The Northern Alliance is in the process of developing a new plan. Like many of you, we are grappling with the challenge of knowing what’s ahead for us in Scottish Education – and indeed for society as a whole. What do we focus on moving forward? How do we prioritise? There are currently so many paths we could choose – all important, all demanding our time, energy and resources. So we revisited our common purpose as a RIC – to improve outcomes through collaboration (in a nutshell). We have also been learning about Michael Fullan’s Right Drivers for Whole System Success:

• Wellbeing and Learning – learning well and feeling well
• Social Intelligence – how we work and learn together
• Equality Investments – breaking down barriers to learning and wellbeing
• Systemness (super driver) – connecting across and blurring our boundaries – building a shared responsibility for improving outcomes

Michael Fullan shared his Right Drivers paper in February 2021 – just as we all began to realise that there was no ‘normal’ – or ‘getting back to normal’. Things were changing and we needed to make sure that they were changing for the better as we moved forward. The Drivers can help us to do just that. They don’t state anything new or different to what we already know – they just make sense! And to be frank, making sense is what we need right now.

When Michael Fullan took his Drivers on the road, as a team we listened to the podcasts, we engaged in the webinars and we talked about how they could support us in our work as a RIC. We have begun to weave them into our work – how we connect with our networks, develop our practice and learn with and from each other. This is helping to deepen our understanding of the Drivers and more importantly, begin to shape what they may look like in our own contexts.

At last year’s World Education Summit, Michael invited practitioners to get in touch with him to share their learning about the Drivers. So I got in touch – and he replied. Since then, Michael has been a good friend of the Northern Alliance – not leading, but guiding by dropping little nuggets for us to consider within our own context, which helps to light the road ahead. In our December newsletter, Michael Fullan shared his latest reflections on the Right Drivers:

'I realize it now that the drivers are best seen as a "treasure map", not a blueprint. No system change worth its salt has ever come about via a blueprint. All system change combines planned and unplanned happenings – planned ideas which fail and succeed (hopefully retaining much of the latter); unplanned events and ideas being sorted to retain the most useful ones.'

There is no blueprint for success or for moving forward – we cannot copy what works well in one context and expect it to lead to success within our own. What we can do is use a treasure map – with key landmarks and pitfalls to negotiate and important milestones to achieve along the way.

We can also learn with and from one another. Going back to our Northern Alliance plan, we want to use the Right Drivers as our treasure map. We are working together to explore the golden threads that are emerging across the North which we can all connect to and which will help us move forward together – as described by Michael Fullan:

‘I define systemness as the degree to which more and more people at each of the three levels (local, middle, and top) become aware of and interact with people within in and across their levels in relation to common goals of improving learning and well-being.’

We know that there is a way to go. We also know that many of us are carrying heavy loads and the fallout of the pandemic is still being acutely felt – we all need a helping hand at this time. We have found that the Drivers are helping us to shine a light on what is going to make the biggest difference for everyone moving forward.

What might your treasure map look like for the road ahead? What are your first steps? If you want to find out more about the Drivers and how they could help you in your context – or about our journey, just get in touch. It would be good to hear from you.

Kathleen Johnston, Northern Alliance RIC

Kathleen lives and works on the island of Islay, in Argyll and Bute. Over the past 30 years, Kathleen has been a teacher, head teacher and education officer. More recently, Kathleen has been the Quality Improvement Manager for the Northern Alliance – a Regional Improvement Collaborative made up of the 8 local authorities in the north of Scotland. Kathleen believes strongly in the power of meaningful collaboration to bring about improvement and she works alongside practitioners at all levels of the system to share practice, learn and solve problems together.