The following I wrote "off the top of my head" one morning in response to the posting New Business Models by Andrew Sutton. I had intended to revise it for publication but Life - and perhaps especially blog-life - is not like that. So here it is, unedited.
Dear Andrew
I do not know if what follows makes any sense. It is not a response to your piece in any meaningful sense of the word ‘response’. Neither is it complete or coherent as an argument. Nor is it fully considered, in the sense that I have weighed words, drafted then re-drafted. For all of that, what follows is the poorer and your essay deserves better but here it is, as it is, sparked particularly by one sentence of yours and a few words that followed it:
Maybe the work of Tsad Kadima and some smaller, unsung organisations might bear description and analysis along these lines of a total ‘business model’ rather than in the familiar tired terms usually used in Conductive Education ....
.... where the basic, irreducible unit is not the pedagogy but the totality of the organization
- I welcome discussion of the “business model”, have no problem with it and, indeed, the view that our discourse
should be about more than “conductive practice and theory,
in effect the ‘work of conductors’
- I welcome the idea “that the basic irreducible unit is … the totality of the organisation”. Such a thought takes us to places that are intellectually challenging.
We at Paces long ago asked ourselves – we do so still – questions about governance, management, finance, markets (where they are and how we reach them), strategic planning, quality assurance, customer satisfaction; alien, almost improper, language for some, but necessary when talking about the totality of the organisation.
Take “management” for instance. Does conductive education have anything to teach us about management? My colleague Karen Hague asked this question long ago and proposed some positive answers. To misquote Dr Hari, as I have done before and will no doubt again, conductive education is “about enhancing the quality of intention to achieve”. (Sorry. Cannot put my hand on the link.) This to me suggests that conductive education is about articulating goals (“achieve” achieve what?); that the goals are motivated and purposeful (“intention”); that improvements can ever be made (“enhancing the quality”); that such improvements are susceptible to planned activity (can be ‘enhanced”) and can be monitored (how else would you know you had done what you set out to do?).
Applied to the total organisation, this aphorism from Dr Hari would suggest that conductive education sits well in an organisation where the manage style is to plan strategically, monitor progress and measure performance, in all aspects of its activity.
I treasure those almost-words of Dr Hari like some biblical text ever open to exegesis and interpretation, revealing its meanings as the layers, onion-like, are peeled back. It encapsulates much that I want to know of conductive education that radically differentiates it from orthodox, medically-based, approaches to the education of children with cerebral palsy that lethargically beset and bestride the mainstream.
Such total organisational thinking demands other questions are asked.
Is the practice of conductive education sustainable in isolation from its surroundings? We did not want to set up yet another exclusive, ‘special school’, apart from the community. This was a matter of principle. Yet conductive education requires, at its best, the bringing together of cohorts of children, apart in specially structured groups. Nevertheless, this principle, of embracing others, became part of our business model.
Is the practice of conductive education sustainable in a setting that is inimical to it? We had to create a space for ourselves to survive, in a hostile landscape. This was a pragmatic decision. We sought allies, made partnerships and with them, we built a fortress of mutual defence: if our enemies in the education departments came for us, they would have to come for our community partners too. This pragmatism, joining with others, became part of our early business model, though later to be set aside
We set out then, as our business model, a “resource for children with disabilities and their families at the heart of an inclusive local community centre": in 1997, Paces Campus.
We specifically rejected the then common business model open to parents: get a few families together, open a small centre, recruit a conductor or two, finance it all from fundraising and advertise it as ‘free’.
We wanted to ask other total organisation questions, not yet, I admit, satisfactorily answered. For instance:
Q. How might we provide for the conductive upbringing of a child with cerebral palsy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year, without being residential for as long as the child benefits?
Q. How might we address issues of training and certification for those working with us who are not conductors?
Q. For those who stay with us until the end of their school days, how should we support their transition into independent adulthood as active citizens?
Q. How should we support parents as parents? (Including, how should we help parents in letting go their children into adulthood?)
These are business questions as much as conductive questions. They are questions about Vision and Strategy and Management and Finance and Resourcing and Marketing.
We also had a Vision of excellence in the quality of our conductive education service that should be reflected in the excellence of our surroundings. How might we deliver that? After 12 long years, on 30th January 2009, the cooperative Trust (an innovative business model in itself and one that Paces was instrumental in founding) that now manages Paces Campus was finally granted a lease on the premises. Ironically, after 12 years – and perhaps in 12 years to come – it might well be said that this could not be a worse time to set out on the transformation of premises in pursuit of the Vision.
One last business model imponderable: Conductive education is a radical challenge to the traditional education of children with cerebral palsy – or it is nothing much at all.
So that said, there has to be way of mainstreaming conductive education for all children. This the business model must make possible. Part of the purpose of the Paces' model was to be an exemplar, not just of conductive education but of how the whole model works as a totality. As we move, I hope, this year to the granting of non-maintained special school status for part of what we do, it still is.
My apologies for
this ramble along ill-trodden ways. The paths by now should be clear of
obstruction, the rights of way well-marked. Unfortunately, thickets obstruct
and we are still arguing for the right to walk this way at all. Even amongst
our own people.