This is part 2 of a series of articles in which I explore what I learned about leadership from my experiences of opening a new school. Here is a link to Part 1 in which I introduced myself, provided a little bit of history to set the scene and talked about the value of always assuming good intent, regardless of whether good intent is intended or not.

Winning the School Community: a never-ending story….

Recruitment of students is a hugely important function of the foundation leadership of a new school. There will be no school if there is no community. So how do you get a whole community of people to join you on an uncertain journey, when what you are offering is very different from what they are used to and they are perfectly happy with what they currently have? The first answer is to present a new vision for education and, in doing so, provide a reason for making the change.

A second answer I have decided is…you woo them. I am not talking about the cheesy one liners you might hear from a stereotypical car salesman or the sleazy pick-up lines from a casanova but rather I am talking about the wooing in a genuine love story like, for example, The Notebook by Nicholas Sparke, where the wife has alzheimers and her husband of so many years, woos her on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis even though she no longer knows him, in the hope that he will be able to bring her back to him and herself even for a moment. He continues to do this even though time and again he fails, and despite the sure knowledge that when he is successful and she knows him for a moment, she will disappear back to the ravages of alzheimers and once again he will be plunged into the pain, grief and loneliness of losing the woman he loves. This is a story of unconditional regard and faithfulness.

Wooing a school community, particularly of a new school, but perhaps all schools, requires commitment, faithfulness and unconditional regard. As in all good novels, the road to true love is never smooth, and faithfulness gets sorely tested. This is certainly true of our journey. I read somewhere that embracing change means daring to be different and accepting that people may strike at your idea like it’s a piñata. How true this is. When you embark on a road that is different, you can be sure that many people will strike at your ideas - most viciously at times – and this has the power to unsettle everyone on the journey. It can make you doubt yourself as the leader, and it will certainly cause a strain to relationships.  I don’t want to dwell on the negativity we experienced at this point of our school journey, but I do want to acknowledge its impact. 

Have you seen the advertisement where the family are on a journey and the children keep asking, “Are we there yet?” We kept asking ourselves that same question in relation to our school community and we came to the realisation, having asked the question for the 100th time, with the answer remaining the same, that in fact, we will never arrive. Winning our school community will be a never-ending story. My mentor and coach, Colin Prentice, gave me some very sage advice after collecting some very positive feedback from the community in our first year of operation: “Don’t ever sit on your laurels. It only takes a moment of time for the tide to turn. You always need to be winning your community.”

So that’s the journey we were on. Winning and continually winning our community. This is not a state of affairs peculiar to our school or even just new schools; all schools should be mindful of whether their school community is on the journey with them, or rather, whether we are going on the journey together. It is particularly pertinent for schools wanting to make a significant change in educational direction. However, it is a pressing issue for new schools, which often start with a small roll, but have a big school infrastructure to maintain and may initially be staffed quite highly. New school principals often worry about finances and worry about whether they will have to lay off foundation staff members one day if the roll does not grow sufficiently.

A Parent’s Story

It is good to hear from a parent’s perspective how they experienced the school at this early point of its history. Here is one parent’s perspective.

Initially we weren’t going to make the shift to Amesbury School. Our daughter had had several good years at her previous school, with the likelihood of a fourth.  Then things changed at the school and I thought that seeing as things were not settled there, we might as well explore a change to Amesbury School. I went to one of the meetings at Thyme Café and for me that was probably the turning point where I became really keen because a lot of the philosophies, the way you were talking about how it would work and the individual development plan for each child. Just the whole style.….not homework for the sake of homework. A whole pile of different aspects…. independent learning. My daughter had gone to Montessori Pre-School so I am already the kind of person that is open to something that is maybe a little bit different and doesn’t have pre-conceived notions about something. I liked that learning would happen in a variety of ways, individually, small group, big group. I loved the concept of team teaching. There were lots of things like that that made sense to me and really won me over. I suppose I was not so worried about the ABCs and the 1s, 2s, 3s. I went into it knowing it could take six months to develop the school and its programmes. We decided we just wanted to be part of that journey. I am not one of those customers on this side of the fence who says, “I want you to deliver - without thinking about what goes into it.” Both my husband and I accepted that it’s a brand new school, a brand new system, brand new teachers who’ve got to learn to work together. They have got to get to know the kids. The kids have got to get to know each other. And I think part of the excitement was that we could be part of that journey.

Any uncertainty we had would have been more around the focus of the school prior to going to the information evening at Thyme Café. Up until then all we had seen were newsletters and pictures on the BLOG and there was one meeting at the Churton Park School that I went to. I guess coming from a decile 10 school and what we’ve been used to and then you turn up, with a Māori Cloak, speaking Māori and for me it was very much, Oh my goodness! What direction is this school headed in? Because for me it was not something I was familiar with.  It is not something I grew up with. I didn’t experience it in my school life, haven’t experienced it in my adult life. And my daughter had not experienced it in her little school life either. It was not so much a negative, but it was a perception and something we hadn’t been exposed to and it created an uncertainty. It was like, “Oh my goodness, where has this person come from. She’s very well educated, but how much practical, on the ground experience has she got.” So for me that was about coming along to those sessions and listening and then when you get up close you can get a really good feel for a person and for the direction of the school and where it is going. And you realise it is much more than that. It is all the different cultures, and all the different experiences and all the different ways of learning. And that I love. But initially, it was, “Ooh! That’s different! How’s that going to go?” She’s got eight kids and they don’t go to school. What does this mean? All the other teachers were relatively unknown. You were it. You were Amesbury School. To be honest I never had anything to do with the principal at my previous school…the two principals. Because I just dealt with my daughter’s teachers.

I don’t know whether it was just how I perceived it or whether it did evolve over time but what happened was that as I became more involved in the whole process, the newsletters had all these greetings from other nationalities, and it got bigger. Initially, for me, that [Maori culture] was front and centre. That wasn’t a bad thing, but it was about the only uncertainty I had because I didn’t know where it was headed. It’s a perception thing.  In relation to your cloak, when we had our opening day, to actually see it up close and when you explained to the students what it was about, it was almost like …you addressed the students, you talked to them about your kakahu, but it was as much for us. And once you understand it, it means so much more. And seeing the young ones at the gala wearing their kakahu was really cool and brought it all back around for me.

This parent wasn’t a typical parent in her lack of anxiety about the “A, B, Cs and the 1s, 2s, 3s”. She wasn’t typical in her understanding and acceptance of the fact that getting the new school up and running would take time. However, her story does illustrate some very important lessons and some complexities that it is useful to illuminate about winning our school community. In our experience, as illustrated in the Parent’s Story, winning the school community began with capturing the minds of the community members and beginning to capture their hearts. It then required our being faithful over time to the community and the fragile relationship that had developed. During this time, there was a greater responsibility on us to maintain and strengthen the relationships. I remember my mum telling me that a counsellor told her that the person in the relationship with the most insight had the greater responsibility to maintain the health of the relationship. Perhaps it will always be more our responsibility as schools to maintain relationships.

Through this faithfulness, the hearts of community members became more deeply engaged and the relationships became more robust. However, as I have already said, this is a never-ending story, and we realise that we will always need to continue to be faithful, to keep working at engaging our community, strengthening relationships and developing trust. I think, as in many contexts, the moment you stop working at a relationship, it doesn’t just stay still, but begins going backwards.

Our leadership learnings were that we have the greater responsibility to develop and maintain relationships and that we always need to be working at our relationships with our school community, most particularly in those early years. Finally, we noticed that the process we went through to build our school community can be summarised using the “wooing” metaphor as follows:

Winning Your School Community: A Summary

Capture the mind

 Begin to engage the heart

 Be faithful over time

 Capture the heart

 Keep being faithful

I will explore the various aspects of this process in subsequent articles and please keep the Parent’s Story in mind, because I will refer back to it often.

Ngā mihi nui

Lesley