'Lynwood Heights Primary School' (Victoria) – Conducting a school audit
‘Lynwood Heights’ is an ‘alias school’ where the real school identity has been withheld to maintain confidentiality. The story is from research interviews undertaken at the school for this Guide.
'Lynwood Heights' is a government primary school located in a middle socioeconomic urban area and is one of several feeder schools to two popular local high schools. The school has a total of 18 staff across two buildings, and traditionally staff from the two buildings did not mix with one another. Parents have a history of some involvement with the school and the school population is generally aspirational with a mix of backgrounds. A high proportion of students come from non-English-speaking or migrant backgrounds, although there are no Indigenous students in the school.
Lynwood Heights was my first role as a principal. Shortly before I took up the position at the school I had been on an extensive training program that incorporated both the David Langford model and the Australian Quality Council Model. These gave me access to tools I might be able to use in my new role, but it wasn't until I arrived at the school and got a sense of the importance of values in setting the tone and environment of the school that I thought about how best to put those tools to good use. So just being armed with the knowledge only gave me a tiny advantage really. Being in the school that first few weeks really opened my eyes to the rationale behind audits, and the jigsaw of what I'd learnt on the training program started making some sense when I considered how to apply it at Lynwood. I suppose it's the difference between information and knowledge. In a way, the situation pushed me to think about the tools and strategies, rather than the other way around.
I suppose the reason I started looking through the lens of values education and doing an audit was that when I arrived at the school, it was clear to me that even though the school had a vision that talked about values, no-one really knew what these were or what the vision was. There was no culture of shared responsibility or staff ownership in reality, even though there was a team structure and sub-schools on paper. I could see that something was desperately needed. I didn't think it was my role to start lecturing staff on systems thinking but the core of the system is relationships and it clearly was not working. In a staff of only 18 there were two discrete 'camps' or 'cliques'. Staff only mixed with the peers in their building, a divide between 'senior' and 'junior' in such a small school!
It was clear to me that in order to change the culture of the school and to have clear understandings of what the school stood for – that is, our core values – we had to find a way of getting clarity around what that term meant to us and what a values education approach might entail.
It also seemed clear to me that the starting point was finding out what we thought and knew and where we believed we stood in relation to the notion of values and how we expressed these in the school. In other words, some kind of audit.
Defining the task
Together with the deputy and some other interested staff we thought about the kind of audit. We had heard of schools that spent a year or more conducting surveys. I felt that was too long. We also considered which elements of the school to audit – were we looking at curriculum, behaviours, attitudes? The starting point and the scope were the two key things to sort out. As I said earlier, getting the tools was easy – I had the Quality Tools and could easily distribute those to my small leadership team. What took most of the initial thinking time about auditing our values was defining that task!
We decided we would look at all aspects of the school, not just the curriculum. It took much less time than I'd anticipated, because I got the students involved in the grind of the number crunching. As this was early days, it was not realistic to expect staff to come on board. I knew that most of the effort would have to come from me, leading this process. I hoped that when I could show staff the hard data, that is the results of the audit, that would persuade them to come on board with the values education journey. In the meantime, though, it was basically up to me, as the incoming principal, to show the way.
I was really lucky that some of the staff had been waiting for something like this to happen. And from the beginning, they helped me. A group of three staff, including my deputy, and I brainstormed the tools and settled on a really simple, clear starting point. We sent a survey through the newsletter to all our parents, and gave the same survey to staff. It included a page of values and their definition and then a request to the participants to indicate whether or not they thought this value was present in the school. So the first step was just a general question about whether we see values happening in the school. It also served the purpose of clarifying for ourselves what we mean by values, which values we should be thinking about, and generally raising consciousness and conversation about values. It was certainly a change from talking about Essential Learnings or literacy and numeracy – a real shift in direction in the language in the staffroom. But this survey was still very general.
Refining the process
We started to refine the process and work in stages. We targeted specific elements. The first touch point was the staff. We ran a session in a staff meeting explaining that we were auditing where and how values were part of our school ethos and practice. We asked the staff to consider questions like: what values are currently operating in your teaching? Are these explicit, identified, acted on or are they implicit? All staff were given the same questions, which, as I said, the students helped me collate.
We then adapted these questions and put them to the junior school council and the school council. Students were asked about how they felt at school, the way teachers related to them, whether they could identify and give examples of the values in their daily interactions at school, etc. Teachers took some class time to get responses from students. Finally, we sent a second questionnaire to parents using the information we'd distilled from the other responses to again refine what we were asking our community to define. This is because most of our parents see the school as the 'experts'. They assess 'values' in relation to how comfortable their child is rather than some kind of expectation they have that the school will 'teach' values to their child. So the parent/community questions were around the ways in which and the extent to which they could put values statements around their child's experience.
A map of values
The entire auditing exercise took a couple of months. I did adopt a 'softly softly' approach on one hand, but had to balance this with not going so slowly that we'd lose the impetus. This audit process was really useful in giving us a matrix and a map of the values we identified existing in the school, comparing these with the nine values in the National Framework and also the Essential Learnings – but also noting that we had our own list of some things that were not in the frameworks. The audit also showed us where these values were implicit in what we did as a school, and where they were explicit, for example, where teachers taught students about manners, bullying etc, or where students were selected as leaders because they demonstrated values in their behaviours. The audit showed up the gaps and, in that way, gave us some insight into the chasm between our vision statement and what we were actually doing on a daily basis.
The most fascinating part of the audit though, was not the information it gave us, not the hard data, but the conversations it started in the staffroom, over a lunchtime, a recess, the kinds of questions they asked in staff meetings, the sorts of issues they raised in those meetings about what was missing at school. It was as though the audit opened up a window of consciousness and thought and took the staff back into their hearts. Suddenly, following the audit there was a lot of talk about 'values' around the place.
This was exactly what I'd hoped for. The purpose of the audit was twofold. One objective was to get some hard data so that we had a starting point. The other aim was to find a way of starting the values conversation without being too obvious about it, without lecturing at the staff as the new incoming principal. So on this level at least, the audit was a very effective entry point into the work that needed to come next, namely making sure that everything we do at our school is based on, and embedded through, values.