Resourcing change in small schools.

Anderson, Michelle ; White, Simone

Introduction

Being a principal in the 21st century entails new responsibilities amid rapidly changing policy conditions and contexts for learning. New responsibilities for principals include managing and monitoring curriculum development, assessment and reporting; staff selection and performance management; financial management; mission building and managing reform; managing professional learning; school accountability; and community relations and marketing (Ingvarson, Anderson, Gronn & Jackson, 2006). In keeping with changing conceptions of leadership, school principals are also expected to work in shared or distributed school leadership models (Ingvarson et al., 2006).

Other emerging responsibilities include community and social welfare roles, supervision of major building works, and grief counselling (Lacey & Gronn, 2007; Redman, 2007). Increasingly, education interacts with other social challenges, including mental health and well-being, obesity, economic disadvantage, and access to products and services, requiring school leaders to actively engage with the complexity of schools within their communities.

More recently, policy developments at the national level in Australia--such as national professional standards for teachers, national curriculum and the reporting of individual school performance--require principals to negotiate and manage internal responses to these external pressures for change. These new responsibilities and policy developments are more acute for leaders in small schools as their own visibility and the relationship and position of the school to its community heightens the intensity of educational change management. Recent research (Halsey, 2005; Roberts, 2004; Sharplin, 2002; Starr & White, 2008) has confirmed that schools in rural locations continue to experience more staffing pressures than their metropolitan counterparts. Equally it is recognised that rural schools are more likely than city schools to be vital to the social and economic network and sustainability of their local community (Barley & Beesley, 2007; Halsey, 2005; Moriarty, Danaher & Danaher, 2003).

Within the study of school leadership, the differentiated experiences of those leading 'small' schools can be overlooked (Southworth, 2004). This article focuses on the challenge of resourcing change in small schools. The term 'resourcing' includes grants, in-kind and volunteer support, sponsorship, awards, prizes or donations, and, more broadly, relationship building within the school and externally. In particular, this article examines the experience of a principal in a small school as he and others sought to resource change. The concept of 'social capital' is used to examine why support is given to various ideas and practices of leadership, what the consequences are and on whom they fall.

Social capital

Social capital can be framed from different conceptual starting points, such as advantages to the individual (McGonigal et al., 2007). We adopt the definition of Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) that social capital is:

   the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an
   individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of
   more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance
   and recognition. (p. 119)

We take our lead from the school leadership research that views change as a socially contextualised collective approach and practice (Blackmore & Sachs, 2007). Viewed in this way, inclusive school leaders are said to engage people in networks of support and relations based on trust (Duignan & Marks, 2003; Fullan, 2001). These are also the sorts of images and expectations conveyed of small-school leadership in the research literature.

Social capital has its origins in historical, cultural, social and political contexts of trust (Bottery, 2003; Bourdieu, 1997; Kilpatrick, Johns, Mulford, Falk & Prescott, 2002; McGonigal et al., 2007). Social capital includes the notions of cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1995), and the use of networks to access resources (Bourdieu, 1997). McGonigal and colleagues (2007) concluded that common to theories of social capital are structures and processes that seek to bind and bridge social relations. The values, beliefs and attitudes of members of the school and its community are strongly aligned.

From these social capital perspectives, particular conditions for school leadership are necessary for change: trust, access, cooperation, reciprocity, proximity, ties, norms and networks, support and learning. These conditions for change can be viewed as 'qualities' and 'assets' but they are not 'commodities'. From this perspective, social capital is thought of as a process that develops and contracts over time. This view flies in the face of an assumption sometimes attributed to small schools, especially within rural locations, that social capital is something automatically bestowed on small schools by virtue of their 'smallness' and geographic location within a small community. This is not the view we adopt in this article. We argue that successful principals find ways for putting social capital to work for community change to flourish and be sustained.

A leader as social entrepreneur?

Small-school leaders believe networks and relationships are vital for the sustainability of their school (Anderson et al., 2010) but often they turn to the same 'institutionalised' networks, relationships and resources that they have always used. In this article, we propose the nature of social challenges increasingly demands that leaders adopt creative ways to counter social disadvantage. The key for leaders in creating the conditions for student well-being, learning and achievement (often in places of social and economic stress) could lie in putting social capital to work entrepreneurially.

The importance of social entrepreneurship as a phenomenon in social life has a long-standing literature base, largely outside education (Harding, 2007). In the literature, social entrepreneurship is recognised as a feature of corporate social responsibility whereby a business makes the decision to 'give back' to the communities from which it derives a business benefit (Brown, 2010; Mertkan, 2011). Ball's (2007) analysis of private sector participation in public sector education explored the broader policy implications of such developments. He questioned where business ended and philanthropy began, suggesting that there may be self-serving purposes beyond such activity. We acknowledge and recognise the complexities, contradictions and challenges that Ball's work raised to do with the motivations and purposes of school-business/philanthropy engagement in education. Ball suggested that 'giving' can be a medium through which to register a presence and make relationships with contacts and opinion-makers. Viewed from this perspective, Ball questioned whether such involvement in education marks it as another policy device: to try things out, to accomplish things, to change things, to avoid established public sector lobbies and interests, and to inject innovation into spaces of social policy that are seen as resistant or risk averse.

We use 'social entrepreneurship' in this article to explore how putting social capital to work in change in small schools might play out for school leaders in practice. We acknowledge that, while over the last decade social entrepreneurship may have been an important agenda item in some countries, clarity around its meaning and impact is still an area of discussion in the literature (Mustapha, Loyola & Loyola, 2007). As such, the concept and practice of social entrepreneurship cannot simply be transposed into school education. We are mindful of these constraints but there is a dearth of empirical school leadership research on this topic (Mertkan, 2011) and so we draw on research from outside education to develop our thinking about this issue for leaders of small schools.

While entrepreneurship shares some similarities with social entrepreneurship (for example, new combinations of resources to deal with a need) there are distinct differences. Entrepreneurs are explicitly associated with a business benefit, and therefore with economic growth and the business motives of profit, expansion of networks, markets or 'the brand'. Mustapha, Loyola and Loyola (2007) concluded that 'unlike the conventional entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs seek to alter the "status quo" of mainly rural, marginalised, disadvantaged and poor citizens' (p. 27).

Common features of social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship include a passion to tackle a local social need and to act as a catalyst for change, combined with an ability to attack the issue with 'business-like' discipline, tenacity and innovation towards a community goal. While the focus of social entrepreneurs is on a social mission, they understand the need to find a revenue stream to further fund their project. In broad terms, it can be argued that these characteristics of social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship also relate to contemporary challenges for school leadership.

In their study to identify what school leaders perceived was needed to meet the challenges facing them, Angus, Olney and Ainley (2007) found that on the issue of principals' estimates of sufficiency:

   only 6 per cent of principals reported that they had sufficient
   resources to meet expectations; at the other end of the scale, only
   3 per cent reported that their school's resources were grossly
   insufficient. Overall, the responses could be divided into thirds:
   nearly a third felt they needed considerably more; a third had
   identifiable, fundamental unmet needs; and a third felt they had
   sufficient--or nearly sufficient--resources. (p. xi)

In this context, the starting points for identifying and resourcing 'needs' clearly varied. Whether school leaders know where and how to find potential funds and partners, historically, has not been a topic of research. An analysis of Philanthropy Australia's annual reports (2007-2009) indicated a sharp rise in the total dollar amount distributed by its top 10 foundations to education. But research commissioned by the Commonwealth (2005) suggested that philanthropic resources are often 'untapped'. To explore the issue of resourcing school change further, we will look at policy conditions spurring on these developments, examine what the literature reports as the nature of school-community relations, and follow this with an illustrative case study of leading change in a small school.

Policy conditions: Encouraging new social partnerships

The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008) presented visionary statements of expectation. The first goal is to promote 'equity and excellence'; and the second is 'for all Australians to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals and active and informed citizens' (p. 7).

Within the Declaration is the expectation that partnerships be formed to help forge connections between young people and the communities in which they learn, live and work. The Declaration promoted new social partnerships among schools (for example, networks) and with groups external to their school (for example, parents, businesses). Similarly, in the UK, Every Child Matters and the 14-19 Agenda set out explicit expectations of schools to collaborate with an array of service providers and, in doing so, to build strong new relationships with external groups (Mertkan, 2011). Within this mix increasingly were public-private 'partnerships', providing businesses an avenue for business-school arrangements (Ball, 2007; Mertkan, 2011). Illustrative of this involvement were England's early academies in 2002-03 (former schools that have more autonomy than other schools). Typically, these academies had sponsors who were successful entrepreneurs from business and who were prepared to contribute significant amounts of their own money, such as 2 million [pounds sterling] for infrastructure costs, such as buildings (Leo, Galloway & Hearne, 2010). More recently, as many as 300, 000 companies have connected with education through England's National Education Business Partnership Network (Mertkan, 2011).

In Australia, a new Perth-based philanthropy umbrella group, Giving West, was established in 2010 to increase the charitable work being done by the state's wealthy. Similarly, the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development set up the Business Working with Education Foundation in 2010. At the national level, the establishment of the Business-School Connections Roundtable by the Australian federal government signalled a commitment to fostering greater business involvement in education. 'Partnerships' in education, both in Australia and elsewhere, continue to be a prominent policy feature, directing the conversation towards preferred ways of working to deal with key challenges for schools and their leadership.

The nature of school-community relations

An image of small schools, particularly small rural primary schools, is that of a relationship-rich community, a notion mentioned in the UK Social Entrepreneurship Monitor (Harding, 2007). Reporting on the connection between location and the level of social entrepreneurship, the authors noted that higher rates of social entrepreneurship were evident in rural locations than in urban locations. This is consistent with some thinking about small schools: that in rural areas there is already strong social capital that enables social enterprises to take hold. But calling a connection with someone or some group 'a relationship' does not make it so. Consistent with the features outlined earlier of social capital, relationships need to have legitimacy at the local school-community level and this involves some form of accountability--not in a bureaucratic sense but in a 'common good' sense. Clarke and Wildy (2006) found that the visibility, stability and credibility of the school and its leadership were also critical to community involvement in rural locations. The idea that small schools, especially rural, are the 'hub' of the community with a readymade bounty of social capital is contextual and contestable; 'parents congregating at the gate do not necessarily constitute a school-community relationship' (Hargreaves, 2009, p. 123). Typically, much of the research literature about 'involvement' is characterised as relating to fund-raising and other such 'events' or 'excursions', the use of school facilities or in formal consultations (Wilson, 2009).

School development research in South Africa of 96 schools exposed to three innovations found that the most productive relationships between a school and its community had one thing in common. Schools that succeeded in decreasing school absenteeism, school-based crime and in improving student achievement recognised that 'the nexus between the school, the community and the local economy was important for sustainable school community development' (Prew, 2010, p. 841). Similarly, the research of Kilpatrick, Johns, Mulford, Falk and Prescott (2002) in rural Australia found broad community benefits from school-community partnerships that included increased retention of young people in the community.

Case study method

St Arnaud Primary School in central western Victoria provides a case study of a small-school leader acting, as we define, as a social entrepreneur. The school is located in Victoria, 235 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. The 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed 8.5% in the region were unemployed, a figure well above the State and national average. In the last five years, 25% of the population has moved to St Arnaud from other communities. Many newcomers appear to be older retirees or single-income families moving to cheaper housing.

St Arnaud was selected for this article because it highlighted the ways in which the principal and numerous other networks of relations worked together to access resources beyond those typically accessed in education for the greater good of the whole school and community. The case provided a setting to explore our premise about the need to put social capital to work. This principal demonstrated many features of social entrepreneurship in a town facing the issue of increasing unemployment and poverty. In turn this was affecting student learning, as the teachers witnessed students who found it difficult to concentrate when their basic needs were unmet.

The St Arnaud case study is one of a set of 20 case studies that has formed part of a larger, longitudinal Australian Research Council-funded project (now known as TERRAnova, www.terranova.edu.au). This study examined the vexed issue of school staffing in regional and rural Australia. One component of the study sought to identify and examine rural schools that were nominated by their community as 'going against the trend of a high staffing churn' (Roberts, 2004) and in which sustainable practices around staff recruitment and retention were identified (White & Reid, 2008). Each case study, including the one featured in this article, involved a preliminary interview with the principal of the school before an in-depth three-day study was conducted in April 2009 by one of the TERRAnova researchers.

Each researcher travelled to the community and collected data about the community and its history, geography and economy (Reid et al., 2010). Photographs, council and school documents and field notes were also part of the data collected. Interviews and conversations were held with people from the school and the wider community. Consent in this case was given for 12 tape-recorded interviews to be used by the research team. Of note, a significant number of the St Arnaud interviews were with 'additional' staff who worked in and across the school and local community, rather than classroom teachers. Within the interviews, further 'resources and staff' were highlighted. In one interview conducted with the welfare officer, a further 10 people were identified as playing a significant support role in the school. These included local police, chefs, the local chaplain and people further afield who had made educational resources for the teachers to use in the classroom. Leadership was identified as a major theme (Reid et al., 2010) and socially entrepreneurial leadership emerged in a number of the cases (White, 2010).

Case study

Significant to the economic climate of St Arnaud, and located in the main street, are two large charity stores. At one end is a Salvation Army store. Operating in 121 countries in the world, the Salvation Army's Community Service Centres provide practical assistance such as food, clothing and household items to individuals and families facing financial pressure. At the other end of the main street in St Arnaud is a large St Vincent de Paul store. Like the Salvation Army, the St Vincent de Paul Society operates internationally in 131 countries to support families who are struggling financially. Donations to the society's stores are used to assist vulnerable families or individuals with free clothing or furniture. The presence of these two large charity organisations in such a small community indicated a heavy reliance on social support for everyday living. From the interviews, the link to the charities was particularly important. The excerpt below from the principal's interview, provides a rich description of the experience:

   For families and their lives; the effect of the drought and the
   effect on business closing, the stress that different families go
   through. If they lose their job, do they stay in the community and
   try and find something or do they leave? So we see all that through
   their kids. We see the pressures and we do a lot of work here in
   connecting with family relationships. It's not accepted here to
   notice that a kid's not happy and something's going on and not to
   follow through as much as we can.

The principal recognised that teaching and learning could not succeed without taking into account the circumstances of families and their living conditions and context. As he explained in the interview, he also recognised that countering disadvantage required the development of relationships with other not-for-profit organisations:

   We've been able to support a lot of families ourselves with our
   connections through St Vin[cent de Paul] and the [Salvation Army].
   The school even now has a trailer with a water tank on it and a
   deal where we can get water for emergency water for families and
   deliver it. Anything like that we spend a lot of time looking at
   it, making sure we don't step on the toes of local businesses, but
   in this case there isn't anyone. So I guess that's a challenge
   being able to support the families who are suffering hardships in
   rural areas.

The school's demographic data showed a community that was suffering financial hardship. Also evident was a strong determination and preparedness to help each other and rally together through community projects. Unemployment was high but so too was volunteerism. The 2006 ABS data indicated that one in three people in the community volunteered for an organisation or to care for others in the community.

Asked during the fieldwork what rural teachers need to know, a local literacy coach at the school remarked:

   It's critical they [teachers] have an understanding of how a small
   community works and the value of volunteerism and how that is the
   strength in the community ... if it wasn't for volunteerism that
   [programs] wouldn't happen. It's like the glue and it depends on
   how strong your volunteerism is as to how long your glue is in your
   community and how fragmented and how united they are. Also, it's
   probably critical for your local government to have a collective
   vision in that the people know which way they're heading otherwise
   you get this 'pulling apart' stuff ... everyone needs to be
   connected and there has to be that communication between your
   primary and your secondary [schools] and the connections between
   all your different services.

The literacy coach's comments suggest that it was important for teachers at St Arnaud to have a strong social commitment. At St Arnaud, this required developing relationships with other groups in the community, including those from the business and not-for-profit sectors. The principal and teachers worked with and within the broader conditions of the local community (drought) and the implications this was having on the families (for example, access to drinking water).

Drawing from a large range of staff and services, the principal had accessed a grant to fund a school-led initiative now known as 'Right Choices' aimed at ensuring student well-being. In 2009 the school won the prestigious school-community partnership National Australia Bank (NAB) award for its Right Choices program and received $50, 000 for its contribution to alleviating social disadvantage and on-going commitment to rural sustainability. Led by the principal, the school program later attracted further media coverage, which in turn led to further grants and wider national recognition.

Analysis of the interviews and documents showed that the school had been able to successfully recruit and retain teachers. Arguably, this was due largely to the leadership approach of the principal: a clear vision, a whole school approach, a positive attitude and an identified working 'culture' or environment that could best be described as innovative, resourceful and socially entrepreneurial. The principal actively sought out individuals, teams and institutional networks and drew them into 'his' network of the school and community. School staff and others connected in the school then did the same. The result was a small school with few financial resources that achieved national recognition and media attention that in turn was harnessed for further access to resources.

Information collected during the site visit suggested that the principal and his leadership enabled others to take on a leadership role. As a team the staff worked hard to develop an ethos of care and a feeling of familial connectivity within and across the school and its community. Many of those interviewed identified the principal's resourceful leadership as important to the success of the school. He demonstrated the social and creative entrepreneurial skills to attract the resources (human, technical, economic, physical) that might be necessary to sustain and support staff and students. His skill helped teachers to see themselves as leaders in the community. While the principal of St Arnaud demonstrated a keen vision and skill for connecting and securing resources to tackle key needs, the same cannot be said for all school leaders.

Conclusion

It is well documented in the research literature that leadership, particularly by the principal, matters when it comes to creating the conditions conducive for student learning to flourish (Dinham, 2008). Few dispute that school leaders in Australia, in particular those leading small schools, face complex challenges in seeking to meet the demands outlined in the Melbourne Declaration goals. It is no great surprise to see that governments and schools are increasingly seeking to rally the support of external partners.

In this article, our interest was in the relationships small-school leaders enter into to deal with key localised needs. These relationships can include the business, philanthropic and not-for-profit sectors. In Western countries such as the USA and UK, corporate and philanthropic engagement in education is becoming increasingly commonplace (Ball, 2007). In Australia, knowledge about the scale, nature and impact of such relationships is limited by lack of research and evaluation other than small-scale, one-off studies, and often it is understood from the one perspective only (for example, grant providers). Contextualised knowledge on this topic in Australia is in its infancy.

For social capital to emerge, the principal of St Arnaud applied many of the characteristics we identified from the literature about social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship. This in turn had implications for the knowledge and skills required of the principal and others in schools. As the case study showed, a principal can be well positioned to resource positive small-school change by developing new relationships with groups, encouraging volunteering, and by seeking and securing funds to support key educational projects. To do so required the principal to rethink existing resources and to harness new opportunities for the school and his school community. The development of school-community partnerships by the principal and others in St Arnaud reflected a form of social capital in that community. Based on our analysis of the literature, our proposition was that perhaps we are seeing the explicit development and emergence of education-driven social entrepreneurship in school leadership. For some, this type of thinking and practice is not a redefinition of school leadership at all, but merely articulates what many have been doing as principal leaders for years in their quest to create the conditions for student well-being, learning and achievement. For others who may be new to principalship or this way of leading change, more support to develop knowledge and skills in this area may well be required.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the research from the Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project known as Teacher Education for Rural and Regional Australia: Breaking new ground (TERRAnova). The researchers for this project are Joanne Reid, Simone White, Bill Green, Graeme Lock, Maxine Copper and Wendy Hastings.

The authors would also like to acknowledge the Principal, Mr Mark McLay, from St Arnaud Primary School and his staff who generously gave their time for this study and for their permission to use this work in this publication.

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Michelle Anderson

Australian Council for Educational Research

Simone White

Monash University, Victoria

Michelle Anderson is Senior Research Fellow and Project Director of

Tender Bridge at the Australian Council for Educational Research.

Email: andersonm@acer.edu.au

Simone White is Professor and Head of School and Associate Dean of Education, in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Gippsland Campus.