Governance and Management
Overall Judgement
The present arrangements are broadly congruent with UK practice and provide a suitable framework for the Section’ governance and management. As a result, the Section has grown steadily in size and standing. The leadership has maintained and developed the quality of work, the standards achieved and the ethos of the Section so that it operates successfully within the French system to mutual benefit. The existing systems of governance and management now need some adjustment to sustain consistency and achievement across the complexity of the sites and settings in which the Section now operates.
Governance
The Section benefits substantially from the support it receives from its parents. Their voluntary help, particularly for younger pupils, their support of Section functions and their fund-raising for additional facilities and resources are greatly valued by the management and teaching staff of the Section. Parents also play a significant role in governance through the Parents’ Committee, which acts in the capacity of governors of the Section.
The elected Parents’ Committee represents effectively all those with children in the primary and secondary settings of the British Section. The Committee is relatively large and meets frequently. It has three standing sub-committees, one covering finance, a second human resources and the communications. It convenes a number of working groups for specific purposes. The Head of Section and an elected staff representative are in attendance at all meetings of the Committee and the Head joins most meetings of the sub-committees and working groups. The Committee extends an open invitation to staff to join its meetings as observers, although in practice they rarely attend. Overall, this executive committee supported by a small number of sub-committees and working groups offers a suitable structure for the future governance of the Section.
The Committee has provided strong and effective support for the Head and for the Section over many years and has guided it successfully through a recent period of considerable expansion and development. Some aspects require further development if the Committee is to meet current and likely future demands on it positively and responsively. In particular, it has to ensure that it strikes the right balance between representing the interests and concerns of the parents and the detail with which it oversees the work of the Section.
The arrangements have a number of particular strengths. The first is that the Committee discharges with skill its primary function of raising the funds for the staffing and resources of the Section by setting and collecting the fees efficiently. It has put into place effective administrative and bursarial arrangements that ensure close financial control. It reports fully to an annual general meeting of parents and responds to their comments and questions.
Secondly, the Committee, through its finance and human resources sub-committees, monitors expenditure closely and prepares appropriate annual budgets that respond to the Head’s staffing and resource requirements and smooth out occasional under- or over-spends. The Committee holds the Head generally accountable for the use of resources and the quality of education provided. However, it does not currently follow a full Section development plan outlining short [1-2 years], medium [2-3 years] and long term [3+ years] areas for improvement or investment. The Committee’s financial and development planning therefore tends to be short-term and reactive rather than strategic and proactive. It is not particularly well placed to provide strategic guidance to the Section’s management on longer-term issues, such as student numbers, staffing and curriculum. The Committee has recognised this shortcoming and has recently established a working group to tackle aspects of strategic development.
In terms of improvement planning, best UK practice involves an end-of-year review by each phase or subject that updates their short, medium and long-term requirements. These are incorporated into an institutional development plan after costing and modifying them to meet institution-wide objectives covering, for example, curriculum, training and capital projects. The governing body is kept in touch so that, ultimately, the plan is incorporated, as amended by the governors, into their overall plan and budgeting. Governors and school management track areas of significant investment in order to evaluate the benefits gained.
The Committee’s third strength is that it has the advantage of being composed entirely of parents of current or former students and thus maintains a strong focus on the quality of provision and a direct and lively interest in their performance. This strength also contains a potential weakness. Although HM Consul General and the Director of the British Council are formally associated with the British Section, in practice they are not directly involved in its governance. As the Committee has no members who are independent of parental interests, its objectivity may be called into question should concerns or complaints arise, particularly those involving teaching staff. Although the Committee through its human resources sub-committee has an agreed procedure for the recruitment, its arrangements for dealing with under-performance of staff are less robust, partly because of the constraints of French employment law.
The Committee therefore needs to seek two or three ex-officio members, perhaps nominated through the good offices of the Section’s official contacts or through links with business and the professions locally, to provide further breadth and independence to its work. Apart from their general contribution, they would be invaluable in situations in which the Committee needs to demonstrate its objectivity.
Fourthly, the Committee works hard to provide maximum support to the Section and ensure that it operates effectively. To these ends, it meets monthly and its sub-committees and working groups sometimes more frequently. As a result, it has tended to become involved, with the very best of intentions, in the detail of the Section’s day-to-day life and work, and consequently to become less conscious of its strategic role. It has not put into place sufficient ‘light touch’ mechanisms to monitor developments and assure itself that quality is being maintained. Instead, it has exercised more direct quality control and has been drawn into ‘micro-management’ of some issues.
It has recognised this tendency and, prompted by the Head, is putting into place good quality policies to cover various aspects of the Section’s work. These set firm expectations for provision and performance and offer the opportunity for the Committee to receive periodic evaluations of their effectiveness. The creation of policies for other Section activities, together with improvements in development planning, regular reports from the Head and other means by which Committee members can keep contact with the Section would provide the quality assurance that the Committee seeks. They would also provide the data necessary for strategic thinking and planning, and reduce the number of meetings.
The fifth strength is that the Committee already has the means to meet the improvements it seeks. The sub-committees already undertake much detailed work on which the Committee bases its decisions. Scope exists to delegate further responsibilities and decision making to them within strictly defined limits. Similarly, the working groups provide opportunities for Committee members to work with staff on precise, time-limited issues as a contribution to the Committee’s strategic thinking. Use of the working groups in this way can relieve the Committee of much of its detailed work and leave it free to make executive decisions. It also brings teaching staff into more direct and purposeful contact with the Committee than open invitations to attend meetings.
Recommendations
1. As soon as practicable, revise the membership of the Committee to include some persons who are not parents of students or former students of the Section and reconstitute the Committee as a governing body with access to governor training.
2. Revise the Committee’s remit to ensure that it concentrates on overall aims and strategic development of the Section; and introduce a development plan and quality assurance mechanisms by which to monitor its implementation.
3. Define precisely the sub-committees’ delegated powers and functions to relieve pressure on the Committee; lay down the ground rules for working groups so that they bring together Committee members for specific time-limited purposes.
4. Reduce the number of Committee meetings to one per term, except in exceptional circumstances.
Management
The Section is led well and managed skilfully. The Head provides clear educational direction to the Section’s work. He works positively and productively with his French counterparts at each of the institutions in which it is housed. As a result, the Section contributes to and benefits from the bilingual and bicultural objectives of the institution as a whole. The standards achieved, the ethos of educational endeavour and the personal development of the students testify to the quality and effectiveness of the Section’s management.
The present management arrangements and the structures adopted are appropriate and mirror existing UK practice. The Head of the Section is supported by a head of primary, who line manages the head of early years, and a head of secondary responsible for the work of the heads of English and of History/Geography. Of similar rank are the heads of the other two main institutions in which Section students are educated and who organise their work and pastoral care.
The major management differences with UK schools are that the head of secondary is responsible for only two subject departments and that the small number of staff means that all managers also teach either in the primary or in one or other of the subject departments. The system is elaborate for the number of staff involved but necessarily so if the work is to be monitored and they are to have appropriate experience and professional development.
Nonetheless, some lack of definition of duties and responsibilities exists within the Section’s management structures and lines of accountability sometimes become tangled and communication short-circuited. The boundary between the duties of the Section managers and those of the Parents’ Committee is also blurred and inhibits the delegation of resources and responsibilities to appropriate levels. Although the flow of information and evaluation from Section management is appropriate for present requirements, the systems would not support adequately a more strategic role for the Committee.
For example, the present management team, consisting of all those with some management responsibility, is too large and diverse for effective decision making. A core senior management team [SMT] of the Head and the heads of primary and secondary, meeting weekly, should act as the principal dynamo for policy generation and development. it should also be the main conduit for information and development work to and from the Committee, and the main means by which its intentions are implemented and evaluated. The SMT’s job descriptions will need some revision to ensure that they are directly responsible for curricular consistency between sites, performance management, development planning and delegated budgets for their spheres of responsibility. Some adjustment of their present duties may be necessary to avoid overload.
The core SMT would be able to draw on the views and advice of the extended management team of other management post holders, meeting periodically, so that each constituency within the Section would contribute to policy formulation and implementation. Its phase and subject members would receive delegated funding in relation to their development plans and be accountable for its use. The heads of the different sites would report direct to the Head but have the responsibility to keep other parties informed as necessary. The core SMT, advised by the bursar and the finance sub-committee, would draw up the Section’s draft development plan on the basis of the annually updated plans from subjects and phases. When finally approved, the SMT would allocate funds accordingly and monitor expenditure.
At present, assessment is under development. Analysis of the Section’s overall performance in public examinations is relatively unsophisticated. Without consistent baseline assessments, say, at age seven, eleven and fourteen, it is impossible to predict likely future performance, set realistic targets or assess the extent to which students’ progress exceeds predictions. It is not possible to demonstrate whether or not academic value has been added. The adoption of a baseline assessment strategy would not only sharpen teaching and learning it would also provide the Committee with hard data by which to assure itself of the quality achieved.
The Section has made good progress in establishing a system of performance management that links assessment of the quality of teaching to professional development. Its advantages are that it offers the opportunity to use agreed criteria by which to judge the teaching and link it to student performance. Aspects for development include the inclusion of annual targets and making more explicit the links between individual, subject/phase and Section training priorities.
The Section’s pastoral arrangements are strong at each stage. Teachers know the students well as individuals. Effective systems are in place to monitor students’ progress closely and intervene to provide support where necessary. Students turn readily to their class teacher in the primary section and their subject teachers in the secondary section when they need help, academically or personally. However, the Section has yet to put in place policies of its own, for example for child protection, health and safety and to combat bullying and harassment. Few channels currently exist by which students can formally contribute to the Section’s development or raise more general concerns. On the other hand, the careers and educational guidance is of high quality, especially in relation to higher education in the UK, France and further afield. Students achieve ready access to UK universities of standing, including a substantial proportion who have gained places at Oxbridge over recent years.
It was not possible to scrutinise the extra-curricular programme provided by the Section. The experience of many students is enhanced by extra-curricular provision, for example, music and Scottish dancing in the primary, drama productions and theatre visits in secondary. It was reported that the sport provided, often with the support of parent volunteers, good though it is for those who participate, hardly compensates for the lack of physical education and games in the French system.
The Section has a well thought out mission statement and appropriate aims and objectives, endorsed by the Committee, that are evident in phase and subject planning, and in the work in the classroom. The promotion of the academic and personal development of the students provides a strong sense of common purpose amongst the staff, although a range of views exists on how best to achieve the objectives. The Section is putting into place a range of policies to give direction to the implementation of its aims and objectives.
Communications are generally effective within the Section and between its various sites. The small number of staff and the imprecision in responsibilities leads, on occasions, to short circuiting and unintended exclusion of those that need to know. For the future, if a core and extended management team are adopted, digest notes of their meetings and decisions need to be distributed to all staff.
Administration and organisation are efficient and effective. The Section has responsive systems to answer parents’ and others’ enquiries. Administrative staff present a positive image of the Section and deal efficiently and courteously with telephone and face to face enquiries. They monitor the enquiries carefully so that the Committee and management can be made aware of any changing patterns in demand. Rigorous systems are in place to monitor income and expenditure and the budget is effectively managed to provide appropriately generous staffing and resource levels, both of which exceed provision in the nearest equivalent schools in the UK.
Teaching and support staff are generally deployed effectively, as is reflected in the high standards achieved. However, classroom support is insufficient in Maternelle 1 and 2; some work with younger pupils lacks up-to-date planning and methodology; and some imbalance exists in the distribution of English expertise across the sites.
The timetable is efficient within the context of the time slots made available by the French authorities. The quality of the designated accommodation is high and additional investment from the parents enhances the positive environment for learning. Other rooms, not under management by the Section, provide a poor learning environment in terms of size, facilities and cleanliness. Potential health and safety hazards exist in the Lycee building that are outside the Section’s control. These include broken steps on stairways, inadequate lighting, loose electrical outlets and poor standards of maintenance and cleaning.
Recommendations
1. Establish a core senior management team, with clearly defined responsibilities, that meets regularly to generate policy and development; monitor standards and quality; service the needs of the Committee; and ensure implementation of agreed policies.
2. Establish an extended management team, with clearly defined responsibilities, to provide effective input from the various constituencies in the Section and implement decisions within their management spheres.
3. The core team should provide an annually updated Section development plan that takes due account of the development planning of the phases and subjects, and should monitor the outcomes.
4. Provide annual reviews and target setting within the present performance management system and link individual professional development and training priorities with those for phases, subjects and for the Section as a whole.
5. Gradually extend the range of policies to cover and guide the major areas of the Section’s work and activities.
6. Approach the French authorities with a view to remedying the most serious of the potential health and safety hazards.