Springboard Trust Project ......Whats it all about?

Springboard Trust connects school principals with business mentors, enhancing their leadership and planning skills, achieving better educational outcomes for schools and their students, and dramatically improving life skills for young New Zealanders.

What they Do

Their programmes provide us, school principals with essential professional development.

What we learn enables us to improve educational outcomes for our schools.

Why They Do It

Helping principals means better outcomes for our schools.

Better education means better opportunities in life for our children. It's that simple.

How They Do It

They  provide a unique mentoring programme and ongoing learning and support.

The opportunity to connect business leaders and education leaders is inspiring for both.

Make a difference! Does it really?

The concepts of ‘make a difference’ intrigued me as I have written strategic plans for 12 years and thinking about it I wonder if any of them have ‘made a difference’

Often Strategic plans are what you do to get a ‘tick’ from the Ministry of Education and to share at the first meeting of the year with the Board of Trustees however for the document to ‘make a difference’ I would have to think about my whole understanding of my leadership role.

When a strategic plan is used as I have been using them, it is a safe and uncomplicated process. It can be written in a night, it can be written through the eyes of an adult and can be written using flash language and concepts that no one understands.

From the first session I had with my cohort I realised that I needed to change my thinking and drill down deeper if I was going to create a living document that was going to ‘make a difference’.

Up until this year I had used all of the correct templates and followed all the correct flow charts however never really made the connection between the words and the people and resources.

A strategic plan that is really going to drive a school and the community needs to have that connection. It needs to clearly follow a process and needs to be honest if it is going to make any inroads to developing planned and effective change.

Start at the start Who are we at St Dominic's Catholic Primary?

·         We are a Catholic school first and foremost. We strive each day to action the gospel teachings. We see this as the most important aspect to our school. The children are taught what this looks like through value indicators and the teachers, parents and other significant adults in the children’s lives are there to role-model and support along the way.

·         We are a multi-cultural school with 30 cultural groups identified. We see this as an asset and work to engage as much cultural input as possible into the school. Most of our parents are both working so most of the way that our school engages in regards communication has changed to a web based approaches.

·         We see our school as very open-door and we regularly have parent information evenings and formal chances for our parents to ‘catch up’ with the teachers about their child’s learning.

·       We have a very proactive and supportive Board of Trustees. Working alongside these people is an active PTA and Pastoral care group. These groups support the school in a range of ways.

·       The use of technology will be a influencing factor in the direction of the school in the future e, not only in the hardware component but also in the way we teach and create our learning programmes for the children.

·      We have recently (this year) developed a new school curriculum so this will have an effect on the school’s direction in the coming 2 years.

·      Population growth in the area will also affect the school. Monitoring and future planning roll growth will become an important factor to the school over the next 3-5 years.

Our Mission Statement

A community centred in Christ, seeking Truth and nurturing excellence in attitude and learning.

We unpacked the Mission statement at the start of the year with the whole staff (support staff and teaching)

I asked the team where they saw themselves in the statement and what parts of the statement spoke to them. We discuss key words and shared our understanding about what these looked like for us as key members in the school community. 

I then opened up the door on this thinking with the parents and parish members. I asked them to share their thoughts and understand about our mission and asked them to reflect on was it relevant and what spoke to them as stakeholders in the community. School values were also part of the discussion and parents understanding where these fit into the school and parent relation

This feedback on the Mission statement allowed me to get a base line knowledge and to set the scene for further consultation around where the school was and where it was going.

I needed to ask some questions?

Questions that I asked myself.

1.      Why has our school strategic plan become a ‘folder filler’?

2.      Who needs to own and have a voice in our schools Strategic plan?

3.      How are we going to make sure it stays at the forefront of the schools direction and development?

4.      How do we know it is driving the school in regards measures and accountability?

Why has our school strategic plan become a ‘folder filler’?

A principal has a choice at the start of every year.

Do they continue to drive and school forward, asking the ‘hard questions’ and setting even higher standard of students, staff and parents or do they settle for the statue que and deliver the same old each year. When a strategic plan become a ‘folder filler the principal has decided that it’s a status que year. Everything has been ticked off and everything will tick over however it is a year that won’t necessarily push the boundaries and ask any more of its stakeholders.

I had found myself falling into the safe yet predictable zone of the ‘same old’. St Dominic’s was a school that was performing and was getting great student achievement results. 

Our ERO report was great and stated that as a school

Learning is at the heart of the school. The last three years have been used to focus on building an inclusive learning community. The 2011 ERO report noted the school’s sound governance, management and teaching practices. These aspects continue to be evident. School leaders and teachers used the areas identified for review and development in the 2011 ERO report to guide their school improvement initiatives.

The school’s strategic plan had become something that I did and I shared with the BOT when I needed to. It was full of very jargon type language that allowed only a few people to fully understand what it meant for the children. Traditionally the staff at the school had nothing to do with the schools strategic planning so the way I was using it had little impact on the staff.

Strategic planning was something that I did and the staff were happy with this. I shared the annual goals that related to them at the start of each year and actually gave them a copy of the strategic plan however never really unpacked it with them and never ever asked for input. In my mind I had a clear direction the school needed to goa and I was going to make the calls on how to get there.

Because of this approach the strategic plan never ever got unpacked and pulled apart. It filled folders and increased our coloured photocopy costs. I had never been questioned on how I used it and the BOT never asked the right questions in order for it to become a document that drove the school.

Who needs to own and have a voice in our schools Strategic plan?

After one of the session with my cohort I can remember feeling really enthusiastic about the concept of ‘value drivers’

I understood what these were however through the discussion at group level I started to see the importance of getting real and honest feedback and buy in from those in the school community that I deemed as value drivers. I discussed this with my capacity partner Rebecca and she agreed. I needed to first understand who these people were and then what it is they have to say.

In term 2, at one of the BOT, I spent some time unpacking the concept ‘value driver’ and asked them to firstly list who these people were and then at what level do they add value for the school. We also discussed what we do in order to support and share with them the goals and direction that the school takes. Surely if we can list them then surely we must share information with them.

The BOT had a great understanding of who our people were and quickly came to the conclusion that we needed to be reaching out more in order to consult and share more with these groups. We also decided that this was easy as St Dominic’s is a close community and all immediate ‘value drivers’ are easy to consult and practically it works well.

We discussed the resources that the school actually had in order to make informed decisions and this included financial resources. We needed to have a clear picture of what and who we needed to use in order to move forward. It was clear I needed to SWOT and keep SWOTTING in order to get a real picture of the school.

One of the groups that was clearly missed out was the actual staff. As I have said I have never really brought them on board to the extent that I now needed to if I was going to make the unsafe choice at the start of a year and drive and school forward, asking the ‘hard questions’ and setting even higher standard of students, staff and parents.

Flipping the 'value-drivers'

Because this process had worked so well, I decided to use some of these factors and some new ideas to bring on the staff to help write the annual plan for 2016.

Staff were given the chance to write the annual plan for 2016 using a range of ways and this proved to be excellent in the way the staff took direct ownership of the process.

I did not want to re write the whole strategic plan as I had just written it in 2014 however I needed to re vamp it and make it easier for people to read and to see where it fits in across the school.

In one of my sessions with Rebecca we spoke about the idea of the Strategic plan being a 1 page representation of the schools strategic plan. I pondered this and did some research of other models. In the past I had used the model ‘more is best’ but clearly I had missed the mark.

Transformational Leadership.

In 2013/2014 I used the process of Transformational Leadership?

Leadership expert James McGregor Burns introduced the concept of transformational leadership in his 1978 book, "Leadership." He defined transformational leadership as a process where "leaders and their followers raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation."

Bernard M. Bass later developed the concept of transformational leadership further. According his 1985 book, "Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations," this kind of leader:

·         Is a model of integrity and fairness.

·         Sets clear goals.

·         Has high expectations.

·         Encourages others.

·         Provides support and recognition.

·         Stirs the emotions of people.

·         Gets people to look beyond their self-interest.

·         Inspires people to reach for the improbable.

The staff really took this on board and it opened up a new way of them taking an active role across the school in regards direction and honest reflection. Staff were asked to set goals that they really felt deeply about in regards their practice and moving children that were below and well below. These were the children that had a range of needs that included Learning and Social needs. They were asked to work in Professional Learning Groups that encouraged collaborate thinking and reflective questioning.

The idea to distribute the leadership across all staff.

Part of it also was to actively present at BOT meetings aspects of the Strategic plan. They worked in groups of 3 and 4 and reported back how they saw it and what they needed to do in order to move the goal along. 

This formed part of our review process. 

This reporting to BOT was great as it developed their leadership skills and provided the BOT with a real hands on look at what the strategic goals look like for a teacher.

My capacity partner Rebecca

Rebecca was able to share with me her knowledge about her company she belongs to and I was really impressed about how she was clearly able to discuss and share her company’s core values and culture very quickly and simplify.

She explained that the strategic plan, mission and vision needs to be to the point and not long winded. She shared with me that when she first read my Strategic plan at the start of the year she almost fell asleep so making a change to how I presented it and how it was written was needed!

She also shared with me that when she first read my Strategic plan it did not mention the staff at all and this she thoughts was an issue. Of course it is all about the children however there needed to be elements of the importance of excellent teachers to teach the children so this has become a focus for me.

You will see references to leadership of staff and well being in my new Annual plan and Strategic plan.

Keeping it real and honest!

How are we going to make sure the schools Strategic plan stays at the forefront of the schools direction and development?

I needed to include into my reporting process to the BOT a constant reflection back to the school’s Strategic plan. I needed the BOT to understand that this was a document they created and that they needed to know it was being actioned.

Actions to make this happen

I brought on board a classic Continuous Improvement Model and explained how this was going to look at BOT level.

 I flipped the BOT agenda so that all actual good quality discussion took place early and business as usual took place at the end.

 I set up scenarios with the BOT that they had to think about as an ice breaker at the start of each meeting.

I asked staff from each year level to report on aspects of the Strategic plan that I used as evidence in my reports

I wrote my BOT reports directly against the Strategic plan goals

So What have I learnt and will change?

The real importance of  common understanding across all the school community   I learnt that you need to identify and judge the significance of each of your ‘value drivers’.

 I learnt that having a 3 year plan is important to bring people along with your vision but you also need to be aware that schools are ‘agile’ and changing places that need to be ever reflected upon and reviewed.  I learnt that my action plan to drive the school forward over 12 months needs to be the voice of those that drive it.

 
I learnt that effective resourcing that includes financial and personal.
 
 I learnt that finding an experienced excellent teacher in Auckland is very hard work! 
 I learnt that being a principal is the greatest job in the world and that thirst and hunger to constantly improve so that your children get the best is always why you get out of bed in the morning.