Working laterally:how innovation networks make an education epidemicDavid H Hargreaves

teachers transforming teaching

in partnership with

F or a teacher, finding ways of doingthe job better has always beennatural. Even when teaching has

been externally constrained or prescribed,as with the literacy, numeracy or keystage three strategies, teachers have to improvise to make it work with theirstudents in the specific context of thelesson. Much of this creative innovation islocked in the heads of individual teachers:they do not know whether what they do isespecially good practice; and even whenit is known to be good, a practice spreadsvery slowly, if at all, within a school, letalone between schools. In otherprofessional worlds, such as medicine orbusiness, innovation has been developedin a much more explicit and co-ordinatedway and then disseminated much fasterthan in education. Could this be made tohappen among teachers too?

The time is ripe for exploring new ways inwhich to increase teachers’ professionalknowledge and skill. Recently educationministers and the DfES have been talkingless about school improvement and moreabout the transformation of schools.Ministers declare the importance ofinnovation and have established theInnovation Unit. Transformation suggeststhat improvement should be faster anddone in a way that allows innovation toflourish, to be shown to work and tospread through the profession. Here weexplore how teachers can move beyondprivate improvisation to engage in plannedinnovation and to do so in and throughprofessional networks. We shall exploresome of the opportunities and challengesthat innovation networks offer to teacherscommitted to making schools betterplaces for staff and students.

Helping students to learnbetter is on everybody’sagenda, and there are manydifferent views about howthis is best achieved.

The challenge oftransformationThere are several drivers of this need fordeep change. One driver is the recognitionby many countries that more peopleshould be better educated than everbefore, so all now strive to create ‘world-class’ education systems. England hasachieved well in internationalcomparisons, but there is room for further development.

Another driver is the growing recognitionthat in a knowledge-based economy morepeople need to be more creative and thiswill in itself require new approaches toteaching. England sought to reach thelevels of literacy and numeracy that hadbeen achieved in Germany and someSouth East Asian countries. Withoutreducing the importance of the basics, we must now aspire to nurture througheducation the qualities of creativity,innovativeness and enterprise.

A third driver is the acknowledgment thatthe recent improvement strategies haveinevitable limitations. Between 1997 and 2002, the literacy and numeracystrategies in primary schools were amongthe most impressive of the government’sachievements. But the rate of improvementhas been levelling off. All strategies havetheir limits. Educational processes arecomplex, so the amount of improvementany single strategy can effect is small. To maintain the momentum, newapproaches are needed.

A fourth driver is that the improvementsalready achieved have not closed the gap in educational achievement betweenthe most and least advantaged. There are some real achievements by thegovernment, for example in Excellence in Cities, but there is more to do.

Do you think there are otherfactors driving this idea oftransformation?

‘Educational processes arecomplex, so the amount of improvement any singlestrategy can effect is small.To maintain the momentum,new approaches are needed.’

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Why innovationnetworks?First, why should teachers innovate at all?

• Teachers do it anyway. As teachersadjust materials or ways of organizinglessons to help pupils learn, theirimprovisations are a form of innovation.

Without this creative capacity toinnovate, a teacher does not succeed in the profession.

• Innovation is essential to improving one’sprofessional skills and to adapting tomeet changing circumstances.

Innovation is a way of learningprofessionally.

• Innovation empowers staff and is highly rewarding professionally.

To see how being creative andinnovative makes a difference for pupils is one of the joys of teaching.

• In our knowledge-based economy,students need to be innovative tosucceed at work and in life.

When staff actively model innovativebehaviour in school, students learn why innovation matters and is something they can do too.

Secondly, why network?

• To transform schools so that there is yetbetter teaching and learning, teachersmust work smarter, not harder.

Today, most innovation is the activity ofnetworked teams, not individuals.

• Teachers need to share good practiceand transfer it rapidly.

Lateral networks do this more effectivelythan top-down hierarchies.

• Government needs to empower teachersto use their creativity in the task oftransformation.

Networks of peers feed the creative co-production of new knowledge that isthe source of better professional practiceand renewed professional pride.

A key to successful innovation is thereforecombining innovation with networks.

Are there further arguments infavour of innovation networks? Are there any risks and dangers in networking?

What is innovation?The text-book definition is that innovationis the exploitation of a new idea thatthrough practical action adds value to aproduct, process or service. In education,of course, we rarely create a new product:but teachers constantly make processinnovations (the way they teach or designlessons, the school day or year) andservices (the way they advise and supportstudents and parents).

Under the umbrella of schooltransformation, it might be simpler to saythat for teachers innovation is mainly amatter of learning to do things differentlyin order to do them better. For teachers,most innovation is the creation of newprofessional knowledge about their work.

One needs to think through the extent ofinnovation that might be involved. There’sa common distinction between radicalinnovation, where there’s a discontinuitybetween the new practice and the one itdisplaces, and incremental innovation,where there’s a bit-by-bit evolution of apractice into something better. In Figure 1,the difference is explained in relation towhat teachers do. The vertical axis refersto change that is either close to, or farfrom, teachers’ current professionalpractices; and the horizontal axis to thedepth of the change. Incrementalinnovation is a minor change close toexisting practice, and radical innovation isa major change far from existing practice.Each axis is really a continuum, so that thediagonal line is a kind of innovation scale,

Figure 1: The nature of innovation

Incrementalinnovation

Radical innovation

Near to existing practice

Far from existing practice

Minor change Major change

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going from small incremental innovations in the top left corner to huge radicalinnovations in the bottom right corner.

There are also different types of innovation.We often think of innovation astechnological. Some technologicalinnovations are truly radical, such as thejet engine or the mobile telephone. Radicalinnovations are often followed byincremental innovation. Though resisted inits earliest conception, the arrival andwidespread acceptance of the mobilephone has been followed by multipleminor incremental innovations to improveeach firm’s market position. Often, thetechnology follows a breakthrough in theunderlying science: biotechnology andpharmaceuticals frequently depend onadvances in ‘pure’ science. ICT opens thedoor to many technological innovations inschools and the rapid advances in theneurosciences may soon make an impactin education.

But there are radical innovations quiteunlike the scientific-technological kind. The development in medicine of therandomised controlled trial, which gainedacceptance only after the highly successfultrial of streptomycin to treat pulmonarytuberculosis in the 1940s, was a radicalinnovation, and it quickly became the gold standard to ascertain the clinicaleffectiveness of new developments. No technology is involved here: it is a radical innovation in professionalmethodology. Here may lie the greatestpotential to achieve the innovation foreducational transformation.

Other radical innovations consist of animportation of what is widely accepted in one field but is radical in another: thesteam engine was used in mines for 75years before it was imported by anotherindustry and adapted to propel boats.Teachers should not close their minds to stealing innovations from otherprofessions or workplaces.

In the business world many firms havegone through deep organisational changesover recent decades. They are very unlikethe companies – often factories – of fifty or a hundred years ago. By contrast,many schools are surprisingly similar to the schools created by the industrialrevolution. So innovation in educationmight mean a very different kind oforganisation for the school.

As we shall see, deciding on the extentand type of innovation is a key decision for a school or teacher embarking ontransformation. Before that we shallexplore the question of whether a schoolhas the capacity to engage in innovation.

How would you set about decidinghow much innovation of what kind you and your school couldmanage successfully? Can youafford not to innovate?

Capacity fortransformation – a new approach We have become used to analysingeffective schools as a set of characteristics,such as having an achievement culture orbeing well led by the headteacher, thatevery school could potentially adopt toraise standards. There is another way ofapproaching this question. Schools, likeother organisations, are effective to theextent that they mobilise the range ofresources at their disposal in effective andefficient ways. Suppose we treated theseresources as forms of capital.

The most familiar form is material capital,which includes financial capital as well asphysical capital such as buildings andequipment. But people are a school’s mostimportant resource. So a second form isintellectual capital, which embraces theeducation and training of individuals aswell as their knowledge, skills, capabilities,competences, talents, expertise, practicesand routines. Intellectual capital is, incontrast to material capital, one of theorganisation’s invisible assets. Schools areevidently rich in the intellectual capital ofthe teachers and staff, but also of thestudents. Were a school to fail to monitorits budget or audit its accounts on asystematic and regular basis, it would beseriously negligent. But a school’sintellectual capital, especially among thestaff, is rarely monitored and audited.

Another of a school’s invisible assets is its social capital, a term that covers the character and quality of the socialrelationships within an organisation.Culturally, social capital is the level of trustbetween head and staff and among thestaff, between staff and students andamong the student body as a whole.Structurally, it is the extent and quality of the internal networks, such as networksof teaching teams as well as informalnetworks of friends. A school that is rich insocial capital has a strong sense of itself asa community, but also has many externalnetworks with ties to other communities

The last form of capital is organisationalcapital, which refers to the knowledge and skill about how to deploy the school’sintellectual and social capital to achievethe school’s goals. Being rich in material,intellectual and social capital does notautomatically mean that the school usesthese resources fully: rather, the resourceshave to be actively mobilised, andorganisational capital is the know-howneeded to do so.

Effective schools deploy these four forms of capital to good effect: they have leaderswho develop and use organisational capitalto mobilise in full the intellectual and socialcapital so that the central goals of theschool are achieved. The best schoolleaders know not only how to deploy theschool’s existing intellectual and socialcapital, but also how to increase them.This mobilisation

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of capital and the knowledge of how toincrease it is, quite simply, a measure of theorganisation’s capacity or growth potential,especially the capacity to manage changeand transformation, which demands, andis fuelled by, high levels of social andintellectual capital.

This capacity, as indicated by high levelsof intellectual and social capital, is aprecondition for making innovationnetworks succeed. There is also a welcomeparadox here, for once innovation networksare alive and working, then their activityserves to increase the level of the capitalon which they feed. In other words, youneed high levels of capital to fuelinnovation networks, but the networksgenerate more capital rather thandepleting it. Investing in intellectual andsocial capital pays dividends.

We shall see how this works out inpractice, as we explore the four conditionsrequired to achieve transformation throughinnovation networks.

Do the four kinds of capital helpyou to judge the capacity of yourschool for innovation? How strongare the intellectual, social andorganisation capital in your school? What could be done toincrease them?

The firsttransformation –creating the rightclimateInnovation is a delicate plant that needs afavourable climate if it is to thrive. It growsin stages, beginning with the perceptionthat something needs to change, and sostimulating the bright ideas about whatmight be done. Each idea is thoughtthrough and tested out, and then eitherdropped because it’s no good or furtherdeveloped because it promises to work.Once proved, it’s disseminated ortransferred to those people or placeswhere it can be used to advantage. There are thus three key phases ininnovation: the generation of the idea; its application in practice; and its transferinto widespread adoption.

In each phase, innovation is easily stifled.Each phase requires creativity – not justthinking up the original idea. Innovationinvolves risk-taking: there cannot beinnovation that is risk-free. The climate thatis most harmful to innovation is a blameculture, which discourages the creation of new knowledge and undermines thecourage needed to take the processthrough to application and transfer.

Many teachers feel the climate has for toolong been one of blame. Innovation neverdisappeared from English schools, but ittended to go underground. Such covert,

personalised, micro-innovation is no longeradequate to the task of transformingschools, which will now need to createand sustain an explicit climate ofexperimentation and planned innovation.The centre cannot devise enoughinnovation across the whole range ofteacher practices to implement thedemanded rate of change. If teachers are to take ownership of reform throughinnovation in their practices, they mustplay a part in the creation of them.

An essential task for government is tocreate a climate in which it is possible to promote among teachers:

• the motivation to create newprofessional knowledge;

• the opportunity to engage actively in innovation;

• the skills for testing the validity of thenew knowledge;

• the means for transferring the validatedinnovations rapidly within their schooland into other schools.

This means that government must giveactive permission to schools to innovateand provide a climate in which risk takingthat is carefully calculated is a normal partof innovation and failure is a necessaryelement in making progress – as is thecase in the business world. In the wordsof the great Thomas Edison, ‘You mustlearn to fail intelligently. Failing is one ofthe greatest arts in the world. One failsforward towards success’. Without moretrust in teachers from the government –

giving the whole system more socialcapital – teachers will avoid taking risksand hide mistakes. To capitalise on theadvantage that trust confers in fosteringinnovation, fear of failure has to beremoved. This means using what turnsout not to work as an occasion forlearning: failures are acceptable providedthat they are a means to improvement.

What action might you take to create the right climate for innovation in your school? How can teachers take risks with what they do but do so in a way that is ethical and protectsthe best interests of students?

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The secondtransformation –disciplininginnovationHow much innovation can a school orteacher cope with? How does one decidethe extent of innovation and choose thetypes of innovation, as described earlier.The essential first step for an innovativeschool is to avoid innovation overload andexcessive diversity by choosing andagreeing upon a limited focus or contentfor the main innovative activity that can bewell managed. A school that encouragesevery member of staff to innovate on anypreferred area squanders its efforts onhalf-baked innovations that never get fully developed.

Moreover, if every school creates it ownagenda for innovation it would unleash a spate of unco-ordinated and unfocusedinnovation in the 1960s spirit of letting a thousand flowers bloom. The result willnot be a strong evidence base of how todo things differently to guarantee doingthem better. If teachers launch a new eraof innovation, it is absolutely essentialit be undertaken in a disciplined way.

So we must think through which aspectsare most valuable as themes for innovation.Limiting the content means deciding onpriorities. This can be done through aprofessional knowledge audit to clarifywhat teachers know how to do well andwhat they do not know or do not do well.Every school has to pose the questions:

what is the most important and urgentproblem area and where do we think wecould innovate successfully?This can be achieved when every schoolexplores three questions:

• What do we need to know to be better equipped in this problem area?

• What do we currently know about this problem area?

• What do we need to do to close the gap?

And this can be collated to provide apicture of the overall needs of a group ofschools – a network such as an LEA orother form of collegiate or collaborativecluster. Choice of innovation will be moresuccessful if it meets the agreed needs of a network working on it collectively.Schools in the network will contributedifferently to the innovation. Some willcontribute more than others: leading edgeschools are expected to take a biggerthan average share. The area forinnovation can be divided up so eachschool develops just part of the innovation,with the pieces being assembled later to produce an innovation that no singleschool would dare to tackle.Transformation involves schools gettingtogether in networks to innovate in a disciplined way rather than each one re-inventing the wheel.

Innovation means developing betterpractice, but what is meant by ‘goodpractice’? Sometimes it refers to standardpractices that are considered effective,part of a profession’s repertoire or ‘custom

and practice’. It’s difficult for most schoolsto judge how they fare against current‘good’ or ‘best’ practice, since they haverelatively superficial knowledge of what’sdone in other institutions. Sometimes theterm refers to a new practice that isthought to be more effective than thestandard: many innovations fall into thiscategory, especially when they remainuntested but are advocated by theircreators. However, greater effectiveness is not necessarily more efficient. Forexample, a new practice for the teachermay help a student learn better, but thedemands on the teacher, in terms of timeor energy, may be so great that the costsof the new practice outweigh the benefits.For a practice to be a good one it shouldhave high leverage, that is, it should havea large effect for a small input of energy. A new practice of low leverage, where theenergy input is disproportionate to theoutcome achieved, hardly qualifies as‘good practice’. High leverage is the keyto teachers working smarter, not harder.So innovation must be disciplined enoughto create high leverage practices: it ispointless to disseminate poor practice –or even good practices that makeimpossible demands to implement.

Whenever teachers engage in innovationthey must be provided with the necessaryopportunities. Experimentation in pursuitof innovation cannot be done in additionto normal work, but must be embedded in the routine. At the heart of this is tryingnew ways in classrooms and devising howteachers can work together and reflecttogether. Each stage of the knowledge

creation process takes time: generatingnew ideas; testing them in application;and transferring the outcomes to others.Innovation doesn’t work when teachersfeel over-worked, jaded and neglected,and when they are not recognised for it.

Remember too that when a school indifficulty adopts effective practices that are well established in another school, this change represents an innovation for the staff involved: what is ‘old hat’ to high performing schools may seemdramatically new and different to thosestruggling against the odds. This learningfrom others, this adoption of second-handpractices, might be called transferredinnovation. Not all schools could or shouldbe deeply engaged in front-line orpioneering innovation. Transformationdepends crucially on the capacity of thesystem to manage transferred innovation.It is additionally advantageous if a set ofgood practices in a particular area can bescrutinised to determine which of the setis indeed the best practice. This is bestachieved where schools work incollaborative networks.

What action might be taken in your school, in association withother network members, toprovide the right opportunities for innovation that is highlydisciplined?

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The thirdtransformation –going lateralTransferred innovation is a simple idea, butmoving knowledge is difficult in practice.The sharing of ‘good practice’ and ‘thedissemination of best practice’ is widelyadvocated. Unfortunately our knowledgeof how to do this is frighteningly slight.

Some innovations and new practices aremore transferable than others. A practiceconfined to a few people in a restrictedrange of circumstances may not be agood practice of much wider value. Whatworks for a primary school teacher maynot work for a sixth-form teacher, andwhat works in a rural area may not transferto the inner city.

Moreover, when a practice is transferred,the teachers receiving it have to chooseto adopt it and they will do so if it seemslikely to make their lives better or easier in some way. Teachers don’t mind doingsomething that’s unfamiliar and difficult,provided that they see some real benefit to students and that the effort demandedisn’t unreasonable. But a new practiceshould preferably not be an additionalpractice, but one that replaces an olderone that is less effective. Older and moreexperienced teachers necessarily have, inthe face of innovation, more to abandonthan younger or less experiencedcolleagues, so an innovation ofdemonstrable high leverage is more likelyto ease abandonment.

Common methods of transfer rely on thedocumentation of good practice in glossybooklets, websites, videos, etc. These areweak mechanisms for disseminating newpractices for two main reasons: first, thesource may lack credibility in the eyes ofthe teacher; and secondly, it’s very hard totransfer knowledge that is disembodiedand de-contextualised.

The best way to spread new practices thatpeople choose voluntarily is on a peer-to-peer basis. Innovations have to catch on,like best-selling books, because they arewhat everybody is excited about, or arecaught from personal contact, like a virus.It helps if within a network there arerecognised ‘champions’ of the good/bestpractices. Practitioner-champions,including advanced skills teachers, whohave devised and successfully applied the innovation with known beneficialoutcomes, have most credibility. Alongsidethem are advocate-champions, such asLEA advisers or academic researchers,who are known and trusted.

Transfer often needs a real encounter orface-to-face relationship between thepeople involved. Although the idea behindan innovation is easy to describe, the wayin which it is implemented or applied inpractice depends in part on tacitknowledge – the kind of knowledge that is hard to put into words, such as theknowledge of how to ride a bicycle. Sobest practice has to be demonstrated, not just explained, and its replication byanother practitioner in somewhat differentcircumstances has to be practised throughtrial and error and this entails creatively

adapting the innovation that is beingtransferred. The donor and the recipient inthe transfer process need to spend sometime together if the transfer is to besuccessful, since just as the donor had toengage in learning to develop theinnovation, so too must the recipient learnduring the transfer. What now seemssimple to the experienced innovator islikely to seem complicated to the novice.The donor needs to offer the necessarymentoring, coaching and shadowing, andthe recipient needs to make adjustmentsso that the innovation works in its newsetting. Innovation transfer succeedswhen the knowledge involved remainsembodied and contextualised in a workingrelationship that is co-creative for bothparticipants. It is often not a case of oneteacher teaching another, but of bothparties learning.

Innovation networks are not only powerfulways of generating high quality innovation,but are also the most effective way ofcreating the peer-to-peer epidemic bywhich they spread. This means using allthe existing LEA/LLSC networks andprofessional networks such as subjectassociations, the Specialist Schools Trust,the British Educational Communicationsand Technology Agency (Becta),Excellence in Cities, Leadership IncentiveGrant clusters, and many differentconsortia, collegiates and federations. The National College for SchoolLeadership’s Networked LearningCommunities are especially valuable here.Innovation networks increase eachschool’s intellectual and social capital but

also boost the intellectual and socialcapital of the system as a whole.

What do you need to do to createa lateral strategy for the transferof the good practice that emergesfrom your innovation networks?Can you link into some of theexisting networks, or do you have create new ones?

The fourthtransformation –using ICT What contribution have ICTs to make totransformation and to a lateral strategy?The huge potential of the new technologiesas an important part of the infrastructurefor innovation networks has yet to berealised. In an education systemcomprising schools linked to one anotherin networks, in which the schools that aresources of best practice become hubs, it should be relatively simple for a schoolor teacher to get in touch with a peer as a source of best practice, as a centre ofinnovation, or as a partner – and in anyarea of educational concern.

ICTs potentially provide a networkstructure to turn 25,000 schools and theirstaffs into another small world in whichany two nodes can connect with eachother easily and quickly. Without this,transformation through transferredinnovation would be too shallow and too

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slow. A teacher wanting to contact a peerwho might know about or be interested ina particular professional practice willsucceed if the right network infrastructureis in place. Innovation networks supportedby ICT provide an educational small worldwhere every teacher is linked by a shortchain to the right peer.

Of course, a teacher could simplyadvertise a need or interest in the TimesEducational Supplement or on a websiteand hope that somebody might respond.But network tracking would almost alwaysgive a better and faster result and couldhave the advantage that the respondingperson or institution would have thepleasure of being approached through a friend’s recommendation, one of thebest routes into co-operation.

ICT does not, of course, make face-to-face relationships redundant: ICTcomplements them rather than replacingthem. At the same time, we should notunderestimate the capacity of innovationand best practice networks to devisesolutions to problems that arise, or toborrow ideas from the Net. Take the wayAmazon.com works, for instance. You lookup a topic, and are provided with a list ofbooks. You look up a book, and inaddition to details of its content, price etc.,two further resources are put at yourdisposal. First, you are offered reviews ofthe books, by the author or professionalreviewers, as well as other Amazoncustomers. You are also told whethercustomers found these reviews helpful.Secondly, Amazon tells you which otherbooks a purchaser of the target book has

also bought. Displayed before you is anelaborate set of factual information andevaluations to help you make a moreinformed decision about book-buying.

Epinions.com offers a similar service. Itsearches millions of products and services– books, movies, cars, restaurants,computers, sports, travel etc. – and tellsyou where to get the lowest price andwhich stores are most trusted bycustomers. Products and services arereviewed and rated by customers, andthese are available to all. Customers ratereviewers for the quality of their reviews,and reviewers whose judgements aretrusted by their peers are designated topreviewers. You are also told which otherreviewers the top reviewers most trust. To become a top reviewer you must earna reputation for the quality of your adviceto other customers.

Will ICT really be a key to transformation?If it can provide what practitioners reallywant and need, it will. Hitherto,government has put on the pressure, but has not managed to match this with a balancing degree and quality of support.By engaging peer-to-peer self-organizingsystems, the support mechanisms can be changed dramatically. The examples on the Internet are already there. Theincredible rise of Napster is a case inpoint. Napster was an Internet system thatallowed owners of popular music to sharetheir MP3 collections with others. Itscreator, Shawn Fanning, noticed studentsgoing to some trouble to exchange musicfiles, so he invented the software to helpthem to share it easily and at no cost.

This drove the Napster epidemic: millionsused Napster before it ran into legaltrouble over music copyrights. In effect,Napster acted as a broker, using itsdatabase of who had which music files inorder to link a request for a song from onePC to another PC that held the requisitefile and was at that moment online – andthen left them both alone to get on withtheir musical matchmaking. The systemworked and prospered without need foraltruism among users, who gave as acondition of receiving. Napster did notreplace a centralized service with adecentralized one, but combined the two.It was the users who stored all the files,not Napster, but users had to go throughNapster to locate what they wanted.Nevertheless, Napster, which folded in2002, eroded the distinction betweenconsumer and provider. Other peer-to-peer systems, such as Gnutella (originallydesigned to help folk share recipes), do not rely on any central authority toorganise the network or brokertransactions. Fast moving innovation inthe peer-to-peer world is coming onstream just when the education serviceneeds it.

What action do you think needs to be taken by whom to ensurethat the new technologies support innovation networks?

The fifthtransformation –making an opensource culture Generating and sustaining networks thatknow how to turn ICT to their advantageis not easy, because we know too littleabout the dynamics of on-linecommunities, both in general as well as ineducation. The challenge of innovationdemands that we change the emphasison ICT from simple communication to thedevelopment of creative communities. Aswe shall see, there is a powerful model forschools seeking transformation in the on-line communities known as open source.

Let’s start with the school. A school orpractitioner who creates the knowledgebehind a powerful innovation faces fouroptions over what to do with it. They are:

• keep it to yourself;

• sell it for profit;

• share it with a partner; or

• give it away for free to anybody whowants it.

In a highly competitive climate, thepressure on a school staff is to keepsuccessful innovations to themselves inorder to maintain their competitive edgeand position in the league tables to attractparents. Why give away one’s best ideas?If knowledge has to be given away,because it might well leak away or bestolen, it seems sensible to sell it. One

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school is said to have made over sevenmillion pounds by selling an IT coursewhich helped it to reach 100 per cent 5A*-C GCSE results.

Exchanging innovations is an attractiveproposition, because of the deeplyembedded gift culture, by which if I giveyou something, you feel obliged to returnsomething of equal value, so we both gain.Applied to schools, the gift culture couldmean that the more effective schools wouldbe inclined to exchange best practice withother above average schools, which wouldsimply widen the gap between the bestand worst schools, and thus not contributeto system transformation.

The path to system transformation requiresevery school to be willing to give away itsinnovations for free, in the hope of somereturn, but with no guarantee of it. Is therean example of how this might work? Yes, in the culture that underpinned thebeginnings of the Internet, which startedout as a peer-to-peer network of co-operating users. Its original design in the1960s was to share computing resourcesbetween several American academiccentres, each of whom acted as bothserver and client. In the same way, TimBerners-Lee designed the origins of whatbecame the Web as a way for physicists toshare research data. During the Internet’scommercialisation, this early symmetry waslost as huge numbers of clients came to be handled by a small number of brandedservers, and many passive consumersbecame dependent on a few commercialproducers. Today many want to restore theearlier decentralised model to enhance

peer-to-peer networks and the norms ofsharing in the ‘hacker culture’.

Hackers are not the secretive, lonecriminals who break into other people’scomputers with malicious intent – theseare properly called ‘crackers’. Rather,hackers are passionate innovators, theexpert programmers and networkingwizards who, through co-operation andfree communication, played the pivotal rolein the creation of the Internet. Theoverarching goal of their culture istechnological excellence, because this iswhat determines the common need forsharing and for keeping the source codeopen, rather than secret, as with mostproprietary software. A paramount value is freedom – to create, to appropriatewhatever is available, and then toredistribute the knowledge. Eachcontribution to software development isposted on the Internet in the expectationof reciprocity. The inner joy of creation is a source of satisfaction, as is achievingrecognition within the community ofpractice. Hackers have little interest infinancial gain through selling their ideas.Instead, they are committed to commonownership of their collective productions.

A classic example here is Linus Torvalds,who in 1991 as a student at HelsinkiUniversity set out to create a freeoperating system (the foundation softwaresuch as Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’sMacOS). He involved others from thebeginning by asking them for their ideas,which were then shared within the emergingnetwork. Anybody could contribute andanybody was free to use the improved

outcomes. A new system, Linux, emergedrapidly and through collaborationdeveloped at an astonishing rate. Manythousands of users have devoted timeand energy to testing and improvingLinux, so much so that it has become athreat to Microsoft’s Windows – no meanachievement.

Could something similar happen ineducation? A key to transformation isfor the teaching profession to establish

innovation networks that capture the spiritand culture of hackers – the passion, thecan-do, the collective sharing. Teacherscould create a common pool of resourcesto which innovators contribute and onwhich any school or teacher might draw toimprove professional practice. This couldbe a professionally self-governing meansof supporting innovation with no centralcontrol. In effect, contributors to the poolwould be offering their innovations andbest practices as public goods in theconfidence of creating an educationalequivalent to the Linux phenomenon.

A hacker has been described as ‘anenthusiast, an artist, a tinkerer, a problemsolver, and expert’ – terms that will arousefellow feeling in every classroom teacher.The professional values and norms ofteachers are close to those of thehackers: in the education service we needthe practices that has allowed hackers totransform their world. The open source (or modifiable software) movement amonghackers hinges on the notion thatsoftware evolves faster, works better andspreads faster as more people work on it.In a similar way, the transformation of

schools needs innovation networks ofteachers that can achieve transferredinnovation quickly and over a far widerrange of schools than ever before. Andthere might come a point – the tippingpoint – where there is the sameexponential effect or geometricprogression by which a Napster arises or a book becomes a best-seller or themobile phone becomes a commonplacepossession or the virus turns into anepidemic, all of which are transformations.

In short, at the heart of educationaltransformation are networks ofcommunities of teachers who arepassionate about transferred innovation.Like the Internet, this needs no centralauthority; the role of government would be to help it to flourish as a system thatknows how to transfer innovation and bestpractice laterally and then simply gets onwith job. It has been said that ‘nobodyowns the Internet, runs it, maintains it, oracts as a gatekeeper or regulator’ – and itworks. We should be able to say the sameof the innovation networks in educationthat are the ‘peer-to-peer solutions to bigproblems’. This path to transformation isdecentralised, distributed and disciplined:it is an innovative way of accomplishinginnovation in teaching and learning ofwhich the profession can take ownership.

What action is needed to create an open source culture (i) withinyour school (ii) in any professionalor school networks of which youare an active member?

EpilogueThis document itself has the potential tobe improved in an open source culture.You have been given this document forfree, and you can help to make it betterby reciprocating through your criticismsand suggestions. So if you have ideason how it can be improved, visitwww.demos.co.uk/workinglaterally. Later on-line editions will then beadjusted to take account of these points.

This document is an adapted andshorter version of Education Epidemic,published by Demos in June 2003.

You can download this publication atwww.standards.dfes.gov.uk/innovation-unit orwww.demos.co.uk/workinglaterally

ReferencesBarabási A-L (2002) Linked: the new science of networksPerseus Publishing

Buchanan M (2002) Nexus: small worlds and thegroundbreaking science of networksNorton

Cairncross F (1997) The Death of Distance Orion Business Books

Castells M (2001) The Internet GalaxyOxford University Press

Gladwell M (2000) The Tipping PointLittle, Brown & Co

Godwin S (2000) Unleashing the Idea VirusSimon & Schuster

Himanen P, Torvalds L & Castells, M (2001) The Hacker EthicSecker & Warburg

Levy S (1984) HackersPenguin Books

Moody G (2001) Rebel Code: Linux and the open sourcerevolutionPenguin Books

Oram A (ed) (2001) Peer-to-PeerO’Reilly

Raymond E S (1999) The Cathedral and the BazaarO’Reilly

Stephenson K (1999) Networks: the deep structure oforganizationsCRC Press

Watts D J (2003) Six Degrees: the science of a connected ageHeinemann

Helping students to learn better is on everybody’sagenda, and there are different views about how thistransformation is best achieved. David Hargreaves argues that schools will be transformed only whenteachers embrace the ‘hacker ethic’ – a passion for developing new practice and a readiness to share the results freely with colleagues throughinnovation networks.David Hargreaves is a former professor of education at Cambridge and a former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

In 1983 he chaired an ILEA enquiry on schools which formed the basis of the national schools standards agenda. He is currently chairman of Becta and is a senior Demos associate working on the transforming public services programme.

Copies of this publication can be obtained from:

DfES PublicationsPO Box 5050Sherwood ParkAnnesleyNottingham NG15 0DJ

Tel: 0845 6022260Fax: 0845 6033360Textphone: 0845 6055560Email: dfes@prolog.uk.com

Please quote ref: DfES/0825/2003

You can download this publication atwww.standards.dfes.gov.uk/innovation-unit orwww.demos.co.uk/workinglaterally

© Crown copyright 2003Produced by the Department for Education and Skills Extracts from this document may be reproduced for non commercial or training purposes on the condition that the source is acknowledged.