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EVALUATION REPORT 2015
36
All in all students could be seen more as ‘assets’ than tar-
gets of education. That would provide a valuable resource to
the School and also strengthen their agency and self-confi-
dence as actors in the community. This would be in line with
the aim of educating architects who can have impact and
make a difference.
Assessment
From the student perspective the assessment of learning,
grading and crits were very much criticised. This issue has
been discussed in detail in section 5.e.
7.i. Leadership
STRENGTHS
There is an noticeable atmosphere of trust and co-operation
within the School between colleagues, and between staff
and students. The climate of openness extends to visitors
and ’outsiders’ to the institution.
The School has an existing high reputation, nationally and
internationally as a strong basis for future development.
OBSERVATIONS and EVALUATION
Governance
From an external vantage point it is not always easy to
discern the pattern of decision making and how leadership
roles and responsibilities are currently allocated. It is often
observed, for example, that when implementing organi-
zational change three modes of leadership are essential.
A ‘vision’ mode, a ‘political fixer’ mode and a day-to-day
‘managing the shop’ mode. It is also commonly noted that
a single person can rarely handle all three modes. Would
such modes be currently transparent within the School?
Implementation of Curriculum Change
Questions then arise about implementation of curriculum
change. How might the leadership-level curriculum vision
(ie TRANSark Plus) be transmitted to teachers’ practice?
The levers of curriculum change can be somewhat ‘rub-
bery’ and it is a well known phenomenon that ‘street level
bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980)
4
– in this instance the classroom
level teachers – have to have a level of discretionary de-
cision-making power delegated to them in order to make
policy work at the front-line. This also passes a degree of
risk to them, but of course the leaders/ policy makers also
incur risk in the implementation in that they cannot maintain
finger-tip control of the process and policy priorities may
be ‘judiciously subverted’ (or occasionally improved!) as they
pass down the School. Reynolds and Saunders (1985, p.
200)
5
characterise policy operation as an ‘implementation
staircase’ at the various levels of which the original policy
purposes undergo treatment – modification or differing
degrees of transformation – at the hands of different inter-
ested parties. Trowler (2002)
6
describes how implementation
usually encounters local ‘resistance and reconstruction’,
as a result of signs being read in different ways and hence
readings becoming difficult to predict. Ball (2006 [1998],
p. 75)
7
suggests that ‘most policies are ramshackle, com-
promise, hit-and-miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered
with, nuanced, and inflected through complex processes
of influence, text production, dissemination and ultimately
recreation in contexts of practice’. Intentions and practices
can change in this mutually adaptive process, and usually
at the local level. How then, will the ledaership team in the
School seeek to keep a level of consistency in the implemen-
tation of the vision as each interested party on the ‘staircase’
adjusts the visionary intention? How can the team build
and expand the collective base of knowledge to increase its
ownership across the School (perhaps akin to the Snøhet-
ta design brand approach to collective ownership?) and
particularly amongst part-time and casually employed staff
whose professional identity is not necessarily always primar-
ily academic. This would seem to require a set of methods
4
Lipsky, M. (1980) Street-Level Bureaucracy:
Dilemmas of the individual in public services.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
5
Reynolds, J. and Saunders, M. (1985). Teacher responses to curriculum policy: Beyond
the ‘delivery’ metaphor. In J. Calderhead (Ed.) Exploring Teachers’ Thinking
(pp. 195–214). London: Cassell.
6
Trowler, P. (2002) The nature of things: change and social reality. Paper presented at the 3rd Education Doctorate Colloquium,
Managing
Educational Change
, 4 April. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.
7
Ball, S. J. (2006). Big policies/small world: An introduction to international
perspectives in education policy. In
Education Policy and Social Class: The Selected
Works of Stephen J. Ball
(pp. 67–78). London: Routledge.