Canadian schools have a lot to learn from the success of Laurel Park, a public secondary school in North London.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
My friend Tom Mautner is the chair of the board of governors at a school in North London. This week, with students out for the summer, he took me for a tour. For a visitor from Toronto, where schools are run from the top down by a vast bureaucracy – a.k.a. the Toronto District School Board – it was an eye-opener.
Laurel Park is a public secondary school with around 600 students. It was built in the 1960s in what is now an area of mixed incomes and backgrounds. Until just a couple of years ago, it was faring poorly. School inspectors gave it low ratings. Ambitious families shunned it. Disciplinary problems were rife.
Mr. Mautner was recruited to shake it up. He had management chops from 25 years of running a big local car dealership. The father of three girls, he also had experience serving on the boards of other schools and colleges. Along with Laurel Park’s new headteacher, Adele Christofi, a drama instructor, he embarked on a sweeping program of change.
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The school eased out underperforming teachers and hired 29 new ones. It replaced four of six department heads. It hired a deputy principal to deal with discipline. It revamped the curriculum from top to bottom. It rolled out a new motto – Learn, Persevere, Succeed – and painted it by the entrance in big black letters. It even got rid of the old uniform and let kids help design a new one.
Such a transformation would be unthinkable in Toronto, or most of Canada for that matter. School boards and teachers’ unions rule the roost in our public-education system, leaving individual schools with limited power to set their own course. Innovation is stifled, abysmal teachers tolerated, kids shortchanged.
But, decades ago, Britain started reforming its schools. A Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher gave them the option to set their own budgets and choose their own teachers, freeing them from the dead hand of local authorities. A Labour government went further and gave them the option to become specialty schools or so-called academies, with funding from the national government and even more independence. British politicians of right and left argue about a lot of things, from immigration to taxation, but there is a general consensus that these changes were for the better.
The results at Laurel Park have been dramatic. The latest government inspection report gave it a “good” rating in every category – just one short of the top rank of “outstanding” – from behaviour to leadership to quality of education. Once a kind of dumping ground, it has become a magnet instead, with a lineup of parents wanting to get their kids in.
Though funding is always a problem, the school cut costs by contracting out its IT support and preparing meals in-house instead of paying a catering firm. It is raising money by renting out part of its underused building to a school for children with special needs and selling off parts of its substantial campus to property developers.
Imagine a Toronto school deciding, on its own, to do that? It doesn’t hurt that in addition to Mr. Mautner, Laurel Park has a business consultant, a real estate surveyor and a senior civil servant on its board, all of them volunteers.
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Mr. Mautner beams as he shows me around the school’s spic-and-span hallways. A sign on the wall in the school colours of blue and yellow announces that “integrity is doing the right thing even when nobody’s watching.” Another sign prescribes the routine that pupils must follow when entering the classroom: Once they have arranged their things in silence, they are expected to ask the teacher for permission to sit down.
If all this looks to Canadian eyes more like a private than a public school, Mr. Mautner is quick to stress that Laurel Park has not become a preserve of the well-to-do just because it has had a glow-up.
Its student body is diverse, with more than 43 languages and six faiths represented. The school provides free breakfasts for those who don’t get one at home. Many students will go on to vocational colleges rather than universities. In the meantime, they are channelled into three different learning streams according to their abilities. That, too, is now rare in many Canadian systems, where the practice has been scrapped in the cause of equity.
Our schools have a lot to learn from the success of Laurel Park. It shows that excellence can co-exist with equity; that high standards and expectations raise everyone up; and that good leadership makes a huge difference. Above all, it shows that schools given a little freedom can achieve wonders.