CEO’s Column

Dear Colleagues

Living our values through the Strategic Plan

During Term One, we were thrilled to launch Anglican Schools Australia’s new Strategic Plan. If you missed the launch, please take a look at the short video clip here purpose of supporting Anglican schools in living their Anglican identity.

SUPPORTING

Anglican Schools Australia

Our Core Purpose is clear – To serve, support and connect Anglican schools in living their Anglican Identity. This Core Purpose, and indeed the whole Strategic Plan focuses around 4 Core Activities:

Firstly, and centrally – Anglican Identity. Our strategic intent is to promote and support schools in living your Anglican Identity. We’ll do this by providing more resources in this area, and by providing networking opportunities for people across member schools who have a desire to be enhance their school’s Anglican identity.

Our second Core Activity is Supporting Chaplaincy. Chaplains are central to the faith, worship and wellbeing of our schools. Throughout the life of this plan, ASA will be seeking to both support and connect our existing chaplains, and to assist our member schools by supporting the recruitment of new chaplains. Working closely with the Anglican Church nationally and locally in this work will be key to its success.

The third Core Activity is Engagement through Advocacy. Our intent is to have a broader engagement with the Anglican Church, its Agencies such as Anglicare and others, as well as with government, industry and business. Our advocacy is in areas related to our core

The fourth and final Core Activity is Sustainability and Growth. Our intent over the life of this plan is to ensure ASA’s sustainability through membership growth, security of our financial position, and ensuring our operational continuity.

Details of our Strategic Plan can be found on the ASA website. You should have received an email from us earlier this year providing an overview of the Plan. One thing about Anglican schools is that we clearly and publicly state our values for the world to see. If you go onto a school website, you’ll find a series of words (and often accompanying statements) which the school uses to communicate to its community and beyond what it holds dearly and how people should treat one another. By placing such values ‘front and centre’, it means that people can assess the authenticity of a school in living the values they proclaim in living its Anglican Identity. A review and restatement of a school’s Core Values is an important reminder for us all that if we say our school values mean something, then others should expect that we’ll live this set of values, and they can reasonably hold us accountable for so doing.

The development of our new Strategic Plan provided an opportunity to reflect on what we see is important to our organisation - what we believe, what we hold dearly, and how we expect people will treat one another. Some changes were made to these Core Values to reflect ASA in the 2020s.

ASA’s Core Values are:

Inspired by Christ, we embrace

• Service

• Integrity

• Inclusion

There’s no better time for us all to be reminded of the awesome privilege and responsibility as Anglican schools to proclaim the Gospel through story, worship and deeds, therein living your school’s stated values in and through the school and wider community.