Freedom Needs Boundaries

A values-driven approach to using the Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland's Colleges

A talk for Scottish College Lecturers hosted by the General Teaching Council for Scotland on 20th March 2024.

Thank you for inviting me today to talk with you about the Values Line. It’s wonderful to see so many people here.

I ought to introduce myself a little. I’m a former FE lecturer. I worked for nearly 20 years at Northern College for adults in Yorkshire, here in England, latterly as a teacher educator, where those teachers were FE lecturers themselves and also community workers, youth workers, nurse trainers and other social purpose educators. We worked from the values out and since leaving there eight years ago I have worked in professional development in further education, where I’ve been involved in two rounds of developing professional standards. I also work closely with the Education and Training Foundation (which is responsible for post-qualification training), with individual colleges and most recently on a Green Changemakers programme for the West Midlands and Warwickshire Combined Authority. 

Everything is about values-led practice and values-driven leadership. I promised myself when I went freelance that I would stick to this and I have. 

When we talk about Professional Standards it’s always in terms of what they are, but why do we have them? That’s actually more important. A real and meaningful why. What they are - as long as they are values based and sensible - is almost less important. We have Professional Standards as a framework for clarity and to be clear is to be kind. The Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland walk the fine line between being clear and not telling you how to teach and they are worth getting to know, as I’m sure many of you already do. They provide a boundary which allows us within it to be creative in our work and to be brave I think as well. I draw a lot on Brené Brown’s research in my teaching and she writes that a boundary is what’s OK and what’s not OK. Another influential thinker, Prentice Hemphill, defines boundaries as “a place where I can care for you and also care for myself,” which has huge meaning for our overwhelming and busy lives as educators. The Professional Standards we work within frame our work in an everyday sense, not a ticky box sense, because what we want is to live good values, not just laminate them and stick them on a wall.

The organisational psychologist Adam Grant writes that 

“Values are a steady compass: they point you towards a future purpose. Passion brings immediate joy. Values provide lasting meaning.”

So they are the long-term bridge between the joyful moments - and the challenging ones - in your teaching. They are about accountability in a really meaningful sense.

I’ve been working a lot with that word ‘accountable’ recently. I don’t know about here in Scotland, but in England it’s often used as a synonym for being compliant and when we are absolutely compliant we never find ways of doing things differently. Our times mean that change is inevitable and crises occur regularly - our services are at breaking point and, in many ways, so is the health of our people, including ourselves.

To be personally accountable is a professional attribute we should be talking more about, because it includes not only meaningful and necessary compliance, but also a commitment to calling out what’s not right or what’s not working. Another influence on me is Nancy Kline, whose ‘Thinking Environment’ set of processes provide another frame for my work in enabling people to think independently together. In fact Nancy Kline coined the paradox ‘Freedom Needs Boundaries’, the title of this session. Nancy writes that,

“One definition of insanity is the decision to keep doing something that is not working, to do it in the same way, and to expect different results. One definition of sanity, then, is to notice what is not working, change the way you are doing it and get different results. One definition of insanity is to do what works.”

In my leadership work I have come to recognise that we spend too much time bouncing the ball up the road. Our hierarchies are so structured that we become infantilised within them, at every level and that goes for senior leaders too, who often have as little time to think about doing things differently as we lecturers do. We are all trapped in structures we can’t change, within systems that feel unchangeable, even as they get burdened with more and more bureaucracy. 

And we are all chasing that dream of strategic alignment, where everything flows from the values and purpose of the organisation, where everyone knows what their role is - not just what their job is - and where processes don’t get under our feet. 

So what’s the answer? Well I believe that it is refocusing on what is fundamentally important - the values of the work that we do, which are enshrined in the Professional Standards. They might not be our chosen personal values, but as individuals we have to find common ground with them or we’ll be unhappy in our work, every day. 

The values of the Professional Standards for Lecturers in Scotland’s Colleges are captured in this word cloud here. I’ve extracted them from the Professional Standards document. It’s all good stuff:

collegiate social justice fairness respect wellbeing equality diversity inclusiveness trust innovative empowering personal responsibility sustainability reflective par=nformed engaged critical accountable thinking listening community enquiring creative

There might be things you might add, but they are all sound and possible to work with. Organisational values should and probably do flow out of these. The question is, how do we bake them into every process, workstream, decision and planning activity, so that - as I said at the top - they are lived everyday, not just laminated on lanyards and the walls. 

I think the answer to that is developing a Values Line. This is how I’ve been working with colleges for some years now and we have been seeing the impact of it for some time in colleges who have moved from the good intentions of the training, to sustainable change. Like anything else, it’s an approach that only works if you do it with meaning. This is not just about chasing that top-drawer inspection report, though of course that’s important. The Scottish Inspection Framework - and the Estyn framework in Wales - are kinder than the English framework, which has single-word judgements and, paradoxically we are all expected to aim for outstanding, to get to the point where ‘outstanding’ no longer means to stand out. The Values Line is about what we do every day, and if we are clear about our purpose and work to those values every day, what we’ll do is the best that we can. 

We all know about the KPI line, even if it’s so hidden in plain sight that we don’t see it. Key Performance Indicators are what we all work to, even when we’re not aware of it. And it’s right that we account for public money in this way. League tables, student outcomes, staff wellbeing measures…I once saw a poster on the wall of the Department for Education in London which said, what’s measured is what matters. Our compliance frameworks are built around this assumption and we have to account for them, they are what hold our structures in place.

But we don’t have to labour the KPI line as much as we do. In England, everything is about the Self-Assessment Report for Inspection, with everyone contributing to the Quality Improvement Plans which feed it. So much of our work, rather than being celebrated widely, falls on the cutting room floor, because we have lost sight of what really matters.

Yes, we need to keep the KPI-Line on track, but what if we had a visible Values-Line running alongside it. And what if we conserved energy for working that Values-Line by doing only what we need to do on the KPI-Line, streamline the processes, dial down the emphasis, make it accurate and timely but not the be-all and end all? We make a fetish out of the KPI-Line, it eats up our energy. Because, after all, every business knows these days that we have a triple bottom line - people and planet as well as prosperity, which we need to balance, and we just don’t pay enough attention to the people and planet part.

How to do it is actually quite simple, though of course it takes precision and will, just like everything else that matters in life. We don’t celebrate our loved ones birthdays on the wrong day, after all. When it matters, we get it right.

The question I have for you today is this: 

What could education look like, with the values that matter to us baked in?

And we can’t do that baking in without asking the right questions. Values-Line questions. Emerging out of my work with the Thinking Environment and tested with colleges over the past near-decade, I have a question formula for you to practise today.

I’m suggesting that when we sit down to do any planning, make any decision, formulate any process we begin with Values-Line questions in this format?

What could [WORK STREAM] look like, as a practice of [VALUE]?

We have the values there for us, drawn from the Professional Standards into the word cloud.

Imagine if this was always our starting point. Imagine where our thinking could go, how we could think differently about the stuff we take for granted in how we structure our work. Process matters too of course. If we generate questions, we have to find ways to think about them and listen to the answers. We’re not always brilliant at hearing all the voices, which is why I work consistently in a Thinking Environment. That’s for another time, but there’s a great Thinking Environment workbook I can ask Vikki to send out to you all. What I’d like you to do here and now is construct a question, relevant to your work, using this framework, and put in on this mentimeter here. I’ll share what’s coming up with you all once you get going.

Please don’t deviate from the formula. We’ve tested it. It works. That ‘could’ is important, for example. It’s a modal verb which brings possibility. The comma matters, to ensure emphasis on each clause. And be careful not to write the answer in accidentally! We do that more often than we might think. The point is to open up thinking differently, rather than fill a gap with what we already think we know.

Thank you. And I hope that has given you a technique to use when you have an opportunity. You’ll have to be brave. The gravitational pull of doing what we’ve always done is strong. I’m going to finish with a photograph of my favourite companion species. This is the Blue Satin Bowerbird from Australia, and in mating season he builds a beautiful bower to attract a mate. He decorates it with blue shiny things, human detritus he finds on the forest floor. Those, for you, are the joyful moments of your practice - the things we lose hold of when we come to write the evidence for our KPIs. But they are the artefacts of your values, values enshrined in the Professional Standards which you can come to know and which you can bake into the organisation and everything that you do.