Seeing the big picture
Neil McClelland
  Neil McClelland, director of the National Literacy Trust, explains why systems thinking is the key to building a literate nation. 

"And crime was reduced by 20 per cent,"  explained my drinking companion with a smile, understandably pleased at the success of the surveillance camera initiative.  "And what happened to crime levels in the rest of the city?" I asked. The smile faded: crime levels had risen.

If you've ever been in charge of managing anything it's an all too familiar story and it's a story that is becoming ever more frequent. In systems thinking it's called "shifting the burden". There's nothing like targets to sharpen the not-in-my-back-yard mentality. Who cares where or when the problem winds up as long as it doesn't figure on your statistics. Exam targets increased permanent exclusions - get the hopeless off the books before the exam season - which in turn increased street crime. If you want to raise exam achievement, what better and easier solution than to get rid of those who won't do well? Even better, don't let them enter the school in the first place.

But the knock-on effect of this is that those in danger of social exclusion will become more excluded and the gulf between those who are doing well and the drop-outs will be even wider.

So what needs to be done to minimise the numbers who fall off the edge into social exclusion? Who is looking at the system as a whole, defining the boundaries, seeing how the pieces interrelate and thinking about what complexity of factors causes the most problems? What are the levers that could be applied that would cause the greatest progress with minimal backwash for other areas?

The Americans have a way of describing it that is gaining increasing currency over here - systems thinking. In the words of Peter M. Senge from the school of management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "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."

The National Literacy Trust has long been trying to apply the systemic approach to building a literate nation. Our goal is to transform literacy participation and standards across the whole community - with particular emphasis on the attitudes, confidence and skills of those groups that are achieving least well.

The Government, to its credit, has in part recognised the need for a systems approach, particularly though setting up the Social Exclusion Unit, which has the brief of standing back, seeing the whole picture, looking for the causal factors and working out which changes will have the most long-lasting effects and do the least damage to other related areas.

Rightly schools are at the centre of the standards drive and we need to be continually vigilant about improving teaching and learning but schools must be supported by the whole community.

Since schools alone cannot create the breakthrough, we need to be looking at which other agencies can contribute and support the work of building a literate nation. Suddenly you are faced by a very long list which quickly goes beyond the education sector to include youth, social, library, and other council services. And it's much bigger than this. There's local business and media to consider, local sports facilities, community, and arts groups, health and probation services and housing providers. Someone needs to be keeping an eye on this big picture, thinking about the knock-on effects in one area and how this will have ramifications in another. Such an approach is of course applicable to all systems but  we are focusing on literacy.

Schools need a transformed context within which to operate. So a key question to ask at a local as well as a national level is: do we have the capacity for seeing the whole, for enabling, promoting and facilitating changes in the way the whole system creates and responds to learners' needs?

Up until recently, standards of literacy had remained much the same for 50 years. This means that over 20 per cent of the adult population have been left without the basic literacy to function effectively. Great strides are being made now within the National Literacy Strategy in the school sector to raise standards of literacy but schools alone cannot tackle this problem. We need a systemic approach to creating a literate nation for all our people as well as for the future of our society. After all, we can see the patterns of underachievement and we know that failing individuals are not wilful, but are products  of a mix of complex issues which are rarely caused or solved by classroom practice alone. Their beliefs about themselves as learners are a product of many environmental factors.

If we fail to develop a whole-system perspective, we'll just be being content to shunt the problem into someone else's patch while ordering another round of drinks to celebrate our success.

Subscribe to Literacy Today