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.