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Professional Partnerships in the School of Education
by Geraldine Davies
The School of Education at St Mary’s is enjoying the benefit of two recent professorial appointments, those of Professor Sir John Rowling and Professor Paul Clarke, who have highly successful national and international profiles and reputations.
Professor Sir John Rowling was a long-serving and highly successful secondary head teacher for many years in the north of England. Following his knighthood for services to education, Sir John was engaged by the Secretary for State for Children, Schools and Families to support the raising of standards across schools in London. He now joins St Mary’s as a Professor of Education.
Sir John said: “It has been a joy to work with senior leaders at St Mary’s, sharing ideas about modern scholarship regarding leadership and implementation of change in our own leadership arenas. It has been especially interesting for me to work with colleagues individually to analyse what the challenges are in their own domain and to contemplate approaches that might facilitate changes they want to happen.”
As a result of some of Professor Rowling’s work, links have been formed with a network of schools to develop pedagogy in Physical Education and to explore the use of different pedagogical approaches to improve student performance in its theoretical aspects. In this way, the University College is directly influencing the quality of teaching in several London schools, as well as having a direct bearing on GCSE performance in 2008.
Professor Rowling works with sixty-six London schools with whom he is involved in raising standards at GCSE. This year, it is anticipated that these schools will exceed the overall average increase made across the fifty-two participating schools in 2007. They achieved an average improvement of nearly five percentage points, almost twice the London average. Some schools improved their results with Sir John’s support by as much as 22% in one year.
The focus for his work this year is embedding practical educational interventions based on sound philosophical concepts and good practice throughout each school.
Sir John’s areas of interest are in leadership and accountability, the use and organisation of data, motivational strategies for pupils and systems for departmental leaders that ensure positive outcomes for pupils.
Professor Rowling said that his partnership with St Mary’s has added an additional dimension to his work. He is looking forward to sharing ideas with colleagues in the University College so that together we can have a direct influence on raising standards at GCSE for very many young people across London.
Professor Paul Clarke has worked as a teacher, teacher adviser and university lecturer in the education field since the mid-1980s. He is currently the director and co-founder of IQEST – a social enterprise organisation that is engaged in research and development projects in the UK and overseas, and attempting to instil a human-scale response to change in public sector reform.
Alongside this work in IQEST, he is a lead consultant in the IQEA – the Improving the Quality of Education for All programme, and he regularly works with schools and networks of schools around the world on improvement programmes. Much of this work forms the basis of his writing and commentary in books and journals.
Professor Clarke is currently writing a new book based on fieldwork from a longitudinal school improvement programme in the north east of England. The book will explore the ways in which schools working in challenging environments are trying to create a learning community, sometimes with great success, sometimes with great frustration.
Professor Clarke’s interests in professional learning are focused at this time on how the workplace organises its relationships. His interest is not on the tasks and functions, and hierarchies that are created, but rather he is looking at the patterns of relationships and how they support people as they try to form lasting and valued partnerships which solve problems.
Professor Clarke is on the editorial board of a number of international journals, including Education, Knowledge and Economy, the Improving Schools journal, and the practitioner journal, Professional Development Today.
Professor Clarke’s expert knowledge of both schools and higher education means that he is extremely well qualified to help the School of Education’s capacity for scholarship and research to develop still further.
With Professor Clarke’s unique blend of academic scholarship and practitioner expertise and Sir John Rowling’s profound understanding of leadership and targeted data analysis, the School of Education will surely become a yet more formidable force for good in the realm of school improvement.
