The Intellectual Capital of Schools Measuring and Managing Knowledge, Responsibility and Reward: Lessons from the Commercial Sector

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889 – 1951. It is difficult to measure effectiveness in not-for-profit organisations like schools, colleges and universities. There is no ‘bottom-line’ against which to gauge performance, they have limited technical development and managers struggle to make meaningful comparisons between outcomes and targets. In education, well-publicised attempts have been made to establish - some would say impose - a set of criteria by which organisations judge success or failure. These have been largely subjective - the percentage of inspected classes regarded as good, the extent to which staff is involved in decision making, the appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, and so on – if occasionally peppered with quantitative measures, like the percentage of students achieving certain grades in public examinations, to sustain the illusion of objectivity. This is not to fault the aspiration necessarily, though initially at least it created a surveillance culture in schools that did justice to neither the inspected nor the argument for inspection. Happily, this is changing.

Preface 1: Introduction to the concept of intellectual capital Introduction The post-industrial business environment Managing intellectual capital A theory of intellectual capital for schools Summary 2: Constructing a typology for intellectual capital Introduction Thinking capital Non-thinking capital Flows of intellectual capital New language; new measures Summary 3: The measurement of responsibility Introduction Job descriptions for salaried jobs The measurement of responsibility Manual and hourly-rated work The totality of work Summary 4: A new Profile Guide Chart method for job evaluation in schools Introduction A Profile Guide Chart method for use in schools The scales on the Guide Charts Post evaluation cross checks and correlation Examples of evaluation using Guide Charts Summary 5: Pay and incentives in an education setting Introduction Performance related pay for teachers: moral hazard, adverse selection and principal-agent resistance Conflict between the individual and the collective Paying employees on the basis of output Summary 6: The retention of intellectual capital: managing continuity Introduction Conceptualising knowledge continuity management Challenges to knowledge continuity The benefits of knowledge continuity management Knowledge continuity management in practice Summary 7: Implementing a knowledge continuity initiative: an adjunct of lessons from practice Introduction Prioritising critical processes Mapping critical processes The knowledge continuity audit and implementing a continuity initiative The value of networks and team-working to knowledge continuity management Reshaping an organisation as a network of teams Supporting networking within and between schools Barriers to intellectual capital networking and knowledge continuity management Observations on team networking in intellectual capital schools Summary 8: Intellectual capital metrics Introduction Gauging the organisational importance of intellectual capital Identifying and analysing intangible assets Exploiting intangible assets Measuring the efficiency of knowledge work and knowledge workers Putting a value on intellectual capital Summary Conclusion Appendix: Two-sided mixed-motive games of strategy: four archetypes Bibliography