Reframing Continuous School Improvement in Australian Schools

Introduction: The Kaleidoscopic Landscape Of Continuous School Improvement

For decades there has been a concerted effort at the international and national level to improve educational quality as part of both international and national educational reform agendas. However defining and coming to an understanding of what educational quality is, has been an ambiguous and difficult journey. There is in fact no universal agreement on its definition, its processes, its methods for measurement, and the complexity of many simultaneously interacting relevant variables that would need to be analysed. This ambiguity in itself provides credence to the fact that educational quality is not a universally defined phenomenon but something that has to be understood at its point of action albeit having a universally accepted notional framework of understanding that nations strive to achieve. As seen over the years, some of the problems endemic to studies of educational effectiveness have been attributed to a lack of empirical evidence, a lack of longitudinal studies modelling change, the issue of data analysis methods, problems in the choice of measures for the outcomes, the issue of sample size, and statistical adjustments (Hill, Rowe, Holmes-Smith & Russell, 1996).

In a rapidly changing environment of social and economic globalisation, education is identified as a primary centrepiece and a requisite for fulfilling many individual, familial and national aspirations (Adams et al., 2012, p. 6). Hill, Rowe, Holmes-Smith and Russell (1996) suggest that, “The provision of schooling is one of the most massive and ubiquitous undertakings of the modern state. Schools account for a substantial proportion of public and private expenditure and are universally regarded as vital instruments of social and economic policy aimed at promoting individual fulfilment, social progress and national prosperity” (p. 1). In this environment, understandings around educational quality have become very much complex and comprehensive.

Schools are open systems where people work together to achieve a common purpose. As open systems, schools are always interacting with their environments and therefore structure themselves to deal with forces within these environments. Betts (1992) suggests that, “The improvement of quality involves the design of an educational system that not only optimises the relationship among the elements but also between the educational system and its environment. In general, this means designing a system that is more open, organic, pluralistic, and complex” (p.40). Adams et al. (2012, p. 2) suggest that there are three major implications that should be considered in improvement efforts across education policy, planning and practice which include: (a) increased centrality of education in national development policy and planning; (b) increased focus and priority on decentralisation and localisation with further empowerment of teachers and administrators; and, (c) the trend towards an emphasis on, and assessment of education quality at all levels. Brooks and Normore (2010) further suggest that “a more glocalised (a meaningful integration of local and global forces) approach to education by the discrete agency of educational leaders is imperative” (p. 52) in being able to develop a deeper understanding of educational quality. As they suggest, “the implications of glocalisation are profound, and the consequences of not understanding the way that the local and global are interconnected will increase over time” (p. 73). Torres and Antikainen (2003) similarly identify that “the presence of globalisation makes the study of education even more complex. Traditional preoccupation with the intersection of classes, race, gender, and the state become magnified with the dialectics of the global and the local” (p. 5).