Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Please complete the simple survey at the bottom of this post to help me understand more about what is driving and what is getting in the way of transformational change in our educational system, at all levels from government to the local school context.

Over recent months readers of this blog will have noticed that I have focused a lot on the issue of transformation and change in our education system. My last post titled ‘the time is now‘ highlights the strength of the call for some fundamental shifts towards a more radical and transformational view of what education could be and can become.

Yet, according to a recent McKinsey report, 70% of transformations fail. So if the need for or desire to transform what we’re doing is so strong, why is the failure rate so high? What are the roadblocks that inhibit or undermine the transformation efforts?

I am currently working with a colleague here in New Zealand to develop a platform to guide transformation efforts in educational organisations, We have created a framework that will help make our change effort more effective, and accelerate our transformational activity. Our goal is to significantly improve the chances of success for educational transformation projects by using this framework as a guide.

So in this post I am appealing to readers of this blog, and to others in your networks, to provide some quick responses to the two questions posed in the survey below. The questions for this initial survey are deliberately broad. My initial attempt, which I trialed with some close to me, provided a series of options that you might choose from – but the feedback I received convinced me that by providing the options I was in danger of putting words in people’s mouths, and may well miss out on receiving feedback on areas I haven’t yet considered.

This survey then represents the first part of a process I wish to follow. It simply involves gathering as many ideas from as many people as I can which will form a very rich, yet very raw data set.

Once I’ve received responses to these two questions I’ll undertake the task of sifting through responses to identify the themes and common ideas – rather than pre-emptively doing so in a checklist-type survey.

I’ll feed back via this blog (and my newsletters) updates on what I have found, and intend then to distribute a second survey early in the new year which will ask respondents to prioritise the key issues from a list that has been identified from this raw data.

I encourage you to share this post with anyone in your networks so that the data set might be as extensive as possible.

If you want to make sure you receive updates on what emerges from the data please make sure you sign up to receive notifications of my blog posts when they are published, and copies of my newsletter as I send it out. You can do this by simply entering your email address in the form at the top right of this page.

Thanks in anticipation for your response to the questions below (NOTE: If the embedded survey doesn’t load please use this link to access the survey directly.):