24th June 2022
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
The leadership team and I have been looking ahead to September to identify our priorities for the forthcoming year. Key to our priorities will be further embedding our core values of Trust, Respect, Equity and Excellence. I have had cause to refer to these values several times in my discussions with families this week. Trust is the one thing that keeps us together as a community. We have always worked hard to be as transparent as possible when it comes to how we run the school and we do this to gain trust. Our values and our systems at the school are designed to ensure the very best for the children and young people we serve. It doesn’t end there though. In a constantly evolving landscape it is important that you continue to place your trust in what we are doing and the decisions we take. In school we trust that our learners will do the right thing; that they will cooperate with the rules that we implement for their wider educational benefit. We trust that you will all support us in the effective running of the school, even though you may not agree with every single decision. This takes me onto our next value: respect. Our value of respect has three simple strands - respect yourself, others and the world around you. Our behaviour policy centres around maintaining these strands. It is us taking civil responsibility for our community. It is all too easy to think only through the lens of self, but this is not enough. If we are to really live through this value we need to think of others and appreciate that there are often consequences to the decisions we make. I am trusting families to have conversations about the importance of this and of respecting the rules that we have in place at school. I am trusting that learners respect each other, not just themselves. Just focusing on your own needs is not respect, it only leads to selfishness. Our third value, equity, also comes up from time to time in my dealings with learners and families. I often used the illustration below to highlight the difference
between equity and equality - something so often misunderstood.
Equity really goes hand in hand with respect . Respecting ourselves is the first step but if we only do that it is all too easy to fall into being selfish. If we are to respect others we need to respect differences; we need to respect that to achieve equality of outcome it will be at the expense of equality of opportunity. Things are not always the same for everyone. It is a classic argument for someone looking to justify bending the rules - what about that person or that situation. In these situations my advice is always to focus on running your own journey at your own pace, not that of other people. If you are focusing on others then who is focusing on you? Respecting others and respecting differences will allow us to achieve equity. We want to achieve excellence for everyone. It won’t always result in an identical path for them though. I am pleased at the tolerance and support I have seen this term from our learners. It requires a delicate balancing act to achieve these values. Sometimes parents will challenge them as a result of decisions that have affected their children. We welcome such feedback but sometimes conclusions are made about the impact of our decisions on the culture of the school without obtaining the full facts. I have had a couple of meetings with parents who have questioned some of our systems and invited them to walk around the school with me to see learning in action. They were pleasantly surprised that what