Why secondary schools unknowingly persist in using the wrong system

In effect, schools use language to perpetuate sameness over time (the autopoiesis of social systems described by Niklas Luhmann). To survive, schools are in the business of 'smoothing' the learning demand on their system. The separation of actors into constituent groups controls any agentic collaboration and halts the production of the information actors need to build a collaborative learning culture. It is reasonable, therefore, to make the following systemic observations (there are more):

1. Leaders do not shape schools: schools shape leadership behaviour.

2. Reforms do not change schools: schools change reforms to minimise system load.

4. The problems schools face are systemic (double loop), not pedagogical (single loop).

5. The same age hypothesis allows meaning frameworks to retain stability over time.

6. The choice of age-grouping determines the structure / agency relationship.

7. Schools are operatively closed organisations.

8. School use linguistics as a means of controlling and limiting any narrative.

Facilitating such deconstruction leaves schools hovering between what Mälkki and Green (2014) call 'two sets of meaning frameworks' that require the template of a viable system to complete the transition. For me, that is a multi-age form of school organisation called the vertical tutoring system (VT).

The VT system works by joining the school to more of itself. It creates multi-age tutor groups for a short time each day (a house or nested system) returning ALL staff (admin, teaching, support, managers) to tutoring creating smaller tutor groups (18-20) and two tutors per group. Teaching groups are unaffected. For schools with heightened organisational consciousness, VT drives a domino effect across the organisation creating a multiplicity of collaborative partnerships among participating actors. Instead of a teacher-dependent system, the school creates a collaboration dependent model involving all participant actors, expanding the capacity to absorb the complexity of learning demand on its system. This increases the school's capacity to harvest, retrieve, and store information in networks of learning, relationships where form tutors are the catalyst. To enable such a system, the communication system is completely rewired to provide participants with a language of collaboration that increases the school's capacity for individual and organisational learning.

This is a very different system, one stymied by headteachers who, when appointed, constantly return such schools to their previous same-age state, and by researchers convinced that pedagogy is the problem. Many schools in Australia have quasi-VT systems but see VT as a pastoral change rather than one that creates the capacity to build learning relationships and liberate management. In such a system, it is the form tutor that holds the enabling key to learning.