards
a continuous improvement. The system can change because it is stable, that is, because its members feel secured and
therefore they are open to take more risks. People can find stability this way
in the change process itself. Anxieties raised by the openness of the change
process are treated by extraordinarily intensive and permanent communication pursued
in the many networks, management teams and other forms of shared leadership.
4. The management reform introduced by
the Tampere
municipality is distributing school leadership at several levels and in several
directions. First, leadership is
redistributed between the municipal authority and the schools. Those principals
who have been invited by the municipality to share their leadership activities
and energies between their own schools and others operating in their areas are
now, in fact, doing part of what the municipality used to do. Beyond leading
their own schools they are now coordinating various district level functions,
like planning, development or evaluation. The municipality has this way shared
with them some leadership functions that are typically local or territorial, and
go beyond the boundaries of the school unit. Second, leadership is distributed within the municipality education
administration itself as the new district heads are now part of a municipal
leadership team. The head of the municipal education department, is now,
instead of managing alone, working in a group, sharing with it problems and
elaborating solutions cooperatively. In principle this could have been done
within the municipal administration, without involving external school level
actors, but the Tampere
municipality decided to realise team management through opening its own
organisation boundaries. Third, the district
heads are now distributing their leadership energies, experiences and knowledge
between their own school and other schools. While coordinating activities like
curriculum planning, professional development of teachers or provision of special
need education in their area, they exercise leadership at both institutional
and local (district or area) level. In this way they distribute their personal
leadership capacities and energies. Fourth,
leadership within the schools led by the district heads, that is the largest
schools with particularly complex sets of pedagogical tasks, has been
redistributed between the principal and other staff in the same school. This
became inevitable as the time the principal can now spent on leading and
managing his own school has been reduced. All these forms of distribution
mutually reinforce each other, and they together are transforming the
leadership system of Tampere
and its schools.
5. The meaning of the Tampere
municipal management reform project and its potential leadership implications
can be understood only if we have a good sight of the role of municipalities in
education in Finland.
One of the main features of the context of school leadership in Finland,
similarly to other Nordic countries, is the particularly strong role of local municipalities. The more than four
hundred municipalities (or, in the case of upper secondary vocational education,
their consortia) are the owners of
the majority of schools, they finance
their schools (in a significant part from their own revenues) and they are the employers of teachers (including school
leaders). Furthermore, and this is particularly important from the point of
view of school leadership, they play a key role also in the area of curriculum planning and development.
6. This strong role of municipalities
in implementing curriculum deserves particular attention. Finland is
currently implementing a curriculum reform that is meant to lead to further
improvements of classroom level practices. One of the features of the current curriculum
reform is that it provides a broad platform and framework in the education
sector for the efforts to improve the country’s development perspectives and to
prepare the country for broader economic and social challenges. This broad
understanding of the curriculum encourages the participation in planning and
implementing it of those who have a commitment to broader social and economic
development, such as local communities and the municipalities representing
them. In the Finnish system of curricular regulation, where the national
authorities prescribe only a broad framework, and classroom teaching is
regulated directly by local curricula, local responsibility for curriculum
planning is shared between the schools and the municipalities. The role of the
municipalities in the area of curriculum is enhanced by the curriculum itself
as it requires schools to cooperate with each other, which broadens the scope
of curriculum from school to local or territorial level. According to the background
report for this study (Improving…, 2007)
schools are obliged to present in their own curriculum document how they
cooperate with other schools. The shift of focus from the institutional to the
local or territorial level may go as far as in some cases there is only one
detailed municipal level curriculum that is applied in all schools. In the city
of Järvenpää,
for example, all comprehensive schools follow the municipal level common
curriculum which has been created in the framework of a city-wide cooperative
effort with the participation of several hundreds of teachers, led by the
municipal department of education. In other cases, like in Helsinki
and Tampere, although
the municipality plays a very active role in orienting and supporting the
preparation of school level curricula and it encourages intensive cooperation
in this area among schools, this does not go as far as to conceive a common
city level curriculum.
7. Municipal education leaders – in
particular, the heads of the departments of education of municipalities – may
have extraordinary strong influence on educational development in Finland, in
general, and on the development of school level leadership, in particular. They
are, for instance, determining the criteria for the selection of principals.
They may require that the candidates possess a qualification obtained in some
kind of management training but they can also be satisfied with earlier professional
experience. Some of them have explicit and well pronounced concepts about how
school leadership should be organised and improved and they make effective steps
in order to achieve these ideas. Tampere
is not the only municipality being pro-active in this area. We saw, for
instance, a very strong commitment by the head of the education department of Helsinki municipality in
favour of school level collective leadership. She demands all schools to establish
and operate executive teams. When
meeting the leaders of the schools in order to discuss questions related with their
work, she prefers to meet the whole team instead of meeting only the principal.
As she is convinced that the quality of the leadership teams has a great impact
on the quality of the work of the schools she creates possibilities for
professional development not only for the principal but also for all members of
the executive teams. The municipality
of Helsinki which,
similarly to other larger cities, is a major purchaser of management
development programs, buys and organises training programs not only for principals,
but also for entire executive teams.
8. In this context of leadership
shared between the school and the local level the quality of local
(municipal) leadership has a major influence of the way teaching and learning
is organised in schools. Leadership at municipal level is shared, among others,
between professional administrators (e.g. the head of the educational section
of the mayor’s office) and elected politicians (e.g. the head of the municipal
education committee). Through this linkage education is connected to broader
local community affaires. This connection is reinforced by the fact that the
administration of education is integrated into overall local administration
(this latter including areas such as urban planning, local economic development,
health and social care, housing or cultural animation). Educational leadership
in this context is strongly influenced by the broader reforms of state
administration or municipal governance. During our visits to local
municipalities we could see the direct impacts of ongoing governance reforms led
by the Ministry of the Interior. Tampere,
for example is introducing its new management model in a framework that is
apparently influenced by business management approaches. The municipal
leadership, for instance, defined the role of the local community (or its
elected delegates) as the purchaser
of services that may be offered either by either public or private providers, depending on which is more
efficient. In the case of schools the Tampere
city management reform recognises, on the one hand, that there is no
significant costumer demand for alternative providers, but stresses, on the
other hand, that service contracts
with the providers will include both cost and learning outcome indicators. In
this framework the leading of the reform of local school management seems to be
more in the hands of the educational
development manager, working on the implementation of municipal governance reform
than in those of the director of the education department of the city
municipality.
9. The municipal educational leaders
we met in Helsinki, Järvenpää and Tampere all used notions
and applied procedures coming from business management, for example the balanced score card approach. Their
mental openness towards the world of business and the management approaches
characterising this world seemed to be in harmony with their commitment to
pupils’ welfare and to the improvement of learning. Being efficient public
managers and playing the role of pedagogical leaders did not seem to cause role
conflicts for them. This seems to be a key feature of the Finnish way of
educational thinking which is positively reinforced by the national culture. Notions
like efficiency or competitiveness are much less in conflict in this culture
with notions like education, cooperation and creativity than in many other
cultures. The very high esteem attributed to art education, for instance, is
easily reconciled in this country with economic needs since art education is
seen also as a source of creativity that is needed to produce innovations leading
to marketable new products.
10. The city management reform pursued
by the municipality
of Tampere is part of a
broader national reform process aiming at preparing the country to the challenges
it will face due to foreseeable social and economic changes. A background
document to the project of the Ministry of the Interior “to
restructure municipalities and services”, entitled “Future challenges” (Ministry of Interior, 2006), stresses
that due to demographic changes resources will have to be transferred form the
education sector to health and social care. According to this document the
expenditure on comprehensive schools in 2010 will be only 93% of what it was in
2005. This makes it necessary the reorganisation of local public services. The
reform of management structures and the strengthening of leadership is strongly
linked with this process. As the leader of the Tampere city management reform said when
asked about municipal policies on school leadership: “good leadership is needed when we are changing things”. The Tampere
school leadership reform – that is the redefinition of the role of some of the
school leaders through giving them new district level coordination
responsibilities and, at the same time, offering them new resources for
building new managerial functions in their own school – is directly linked to
the efforts to meet these challenges.
11. It is important to stress again that
not only all mentioned levels and directions of leadership redistribution
deserves attention but also their mutual interplay.
Redistributing leadership within the municipality, between municipal
authorities and schools, between schools and within schools at the same time
significantly changes the way leadership functions all over the local system.
All actors find themselves in a new space of more intensive communication; all receive
new bits of information, and all meet and talk to new actors in new situations.
This intensification of information exchanges and the new forms of interaction
necessarily leads to changes in the behaviour of all actors. Municipal leaders start
to depend more on the behaviour of district heads as their success in solving local
problems is increasingly influenced by what the latter do. District heads also
increasingly depend on other principal colleagues operating in their area as
the evaluation of their work is not based any more only on what they achieve in
their own school but also on what the community of the schools in the given
area achieve. They also depend of the behaviour of those who, in their own
school, take over parts of their earlier management functions. In this new web
of increasing mutual dependences, both horizontal and vertical, new types of
behaviour emerge. Principals are forced to start thinking in local dimensions, what
leads to a better understanding by them of the broader community needs. They
tend to be less inclined to entrench themselves into a position of fiercely defending
the interest of their own organisation against that of others (what certainly makes
things easier in a period of shrinking financial support and forced
redistribution of existing resources). They also become more open to and can see
deeper what happens in other schools which opens new windows for mutual
learning. As they can devote less time and energy to their own school they are
obliged to delegate various management tasks to other staff, which leads to a more
open and more democratic institutional leadership.
12. Leadership in this local and
institutional web of new mutual dependences becomes systemic in different
senses. This happens, first, because the focus of the attention of several
leaders is shifting from the school unit to the broader local system. Exercising
leadership may have an increasing influence not only on the smaller part, that
is the territory under their control but also on the larger system, that is on
other territories. Second, it happens because boundaries separating, on the one
hand, the various parts of the local educational system and, on the other, the
various parts of the schools as subsystems become more permeable. The
strengthening of mutual interdependences and the intensification of
interactions push the system towards a new state of balance, and it starts
behaving as an evolving system more than before. Leadership in this system has
to become systemic as the actions of leaders is both influenced by and is influencing
a growing number of factors. What the district head does in his/her own school
has a growing impact on other schools, and what happens in one district has a
growing impact on other districts. When, for example, as it happens in Tampere, one of the district
heads develops, in the framework of a pilot district level project a new
computerised system of information in order to see better the resources
available in all the schools of his area, this inevitably leads to an increased
need for transparency in the whole territory of the municipality. If one of the
schools starts applying a new approach in dealing with pupils with particular
learning difficulties, this may be transferred to other schools quickly by the
mediation of the coordinator of special needs education who is member of the Tampere team of district heads.
13. The new web of mutual dependences created
by the Tampere
educational management reform project not only enhances the emergence of new
types of leadership behaviour, but it also opens new possibilities for practical
problem solving. This is clearly seen when one thinks of one of the key
problems that schools are currently facing: the demographic loss and the need
to transfer resources from education to other sectors, namely health and social
care. This makes it necessary the revealing of hidden resources and also the
creation of new mechanisms to redistribute them. Without the dense
communication web created by the district head system, it would have probably been
impossible for the municipal administration to reveal hidden resources (for
example unused manpower) and it would have been very difficult to persuade
those possessing them to share them with others. The intensive
inter-institutional communication created by the Tampere reform project not
only made it impossible for institutions to hide their resources form each other
but it also created social or moral pressures to share them with those most in
need of them. The improved potential for sharing resources (money, manpower,
knowledge) will undoubtedly increase the capacity of the Tampere education system to adapt itself to
the changing conditions without making significant harm to its current
performance.
14. As already mentioned the new
management model is also used as a coordination instrument in the process of
implementing the new national curriculum. The increased cooperation and
communication between schools achieved by the district head is used not only to
communicate more effectively the national and local strategic goals of the new
curriculum towards the schools but also to make it work better in daily
practice. As we saw, Tampere
municipality and its schools have decided not to have just one common municipal
curriculum (as it is the case in Järvenpää) but to allow all schools to have
their own: the municipality issued only guidelines for the preparation of
school level curricula. As every school develops its own curriculum document,
there is a risk of growing incoherence that may hamper the horizontal or
vertical transfer of pupils between schools. Coordination has to be achieved, therefore,
in a different way, using the new mechanism of district headship. According to
their job description one of the functions of district heads is “guaranteeing an adequate coherence of the
curriculum in the district” and “a
smooth school path for the pupil.”
15. More frequent interactions,
stronger mutual interdependence, intensified communication and more permeable
organisational boundaries not only improve problem solving capacities but can also
induce new energies for further development. It is expected that the new
management model will “create new personal
resources for basic education, which will also promote Tampere’s
ability to take part in nationwide development work and policy discussions” in harmony with the ambitions of the region to
be a flagship in the movement of Finland towards the knowledge
economy. With the mobilisation of the new network of district heads the municipal
leadership hopes to acquire better access to schools and to involve them better
in the implementation of its future oriented strategy: as it was formulated by
the municipal development manager: “This
way we want to keep alive the future orientation of schools”. Accordingly,
area principals have been assigned a number of key developmental tasks, for
example helping the sharing of good practices, enhancing evaluation practices
as sources for mutual learning and supporting the professional development of
teachers who work in the schools of the districts.
16. It is important to stress that the
cooperative management model behind the Tampere pilot
project is not entirely new in Finland.
There were consultation mechanisms operating before the project started,
involving all school leaders in the region, although, according to municipal
leaders, these were not effective enough due to the large number of participant
principals which prevented a deeper and more substantial dialogue. Team
management was also widely used at school level. Discussing the problems of
teaching and learning or the problems of individual pupils presenting learning
difficulties in multidisciplinary teams has long been an important feature of
Finnish comprehensive schools, and many analysers attribute the high
achievement of Finnish education among other factors to this, both in terms of
student performance and equity, (Grubb,
2005; OECD, 2004; Aho et al, 2006).
17. We saw a strong commitment to team
leadership not only in Tappere but also elsewhere. The approach of Helsinki municipality has
already been mentioned. In Järvenpää all comprehensive schools operate advanced
forms of team management. The leadership team of schools, led by the principal,
consists of the heads of various lower level groups called learning and improvement teams. These are organised according to
certain grades or to various subject groups. The learning and improvement teams
are the places where daily pedagogical problems are discussed by teachers and
solutions are searched for. One of the teams, the student welfare team, has a special status. According to the
municipal guidelines it is led in every comprehensive school directly by the
principal. In larger institutions it has among its members the school nurse,
the special need education teacher, the school psychologist, the social worker
and a doctor. This is an organisational framework that allows teachers to discuss
the cases of pupils in need of assistance and this way it is a key factor of providing
individualised support to pupils. The fact that the principal is charged to lead
directly the student welfare team has as a consequence, that he or she is has
to be involved in solving daily pedagogical problems. He or she knows all
problematic cases and can take those appropriate measures which require the
cooperation of various actors. This organisational form assures that the
director cannot neglect pedagogical leadership in favour of managerial tasks.
18. Leading through teams is present also
in upper secondary schools although other forms of collegial leadership may be
more important here. The general upper secondary school we visited in Järvenpää
introduced, as a school level management innovation, interdisciplinary teams
discussing whole school issues. The members of these teams are selected in this
school on a random basis and the teacher they elect as their leader becomes automatically
member of the school level leadership team led directly by the principal. The
example of this school shows also that shifting communication and cooperation
from disciplinary groups to teams dealing with whole school issues is not always
simple in upper secondary schools. Many subject teachers seem not to be sufficiently
motivated to take part in discussions that go beyond their own specific area.
However, at this (ISCED3) level new opportunities are opened for the
involvement of students in dealing with whole school affairs. Distributing
leadership, as we saw in the Järvenpää upper secondary school we visited, has
reached students. The school is operating an efficient network of student
tutors, which has a key role in managing the increasing complexity of the
organisation of learning. As learning in this school is organised on a course
basis, with a great autonomy of students to determine their own learning paths through
composing specific mixes of courses according to their individual interest –
including even courses provided by other upper secondary schools – a high level
of complexity arises that could probably not be managed without involving
students in managing it. The operation of tutoring by well prepared and highly
motivated students in this school is what allows for the organisation to
maintain a high level diversity and complexity – that is, organisational
features that are favourable for change and adaptation.
19. Coming back to Tampere: one of the most interesting,
probably unintended, consequences of the creation of the function of the district
head – and of the situation in which the principal have to spend a significant
part of his time far away from his own school – is that the distribution of
leadership even further becomes almost inevitable in the organisations
concerned. In the absence of the principal the staff has to take things into
its hands. The creation of the post of the vice-manager (called also assistant
director) has, in fact, doubled the management posts at the level below the
principal (the previous function of the deputy principal was not significantly altered
by the changes). In a comprehensive school we visited in Tampere the new vice-manager, the old deputy
principal and the principal charged with district affaires composed the
management team of the school. At the meeting of the group which presented us
the school the vice-manager played the leading role: he was much more active
than his principal (assuming the function of the district head) who was also
present. The school has operated several teams and every teacher has been the member
of one of them. All the teams have been dealing with whole school affaires,
focusing on one of the areas that have been perceived as crucial for the pedagogical
development of the school (see text in box)
Teams in Linnainmaa School
- Team of development of education
- Recreational team
- Team of special education
- Team of immigrant education
- Team of information and communication
- Team of the operational culture
- Team of the theme “Multicultural education
and continuous development”
20. The distribution of leadership and
the creation of an expanding web of communication through the operation of various
thematic teams with the involvement of each staff member allow schools to
manage a higher level complexity. By intensifying communication and cooperation
through the operation of teams the perceptive capacity of the organisation is probably
increasing significantly. This is strongly needed in an organisation which – as
Finnish schools do – supports the individualisation or personalisation of
teaching. Cultivating an individualised approach which recognises the specific
needs of each pupil necessarily leads to a higher level organisational
complexity. If the richness of information that comes to the organisation from
every pupil is to be heard, the organisation has to increase its perceptive capacity.
New communication channels have to be created and continuously operated which
inevitably increases organisational complexity and raises serious management
and leadership challenges. The value attributed to sharing leadership functions,
to team leadership and to the involvement of as many staff members as possible
in various leadership related functions in Finnish schools seems to be not only
a sign of commitment to democratic ideals but probably it is also an instrument
to organise learning effectively in an increasingly complex teaching and
learning environment. One of the interesting instruments used by Finnish
schools to enhance their capacity to deal with increased pupil diversity seems
to be the particular role attributed to special needs education, to teachers specialised
in this area and to organisational facilities created to deal with this area. This
appears not only at school level but also at the level of municipalities. In
Tampere, as mentioned earlier, beyond the five district heads a sixth head-teacher,
responsible for special needs education, was also appointed and invited to be the
member of the municipal level management team.
21. The sixth member of the team of the
district heads, that is the head-teacher who has municipality-wide responsible
for special needs education seem to have a central role in this team. He is the
only member of the team who supervises not only one district but all the five,
which means that he has the broadest view about what happens in the whole
municipal area: he knows all schools. He seems to be an engine of transfer of pedagogical
solutions from school to school. As he expressed: “the knowledge of the special
needs teachers and the specials needs class teachers should be used when
planning and making special needs teaching in the district”. As special needs
education has a broad meaning in Finland – the number of pupils receiving
special education is here much higher than in most OECD countries and the
number of those classified as having learning difficulties and disabilities is
particularly high (OECD, 2000) – and
as a great part of special education is conducted in integrated settings, this
transfer reaches many spheres of teaching.
22. The multilevel distribution of
leadership seen in Tampere would certainly not
been possible without the high level trust
that characterises the world of education and its social-political environment
in Finland.
Distributing leadership while it opens extraordinary opportunities for
development, effective work and problem solving it also incurs risks. Sharing
responsibilities may open the possibility of social games that leads to unequal
sharing of burdens or escaping responsibility. We did not see signs of this. No
one seems to abuse of the change of the rules of the game. Although the
municipality is putting some of the burden of territorial coordination on the
shoulders of school principals, who now have to deal with problems that used to
be outside the boundaries of their responsibilities, by its action it also
transfers much of its power to them, accepting the lost of monopoly of
information, and letting local actors agree among themselves to solve problems
on their own way. While the time principals can spend on managing their own
schools was shortened, their employer, the municipality, also made extra
resources available for the development new school level management structures
that can compensate for this, and also accepted that other persons than the
principal could be responsible for certain processes in the school (that is, it
accepted the loosening of the principle of undivided personal responsibility). As
the redistribution of leadership has been done in an atmosphere of mutual trust
it was possible to do it so that everyone could feel himself in the position of
winner.
References:
Ministry of Interior (2006): Future challenges.
A background document of the “Project to restructure municipalities and
services”
Grubb, Norton et al. (2005): Finland country
note. Equity in education thematic review. OECD
Improving school leadership in Finland
(2007). Background report to the OECD thematic review of school leadership.
Manuscript under revision.
OECD (2004): What makes school systems perform?
Seeing school systems through the prism of PISA. Paris
OECD (2000): Special Needs Education.
Statistics and Indicators. Paris
Aho, Erkki, Pitkänen, Kari and Sahlberg, Pasi
(2006): Policy Development and Reform Principles of Basic and Secondary
Education in Finland
since 1968. The World Bank. Washington
Sahlberg, Pasi (2006): Raising Student
Achievement: The Finnish approach. The Contexts, Configurations and
Consequences of Differing Strategies. Paper presented at the AERA 2006
Symposium - SIG on Educational Change. San
Francisco, 11 April, 2006
Helsinki, 2006 January
Gabor HALASZ