The Sharing Education Programme and the Regional Training Unit hosted the third annual Leadership lecture on Thursday the 11th March. This year’s speaker was Andy Hargreaves, the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College .

Andy Hargreaves's teaching and research at Boston College concentrates on sustainable leadership, professional learning communities, educational change and the emotions of teaching. His most recent publication is “The Fourth Way” in which he considers the way ahead for education leaders beyond the constraints recently imposed by standardisation.  He deals with fundamental issues about learning and schools and sets out by briefly covering the three ways that have supported change in education in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Using evidence drawn from diverse research projects, Andy selects four examples of hope for the future:

• The world’s highest performing education system
• The most turned around school district in England
• A professional network of 300 underperforming schools
• Outstanding instances of community organization

In the lecture Andy challenged participants to think beyond their immediate comfort zones.  He confronted the quick fix mentality that drives schools to delusional short-term gains at the expense of deeper and profound learning.  He used case studies from schools where improvement lasts and growth is sustainable.  Drawing on evidence from health, sport and the business sectors, Andy considered what leaders can learn from each other, for the benefit of society.

Andy took us beyond the dead-ends of standardization and divisiveness to a future in which all teaching can be a high-skill, creative and life-shaping mission. 

“The Fourth Way is about less government and more democracy.  The government shouldn't drive and deliver, but steer and support. Public engagement shouldn't stop at the ballot box, the focus group or service delivery, but be evident in the development of neighbourhoods and communities as in America's tradition of community organising on which Barack Obama cut his political teeth.

The Fourth Way galvanises professionals by giving them opportunities to develop curricula together within broad state guidelines. Teachers set shared targets, rather than scurrying around to meet the targets demanded by others.

In the Fourth Way, democracy plus professionalism, replaces bureaucracy and the market. Finally, in the Fourth Way, responsibility comes before accountability. Accountability becomes the conscience that checks you, not the ego or id that drives you. It is applied prudently to samples (as in Finland), not profligately through an expensive census.

The elephant in the room of the Third Way has been an excess of government control. It is now time to forge a Fourth Way that will create room inside the government elephant.”

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