If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress (Barack Obama)

Mmmmm - coffee

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything (George Bernard Shaw).

My current school changed from a horizontal form structure to a vertical one a few years ago. This meant a change to vertical pastoral Deans for this year. With the year delay between the move to vertical forms and vertical Deans, the two progressions were not in synch but I'm trying (really I am) to 'build a bridge' (not literally).

As far as I was concerned, this move was progress, from a bureaucratic/administrivia oriented system to a new more caring/nurturing vertical system.

Seems there are still (older) students and staff who cannot change their mindset from that past system and want to return to it.

I think that's a shame, but I understand it more these days. Long serving staff members have an investment in the school's past organisational culture that I do not have. 

I cannot stay in a school more than four or five years; I don't understand how people can remain in one school for their whole career. The school culture becomes more 'enshrined', more set in stone, for older staff, than it does for me.

Many of the students come from families that have not moved from the family farm for generations. Of course they despise change. 

But the world around them all has moved on, and it will not stop moving on. When the students leave a school they have become very familiar with, they will have to adapt or else. Change happens! Move on!!

Unfortunately, because they will not be literally moving on beyond the school, many longer serving staff no longer have that perspective, or the will to look beyond what has always been in place and embrace fresh thinking.

Horizontal forms? Horizontal Deans?

That horse has left the building, the genie has left the bottle. A good starting point is this great article about (shock horror) the end of schools as we know them!! 

Mmmmm - coffee!!