Top down approaches

One of my sad experiences this year came from a conversation I overheard in a school. A parent asked about a minor aspect of the school's future arrangements. The senior staff member replied: "We don't know ... the Department hasn't decided yet."

This informal exchange illustrated the extent to which the Tasmanian education system has become a top down system. In earlier times, such minor matters would have been decided by the school as a matter of course.

Few Tasmanian schools are the purposeful creative places they used to be before the system became the client. This latter development is the inevitable outcome of the recent unchallenged top down approaches.

Despite their rhetoric, top down systems do not support leaders at all well. They may talk 'leadership' but the system constraints reduce leadership to management (implementing the system's decisions) and compliance. But there are still leaders in spite of this. And the leaders are paying a very high price in those schools that are trying so hard to be purposeful and creative. Many school leaders are quite exhausted by the competing demands of the Department and governments and the needs of the staff and students. An indicator and outcome is the low and shrinking number of applicants for Principals' positions.

And then there is the paradoxical phenomenon in top down systems that

• The less well top down interventions work, the more likely they will be applied and increased.

The common flaw in top down approaches is that they treat most things as simple when in reality most are not. See It is not personal and it is not simple below.