Vision without systems thinking, ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.’  
(Peter M Senge, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)  

This paper is presented as a contribution to our collective debate on how we might achieve our shared goal of sustained transformation in literacy standards and participation. I hope that those who are interested in pursuing this goal will work with the Pakistan Foundation for The Advancement of Engineering & Technology so that we can sharpen both our thinking and the implementation of new partnership approaches to literacy 
 
Asim Javed Uppal, Managing Director

• 1: Introduction
• 2: A vision of transformed literacy standards
• 3: Systemic approaches
• 4: Literacy and the relevance of systemic partnerships
• 5: The Leadership Challenge
• 6: The Newcastle Literacy Trust
• 7: National Literacy Trust
• 8: Postscript
• Appendix

1: Introduction  

I am delighted that the Government is so committed to lifting literacy standards, and grateful for the clarity of vision and extra resourcing. Central to an enduring improvement in literacy standards is, of course, the work of our schools, and much important work is being developed in this sphere. However nobody would take the view that world class literacy standards can be delivered by our schools alone. Schools need a transformed context within which to operate and, most importantly, a multi-disciplinary strategy which will, amongst other things, strengthen the role of parents by harnessing and focusing energy and expertise to empower them to support their children’s language and literacy; and for some, develop their own literacy confidence and skills. 

The key question, of course, is how this ambitious goal can be tackled most effectively. I believe that sustained change requires a strategy which contextualises literacy developments within the ‘whole picture’, by which I mean all those systems issues - social, economic, psychological etc, that work for or against learning formal and informal. Such a strategy, both across Whitehall and locally, would enable the coherent planning of the jigsaw of interdependent parts that will, if effectively delivered and linked, support a wide range of policy areas including, of course, the National Literacy Strategy. 

This type of approach is necessary and urgent. If well implemented it could have profound long-term benefits by focusing on the cultural and structural roots of underachievement issues; whilst in the short-term it must be planned and delivered to support current policies and targets. 

This paper is presented as a contribution to our collective debate on how we might achieve our shared goal of sustained transformation in literacy standards and participation. I hope it will raise questions, challenge thinking, and perhaps stimulate new perspectives on how the literacy and educational ambitions we share can be most effectively achieved. I hope also that those who are interested in pursuing this goal will work with the National Literacy Trust in developing the dialogue so that together we can sharpen both our thinking and the implementation of new partnership approaches for literacy. 

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2: A vision of transformed literacy standards   

I wonder how you would respond if I told you that it is possible to build a strategy that would, in say ten years time (there are no short cuts), create for our communities a high probability of the following:  

- significantly higher levels of educational achievement 
- better job prospects for young people 
- a stronger local economy 
- higher income levels 
- a work-force better equipped for skills up-dating and lifelong learning 
- less crime 
- less social exclusion/alienation 
- less welfare dependency 
- less school truancy 
- more social participation and democratic involvement.  

I am confident that if we focus new energy and insight on to this one issue we will, over the next ten years, achieve previously unimagined targets in all of these areas. The one issue? A commitment to deliver an inclusive and community-wide policy of literacy skills development and participation via systemic partnership approaches to literacy.  

To coin a phrase, a commitment to deliver ‘total literacy’.  

You may say “… surely all this is the responsibility of our schools and the National Literacy Strategy…” and of course they are absolutely central. But the drive to raise standards in our schools and the obligation to do something powerfully effective about the 8 million functionally illiterate adults, will necessitate wide and long-term contextual support.  

We will need to create a strategy to harness the motivation, skills and new energies from, for example, the health sector, libraries, the arts sector, business, media and so on. And we must create the mechanism to enable professionals from many different backgrounds, plus more and more volunteers, to work in co-ordinated ways that value differences of perspective whilst sharing a common vision.  

Some local authorities, in one form or another, have started down this path and others have established new partnerships during the National Year of Reading. They have viewed the Year as more than a valuable one-off celebration of reading and used it as the foundation upon which to build new partnerships for literacy. I hope that this will develop further during the National Reading Campaign.  

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3: Systemic approaches   

For the purposes of this paper, I have taken systemic to refer to analysis and action across the whole of a system rather than just one part of it; an approach that enables us to identify and influence the key interrelationships that affect behaviour over time. The discipline in our case is to understand literacy underachievement and low participation by looking for the full pattern of causal factors across all systems, rather then focusing on snapshots of parts of the systems.  

You might want to assess how systemic your organisation’s planning and activity is. Take each systemic characteristic and reverse it into a non-systemic approach. The first two examples are given.  

 

Systemic	Non-systemic
Looks at the whole structure of systems that input upon an issue	Looks only at component parts in isolation from other possible influences
Looks for interrelationships across systems.	Does not look for interrelationships
Seeks to understand the long standing causal factors which generate problems
Looks for the key levers of influence across the whole system
Looks to see how one sector or organisation’s actions or influence impacts upon the rest of the system both short and long-term.
Consciously avoids ‘shifting problems’ to other parts of the system
Looks for the main sources of resistance to change, rather than pushing harder to overcome resistance and barriers by increasing the driving forces.
Generally is geared to the long-term and seeks to identify the slow, subtle and often hard to detect changes which over time can have powerful implications.

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4: Literacy and the relevance of systematic partnerships  

 4.1 The problem  

We face long-standing underachievement in literacy, the implications of which spread to wider educational achievement and then on to issues of self-esteem, employability and economic competitiveness. With increasing workplace complexity and globalisation, unless we bridge the ‘literacy gap’, we are in danger of creating a growing group of mainly poor and working class people who will become increasingly alienated from society.  

These issues are recognised by Government. The standards’ drive, including the National Literacy Strategy, lifelong learning and post-Moser strategies will be powerful contributions to addressing the concern; as could early years initiatives and a number of other policies if the ‘literacy dimension’ is integrated. But will they - unless these strategies are ‘joined-up’ and then strengthened by both national, regional and community partnerships - be powerful enough to deal with the full range of underlying causal factors?  

4.2. The vision  

The vision is to create, via long-term systemic approaches at national, regional and local levels, a sustained breakthrough that eliminates the long-tail of underachievement. The goal is to create a society where no school leaver or adult is disadvantaged by lack of skills or self-confidence in literacy.  

4.3 A systemic perspective  

Ultimately, society is an aggregate of individual learners. Few would contend that the capacity of a learner to develop the skills, attitudes and confidence to become truly literate, can be simply a matter of the quality of the teaching they receive, or that skilled teaching, alongside a supportive home environment, is the most important single issue we can deliver.  

However, the learner is part of a series of systems that affect his or her capacity to learn effectively.  

Amongst the systems variables are:  

- quality of teaching/school effectiveness 
- home literacy modeling and opportunities 
- early language development 
- the quality of pre-school support  
- peer group influences 
- media influences 
- housing conditions 
- the learner’s health  
- poverty 
- racism 
- the expectation of satisfying employment, and the motivation this provides 
- workplace literacy and training 
- and the availability of libraries, arts provision, youth service support community and adult education, can all work to support many learners.  

There are then many variables from a number of systems that can influence each learner’s capacity to make best use of what pre-school, school and post-school education and the wider community can offer.  

In the recent Robina Addis Memorial Lecture, (Young Minds Conference – October 1999) Tim Brighouse reminded us that so much significant learning takes place outside of formal education and that time at school is only a small fraction of children’s lives. Between birth and sixteen children attend school for 9 minutes of every waking hour. This is based on the assumption of full attendance for 6 hours per day for 38 weeks per year and 10 hours sleep. Are the other 51 waking minutes making any contribution to children’s literacy; their skills, motivation and attitudes?  

Or, to look at it another way, 75% of brain development occurs between 3 months and the age of two. Are we considering, as effectively and collaboratively as we should, the language and literacy implications for this period and particularly for the most disadvantaged? Are we utilising the skills of those who can contribute most in this period? Do we have the systemic thinking and structures to do this?  

The learner, of literacy in this case, is the product of a network of interrelated systems which work for or against achievement and often take years to fully reveal their patterns and their impacts. Our goal is to maximize the ability of the home, the community, the teacher and the learner to give of their best so that each learner can fulfill his or her potential; and a systemic approach to learners’ literacy needs, recognizes that the issue is far from one-dimensional (i.e. the quality of school teaching) but that this key component needs to be complemented by systems analysis of need.  

4.4 A systemic partnership approach will recognize and require  

• that across the system the whole can be greater than the sum of the individual parts. 
• that the partnership structure provides the capacity to see: 
  - the whole 
  - interrelationships 
  - patterns 
  - cross-systemic implications of activity 
  - time-delays for cause and effect 
  - key high value activity – high leverage areas 
  - the underlying and often very difficult structural/causal issues  
  - restraining forces for change.  

  4.5 Organizations that seek to implement systemic approaches will:  

  • work with their communities to develop a shared vision. 
  • recognize that deep causal issues will take a long time to resolve. But they will commit to a constancy of purpose in moving from an assessment of their current situation to the delivery of their vision for the community. They will recognize that in some ways ‘slower is faster’. 
  • pursue urgent action to meet needs but will be alert for long-term unintended consequences. 
  • establish either key post-holders or strategic planning groups, normally both, which will lead and implement systemic thinking and action. 
  • work to encourage all systems partners to: contribute to the vision; maximize their own influence in the context of the shared vision; act co-operatively; be cognizant of the wider implications of their own activity, and share different perspectives and expertise in order to strengthen each other’s ability to contribute to the delivery.

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  5: The Leadership Challenge   

  Systemic partnership approaches are about leadership rather than about management. This is important. A major obstacle in the way of shared vision, perspective, and high leverage decisions, would be to try and manage the whole system. This would be too complex, prohibitively expensive, and there would be a surfeit of information and no proper capacity to use it properly. It would be all trees and no wood.  

  Instead, the partnership leadership must  

  - help build a shared vision of a fully literate community 
  - articulate the vision 
  - motivate others to take action  
  - look across the whole system for strategic gaps and potential weaknesses 
  - think long-term for cause and effect 
  - ‘knit’ key links together, and then empower and motivate the partners to develop their work with reducing direct support 
  - look for new partnerships 
  - help create synergy between overall goals and the individual goals of the partners 
  - think radically about new approaches to motivate literacy involvement 
  - respect the aims and the practices of the key strategic partners 
  - ensure high level monitoring and evaluation.  

  Systemic literacy partnership must work closely with other partnerships. For example, early years and lifelong learning. The communities’ leaders should be represented on the strategic planning groups for most of these key partnerships and their overlapping roles will serve to mutually strengthen implementation of the various partnerships via insights, cross referencing and increasing awareness of mutual benefits. It must also be made clear that the literacy partnership is about leadership and influence and will therefore not cut across any existing line management of partners.  

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  6: The Newcastle Literacy Trust    

  The Newcastle Literacy Trust, previously known as the Newcastle Literacy Collaborative, is the first attempt to introduce some aspects of systemic thinking to the complex task of transforming literacy standards in a community. It was established in 1998 on the premise that there are no ‘quick fixes’, and that there is a need for the Collaborative, via its Director and other staff, to see the whole and identify interrelationship and high-leverage activities. It is very early days yet – it is a 10 year initiative – but there are encouraging signs.  

  Central to systemic thinking is the structure and skills to see beyond complexity and a mass of information and to identify the causal, structural issues that inhibit or generate change. It is important that once the shared vision has been agreed and the current reality gap assessed, that systemic practice avoids information overload and delivers the high stakes, high leverage issues. In Newcastle the following have been identified as key priorities:  

  - children aged 0-3 - parents - young people aged 16-20 - employees.  

  Work is strategically focused although not exclusively on these areas and within a context of community-wide literacy celebration and the promotion of a ‘literacy culture’.  

  The Newcastle initiative is not a blueprint, but it represents an original approach and an example of new collaborative working for literacy. Initially led only by a director, but now with an assistant director and administrative support, it is a highly cost-effective way to develop long-term cultural support for the literacy of all who live and work in the community.  

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  7: National Literacy Trust   

  I hope that via the Trust’s literacy partnerships network, those who wish to share ideas, challenges, successes, disappointments and inspirations on the road to achieving their vision, will work openly and collaboratively with us to pool knowledge and good practice in this field. We wish to facilitate a dialogue amongst a community of interested parties.  

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  8: Postscript   

  The implementation of systemic partnership for literacy will be challenging. There is no single model although all approaches will share a similar vision of the benefits that ‘joined-up’ approaches can, over time, generate. However the benefits will not all be in the long-term.  

  Experience from Newcastle, Read On – Write Away! in Derbyshire and Derby City, the National Year of Reading and others, confirms that facilitating new opportunities for colleagues to work together to deliver better literacy/reading opportunities is energising and stimulating. The methodology in itself is recognized as being right – albeit on occasions difficult to implement; no one should pretend that real partnership working is necessarily easy to establish. However few who have seen the benefits of genuine partnerships working for client groups, would ever want to go back to previous ways.  

  Most colleagues accept the need for more co-ordinated and less professionally ‘boxed-in’ approaches, but don’t yet know how to get started and I hope that the network we can offer, will help with practical ways forward.  

  We need to bridge the gap between current reality and our vision of a more truly literate country. This gap can be used to generate a ‘creative tension’ but we must recognise how to deal with this tension.  

  - We must not, because the gap is large, respond as we so often do, by lowering our aspirations and compromising the vision. To do so would be to abdicate our professional responsibilities - our stewardship, and it will also create a ‘feedback effect’ odium and long term, very inexpensive.  
  f making the lowered goal even more difficult to deliver because of our limiting ‘mind-set’. Fundamental to systems thinking is that we can, given enough time and via the right analysis and approach, transform vision into reality.  

  - We must also recognize that our literacy partnership organization must build the capacity and commitment to listen to our least engaged communities i.e. we diagnose and determine the required action only after listening to understand more deeply.  

  - We must look to create mutually beneficial partnerships and recognize that we are always in danger of perceiving the world from our professional boxes. This will demand that we challenge our fixed mental models and we always work with a client/learner focus.  

  If we can deliver our goals for literacy we shall, in all probability, do so also for very many other learning outcomes for pre-school, school age and post-school learners. The net resource requirements for this type of approach are not high and compared to the potential benefits in the me 
  My hope is that over the next five years at both national and local level we shall establish partnerships for literacy which focus on the literacy needs, for the 21st century, of all the community. Such partnerships are the means for generating and targeting a phenomenal resource of collective Endeavour in order to truly transform literacy standards for people of all ages. If we don’t build these mechanisms for harnessing potential energy, expertise and enthusiasm for literacy, are we not abdicating our responsibilities?  

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  Appendix   

  Partnerships for literacy – some of the theory into practice  

  1. The National Literacy Trust has been developing and supporting collaborative partnership initiatives for the last five years. We took the view that the National Year of Reading and the National Reading Campaign could also provide a unique opportunity to promote a ‘whole-community’ approach to developing stronger cultural and infrastructural support for sustained literacy improvements. We therefore work to support authorities to build upon good practice and establish wide partnership planning groups and, wherever possible, specific posts to promote this approach. We consider that such capacity building should be a priority, and will require:  

  i) the structural capacity to work with the local community’s broadly based leadership to establish the process for creating the shared vision of a highly literate community. This to be done by listening to and engaging all potential partners in the dialogue in order to gain ownership from key organisations and groups and a commitment to work for organisational and cultural change. The process would involve ‘bottom-up’ community consultations to ascertain how the least engaged view their literacy requirements and current barriers.  

  This involvement would include: all pre-school sectors, schools, FE, HE, community education, youth services, local authorities, libraries, health, housing providers, business, EBPs, TECs, chambers of commerce, education action zones, health action zones, New Deal for Communities, RDAs, local media, community groups, faith groups, Football in the Community, voluntary sector organisations, volunteering organisations and arts groups.  

  ii) the establishment of high quality leadership to maintain the vision of the potential, for individuals and the whole community, of transformed literacy participation and standards.  

  iii) an audit and database of current and potential local contributors and key initiatives.  

  iv) the facilitation of strategic links and partnerships between organisations and groups.  

  v) a clear perspective on ‘the whole’ and a systemic approach to proposals for strategic development which; maximises opportunities to remove restraining barriers to achievement; monitors for ‘costs’ across the system; and promotes policies and activity that impacts more upon causal than symptomatic issues.  

  vi) connections between the community’s literacy goals and the various council policy areas, and also, by bringing a ‘literacy opportunity’ perspective, develops mutually strengthening links to the various Government policy and funding strands: Sure Start, health action zone, education action zone, lifelong learning partnerships, SRB, New Deal for Communities, Excellence in Cities. This, in order to maximise funding opportunities for literacy activity and to maximise the capacity, via literacy, to ‘thread policy strands more effectively together’.  

  vii) the promotion of a reading culture as a continuation of the National Year of Reading. Engaging new partners who will promote reading activity for a host of reasons including the skills and competition agenda and, not least, ‘reading for pleasure’.  

  viii) the development of the expertise, and the contacts, which will help bring to the partnership extra resources from the voluntary and business sectors. Experience suggests that communities which demonstrate that they have a clarity of purpose and are working in innovative ways to break into the cycle of underachievement are able to attract targeted funding from a range of other sources.  

  ix) facilities to maximise the co-ordinated and systematic involvement of trained volunteers.  

  The key role in any such approach is, of course, that of the partnership’s director who will need the skills, personality and drive of a highly influential leader. The task will be to generate shared vision, promote a ‘literacy culture’, develop systemic thinking, and motivate key organizations to take ownership of the agreed literacy agenda and commit to collaborative working.  

  2. Systemic questioning  

  The following are exemplifications of the type of analysis that literacy partnerships will need to address.   

  1. Who looks across all of the systems for the literacy dimension and opportunities? Is there somebody who can view the whole of the current, and potential, literacy territory from the ‘mountain top’?   

  2. How do we identify and then empower individuals and systems to work to remove the inhibiting barriers to literacy?   

  3. Do all children enter the school system with an equal opportunity to succeed at literacy? What are the high leverage areas of activity that, if successful, could enhance their capacity to take advantage of high quality teaching?   

  4. Do all homes provide a supportive environment for literacy? To use the Peter Hannon ORIM framework for early literacy support, do they all provide children with equal:   

  opportunities for them to encounter written language  
  recognition of their early achievements  
  interaction to extend their development  
  modelling by parents i.e. using written language themselves in the home context.  
  (Peter Hannon – The Sheffield REAL Project reported in Literacy Today, June 1995; see also P.Hannon, ‘Literacy, Home & School’., Falmer Press 1998)   

  5. Do peer group influences and learner expectations work for or against literacy involvement and skills development?   

  There are obviously scores of other questions some of which require us to look at the following two key areas:   

  1. Involving all possible agencies, in a co-ordinated manner, to strengthen the power, confidence and skills of parents to support early language, and the developing literacy activity of children.   

  Who can contribute to this?   

  Ante and post-natal providers, health visitors, doctors surgeries, clinics, libraries, all pre-school provision, supermarkets, adult education, community groups, housing providers, PTAs, home visiting…………...   

  How?   

  Bookstart, RIF, family literacy, Storysacks, Homestart, SureStart, under 8’s policies, community health, New Deal for Communities, education action zones, health action zones, Share Project…………..   

  2. How do we harness the wider community, and media support, to generate more self-confidence and demand amongst young people to develop their reading and literacy skills?   

  Who can contribute to this?   

  Local and national newspapers, libraries, tv and radio, youth services, arts/theatre groups, authors, professional sport, employers/mentors, housing providers, magazines, voluntary sector, business sector…………..   

  How:   

  Newspaper images, positive stories, soap scripts, popular radio and tv. programmes, local radio messages, theatre in education, extended day study support, drama opportunities, Football in the Community, Reading Is Fundamental, adult mentors and role models in school and in the media, author visits, library and youth work partnerships, National Reading Campaign, Book-it clubs