ITT, along with the education sector as a whole, has experienced massive changes in the last 10 years. Indeed it was these changes and the challenges they presented which brought about the Warwick-Comino link. In particular, one should refer to perhaps the biggest change in almost 100 years, the switch to a school-based training model for both four year undergraduate students and those following the one year postgraduate course. This has meant that university schools of education such as Warwick have simultaneously had to prepare coherent programmes for training the new school mentors at the same time as overseeing the diminution of their own role. The new model is, moreover, very diffuse with small groups of students - sometimes individual students - receiving much more of their core training in literally hundreds of schools, all with different modes of working. The consequences of this is that, even more than in the past, there is a need to provide for a common approach to planning, managing learning and evaluation. This is against a background of the growth in the HE sector generally of a range of numerous quality control mechanisms (OFSTED is only one amongst many), creating additional strains. Finally, there is the additional burden of diminished resources for managing and delivering a training programme which is, paradoxically, more complex and less cost effective than past models.

The GRASP process was the discipline used by the management group charged in 1991 with the task of devising and launching the school-based model for secondary PGCE students, and it was also used in the first training programme for school mentors. These first training programmes were not without anxieties and uncertainties, particularly as the participants were compelled to plunge immediately into action. However the results were encouraging. For example, one of the key elements of the training programme - the induction of students into school - has always been problematic, with some students disappointed with the quality of the initial reception and guidance, and some schools critical of student attitudes and the adequacy of tutorial guidance. The questioning cycle was used to plan this phase of the training with tutors and mentors working together to bring about real improvement in quality. When this element was reviewed at the end of the year and compared with previous years, the contrast was striking with something like 95 per cent of students expressing satisfaction or more with the quality of the experience. Clearly there were a number of factors which contributed to this improvement but, undoubtedly, part of the success was the result of the discipline and clarity which GRASP brought. The other early input was incorporating the questioning cycle into the key document for secondary students, mentors and tutors, the Record of Professional Achievement. This is the means by which the novice professional is helped to move towards competence through systematic recording and self-evaluation, at each stage of the course students are obliged to use the GRASP process to set their own purposes, develop criteria for success, write action plans and evaluate their work. Some secondary schools involved in the Warwick partnership scheme incidentally have incorporated GRASP into their own management systems.

The move to the school-based model in primary ITT is currently having its first run through at Warwick and here GRASP has been utilised very explicitly by Colin Talbot, the primary ITT development officer and it guides both the training and the ROPA. Many primary school mentors who have been through out training programme have recognised the relevance of the process to whole school planning, continuing, professional development and not least the demands of inspection. Currently there is a focus on the demanding task of developing a pedagogic model for introducing student groups (sometimes in excess of 200) to the GRASP process in short sessions at the beginning of their course. There is also a significant extension to the work with partnership schools, whereby head teacher, mentor, class teacher and students have been working on identified issues of whole school development. There is also some use of GRASP as a planning and teaching tool by tutors and it is clearly a model which OFSTED favours for staff use in ITT. The relevance to long-term planning and day-to-day lesson planning for both students and teachers has already been referred to and the Warwick Centre would want to endorse this.

There are a number of examples of work with organisations outside our main area of interest - for example, health service managers, a youth advisory service - but I would like to mention a particularly successful project, the use of GRASP by a voluntary arts group - a choral society - to rethink its management strategy with, at one point, more than a hundred assembling for a seminar at the university to contribute to a development plan.

There have been some mistakes and disappointments. It is all too easy to convey the impression that "there is no other way" or that the process is the remedy for all organisational ills. To do this is to condemn GRASP to the fate which inevitably befalls all management panaceas which promise instant cures. Furthermore, there may be a need to be more aware that there are some people for whom, temperamentally, this way of thinking is not appropriate or possible and indeed this may be true of groups as well. It hasn't proved easy to persuade as many university staff as one would have liked to consider the process and there could be a number of reasons for this. One needs to distinguish clearly the GRASP model of effective change and improvement, with its emphasis on flexibility, imagination and collegiality, from some of the mechanistic strategic systems of the 1970s (for example, Management by Objectives). One perhaps needs also to draw out the parallels with some of the best recent humanistic management theory with which GRASP shares many concepts and ways of working. However, the experience of the Warwick team suggests that no other model moves quite so easily from the senior management suite to the collegiate staff planning group to the individual classroom teacher, and indeed, can become part of the everyday practice of a six year-old child.