25 January 2022. Schools | Systems
A four day week for schools. Understanding the idea of ‘social acupuncture’.
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1: A four day week for schools
One of the more interesting trends out there at the moment is the shift towards a shorter working week, which I’ve written about here on a number of occasions. Alex Pang, whose book Shorter is an influential contribution to all of this, has recently published a 2022 update of developments since the book was published—downloadable for free—while he’s also trying to catch developments week by week on his blog.
But the most interesting new development in this space is not another business giving it a go, but schools trying out a shorter week.
In the UK, the think tank Autonomy published a report recommending that schools move to a four day week.
The potential driver of change is simply the number of teachers reporting that they are exhausted. In a survey done for the report 60% of teachers reported that “they had felt at breaking point because of my workload.”
(Source: Autonomy)
The data from elsewhere on this is pretty striking, as the report notes:
The 2020 Teacher Wellbeing Index found that 74% of all education professionals have experienced negative behavioural, psychological or physical symptoms due to their work, while nearly a third had undergone a mental health issue in the past year. Of those teachers affected, poor work-life balance (65%) and excessive workload (62%) were routinely cited as the main causes. Beyond the negative effects on their work performance, 40% of affected teachers believed that their personal relationships had suffered. 10% had felt suicidal.
No surprise that they’re prefer a four day workweek, but the perceived impact on whether they’d be more likely to stay in the profession as a result is significant—especially since teachers are expensive to train and hard to retain. Even those who stay are likely to have health related absences which bring their own costs with them. At an individual school level, reducing teacher stress both reduces costs and reduces complexity.
(Source: Autonomy)
One of the curiosities here is that because the UK school system has become far more devolved, headteachers and school governors can decide to reorganise the school week, as long as they also fulfil various curriculum requirements. So it’s doable.
But does it work? There’s a case study of a group of schools in London that has moved to a four and a half day week in 2019 and reports nothing but good outcomes. (The Guardian also ran a story on the school when the Autonomy report was published). It took a little juggling, but essentially the school cleared its Friday afternoon timetable by adding some time on Tuesday and Wednesdays.
It was part of a wider package designed to improve the teachers’ working conditions, but it turns out that it’s good for everyone.
The schools stay open on Friday afternoon, for extra curricular activities, but there aren’t classes. The pupils are also free to leave at lunchtime. Exam results have also improved. Perhaps keeping kids at their desks on Friday afternoon, when they’re knackered, isn’t good for them either.
It’s also worth noting that as of 1st January all of the schools in UAE moved to a four and a half day week, in keeping with other public organisations.
One additional note from me. It’s a commonplace in the literature that the design of schools and education—in the wake of the industrial revolution—followed the design of work. There’s plenty of critiques of education that say educational timetables are designed to prepare children for the timetables of offices and before that factories. So the fact that school hours may be starting to break down may also be a further sign that patterns of work are also starting to break apart.
2: Understanding the idea of ‘social acupuncture’
I wrote yesterday about Jon Alexander’s podcast with Andrew Keen about his forthcoming book citizens. One concept in that conversation that seemed interesting but under-explained was the idea of “acupuncture points”.
So I’m indebted to David Bent, who also talked recently to Jon about the book, for pointing me towards the source of this idea.
(Dr. Orit Gal. Photo via socialacupucnture.co.uk.)
It comes from the work of Orit Gal, at Regent’s University, London, who has developed the idea of “social acupuncture”. Happily she has published quite a lot about it on her website:
Whether running a country, a city, a business, or a social campaign, the greatest challenges standing in your way are always complex. Involving numerous players and constrained by multiple interdependent forces, they form systemic patterns that are seemingly impossible to break. Tackling them requires creative new approaches that not only address their complex nature, but are uniquely designed to take advantage of it.
There is, she says, a gap between “complexity thinking” and “complexity doing”, and this means that decision makers need different kinds of tools to bridge the gap:
Social Acupuncture is a personal research project... (that) explores how analysing the deeper interactions sustaining patterns can be used to identify leverage points; and how small accumulative interventions across such points can be used to disrupt and transform them.
There’s more here than I’ve really had a chance to get into today, but it is always a pleasure when an academic takes the time to lay out their work as clearly as Dr. Gal has here.
The site has six ‘building blocks’ — short essays that build up the argument — and also a set of resources on different patterns of complexity.
One of the things that struck me in my quick review was that the ‘acupuncture” idea is actually a genuine metaphor—based on differences in strategic thinking between Western thought and Chinese thought—rather than just a catchy idea.
(In) the Western strategic tradition... the strategist thinks up an ideal form – an end state towards which all action must be directed. This ideal model is determined on a “theoretical” basis – what do we want to achieve?... This theoretical model is then transcribed into “practice”. The Western role of strategy therefore, is to develop the practical path for bringing our ideal model to life.
This leads to a cycle of optimism and disappointment. The Chinese tradition is different:
The Chinese epistemic tradition did not develop a similar world of ideal forms and definitions in the Greek sense, but rather focused on exploring the nature of reality and how it unfolds. In very general terms, reality was perceived as a continuous and dynamic process that stemmed purely from the interaction of the factors at play... Within this mind-set, strategy is perceived in terms of seeking potential rather than a course of action, focusing on identifying existing emerging trajectories and how to best position oneself to take advantage of them.
The medical art of acupuncture has similarities. It sees the body as a site of flows and inter-relationships; it believes that the system has the power to heal itself; and the interventions are “minimalist”—and often located away from the apparent heart of the problem.
Hence “social acupuncture”. The idea starts with understanding the patterns in the system. And having done that, it looks to “develop counter-pattern strategies”.
Here one key rationale takes the lead – the logic of disruption.
It’s a commonplace that complex patterns and common systems have emergent properties that mean that they can’t be designed into particular configurations. But, if you can disrupt the pattern that sustains the existing configuration of the system, you can influence it so it starts to behave in a different way. Potentially, as she says, “you will destabilise it enough to transform it:“
This means designing practical interventions that can nudge and alter flows within the network that supports the system, hence the importance of identifying flows throughout the pattern’s network. Naturally, implementation, also part of the strategic design process, requires continuous and iterative actions, learning and adapting as the impact and inevitable unintended consequences of the interventions take hold.
There’s lots to like about this, and it connects to quite a lot of other work on working with complexity. For example, Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework the different ways to understand and respond to different types of pattern. In the ‘complexity’ area of the framework, it requires actors to ‘probe -> sense -> respond’, as a form of emergent practice. And reading on—I discover that she discusses this in one of the later essays.
Errata: Obviously it was Adam Curtis who authored ‘The Century of the Self’, the documentary series about Edward Bernays and the world that he made, not Anthony Curtis. Thanks to Nick Way for noticing my mistake.
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