The intellectual capital of schools : measuring and managing knowledge, responsibility, and reward : lessons from the commercial sector

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889 – 1951. It is difficult to measure effectiveness in not-for-profit organisations like schools, colleges and universities. There is no ‘bottom-line’ against which to gauge performance, they have limited technical development and managers struggle to make meaningful comparisons between outcomes and targets. In education, well-publicised attempts have been made to establish - some would say impose - a set of criteria by which organisations judge success or failure. These have been largely subjective - the percentage of inspected classes regarded as good, the extent to which staff is involved in decision making, the appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, and so on – if occasionally peppered with quantitative measures, like the percentage of students achieving certain grades in public examinations, to sustain the illusion of objectivity. This is not to fault the aspiration necessarily, though initially at least it created a surveillance culture in schools that did justice to neither the inspected nor the argument for inspection. Happily, this is changing. Preliminaries......Page 1 CONTENTS......Page 8 PREFACE......Page 12 CHAPTER 1 Introduction to the concept of intellectual capital......Page 14 CHAPTER 2 Constructing a typology for intellectual capital......Page 33 CHAPTER 3 The measurement of responsibility......Page 51 CHAPTER 4 A new Profile Guide Chart method for job evaluation in schools......Page 64 CHAPTER 5 Pay and incentives in an education setting......Page 86 CHAPTER 6 The retention of intellectual capital......Page 102 CHAPTER 7 Implementing a knowledge continuity initiative......Page 113 CHAPTER 8 Intellectual capital metrics......Page 140 APPENDIX Two-sided mixed-motive games of strategy......Page 152 BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 159 This book is an attempt to describe a school's potential for improvement in new intrinsic terms ... in terms of its internal intellectual capital; the resource that comes from relationships between the school and its stakeholders, from its ability to innovate and manage change, from its infrastructure, and from the knowledge and transferable competencies of its staff. Intellectual capital is at the core of what society deems to be the purpose and definition of successful schooling, and being largely internal, promises maximum leverage in the search for improvement. Describes a school's potential for improvement in new intrinsic terms, in terms of its internal intellectual capital; the resource that comes from relationships between the school and its stakeholders, from its ability to innovate and manage change, from its infrastructure, and from the knowledge and transferable competencies of its staff. "This is the first book to develop a theory of intellectual capital for schools, from an author with considerable experience in extending sophisticated external concepts to education. It will be of interest to practitioners, academics and students in the fields of education, business and social enterprise."--BOOK JACKET Education too has developed a more sophisticated customer base and within reason, geographical separation is nowadays less of a barrier to choosing a preferred school.