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This conceptual paper explores the relationship between school structure, organisation, and home–school collaboration. It argues that the traditional and dominant secondary school model based on same-age organisation acts in ways that constrain home–school collaboration while claiming to value it. The paper proposes an alternative model (vertical tutoring), one that relies on home–school collaboration and developing the capacity to absorb the complexity that collaboration creates

Models of home–school collaboration abstracted from the research literature are set within a framework of organisational studies, complexity science, and systemic thinking, revealing incongruities between claimed values and operational practices. The paper contrasts the frailties endemic to same-age organisation with the advantages claimed by schools that have adopted a vertical tutoring (VT) system

The choice of organisational structure is a major influence on a school's capacity to develop the home–school collaboration needed to liberate individual and organisational learning. Same-age organisational structure has a reduced capacity for building the collaborative partnerships needed to engage parents in their child's learning process. Multi-age organisation matches capacity with learning demand, enabling agency and liberating management.

Current approaches to modelling rarely consider same-age operative structure and so are destined to restrict rather than enable home–school collaboration. The adoption of VT by schools broadens the scope of organisational analysis, positing a need for multi-disciplinary research able to link the form of school organisation to individual and organisational learning.

VT is rarely mentioned in the research literature as an alternative to same-age structuration. This paper addresses this issue and draws upon complexity science, autopoietic theory, and systemic thinking to explain why current models of home–school collaboration are insufficiently situated in organisational practice.

At a time when many education systems are grappling with the issue of school reform, there is a concern that traditional UK secondary schools are organised in a way that makes them unable to respond to increasingly complex environmental demands. This research-based paper uses complexity theory to gauge the organisational differences between (1) the traditional model of schooling based on same-age organisation and (2) a form of organisation based on multi-age tutor groups, one that schools call a vertical tutoring (VT) system. The intention is to highlight the organisational changes made by schools that choose to transition from their same-age iteration to the VT system, and expose organisational assumptions in the dominant same-age structure that may account for the failure of reform.

The author's consultancy and research work spans two decades, and includes around 200 UK secondary schools, and others in China, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Qatar, Germany and Colombia. This conceptual paper draws on the recorded discourse and critical reflections of leadership teams during programmes of transformative learning, the process involved in the transition from one system to another. Using descriptions of school organisation abstracted from the complexity literature, differences in the two models not otherwise apparent, come into sharp focus. These not only reveal a substantive connection between organisation, complexity, and individual and organisational learning, but offer insights into the challenge of school reform.

Same-age organisations act in ways that regulate and restrict the agency of participating actors (staff, students and parents). The effect is to reduce a school’s learning capacity and ability to absorb the value demand on its system. Such a system is closed and non-complex. VT schools construct an open and fluid learning system from the base, deregulating agency. By unfreezing their structure, they intervene in processes of power, necessitating the distribution of leadership to the organisational edge, a process of complexification. The form of organisation chosen by a school explains the failure of reform.

Insights from VT schools cast considerable doubt on the viability of traditional same-age structures to serve complex societies and communities, while highlighting the critical role played by complexity theory in organisational praxis. If correct, the current emphasis on teacher “will and skill”, curricular editing, pedagogy and the “what works agenda” will be insufficient to bring about reformational change and more likely to contribute to systemic stasis.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to explain the link between traditional same-age school structure and the impact this has on a school’s capacity for individual and organisational learning; second, to explain why attempts to develop schools as learning organisations (LOs) invariably reify existing structures and practice, and finally, to provide an example of how and why schools that have adopted a multi-age form of organisation, a vertical tutoring (VT) system, have stumbled upon an embryonic form of LO.

This conceptual paper draws on a critical review of the LO literature and its defining characteristics. The paper adopts a multi-disciplinary approach combining autopoiesis and complexity science to explore differences in learning capacity between traditional same-age schools (year or grade-based structure) and schools that have transitioned to multi-age organisation (vertical tutoring system).

The traditional form of same-age organisational “grammar” used in secondary schools is highly resistant to change, and any attempts at reform that fail to focus on organisation only reify existing systemic behaviour. VT schools change their form of organisation enabling them to create the capacity needed to absorb the unheard voices of participant actors (staff, students, and parents) and promote individual and organisational learning (constituent features of the LO).

This conceptual paper argues that for secondary schools to develop any semblance of an LO, they must abandon the restrictions on learning caused by their same-age form of organisation. The VT system provides the kind of organisational template needed.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the influence of a school's operational structure on organisational learning capacity (OLC), and how this either supports or disables any aspiration as a learning organisation.

Two organisational working models are described, one based on same-age structure and another that uses multi-age organisation. These are systemically examined to test for OLC and subsequent potential to develop as learning organisations.

Schools using same-age organisational structure have restricted feedback mechanisms that inhibit their ability to develop OLC. Schools that have adopted multi-age structures have extensive information feedback mechanisms; consequently, they have a higher OLC and the potential to develop as a quasi learning organisation.

This paper intervenes at a time when interest in the concepts of OLC, transformative learning, and the idea developing schools as learning organisations is increasing. The danger of this development is to repeat the reformational mistakes of the past by failing to reflect on ingrained organisational assumptions. This paper encourages schools to reflect on their organisational strategy.

This paper fills a gap in the research literature by offering a practical analysis of two organisational systems, to show how structure impacts on OLC and aspirations to develop as a learning organisation.

A recent development in England is the emergence, under various names, of groups of schools working together in a variety of collaborative ways. Such diversification enjoys broad political support. In this paper, the author aims to argue that the trend is potentially a radical transformation of the school system as a whole. The concepts of coupling and capital are drawn on to show how these changes enhance capacity building at the level of the individual institution and, more importantly, at the system levels, both local and national.

The paper uses different conceptual schemes to throw light on the emerging phenomenon of partnerships between clusters of schools.

As this is not an empirical research paper there are no findings as such.

The paper is concerned with new policy directions, some of which are consonant with developments already taking place in England's education system. The analysis is intended broadly to support these changes but also to improve their design and implementation.

The conceptual analysis is original and has implications both for a theoretical analysis of inter‐school partnerships and for the practical issues of how such partnerships might evolve.

This paper is the first of five based on research carried out in the Centre for the Study of Management Learning at University of Lancaster. It concentrates on the relationships between tutors and learners and the facilitating strategies of tutors, and the effect of these on learners' feelings and their learning and interest.

This paper presents a part of our research work that places an emphasis on Tracking Data Analysis and Visualization (TrAVis) tools, a web‐based system, designed to enhance online tutoring and learning activities, supported by computer‐mediated communication (CMC) tools. TrAVis is particularly dedicated to assist both tutors and students in the task of exploiting tracking data of communication activities throughout the learning process. This paper focuses on the technical aspects of TrAVis, the visualization of students' tracking data and the experiment we have conducted in an authentic learning situation.

A mixture of iterative and participative approaches has been adopted for the design of TrAVis. Different versions of TrAVis were built during the progress of our research. The major changes in each build have particularly involved the conceptual design of data indicators of students' activities and the visualization techniques of the data indicators. Both case studies and experiments have been made to evaluate TrAVis.

This paper demonstrates how TrAVis provides a new experience in visualizing and analyzing students' tracking data. While it shows the originality and novelty of the system, it also reveals the potential benefits of TrAVis to both tutors and students in their online tutoring and learning activities.

The result from the experiment is not sufficient to evaluate some specific aspects of TrAVis. As a matter of fact, the lack of user's feedback did not enable us to justify whether or not the proposed data indicators would be actually used by the users.

The data indicators shown in this paper are computed based on the real needs of the participants in the learning process. Online questionnaires were used and face‐to‐face interviews have been made to study the needs of the users throughout this research work.

One of the particularities of this research is the proposed system, TrAVis, objectively designed to better support the tutors in the tasks of monitoring and evaluating students on CMC tools. Plus, TrAVis is distinguished from the existing systems by its capacity in computing substantial data indicators, allowing the tutors to efficiently visualize and analyze both the process and the product of students' activities.

The purpose of the study is twofold: to offer a theoretical model that illuminates families' motivation to invest in private tutoring and to consider the implications of such investments in the context of South Korea. Given that parents invest in private tutoring for their child if the perceived expected benefits, at the time of enrollment, are greater than the direct and indirect costs of such tutoring, the study explores how private tutoring may affect educational inequities and possibly lead to inferior social outcomes.

A theoretical model based on the human capital approach was developed. Three questions based on stylized facts were addressed: (1) Why would a household send a child to private tutoring? (2) Why do different households invest in different amounts of private tutoring? (3) Why may a household over-invest in private tutoring?

The findings of this study indicate that the demand for private tutoring services decreases with the costs of private tutoring, while increasing as levels of academic readiness and aptitude, levels of household education, levels of current wealth and expected returns to private tutoring increase. These findings imply that private tutoring may exacerbate social inequities and cause an inferior social outcome, but that a government can influence the demand for tutoring through taxation.

This study did not address the non-pecuniary benefits that may be derived from private tutoring. The most important limitation and potential source of weakness of the study is that the model is theoretical. These results therefore need to be interpreted with caution.

The study indicates the need for private households, as well as government officials, to carefully consider the costs and benefits of private tutoring in South Korea. Although the study focuses on South Korea, the findings may apply to other countries in which private tutoring offerings are prominent.

The educational choices that families make for their children have important financial and social implications in all countries, but especially in South Korea. The important implication is that private tutoring will tend to aggravate educational and social inequality.

The existing body of research on private tutoring investment in South Korea suggests that the phenomenon is ubiquitous, growing and spreading to other countries. Furthermore, the motivation behind households' decisions to invest in private tutoring for their children is not always addressed in the published literature. Also, far too little attention has been paid to the economic impact private tutoring has on households and children, as well as society in general.

With many countries having reached universal primary and secondary education, parents are increasingly investing in private tutoring as a means of ensuring that their children attend the best schools and universities. However, unlike the returns to years of schooling and effects of school quality on student achievement, the effects of spending on private tutoring have received limited attention. This chapter studies the impact of tutoring on higher educational outcomes using exogenous variation in tutoring expenditure caused by the imposition of a curfew on the operating hours of tutoring institutes in Korea. The estimated effects of the curfew highlight the severity of the college entrance rat race, with a 10 p.m. curfew constraining tutoring expenditure and increasing sleeping hours. I find diminishing marginal effects of tutoring on college entrance and positive effects on degree completion while the impact on college major followed varies across disciplines.