Many European schools look much the same today as they did a generation ago, and too many teachers are not developing the pedagogies and practices required to meet the needs of the future. Scholars, educators and policy makers are arguing that schools should be reconceptualised as “learning organisations” that can react more quickly to changing external environments, embrace innovations in internal organisation, and ultimately improve student outcomes (OECD, 2016).

Several countries are on a quest for the learning school. In the Netherlands, the Foundation LeerKRACHT, aims to reshape national education policy by creating a body of high-quality teachers and encourage schools to create a culture of continuous improvement. School leaders are supposed to be role models for learning (op cit) . In England, the Research Learning Communities project was designed to help schools that aim to become more evidence-informed by developing approaches to building teacher capacity, and two leaders, a senior leader and an informal opinion leader was central in each scool participating in the project (op cit ). Central in the Austrian New Secondary School reform is the creation of a new leadership position at the school level, the Lerndesigner, who, together with the school’s principal and other teacher- serve as change agents in their schools (op cit). In Norway the “Lower secondary school development” («Ungdomstrinn i utvikling”, Udir, 2012) is a national development programme over 4 years, targeted at all Norwegian schools with students at the 7-10 grades (age 13-16). The programme is designed with a “learning school strategy” accounting for a need to develop learning capabilities in all the Lower Secondary Schools in this country. All schools at this level are feeded some basic principles and concepts on organisational learning understood as school development (Udir, 2012).

Projects as these points at several learning “leverages” in schools and school systems, but central semes to be both teacher capacity on an individual level and organisational capacities in form of management and leadership practices.

This is the starting point for this text where we ask what the learning entity in a “learning school” might be, and how we could measure the degree of collective and individual learning in schools and school systems?

Questions as these demands definitions and concepts. The theoretical framework applied here builds on Moilanen (2001, 2005) who defined a learning organisation as composed of the indivdual members thoughts, ideas and images of themselves in view of the organisation they belong to. Moilanen is developing an eclectic definition, where the organisation is understood as “a whole”, a holstic concept. This “whole” is then divided into five parts on two interconnected levels, the individual and the collective. The five elements are driving forces, finding purpose, questioning, empowering and evaluation.

As a general idea this framework puts the individual teacher in centre of the learning scool, but when measuring learning, the individual is always seen in contrast to a whole. Degree of organisational learning is understood as a question of concistency beween indivdual learning and the organisation as a learning environment.

In this text we present a study where the theoretical framework was applied in one large Norwegian school system (Pytte, 2014, Glosvik og Pytte, 2015). The framework is part of an ongoing project focusing in learning educational systems and has been used also on measuring learning in a system of kindergartens (Glosvik, Pytte og Sønsthagen, 2016).

Moilanen approach to measuring learning in organisations is quantitaive. Based on an elements found in the works of Mike Pedler, Tom Boydell and John Burgoyne, Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, and Peter Senge she developed a comprehensive but simple instrument to evaluate the present state of a learning organization. The instrument is relatively straightforward to use - only 40 statements are used. Half of them focusing on the individual level and half on the organizational level. At both levels, the statements operationalise the five areas of focus that constitute the learning organisation framework, and for processing answers are clustered by these areas of focus (driving forces, finding purpose, questioning, empowering and evaluation). Each question is presented as a statement, and the informants are asked to answer if they describes him or her – or the organisation - well or not by a value from 0-4. The whole school system in one large, Norwegian commune was studied. It had at that point (2014) 2694 employed teachers. A Questback was sent to all of them, and 551, a total of 20,45% answered. This gives +/- 3,7 % margin of error on the 95% confidence interval. Cronbach's alpha was used to test internal concistency. Alpha measured on whole (0,949) on organisational level (0,845) and individual level (0.841). On four of total of ten focus areas alpa dropped below 0,7,a result usually regarded as questionable, but all of these were statements about the indivdual. Statements on the organisation were all above this result. This implies a much higher consistency on statemens regarding the collective level than the individual. Even if not traditionally used this way, differences between statements on organisational (collective) and individual levels were measured by Cohens d. The differences between This gives us five measurements on the degree of organisational learning operationalised as the five focus elements driving forces, finding purpose, questioning, empowering and evaluation. A low d-values implies higher degree of organisational learning than a higher one.

Results regarding “Driving forces” implies strong “management” and “leadership” in the sense that school leaders are visible and seen by teachers, But this do not imply leaders as role models, and regarding motivation for indvidual learning, standard deviation is high. Cohens d was 0,28. On the next focus area, finding purpose, d is 0,59.This implies that to a certain degree school objectives are guiding teacher learning, but teacher perceice themselves as more interested in learning new things, than motiviated to do so by the school. On the focus area empowerment, d is measured to 0,71.These are statements primarily on differences between teachers perception of their own ability to change and the schools abilty to remove obstacles to learning. In other words, teachers perceive themselves more capable of learning than the schoo. On the focus area, questioning, d= 0.8. This is high, but alfa values are low, both on organisational and individual statements. The results to imply that teachers are learning from their own experiences and from self organised feedback, but to a lesser degree from organisational instructions and feedback. The last foucus area is called evaluation. Cohens d was measuredt to 1,03, generally regarded as very high. The results implies that teachers evaluate themselves and practices among communites of teachers, but there do not seemes to be a strong connection between this kind of evalutaion and the way schools reward success on teaching leve. Moilanen hypothesis that three modes of organisational learning might exist: The organisaton is in more need of learning than it’s members deliever. There is an equlibrium between demand on organisational level and learning on indvidual level. There is a mode where learning capability among members are greater than the organisation is able to utilise. The studied school seemed to be in the last mode.

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