Vertical Tutoring in schools: at last a panacea?

So, what are the basics of VT and how is VT (when understood) different?

There are three basic critical drivers to nearly all successful service organisations. These are

Systems thinking: the way we look at how a system operates; in this case a supported learning operation. Such thinking explores how a system actually works rather than how we think it works in order to improve matters.

Customer care: the idea that everyone in a school is dependent on everybody else: everyone is a customer in a learning support and information market on which the organisational outputs depend

Ingroup Loyalty: group membership impacts on attitudes and behaviours and especially ‘openness to experience / learning’. Children arrive as members of very powerful groups (family, estate, ethnic origin, peers, gangs etc). How schools impact on these groups is critical if the aspiration gene is to be switched on. The answer is not through programmes!

Systems thinking rejects outright the year system that schools use. They don’t work, have never worked and cannot be made to work. In particular, year systems fail totally in the area of customer care and especially parent partnership and student support. Every school I visited claimed these as strengths and ‘best practice’. Systems thinking says this is simply not true. Negative peer groups are made worse in year systems (schools think the opposite) and this starts in the first critical days of a student’s induction into school and in the planned (getting to know you and team game) activities supposedly designed to make students happy and confident learners who are known to the tutor or home group teacher. An understanding of ingroup loyalty reveals that these assumed processes have the opposite long and short term effect.

If peer groups and parents are not engaged positively through the auspices of the school, learning and teachers take a big hit. In every school visited it was possible for kids to go through school without any single person knowing them well or having a deep learning conversation with them and with parents. Every single school: and this was not the fault of schools but of a system gone haywire, that had replaced values with targets and management principles with management assumptions.

What VT does in 20 minutes each day is reform a child’s social loyalty groups and create a myriad of positive, pro learning relationships that include parents and the personal tutor. This requires no programmes as such. The tutor returns as the leader of learning; there every day cheer-leading, nurturing, encouraging, checking, listening, mentoring and healing. The school’s operational system is re-engineered around how best to make these learning relationships work as every child is given the chance to lead and be supported. Building this support system means doubling up tutors, reducing tutor group size, changing tutor times and avoiding ‘programmes’ (and more besides).

All schools need is an understanding of management principles and to be reconnected to their desire to be values driven. It is this understanding that improves the learning relationships that enable high quality teaching and learning to be built in, not added on, and for outcomes to get better instantly and at no cost.

Sadly, without knowledge and training well-meaning schools will still mess-up VT. But whatever they do as VT it will be better than what was. In a world gone toxic and crazy, VT looks like schools’ best bet. Of course, we now need to change teacher training, rewrite our Leadership programmes and revisit research. No problem, then!