15..DEVELOPING A CLIENT-BASED PHILOSOFHY

It is necessary to challenge the whole way in which we traditionally perceive schools and to construct a new philosophy about how we think about them. A fundamental approach in response to this challenge to the existing perception of schools is to reconsider the way we think about clients by asking the question, 'What are the assets of the school?' the traditional answer in accounting terms would be the buildings, the classrooms, desks, chairs and equipment. In human relations terms the answer would be the staff because they undertake the educational process. These have always been misconceptions; schools are not of much use to society if they have furniture and teachers but have no children to be taught. They then become a waste of society's resources. A more fundamental analysis would establish that all these assets, both human and physical, only facilitate the education process. The key ingredient is the pupils themselves. Within the school a similar perspective can exist. For example, a librarian may consider a 'good' library as one with tidy desks and chairs and neat rows of books which fill the shelves, whereas the most effective library may be the one where children are sitting everywhere reading and the books, therefore, are off the shelves being used. So it is with the schools themselves. They do not exist to provide neat tidy buildings or jobs for teachers; they exist for the children and for their education. This has been brought into sharp relief in the UK with the advent of formula-based funding associated with Local Management of Schools and Grant-maintained Status. According to this new framework, empty chairs and desks are liabilities rather than assets. Rooms still have to be insured, cleaned, heated and other fixed costs met despite there being fewer pupils in the class. The real assess are the pupils and the parents who send them to the school. Without the pupils nothing else is possible; all the other components only facilitate the education process once this vital asset is in place.This is a different, but necessary, way of thinking about the assets of the school. Organizations such as local government and the civil service have often been pilloried for being bureaucratic and more concerned with rules and regulations rather than with the people whom they serve. The structures and ways of working are not an end in themselves but merely a means of achieving a quality of service to a client. So it is in schools: all the buildings, organizational structures and staff only exist to provide the client with quality education. We should not, therefore, lose sight of this when organizing the resources which deliver education.Schools must stop being inward-looking and dealing only with the day-to-day problems and the challenges of the teaching process. They must consider the fundamental importance of the client in the school and how the recipients of education, their parents and the wider community, view the school. School leaders need to encourage this development of attitudes about the centrality of the client and to create significant management opportunities for promoting this way of thinking.