Some of The Key Themes and Principles of Vertical Tutoring:

1. Human Relationships:

Vertical Tutoring is actually about Schools as Organisations and the many learning relationships therein. It is a means of changing schools into what they always wanted to be: places where learning is centrally placed and where all stakeholders (students, staff, parents and the wider community) can contribute more equally to the learning support processes. It is in fact an exciting contribution to the philosophy of organisations that places people at the heart of all decisions and where the ownership of learning can be better shared. Vertical Tutoring allows the possibility of allowing people to develop and grow by giving them back the time to be the people and citizens we need them to be and by ensuring that ICT is effectively used as the key communications conduit. At the heart of all organisations are conversations between creative people. Vertical Tutoring as a concept attempts to encourage, capture and nurture these deep learning opportunities.

2. Creative Use of Data:

In all its forms, data is integral to the key players involved in the learning process. Data can be statistical, objective and subjective and will always take a number of different forms. Schools are data rich but sometimes find data capture difficult to do and yet this is what they must do. Vertical Tutoring without good data capture misses the point. Conversations without the questions that come from information are simply shallow conversations. At the heart of the school is a three-way discussion between a student, parents and a tutor. That discussion (that ‘deep’ conversation) uses data creatively to better plan the learning process and the learning journey. Parents and students have stories to tell and VT gives the school the time needed to listen

3. Curriculum:

It is that discussion between the many voices involved in the learning processes, including subject teachers, students and parents which should define and shape the personalised curriculum and allows individual human potential (not just that of the student but of staff and parents too) to be developed. It is the many stories of the many journeys by so many students and their parents that should form the main drivers of learning. This is why the National Curriculum must be allowed to fade having done its job of kick-starting a culture of education that had grown moribund. However, schools must listen to these stories and be able to respond. It is these stories of learning that should inspire curriculum development alongside a national learning and achievement framework.

4. Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning today involves collaboration and motivation as inbuilt necessities. It is a tough ask for teachers and for many students too. The curriculum on offer nationally has fallen short of student needs and successive Secretaries of State know they have to let go but too often meddle. Everyone wants to be the Headteacher and nobody can be the Headteacher all at the same time! We have arrived at a time when the National curriculum has the opportunity to develop into a National Framework and this chance must be seized. To have a personalised agenda requires that all youngsters must have a mentor. Teachers cease to be ‘the sage on the stage’ and become ‘the guide by the side’. This requires some training and plenty of opportunity. Tutor thought has to be given to career and learning aspirations at the very time when time itself has been drained from our schools as organisations. Vertical Tutoring can put much of that time back.

5. Care

There was never a time when ‘every child did not matter!’ What was really at fault was a ‘soft’ and simplistic view of care in schools often separated from learning. Vertical Tutoring seeks to redefine ‘care’ in the wider sense advocated by the ECM agenda. In fact it goes beyond ECM in some ways. If there is a working engagement with parents, the student and the school, together with curriculum planning and target setting agreed by all parties, we can form the kind of synergy around students that really is ‘caring’. Unless a view is taken by the tutor on the ‘whole child’ and the data good enough to enable others to do the same, then we cannot claim to care. Learning and care in a vertically tutored school go hand in hand.

6. Leadership

Growing leaders in school is an essential activity. Paradoxically, if we concentrated far more on providing endless leadership opportunities for students, the staff would creatively develop their own leadership skills too. Thus, ‘Citizenship’ was never a ‘subject’ to be studied as such but is in essence, the way we run our schools and the way we care for each other and help each other make the best decisions that we can. Leadership, almost by definition is best developed in the safety of mixed-age situations. Vertical groupings greatly enhance leadership opportunities and developing leadership is a core human principle in any organisational philosophy.

7. Student Voice

Our view of ‘student voice’ is hugely constrained in horizontal systems because our organisational thinking is constrained. We need to move beyond councils and the representative voice, right and proper though this is, to hearing every student’s voice. In essence, we must broaden the concept so that each individual voice is heard. Even that is not enough. Parents too need to be heard and to be engaged in the deep conversations that our complex and fast moving society ignores. Vertical Tutoring nurtures the engagement that encourages the conversations, that listens to the voices, that enables the organisation to respond. All voices are heard but this can only happen when time is re-invested in people.

8. The Academic Tutorial

At the heart of Vertical Tutoring is the Academic Tutorial or Deep Learning Conversation. It is an investment in people unrestricted by bells and time constraints. Vertical tutoring without full academic tutorials misses the whole point completely and fails students, parents and staff. Some schools claim to do this in a closure day with tutors seeing parents and students for 15 minutes one after the other. This may be better than nothing but it falls dangerously short of what is required. It also has the potential to be hugely damaging to staff and to student/parent engagement. The tutorial time has no restraints in a vertical system because the academic calendar spreads the engagement load over the year. It is this single act that is the single most important conversation in the school year. It is deep, reflective, positive and even spiritual and very much life-enhancing.

9. ‘Family’ Mentoring

For a child to be an important member of a mixed age group where all are engaged in support, mentoring and leadership at various times, has to be right in an age when the family, in so many cases, is in crisis. It is natural for older students to take the responsibilities we invariably deny them in horizontal systems. They are also members of Houses and the community beyond. In family type groups, the tutor can facilitate a place for everyone. It is simply safer, more natural and more fun. It is also educationally and achievement orientated. Of course, the demands on the tutor are more sophisticated mainly because of the need to ‘unlearn’ one system and readapt to a more 'facilitory', professional lifestyle.

10. Chaos Theory

I wrote about this many years ago in ‘Chaos, Culture and Third Millennium Schools’. Schools fear change and a move to VT is a big change fraught with risk, if schools don't think things through. This is change with passion! Without the passion and vision of the Leadership Team, things can go horribly wrong. Without taking the risk, things can remain horribly stale. Each school in the end has to find its own answers but then each schools has the highly creative people it needs on the staff, in the student population and among the parents who want to be reached out to but who are denied by the current poverty of horizontal systems. All of the principle above are chaotic and therefore present an unexplored territory for those Headteacher prophets and leaders at home in a Land without signposts.

Peter A Barnard

2006