Head Masters: Do heads need an MBA to raise student achievement?

Being the head of a school that serves a disadvantaged area demands many skills, such as the ability to develop staff and secure great pedagogy. But how will refining business skills – typically the servant of profit – help children, especially poor children, learn more?

Changes to the education landscape, started under Labour and accelerated by the coalition government, mean that excellence in educational leadership is not always enough on its own for heads and schools to succeed. Heads increasingly need to master the business skills essential to managing autonomous, complex and sometimes resource-strapped organisations. That's why the education leadership charity I work for, The Future Leaders Trust, recently started offering members of its Headship Institute the chance to study for an MBA. The aim is to provide some stretch for those a few years into headship, preparing to step up to executive headship, or who are already there.

Systems leadership

Last year I spent an afternoon in Bristol with Matt Butler, Future Leader and Executive Principal of Oasis Academy Brightstowe and Oasis Academy Long Cross. Before becoming a teacher and joining the Future Leaders programme in 2007, Matt worked for 11 years at British Airways, finishing as an area manager in Singapore. Matt’s view of executive headship is that the task is as much about systems leadership as system leadership and that there is much education can learn from the business world.

One of the challenges he faced at BA was how to instil consistent values across a workforce located in different time-zones and thousands of miles apart. Part of the solution was provided by regular staff training designed to inculcate and revisit often those core behaviours and beliefs that define the company’s culture.

Matt has carried this experience of “systematising the intangible” with him to the education world. His aspiration is not to be the hero head, but someone who embeds effective systems so completely that they carry on when he isn’t there. And he seems to be succeeding. A year after Matt became Principal at Brightstowe, inspectors noted how “monitoring systems are thorough and wide ranging... Evaluation of the data collected is extensive and leads both to immediate change if necessary and to long-term plans, such as the re-organisation of the curriculum”.  A year later, the school was the most improved secondary in the country.

Is an MBA right for me?

There’s no doubt that finding the time and money to do an MBA to hone the business skills behind the success at Brightstowe is a challenge. An MBA costs in the region of £15,000 and requires three years of part-time study. However, it can be time and money well spent for heads whose school(s) could benefit from a more business-like approach to maximise the impact of limited resources or just to make the school(s) run smoother.

These are not usually heads of challenging schools in the first year or two of a turn-around where the focus needs to be on what is happening in the corridors and classrooms. Adding the pressure of an MBA is unlikely to be manageable during this time. A better moment is when the ship has been steadied and there is more time to reflect, plan and embed the systems that will secure lasting improvement.

Even then you will need determination, resilience and an understanding governing body (and partner at home!) if you are going to meet the course requirements alongside the demands of the job. However, the positive impact on the school means it would not be unreasonable to ask governors for at least a contribution to the cost and to consider flexible working arrangements to help you study. Making a strong business case outlining the short- and long-term benefits to the school might help persuade them.

Is an MBA right for my school?

The Open University course we offer to Future Leaders Headship Institute members is an off-the-shelf MBA. Like other MBAs, the qualification is designed to hone strategic analysis, inter-disciplinary skills, intellectual rigour and independent judgement. It requires the mastery of core disciplines, including human resource management, organisational behaviour, accounting and finance.

There is a danger that pursuing an MBA to run a school could be seen to be missing the point. The main driver of better pupil outcomes is classroom practice – and yet teaching and learning isn’t a feature of the MBA curriculum. There’s nothing on curriculum design or how to improve behaviour and attendance or any of the challenges we know our heads face every day in their schools.

What there is, though, is the chance to think broader and deeper about the things outside the classroom which can make the things inside the classroom even better. Strategic thinking enables heads to take a more sophisticated view of the challenges they face, especially as they assume leadership of increasingly complex organisations across more than one site. Heads serve many masters/mistresses and can face opposition and demands from a variety of quarters. Yet, the best leaders are able not only to recognise and steer a course through the diverse groups and power bases around them, but to mobilise them in complex manoeuvres that would dazzle even the most accomplished strategist.

They also elevate financial management beyond the task of balancing the books to an engine of sustained improvement. No head needs a degree in accountancy, but financial management is something they ignore at their peril. Get it wrong and scarce resources can be wasted on things that add little or no value. Get it right and every penny is efficiently spent delivering the curriculum and classroom experience which see pupils flourish. Be even more entrepreneurial and you could find innovative ways to generate income to be invested in anything from the basics to buildings to extra-curricular activities for your pupils.

These are skills which the Karen Bradys, Philip Greens and Keith Williams’ of this world have been practising for years.  What we want to do is to equip heads with the skills that will ensure every resource at their disposal – whether human, financial or cognitive – is directed towards improving children’s education and creating the conditions which enable staff to focus on what really matters in the classroom.

To find out more about the range of programmes offered by The Future Leaders Trust  visit www.future-leaders.org.uk or call 0800 009 4142.