School trusts and teacher autonomy by Jim Lauder

Teaching is overwhelmingly and undoubtedly a team sport. It doesn’t often feel that way when we’re alone with our students in the classroom, but other teachers had them last year, others will have them next year, if I’m a secondary teacher they’ll move on in an hour, and if issues arise somebody else really needs to have our backs. This is one reason, incidentally, why performance related pay never made much sense in teaching. There are still those who emphasise the individual nature of teaching: we should be reflective practitioners, crafting each lesson as bespoke.

The artisans worry, in some cases understandably, about schools trusts becoming overly centralised in their expectations, with a McSchool model where the teacher dishes up codified pedagogical happy meals with all the associated health benefits for the young people in our care. Booklets, PowerPoints, churned out by central teams driving a Fordist approach to education.

I think this misunderstands the relationship between school trusts and teacher autonomy, or at least, what that relationship could be and ideally is. School trusts are the teams we join to play our sport (different teams have different styles of play, and influence and learn from each other, and that’s great). Like in team sports, everyone needs to know really well their role in the team, but the overall structure the team provides gives each player the framework within which they can express themselves. Further than that (to stretch the analogy to breaking point), in the best teams the players are the ones who call the shots and make key decisions to drive the team forward – the coaches just build an environment and culture to make that possible.

At Dixons, we place a lot of emphasis on self-determination theory, as expounded by Daniel Pink. At the heart of this is the idea that people flourish professionally when allowed to develop mastery, exercise autonomy, and work towards a purpose higher than themselves. Autonomy is built into what we do – trusting our colleagues and having the right people make decisions regardless of hierarchy. But autonomy can’t mean everyone just does their own thing. Children need to have a coherent education, for starters. But people also need structure in order to flourish best. Our key concept for how this works at a trust wide level is ‘aligned autonomy’. There are some areas all our schools must align on (our ‘backbone’) and other areas where schools have autonomy. Lots of this is common sense, so for example we have a common approach to safeguarding, as you’d expect.

However, there’s another piece of the puzzle. Trusts are often seen as corporate entities, separate and hierarchically dominating individual teachers. But this needn’t be, and often isn’t, the case. Decisions about the common structures and expectations across a trust can be made by teachers collectively. The 18th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant held autonomy as a central concept, but he argued that it was different from just doing what we wanted. We always follow some sort of rule or guiding principle to be moral. We are free – autonomous – when we have given that rule to ourselves. Kant’s predecessor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had silly ideas about education (and was a very strange man by all accounts), but expressed this idea with a collective dimension, arguing that we are free when we obey laws we have all inputted into making through a deliberative political process.

What does this all mean in practice? Well, school trusts can have a variety of structures where colleagues across the trust can professionally deliberate and agree what they need to align on. At Dixons, for example, we have cross-cutting teams where, say, the heads of English at all our secondaries come together to develop our curriculum and resources. They would be supported by trust central staff (who have frequently been HoDs in our schools or similar in any case), but fundamentally they are the right people to make many of the decisions. Trusts following this sort of model can ensure the constant improvement of curricula and associated materials, but in a way that enhances the professional development of colleagues.

This isn’t the end of the story – it’s also, for example, important that within individual schools teachers beyond middle leaders are also afforded professional autonomy within the common structures and expectations. For instance, if cross-cutting teams refine curriculum booklets these need to be high-quality, useful, teaching tools, not restrictive cookie-cutters.

There’s another essential ingredient of a highly performing school trust based on teacher autonomy. Culture is vital. In particular, trusting colleagues is key, and being willing to defer to the brilliance of others without regard to ego. This is what makes a minimally hierarchical organisation successful. It’s only possible with a very high degree of alignment, based on a core mission. There also needs to be alignment on some core basics in terms of educational approach (at Dixons, for instance, we believe in the importance of powerful knowledge, inclusion, anti-racism etc, in service of our mission). Alignment without ego builds trust and psychological safety, which means the reasonable disagreement in cross-cutting conversations can be productive (indeed, heartily encouraged) and not acrimonious. The missions, values, and attendant cultures of different trusts will naturally look different, which is no bad thing.

So there is no inherent tension between teacher autonomy and the successful operation of a school trust. Trusts are our teams, and all teams need common goals, structures and routines within which individuals can flourish and there is collective success. Most importantly, trusts should push power down, minimise hierarchy, and make sure the right people are making the decisions they then have to live by, with appropriate support, input, challenge and accountability. In such an organisation, teachers are able to be truly autonomous professionals. Some might argue this is a rosy view of school trusts as they are. I would disagree. Many are en route to this sort of vision or something like it. School trusts are (hopefully!) in their infancy in historical terms, but already it is becoming clear that, run well, they can be the supportive environment teachers need to flourish that we’ve never quite had before.