Structuring and culturing schools. Abstract Given the fact that teaching, learning and leading take place in organisations, it is therefore an important task for school leaders: “To structure and culture schools.” The main responsibilities are to adjust structures to the intentions and culture of teaching and learning where possible so that they support instead of hinder the work. Schools are organisations, held together by structures, but if they are to be effective and successful, they must also be communities, held together by a sufficiently shared sense of identity and by sufficiently common norms. Classrooms and schools are social fields, and education and learning take place in those social fields. There are thus two aspects of this work, a structural and a cultural one. The structural aspect comprises work on planning and managing human and material/financial resources. And it includes building optimal procedures of communication and decision-making. The cultural aspect focuses on the creation of a corporate identity.
Structuring and culturing schools. 8.4.1 How do school leaders build appropriate organisational structures? The teaching staff ’s municipal collective labour agreement lists tasks that must be delegated and that also are delegated in the same way in almost all schools. These tasks include among others: the role of form master/mistress, group counsellor tasks in upper secondary school, student union counselling, liaison teacher who acts as a liaison person in cooperation between the school and the municipality, maintenance of the school library, maintenance of school collections, arranging music performances, maintenance of audio-visual equipment, and being in charge of ICT, to mention just a few. In every school there is a student welfare team; its ways of working and responsibilities vary slightly between schools and municipalities. Responsibility issues are greatly dependent on the presence of a vice-principal or a deputy principal and what their tasks are. In any case, the principal takes ultimate responsibility. Tasks can be delegated but not the final responsibility. When delegating tasks, their job descriptions must be clarified precisely. Responsibilities, duties and rights relating to any particular task must also be specified precisely. In Finland, the most significant degree of leadership delegation can be found in the vocational sector. The size of the school affects greatly the way in which tasks are delegated. In small schools, the significance of task delegation is different from that in larger schools because the structures differ from each other. Every school must have a principal who is responsible for the school’s operation. Certain responsibility areas have in some schools been specifically delegated to the vice-principal. Additionally various responsibility tasks have been delegated to teachers and/or teacher groups, to student welfare staff and to the school secretary and janitors. The delegated tasks vary in different schools depending on the school size, schooling form and culture. Leadership is becoming more and more delegated so that more attention will be paid to the expertise of different people in a school and their opportunities for inclusion. When the education provider is a vocational education and training consortium, leadership styles and the consortium organisation vary. In a big organisation, there are the so called ‘profit areas’ within the consortium; in other words there are units accountable in terms of finances. A profit area may consist of one to six...
