Publications

School Practices and Equity « Pratiques d’écoles et équité »

Benoît De Waele

SeGEC – Secrétariat Général de l’Enseignement Catholique

Brussels – March 2013

Research

French

English

Students with learning difficulties

Are good results achieved in a school due to chance, or are they the logical consequence of the practices carried out there?
Benoît De Waele reviews the results of several primary and secondary schools with a low socio-economic grade, but that bring more students than other school of the same socio-economic class above one set expected result.
On this basis, the author interviewed the headmasters of those schools on four topics: how the school is run, the pedagogical approach, the pedagogical functioning and the school climate. He draws the following conclusions.
A school run on a wilful basis, rather than managed:
• A headmaster (-mistress) who takes on their role and position, among other leading the way and taking care to respect the markers guaranteeing the implementation of common objectives in the school;
• Mobilises their educational team around a major challenge, refocussing the work organisation on the education mission, the school project and the consideration of students as they are;
• Combines professional demand and attention to well-being, support and coherence;
• Uses autonomy margins in the organisation of the school to improve and extend pedagogical support to students taking local circumstances into account.

A voluntary pedagogical approach, which trusts in its ability to impact students’ results:
• Demanding regarding results and daily work.
• Careful to propose solutions adapted to the school audience, among other through an extensive support to student (adaptation of timetables, remediation, after-school centres...).
• With an explicit and repeated request for parents’ support.

A pedagogical functioning that requires:
• Teachers’ personal commitment outside their class.
• The ability to question one’s practices.
• A frequent collective coordination work within the educational team.

Particular attention to the management of school climate:
To guarantee the quality of relations, the quality of learning periods and well-being. Notably, paying attention to the coherence of students’ behaviours and of the educational team with the values professed in the school.

The study explores local experiences to find out practices that could lead to a school dynamics that is favourable to school results.

It was led in three phases:
• Collecting a series of markers or factors described in the literature as a driving force for efficiency.
• Identifying, based on the results of external evaluation in French (reading) and mathematics, schools with noticeably better results than other schools with the same socio-economical grade.
• Based on those two explorations, question the headmasters of the identified schools to explore how the factors identified in the literature are carried out.

The study shows that school failure is not unavoidable. There are solutions in concrete school practices to be found in the margins of freedom that headmasters allow themselves and considering the school as a place to live in.
This is the author’s conclusion: “those headmasters take a position of driving force, organiser, guarantee of the school project. With their team, they develop a trustful and voluntary ambition. They believe in their students’ abilities to progress, and in their own ability to change things. Professionalism is required, as well as support of students outside the class“.

The author highlights the benefit of fostering a functioning framework that enable headmasters to evolve from an essentially manager role to a role of pilot (or leader), able to mobilise resources and the school actors around objectives and projects, shared and adapted to the context of their school.

A synthesis of this study is proposed in an article of the magazine “Entrées Libres” no78, published by SeGEC:
http://www.entrees-libres.be/n78_pdf/78_avril2013.pdf

SeGEC website:
http://enseignement.catholique.be/Fichiers_LAV/cover_pratiques_equite_introduction.pdf

Julien Keutgen

Inforef

Translator – project assistant