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It’s great to see such serious attention being paid to the quality of (Dutch) education at the moment. The performance in primary and secondary education is, to put it mildly, concerning. In vocational education, we see a lot of struggle to better align education with students’ needs and the current demands of the job market. It’s not surprising, given that educational organisations are so busy with the demands of today, that there’s hardly any time or space to work on the education of tomorrow.
However, there is more to it. There is a sacred cow that no one dares to touch: the autonomy of teachers to determine how they shape their teaching. Or perhaps, more accurately, the hesitancy of their leaders.
It’s essential for good education that teachers have significant freedom to determine what happens in the classroom based on their experience and expertise. On the other hand, leaders in educational organisations often have a good sense of what needs to be done to improve the quality and effectiveness of education. But in practice these two perspectives don’t always align well.
This leads to frustration among teachers who want to work on innovation and improvement but don’t always know how to prioritise this amidst their busy days. They expect clear direction from management and enough space to work towards it. When direction and space are lacking, teachers focus on immediate tasks. Similarly, we see frustration among managers and leaders when they feel teachers are resistant to new ideas about their profession. As an educational manager at a University of Applied Sciences, put it: “Some teachers almost literally keep the classroom door shut to exclude innovation.” Other managers expressed similar sentiments: “We organise study trips to Finland, the country of educational innovation. But none of the teachers want to go.” And: “We all know that the learning outcome of a lecture is very small. Yet many of our teachers cling to that form of teaching.”
This paints a somewhat polarised picture, but it’s not the general practice. All parties involved in educational institutions usually work on good education with genuine passion. The frustrations that sometimes arise seem to stem from how these organisations work on educational innovation—often with insufficient direction (do we really have a clear picture of what and how we want to change?) and insufficient space to work on it.
What stands out: teachers are actually asking for leadership. They want direction-givers and connectors who ensure that working on innovation is an effective process involving everyone. At the same time, I see leaders (such as those I cited above) who ‘keep their distance’ and are reluctant to interfere with their professionals’ views. This is perhaps the core of the problem. Why shouldn’t a leader give more direction on how teachers do their work? Personally, I think there’s been a misconception, which we also see elsewhere in the public sector. Over fifteen years ago, Matthieu Weggeman wrote the book: Leading Professionals: Don’t Do It! He argued that professionals have an inherent drive to deliver good work and that it’s counterproductive to manage them through bureaucratic processes and systems. This is a valid warning that remains relevant today. The misconception is that Weggeman uses the word ‘leading’ but actually talks about ‘managing’—about managers trying to control production, quality, and costs through business operations.
More of that kind of management won’t solve the problems in education. The challenge is not (only) to control but to help the organisation change. And change requires leadership. The courage to give direction and indeed get involved in what happens behind the classroom door. That is easier said than done, because you can’t change people—they can only change themselves. Giving direction means inspiring your people to move.
In 2022, my colleagues and I spoke with about 60 leaders about leading change. Many of them led professionals. One of the most interesting topics was precisely that question: how do you get professionals moving on the content of their profession? The conversations revealed one clear conclusion: it only works if you, as a leader, have a clear vision of the profession and enthusiastically engage with your people about it. If you consistently make time and energy for dialogue. As a leader, you share your personal convictions about where you want to take the profession, inspire them, and sometimes set hard boundaries. Simultaneously, you must be genuinely curious about the convictions, experience, and passion of your people. In such a dialogue, you influence each other mutually. A common language, a shared vision, and more trust develop, making it easier to challenge each other. Usually, the ideas about the desired direction converge. If successful, you eventually align the professionals’ passion with the necessary ambitions for innovation. As a leader, you still give direction, but the result belongs to everyone.
Besides a shared direction, educational innovation and improvement also require space to work on it. Like any change process, it’s important to organise educational innovation so that professionals can experiment, reflect, and learn how to do things differently in their daily work. Sometimes there’s a tendency to keep changes outside daily work by working on them in projects. But projects can only provide the conditions; it’s the professionals themselves who shape the actual change.
A University of Applied Sciences is working on making education more flexible. This means that in the future, students can compose their learning paths with modules from various programmes. This is a significant transformation for everyone involved. For example, the structure of education needs to be standardised: the same structure in lesson lengths and blocks, the same scheduling methods. Each programme must redevelop its education into modules that can be followed individually. The new education also requires different skills from teachers. Besides imparting subject knowledge, they will guide students in determining and following their personal learning paths.
At this institution, the change process begins by asking all programmes to create a plan: how do you want to work on flexibility? Projects and working groups soon spring up everywhere. Meanwhile, colleagues from support services also start developing ideas about structuring education and harmonising systems. They ask the programmes many questions to understand what the new education will look like, resulting in a lack of clarity and many different answers. It’s evident that there are no common frameworks yet, leading to increasing frustration among teachers. They must find scarce time to develop new education, while their leaders can’t clearly explain what is intended.
This situation shows that the bottom-up approach, which is deeply rooted in the culture, doesn’t work well for such fundamental changes. More direction and guidance are needed. From a clear vision of flexibility, which describes in quite some detail what the future education will look like. More guidance also requires more intensive involvement from team leaders so they can better lead the change process within the programmes. Subsequently, it’s important that educational professionals can work on new education and their development as coaches with a clear mandate, sufficient time, and support. More direction, more guidance, less autonomy for the programmes and teachers. This takes some getting used to and regularly causes tension. But it’s necessary to ensure that the change process at this university of applied sciences takes off.
The Dutch government frequently advocates for increased control over education quality – for example through the education inspectorate. I don’t believe that’s where the solution lies. Before you know it, controlling quality will follow the lines of business operations: more rules and procedures, more control, less impact.
My plea is to take the other route. By working with leaders and teachers on a shared vision of the profession and the substantive improvement you want to achieve. By helping team leaders and programme managers lead the innovation process more effectively. By organising and structuring the innovation process more intelligently, partly in projects but mainly as a joint learning process. And by creating space to work on it. The latter is challenging, certainly. But it’s an absolute prerequisite in any change process.
Finally: When you want to address a particular problem, it can quickly seem like nothing is going well. Of course, there are many examples of educational institutions where leaders and teaching teams work passionately and successfully on innovation and improvement. I’d love to explore these cases further for a future publication. So if you have such an example and would like to be interviewed about it, let me know!
Written by: Michiel van Delden, managing partner Involve