George Walker’s weblog

We have never done it so openly before and this meeting is the culmination of a year’s business planning which started when every department in the IBO set its objectives in the light of the strategic plan.  There is a beautiful logic about it all: the corporate plan leads to departmental plans (which, importantly, feed into staff objectives as part of annual appraisal) and these are translated into next year’s budget requests.  Thus, the budget becomes what it should be, not a list of figures, but a financial plan to achieve our strategic goals.

Meanwhile, the Council of Foundation, the IBO’s governing body, has approved a set of parameters for the budget including expected income, salary and fee increases and so on.  Following pro-bono advice from Goldman-Sachs we have taken out currency options with our bank for 2006 to protect the organization from the worst effects of the unpredictable US dollar.

So: all is ready, everything is in place.  But there is just one small problem to be solved – the requested expenditure will exceed our anticipated income by a very large figure, by several million dollars I am prepared to bet.  As I write I have not seen the detailed figures but I make the prediction with complete confidence because every budget I have ever worked on has been the same.  Expectation massively exceeds reality: hopes are dashed, ambitions are thwarted and boring old compromise wins the day.  Why didn’t we just divide our additional income by 18 in the first place and go home?

My presentation to this conference has given me the opportunity to look back over the time I have been associated with international education – almost 15 years now – and to ask what I have learned about it.  What is different, what is distinctive about international education?  Reviewing what I have written in the past on the subject….

….but I must pause for the conference opening ceremony held in the assembly hall of our host school, Kungsholmen’s Gymnasium.  It is also Stockholm’s specialist music school with a distinguished choir which performs for us, lining all four walls of the hall with its young conductor in the middle.  The sound is electrifying and I wonder if the IB’s most effective contribution to world peace might be to introduce a compulsory course in choral singing.  Listen to Och sången doftar i natten…, 23 Sverige.

The most beautiful musical instrument – as Mozart recognized – is the human voice.  It costs nothing and most of us have one if only someone can help us to find it, and the double sense of harmony that comes from singing in the middle of a large choir could surely help the cause of international understanding.

Listen to Och sången doftar i natten…, 16 Sankta Lucia.

At the end of a long day (no one matches our Nordic colleagues in the art of mixing serious business with serious pleasure) we settle down to dinner at the famous Vaxholm fortress that used to guard the sea lane into Stockholm.  The conversation around me is about growth and how the IBO will retain its distinctive personal touch as it gets bigger.  I insist it has nothing to do with size but rather the people we employ: either they care or they do not, and of course they do.  Moreover, my own occasional interventions (most recently on behalf of a Polish girl who was being absurdly treated by a German university) do not so much set an example as follow, and thereby validate, the example being set every day by my colleagues.

It is a typical noisy dinner where the cultural diversity of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Icelanders and Finns, plus more recent arrivals from the Baltic states, and all (happily for me) using English as their common language, is a familiar scene at IB conferences around the world.  I am never exactly sure what point my neighbour is trying to make to me, but never mind – I am amongst friends.

Earlier in the day, in an outstanding speech, the deputy mayor (who is also responsible for Stockholm’s education) welcomed us to his city and warned us against elitism.  Yes, he said, the IB Diploma Programme is a wonderfully tough preparation for university but you must also seek to attract those students whose parents never went near a university.  Not a bad key performance indicator for the IBO!

….and so back to my own presentation.  But why not read it for yourself ?

This afternoon has been very high on vision.  We are planning October workshops in Banja Luka as part of a joint project in Bosnia and Herzegovina between the IBO and the United World College (UWC) Movement.  The project has three linked components.  The first plans to establish a group of UWC scholars and teachers in the famous gymnasium in Mostar (which is being rebuilt from near-destruction) so as to build an international bridge between the majority Croat and minority Bosniak students using the IB Diploma Programme. At the same time we want to introduce the programme to a school in Banja Luka in the Serb Republic where the headmistress is already a keen IB fan (a number of her students have gone on to study the IB at the UWC of the Adriatic in Duino).  The third component exists already: a successful IB Diploma Programme school in Sarajevo that is now beginning to introduce the Middle Years Programme (MYP).  The three parts potentially add up to an IB presence in each of the main ethnic areas in this complex and still-divided country plus the possibility of mentoring, joint professional training, online learning and all kinds of interactions within each school’s wider community.

I first visited Bosnia and Herzegovina back in April with my colleague, Mélanie Coquelin, who is an IB graduate of the Nordic Red Cross UWC.  There we met the project’s manager, Pilvi Törsti, another IB/UWC graduate who has temporarily abandoned her native Helsinki to live in Sarajevo with her husband and 18-month old son, Elias.  (Elias could well turn out to be a more powerful force for reconciliation than the combined IB and UWC – no one can resist a lively toddler.)  Pilvi wrote her PhD thesis on education in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina so she has many local contacts and, most precious of all, she speaks the language.

So now we are planning to go back to Sarajevo and on to Banja Luka to explain more about the IB.  We have a shoestring budget at the moment, with grant applications for serious funding submitted to different foundations.  The spotlight of large scale international aid has shifted in recent years from the Balkans to Iraq and Afghanistan but we are running high on vision (and on volunteer help) because we believe that the UWC’s values and the remarkable qualities of its students combined with the internationally recognized IB Diploma Programme could offer a powerful model for rebuilding education in any post-conflict society.

In any case, ‘to help to create a better and more peaceful world’ and a commitment to the ‘ideals of peace, justice, understanding and cooperation’ are respectively parts of the mission statements of the IBO and the UWC and in this project we have been offered an opportunity to do something about them.

August is a good moment to review the major issues that will surface between now and the end of the year.  The 2006 operating budget will be put together in September for approval by the Council of Foundation meeting in November.   It is already clear that council will be pushed to discuss this and all the other issues piling up, including fee structure, vocational IB courses, the concept of an IB open international college, key performance indicators and the council’s own committee structure.  Council meets twice each year face-to-face and twice by telephone and we are still learning how best to use the faceless telephone meetings.

August is a good time to read.  I almost finished Thomas Friedman’s The Earth is Flat before Steve, my son-in-law, took it home with him to inspire some new business initiatives.  Blakemore and Frith’s new book The Learning Brain seems to have gone in the same direction with my daughter, Catherine.  If she is expecting simple brain-related answers to her primary classroom challenges, she will have to wait a few more years, I’m afraid.  I am left with Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner which is a powerful and moving story set mainly in Afghanistan and John Buchan’s Greenmantle.  John Buchan?  The terminally, politically incorrect John Buchan?  Yes, that one: but I seem to remember that Greenmantle is about the rise of Islam during World War 1 so perhaps he has something new to shed on the subject.

I’ll let you know.