Change the system!

Education has a value gap

Teachers do well what they do, every metric I know supports this view.

Professions are examples where the meaning created in the relationship between professional and client is a large part of the value created overall. For example, it is now well established that a doctor’s bedside manner has a significant impact on the recovery rate of their patients*.

More than twenty years ago, I developed a methodology to measure the value of such service relationships and when I apply this to education I find a “value gap” meaning that schools do well what they do but given the quality and types of people working in schools much higher value could be expected. Another way of looking at this is to say that teachers do well what they do, but they have the capability of doing something much more valuable. Yet another way of looking at it is to say that the system is not delivering outcomes that it could be delivering, not due to inefficiency, but because these outcomes are not currently desired outcomes of the system.

Thus, the issue is one of systemic change. Most of the value in a schooling system is created within and between people implying that to deliver higher value – once such value has been identified, and the idea of 21st century skills is a pointer in that direction – then the unlocking of this value will come through changes in behaviour.

This is no different from evolution of other professions which have moved from a focus on technical skills to a greater focus on human skills.

A first step is to identify the outcomes that are not being created by the system today and then specify the behaviours that would be needed to create them.

Then the work begins.

*Footnote: "Our results show that the beneficial effects of a good patient-clinician relationship on health care outcomes are of similar magnitude to many well-established medical treatments," says lead author John Kelley, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He added that "many of these medical treatments, while very important, need to balance their benefits against accompanying unwanted side effects. In contrast, there are no negative side effects to a good patient-clinician relationship." The full report is: The Influence of the Patient-Clinician Relationship on Healthcare Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials - John M. Kelley ,Gordon Kraft-Todd,Lidia Schapira,Joe Kossowsky,Helen Riess, Published: April 9, 2014 and the quote can be found at https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2014/04/14/study-physicians-bedside-manner-affects-patients-health]

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter. Earlier blogs can be found here.

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UncategorizedJune 16, 2020