Every School an Outstanding School!

Don't tell me that every school can't be an outstanding school.
The McKinsey Report sets out very clearly the stages on the journey to excellence. The steps, and the policies, are as follows.
• From Poor to Fair - concentrate on the '3Rs' to bring all schools up to a minimum level.
• From Fair to Good - invest in good system-wide performance data, put in good financing, organisational infrastructure, accountability etc.
 • From Good to Great - invest in teachers and professional development so that teaching "becomes a profession like law or medicine".
 • From Great to Excellent - move the "locus of improvement from the centre to the schools themselves", facilitate school-to-school and teacher-to-teacher peer-based learning, encourage system-sponsored innovation and experimentation. real challenge for schools in an age of rapid change is to prepare our young people "for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that have not been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet".

No school system in the world has adequately addressed this challenge, even though all of them know they must do so. The International Futures Forum (IFF) has published a short book on how to do so - "a playbook for pragmatic visionaries". It had a simple recipe: give professional staff, school leaders, local authorities, parents and pupils the tools, prompts and frameworks to encourage them to think beyond the constraints of the current culture and support them to move towards more radical aspirations. If you want to read the book go to their web-site at http://www.internationalfuturesforum.com/home.php.
Chris