I always have such good intentions for writing and then events seem to get in the way and block the actual process of putting fingers to keyboard. I have notebooks with all kinds of ideas for posts, but sadly they never seem to get from the notebook to these pages and so it is that months have passed since my last post.
In that period I have moved house and also run the first face to face intensive week for the degree program I co-lead since the fall of 2019.
So, now I am starting off again teaching a course that looks at the trends and innovations taking place in contemporary education. It is disappointing to note that I also wrote a post on starting to teach this course two years ago in this blog and I did not manage to follow through with further posts!
I am very fortunate to be “teaching” (which is quite the wrong word) this to a diverse group of post-graduate students located across the world. I am therefore very much looking forward to exploring the trends and innovations that are happening in their own contexts.
I therefore think it timely to reflect a little and comment on what I experience as the trends in my own context and how they impact teachers, students and the process of education. This is quite challenging to do without launching into a polemic rant that would probably do little except release the stress and frustration that has been building up, like the safety valve on a pressure cooker. I do not want to be a curmudgeonly old man, seemingly complaining about everything.
This then is a serious attempt to write about the situation as I experience it. The main trend that I have seen emerge over the last decade and then raise to prominence in the last two years is that of educational leaders becoming entirely focussed on finance and budget to the expense of all other aspects of education.
This is not to claim that the financial survival of an educational institution is of no importance, but rather a feeling that senior leadership seem to have lost sight of the actual reason that we exist at all, in other words the question of purpose. This then gets transmitted down to middle managers by the metrics and KPI’s that are monitored and by which they are judged as successful or not.
Interestingly this then can also lead to contradictions and misalignments between what is tracked and measured and what the institution states are its strategic objectives and values.
This focus on income and costs, mean that staff and leaders lose sight of the actual reason that we exist, and all aspects of education become financialised. The drivers for this are, in my opinion, political and economic, but also to some extent also just the result of poorly thought through strategies that result in unforeseen consequences.
None of this is new, Gert Biesta wrote an excellent book that touches on this topic in his “Good Education in an Age of Measurement” in 2011 and researchers like Stephen Ball have spent much of their career focussing on this. Despite this, I am still experiencing this as an ’emerging trend’ because it now seems that we are in a time when education is a commodity, the process transactional and the only focus of those in charge is the spreadsheet of KPI’s.
The knock-on effects of this impact curriculum, pedagogy, processes, support and mental wellbeing and, of course, technology adoption.
In a future post I plan to unwrap this a bit more in terms of specific and concrete examples and how these play out in a contemporary public sector university focussed on professional and vocational education.
