• Home
• Stories
• Rooty Hill High School

Rooty Hill High School (New South Wales) – Connecting values

This story is from Christine Cawsey, the principal at Rooty Hill High School, as quoted in Susan Pascoe (ed), Values in Education, Australian College of Educators, Canberra, 2002.

Rooty Hill High School (RHHS) is a large, comprehensive, coeducational school in western Sydney. Forty-five percent of its students come from non-English speaking backgrounds, including almost two hundred students from Filipino backgrounds. There are fifty Aboriginal students and a growing number of students with ties to the Pacific Islands. The community has had a local, comprehensive high school since 1962 and there is strong support for the school in the local community. The school is well known in the wider community for its reputation in the creative arts, particularly its successes in the Rock Eisteddfod competition from 1985–1997.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, the school also developed exemplary leadership and parent participation programs. The former principal, Malcolm Leaver, articulated a vision for the school that saw it win many awards for the skills in leadership developed by students, staff and parents at both the school and community level, including a 'Centre of Excellence' and an 'Outstanding Program' award for student and parent leadership. He was an early exponent of schools creating what would later be called 'social capital' (Putnam 2001). He believed the school should provide opportunities for students to develop their social skills in addition to what was available in the community. His focus placed the school firmly at the centre of community development in the district and engaged both parents and students who had not been involved in the past. Significantly, the school published a set of training materials for student leaders that is still used in many schools in New South Wales. Included in these materials are activities in conflict resolution, conducting meetings effectively, handling controversial issues, leading a team and group dynamics.

In 1997, I was appointed to the school as principal with the expectation that the school would maintain its focus on leadership, participation and learning. With the leadership of staff, students and parents, the school community, began a process of school improvement in a very difficult political and educational context. The context was difficult because there had been significant media and political criticism of public secondary, schools, in western Sydney particularly. Schools were also being asked to report on the performance of students on what was seen by many teachers as a narrow range of external measures, primarily centred around Higher School Certificate (HSC) and School Certificate examination results.

Five years on from that time, public schools in New South Wales are much more comfortable with their public reporting requirements. However, in 1997, there was great sensitivity about how a school would define and report on its improvements. One strategic response was to build acceptance of a broader range of areas of accountability, based on a wider conceptualisation of teaching and learning programs in the school.

At RHHS, the first step we took to articulate a broader version of accountability was the development of the school's Learning Principles (core values). These principles were defined at a conference of students, parents and staff. They, focused both on maintaining the best of the school's traditions and on identifying values for the future that students and staff would work towards. The principles were linked to the school's motto, 'Persist', and were refined by staff, students and parents over the next twelve months (see Figure 1). They also formed the basis of a statement of school purpose that committed the school community to a set of values for learning. This statement says:

Figure 1: Principles of Learning at Rooty Hill High School

In 1998, the school was asked to host a visit by local school principals as part of a district focus on school culture. As a result, the school conducted an analysis of its culture (ethos), looking at the culture on three levels – the level of 'artefacts' such as documents or defined programs; the level of 'socio-facts', a term used to encompass the rituals, stories and practices of a culture; and the level of 'mente-facts', a term used to encompass the ideas, values and philosophies of a culture. The school's executive 'mapped the culture' in a light-hearted diagram (see Figure 2) that then was used for discussions during the visit.

Figure 2. A Tentative Culture Map for Rooty Hill High School (1998)

In examining the culture for this 'Culture Project', it became obvious that when outsiders visited the school, they were most likely to notice and comment on the artefacts of the school – its property, the uniforms, the manners of students, the way the foyer looked, the prospectus and the behaviour of staff at the front office. As a result, students, parents and staff began to work on these areas. It is significant that parents and students provided most of the leadership in these changes and that their skills were well suited to managing a variety of projects at this level. Parents and students designed a new uniform that was successfully introduced in 1999. The parents designed a new foyer that was more welcoming and 'professional'. The school introduced 75-minute lessons to increase learning time, reduce the amount of movement and give students a break after each lesson. Students continued to he the public face of the school, both in the school community and in the wider community. These are the 'little' things but they are the things people notice first, so it was a case of 'first things first'.

Concurrently, staff and students evaluated and suggested changes to the socio-facts of the school, including the rituals, stories and structures that highlighted the 'way, things were done around here'. In a school, the socio-facts can include the way assemblies are organised, the way assessment is planned, conducted and reported, and the way, teaching and learning programs are developed. This is the level of processes and systems that underpin the more visible aspects of the school's culture and this is the level at which the professional leadership of teachers is critical. This level of a school's culture is not always well understood, even by those who are responsible for creating it.

In fact, in some 'struggling' schools, there will he a constant cycle of structural changes that do not result in any long-term change for students. Quite often, while new aspects of culture may emerge, positive aspects of the old culture may, be lost. There is considerable skill required to create sustained change and improvement while retaining the positive features of the traditional culture.

At RHHS, the staff decided to focus on a number of projects that had high leverage with the school community. These included the introduction of the 4MAT teaching and learning framework, a system of designing teaching activities to meet a variety of learning styles in the classroom (McCarthy 1987). It also included outcomes-based assessment and reporting in Years 7–10; a shift to 'stage-based' structures and curriculum; a commitment to implementing the NSW Department of Education and Training's Aboriginal Education Policy; and the successful introduction of a school-wide technology network.

At all times, the structural and visible changes were linked hack to the values, ideas and beliefs of the RHHS community. The school took opportunities that were offered and, despite considerable financial and resource limitations, developed its academic and social programs concurrently.