Fairhall School
Simon Heath discusses leading change and achievement.
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Clip duration: 3:30
Build collegiality
When you go away together with a group of people, you start to understand how they tick. You listen more intently because you don't have all the other distractions and you're there with one purpose and we got to know each other.
I've always thought of leadership as being quite separate but in this instance I was part of the big picture. I was one of the team. I don't believe I'm ever the boss. We were together. It was very tight as a group and that was an exceptional catalyst for where we've got to today.
We had two beginning teachers start that year and they couldn't have asked for a better introduction to our school. The Taranaki trip took place in the second week of term 2 and they got to know us well and we got to know them well and we just started to move in a single direction. It made a lot of difference.
We visited a number of Taranaki schools and found the visits incredibly valuable. Before we left we wanted to make sure we got the most out of it so we teamed up in pairs and set a focus on specific things such as goal-setting. How did they plan? How did they achieve consistency across the school?
We looked at focused teaching and leadership, not just from the principal but also from the area leaders, APs (assistant principals) and DPs (deputy principals), senior teachers and all staff. We talked to the caretakers about their leadership roles in that school. So there were all sorts of things, including the school environment.
When we returned from Taranaki we had a three week period before all the schools that went were going to meet again. We converged on the Country Lodge on a Friday afternoon at about 3.15 for a few drinks and to sharing what we got out of the trip to Taranaki. We also got an opportunity to say what we were going to do as a result. In our case we had actually prepared a plan of where we were going to go from there.
My staff were determined to make a difference as a result of this, not just for themselves as a teaching team, but as a school. When they got up and presented their reports it was absolutely one of the most satisfying moments of being a principal at this school. I knew then it was probably the most valuable professional development that we had ever invested in.
Audit achievement
We recognised that we needed to audit the school in terms of how our kids were achieving. We decided to prepare detailed status reports in every curriculum area. Within those reports we needed to know what resources we had and the levels of teacher expertise and student achievement in those areas at that time.
We discovered that we were doing some things incredibly well. Student achievement was right up there and the resources and teacher expertise was right behind it to support it.
What we also found, though, was that we were putting a lot of resources into some areas where students were achieving well and yet we weren't putting enough resources into other areas where they weren't. We found, for example, that our students were good at reading and grammatically correct writers. On closer examination, however, we found that the quality of their writing was not rich in content.
We really started to analyse what our needs were and then develop plans to meet those needs in a focused way, whereas before we didn't analyse in depth to the same degree and we didn't therefore have rich information to base our judgements and decisions on.
The net result is we have focused our teaching and resources on improving student achievement. This has made a huge difference across the school and quality is inextricably involved in every aspect of that. It's intertwined in a way that helps us to achieve those objectives.
Enlist community
We decided as a staff that we were going to present the results of the audit to our school community. We felt that if we were going to make a real change in how we were doing things here, we needed to bring the community on board to understand why we were going to make those changes.
We had a community meeting in November 2002 and gave them the whole picture, including student achievement in every area, what we thought was great and what we thought wasn't good enough. And we also identified where we wanted to improve and how we were going to go about that, for example in the quality of written language. So we laid it all on the table, warts and all, to the community.
It was a risk because we felt they could turn around and point the finger and say, "Well, why aren't you doing these things?" But they were absolutely thrilled that we were prepared to do that and had a plan that we were going to make a difference over the next twelve months. And we did, and were able to present information to the community last year to support that. So we have made it part of our yearly programmes that each year we present the whole picture to the community and it's been powerful in terms of getting parents on board.
Lead change
My first professional development as principal at Fairhall was a week with David Stewart and it was an amazing course. I learnt a lot of things, but the underlying theme all the way through was, if you are going to lead your school effectively, you have to manage the culture of the school.
We learnt a lot about how to define a culture at your school, how to manage that culture, how to inject yourself at times and pull back at times. It's all about managing that. So that was a powerful learning experience.
You've got to get the energy force going in the same direction, deal with the issues that might take you off course and also understand that maybe it is important that it changes course a little because the end result will be better for the organisation.
Support democracy
Our staffroom has a round table and it's very important when we sit down there, there's no one person who has any more importance than anyone else. We are all prepared to throw our ideas on the table. I guess the whole quality project has allowed all of us to be a bit more natural about that.
I require my assistant principals to show strong leadership all the time and they do. And they show strong leadership towards me in terms of telling me what to do sometimes. Sometimes we'll walk out of that meeting and the things I wanted don't happen and the things they want happen. Those are important aspects of shared leadership within the school.
Define core beliefs
As a teaching staff under the quality project, we defined the core teaching beliefs in our school. The underlying aspect that's come through those teaching beliefs is the 'promise' from teacher to teacher.
We have six words in our school that all begin with 'c' that we use and talk about: connectivity, collectivity, consistency, compromise, communication, and creativity.
When we talk about 'connectivity' we talk about the promise between the teachers at different levels in the school. So our year 1 teacher knows that, by the end of the year, children in her class will have achieved certain levels and certain competencies and understand the expectations and standards of the school at that level before they move on to the year 2 teacher. So the year 1 teacher is making that promise to the year 2 teacher and so on through the school. So there is connectivity right through - that's the promise. And at the end of year 8 we are promising our families and our kids that they will be well prepared for when they move on to their secondary education.
The kids love it here and have a real sense of well being. When we went through the process of reviewing our mission statement, the single key word that kept coming through was that the kids were proud of their school, that they liked being here. So that word stuck. It was tossed around a lot and in the end we came up with a very simple mission statement, which is 'Fairhall PRIDE - Pathway to excellence'.
When you break up the word PRIDE:
- P is for personal best
- R is for respect
- I is for integrity
- D is for determination and we always talk about that because if you've got that in place then,
- E is for enjoyment, and you're having a ball at school.
We talk about integrity as being the biggest word in Fairhall PRIDE and we want our students to really understand this. We talk to our students about being true to themselves and that, if they're true to themselves, then they'll be true to others, and that's a really important part of our Fairhall PRIDE.
It's a journey. Where excellence is on the pathway is difficult to define. It's like looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
We are always looking to improve so we will be doing status reports again at the end of the year, to look at the whole picture to see where the needs are, and place emphasis and resource support wherever it needs to be focused. So where to from here? Continue to develop the culture and manage that in a supportive way so everybody feels a part of where we are going. And to keep that energy moving in the direction that we want to head and not be distracted by things coming in from the sides.
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