FE has its power structure completely upside down

There are lessons like cleaning your teeth, washing, and cooking that everyone has to learn in life. But a lesson that comes only to some can reveal the secret of the true nature of power. Many worship power. Many more strive for it and spend much of their lives chasing after it. But power always resides elsewhere, however much responsibility your job gives you. This truth applies to every head of FE department, curriculum manager, middle and senior manager in education. It applies even to the most powerful person you can imagine on earth – even the American President, or the Pharoah of Egypt himself was at the mercy of untamed external forces; the markets, the electorate, the climate or even their own partner. Every one of us is just riding the tiger.

The only real power any of us really has is the power to influence another person.

This realisation can shift the way one sees educational institutions. The whole purpose and focus of what we do throughout education is about maximising the influence we have on those in our classrooms. Everything is supposed to focus on that. That’s why the teacher stands where the rubber hits the road, where the needle hits the groove. It is not done in consultants’ apparently revolutionary programmes, nor in long management meetings or inspectors’ curt briefings. Not even in dubious ministerial appointments. Education happens where a teacher influences a student.

The manager’s only real power is exercised through how far they can influence the teacher, who in turn influences the student. And so on throughout the whole system, the government minister influences the inspector, who influences the principal, who influences the manager, who influences the teacher, who influences the student. Therefore the further you get from the classroom, the more remote you become from the centre of real educational power. This turns everything upside down.

Thinking that promotion means moving ever closer to the centre of power is a fallacy. Those ambitious enough to be promoted learn this quickly if they have eyes to see. The further you get from the actual classroom, the further you also find yourself from real educational influence so the more theoretical and abstract your contribution to the whole thing becomes. That can come as a surprise. Education is not a pyramid which people ascend up to power but a vast inverted pyramid, with students at the top and each layer increasingly removed from them beneath.

Properly seen, colleges should not be conceived of according to the usual style of organisation shaped by ambition and status. Management theories can deceive us here. Education is not really a power or business transaction, even if it is sadly now often reduced to a cost equation in which the money that’s required to oil the whole process becomes king.

In fact, every educational professional who is not a teacher is merely at the service of the teacher, who is at the service of the student. Every initiative should be there to aid the teacher. The student is king, the teacher chamberlain. This may sound counterintuitive., but one of the Pope’s titles is ‘servant of the servants’. That seems an appropriate way for managers in education to view themselves too.

At several points in my career, I’ve taken on management responsibilities which have reduced my contact time. I well remember the feeling of relief that has accompanied such reductions. Spreadsheets sometimes seemed preferable to whiteboards. Less hassle. More predictable. More, dare I say, controllable. But every time I’ve laid those responsibilities down and happily returned to the classroom. While I was a manager of various sorts, I often felt like a fraud. It wasn’t simply imposter syndrome but the fact I was aware that I was trained, experienced and skilled to do one thing but then had to leave that behind to progress professionally within the same career by doing something else. But when I left the classroom, I was now supposed to know more about it than those who spent all their time there. That seemed a ridiculous situation to be in. It still does. Why do people who are removed from the classroom thereby gain supposed expert status in what happens there? Of course, the practitioners are the true experts. Everyone else is in the support team.

I wish it were seen this way more often. Instead of consultants, managers, advisors, inspectors and ministers being viewed as the true experts with voices that needs to be heard, they should be seen as the servants instead. They, after all, are supporting those who do the real work of education; the teachers. I think most of those in ‘power’ positions know this deep down. It causes the strange imposter feeling that they hide.

The worst managers sometimes seem to resent teachers, sometimes seeing them as the problem. Perhaps this is because of the limitation on power they come to represent. Teachers can come to be seen as awkward, a hindrance, just not doing what the manager wants them to. However, the best managers I’ve known have had profound respect for classroom practitioners, seeing their own role as helping teachers to better do their job.

The very best senior managers I know have sometimes tried not to leave the classroom and kept a foot in the door. I’ve known principals who have continued to teach and have regularly sat in on lessons, not to formally observe but just to see where the real work is being done. That has given them enormous credibility. Because the classroom is the only place in education where students are really influenced, whatever those with supposed power might say.