ABSTRACT
Schools tend to be large, crowded places. Though there are a number of primary and rural schools with just a few teachers and fewer than fifty pupils, the norm is much larger particularly in the case of secondary schools (see Table 3.1) and this generates certain problems characteristic of large organizations. As large organizations, schools first need to achieve goals and meet objectives set by the environment in which they exist. They need to be responsive to the social, political and economic demands that dictate whether they survive or fail. Second, they need to co-ordinate the activities of their personnel in a manner which is effective for achieving these goals within the constraints of the available resources. Such coordination of activities normally involves a formal organizational structure in which duties are specified through rules and procedures, where responsibility and accountability is established through a hierarchy of authority, and where resources like materials, personnel and time get distributed in a rational manner. Third, there is a need to motivate members to comply with the formal structure. Without a tolerable level of compliance the formal blueprint for activities becomes irrelevant and useless, and this is why large organizations tend to build in to their structure a blend of incentives, rewards and sanctions designed to persuade the members to operate within lines set by the formal structure. But to point to such aspects of organization which schools share in common with other large organizations is not to imply that schools are simply the same as all other large organizations. This would miss the fact that, in terms of their goals, their structure and motivation of their members, schools have certain features which give them a distinctive character (cf. King, 1983). What it does do, instead, is to suggest a perspective for investigating the effects of schools on their members – a perspective which might reveal something about the character of control problems and how they have their genesis in the ways schools, as a particular kind of organization, try to cope with co-ordinating many staff and pupils towards given goals using limited resources. School size based on pupil numbers: England, January 1983 https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Type of school
Number of pupils
1-50
51-200
201-400
401-800
801-1,200
1,201-1,500
1,500
Total
Primary
1,905
10,503
6,723
472
1
—
—
19,604
Middle deemed primary
1
147
533
76
—
—
—
757
Middle deemed secondary
—
33
286
326
3
—
—
648
Secondary
1
43
206
1,401
1,550
486
218
3,905
Total
1,907
10,726
7,748
2,275
1,554
486
218
24,914
Total Pupils
65,387
1,410,495
2,096,588
1,298,087
1,519,335
644,293
364,717
7,398,902
% of pupils
(0.89%)
(19.06%)
(28.34%)
(17.54%)
(20.53%)
(8.7%)
(4.93%)
Source: DES, Schools Statistics Dept, May 1984