A step by step guide to refreshing a school's vision and values

There is some feeling that Twitter (or X...) and edu-blogging in particular being in decline. Nevertheless, I find the process (occasional as it is) somewhat helpful. This post is a step by step guide to how I established a refreshed vision and values for a school that was new to me.

Context

I started my second headship in April 2023 after almost 5 years in my first. My new school (a very large, single sex comprehensive that opened 100+ years ago) could not be more different to my previous school (small, SEND, opened in 2014, and where I had stepped up from DHT).

Starting in the Summer term is an equal blessing and burden. On the one hand, it provides a great opportunity to look, learn, listen and start to draft the school development priorities for the coming September but on the other... you are barrelling towards very critical points of the year (being Head of Centre during exam season, timetabling and May 31st resignation deadlines) as a complete newbie in the 'top job.'

Getting to the point of having a school development plan for September can come from a process of (fairly) typical school evaluation but having a clearly articulated vision and values is something more profound. I certainly hadn't arrived with the certain intention of refreshing/resetting the vision and values - this isn't always necessary and it would certainly be hubris to impose a vision and values on a school in which there is already a clearly articulated vision that is well embedded and known by whole community and achieving its function.

Step 1: Establish if a re-set or a refresh necessary.

Find the current vision/values - when were they established? How 'living' are they? Do they align/overlap appropriately with your MAT if you've recently joined one?

In addition to adhoc conversations, I did the below activity with the extended leadership team (SLT plus Heads of Key Stage, Lead Practitioners and Heads of Faculty) and listening to the good-humoured conversations was illuminating, there was a lot of 'Ummm... I know I've seen this somewhere...!' etc. We were simply saying too many things about ourselves. Plus, our vision had been created two Headteachers ago and the world has changed a lot since their tenure between 2011 and 2018 AND we had recently joined a new MAT. The added bonus of this activity (in addition to being light-hearted) was the fact it helped facilitate the realisation for colleagues that perhaps we could do with sharpening our vision, values.

Step 2: Identifying your stakeholders

In one of my interview tasks, I had explained that I don't see it as Headteacher's role to impose a predetermined vision or values but rather to co-construct these with the community, to set our new destination together, and then guide the community towards it. I am convicted that having a shared language to articulate your goals and what matters to you is fundamental to a community's ability to work together - this is not an vacuous, "corporate" activity.

So: who to consult?

(a) Governors

(b) Families

(d) Staff

(e) MAT

I'll outline how I engaged each group with examples of the resources/activities.

Step 3a: Consulting with Governors

I did a simple 10-15 minute activity in a LGB meeting. I printed off copies of 'all the things we say about ourselves' currently (it came to about 4 slides) and asked the governors to highlight 5-7 individual words that reflected what they felt should be foregrounded. They could also add- any individual words that they thought were important.

Step 3b: Consulting with Families

I edited our annual survey to have 3 simple but important questions as the first 3:

(1) In a sentence or two, what is your greatest hope for your child when you think about your child and their future?

(2) In a sentence or two, what worries or concerns you when you think about your child and their future?

And then I asked families to rank ten 1 word values which were a mixture of ones that were already in the various documents/statements and others that seemed to be important from discussions.

On our Year 6 to Year 7 Parents transition evening, I asked new families the same questions and got them to write it down on pieces of card and to vote by tally mark for the values that were important to them.

The question about what worries/concerns you is important as I think it allows you to shape a vision statement that is very relevant/pertinent to your community as it is now.

Step 3c: Consulting with Students

I did a student survey in which I asked the same three questions as above (hopes/dreams, worries/concerns and a ranking task). I share all the values-ranking results below.

I also did a more detailed engagement task with the student council asking these three questions -->

Step 3d: Consulting with Staff

This was a 3 stage process:

(1) Speaking with individuals

(2) Working with the extended leadership team

(3) Working with the whole staff body

(1)As part of getting to know all 200 staff, I invited staff (in reverse alphabetical order!) to come to a 10 minute chat which had no agenda whatsoever. Colleagues used it in all different ways: they shared their life experiences before the school, their views of the school, their ambitions and aspirations, their kids, pets, hobbies. These conversations were fascinating and enriching and often shed light on what colleagues felt were priorities for our school and our students.

(2)At an extended leadership meeting in June we did the brainstorm activity described above but also discussed:

-->

The above (completed) pyramid is from Steven Radcliffe's Leadership: Pure and Simple and is really helpful way of thinking about how all of these things fit together. I explained to colleagues that right now we weren't necessarily in a period where it was all about generating ANY possibilities/ideas/blue-sky as there has been some instability at the school and next year we were focusing on consolidating and putting down some roots.

So when thinking about priorities, we used this simple 3-part framework for school improvement to identify absolute priorities: it's about your culture, curriculum and learning and teaching.

(The circles are from Simon Sinek's Golden Circle).

Doing 'Imagine/Draft your 'Top 3 priorities' with your 20 'most senior' senior and middle leaders was so interesting. It generated a surprising amount of overlap and alignment.

(3) All of the above generated quite a lot of clarity about the emerging priorities. These were then confirmed and sharpened in an inset day with the whole staff body.

*We looked at how the world had changed between 2018 and 2023 using lots of data, graphs and articles from a variety of sources such as TES, Teacher Tapp, IPSOS surveys, Geoff Barton articles etc.

*We did the values ranking task and had rich discussions such as what was the difference between a value of 'community' vs 'belonging.'

*We did the 'Top 3' priorities task (see above)

Step 3e: Consulting with our MAT

I'm lucky that our MAT is such that they genuinely responsive and keen that each school has its own identity and reasonable levels of autonomy. For example, my school needed this work on clarifying vision and values but that wasn't necessarily the case for the other 6 schools. Our MAT have values that (unsurprisingly given that I've chosen to work for them) I subscribe to. I shared the above processes with our Director of Education and CEO at each step so there were 'no surprises' and all our CEO really stipulated was that the we kept including our MAT values alongside the others when we were choosing, ranking and prioritising and ensuring that there was a sense of coherence between what we ended up with and the MAT's ones. It was appropriately light-touch and empowering as a school leader - certainly not the 'nightmare' of being dictated that 'now you're part of the MAT the vision is X and your values will be A,B,C.'

Step 4: Bringing it all together

I worked on the above all through out the 13 weeks of the summer term and it was surprising how much clarity and consensus did emerge. As July approached, I really was starting to feel confident that I had pinpointed what we all thought was important as a community (our values) and a clearer sense of what exactly we're all here for (our vision.)

If you look at the 3 graphs below they represent staff voice, student voice and family voice regarding values. I've deliberately not labelled which graph was whose because, as you can see, there is a LOT of consensus.

So, I therefore spent half a day in the summer holidays, turning this 90% clarity into a 'sharp' 1 sentence vision statement and 5 key values. I don't think there are 'quick' ways to do this - I iterated lots of versions with input from lots of 'word smiths.' I then set myself the challenge of being able to 'annotate'/explain the significance of every key word in the vision statement. I won't explain each one but:

'Thrive' is critical because it unites what families said they most wanted for their children: 'HAPPY' and what students said they most want for their futures: 'SUCCESSFUL.
'Belonging' was selected rather than 'community' after insightful feedback from a colleague that you could be a member of a community almost by accident (just because of where you live or your age etc) whilst 'belonging' is more active, more powerful. Also - it seems to be a necessary antidote to a sense of disconnection that seems more prevalent at the moment.
'Determination' was chosen as a more, assertive and proactive (and potentially less tired and problematic term) than resilience - I find Bruce Daisley's work on 'fortitude' and why resilience could be toxic intersting on this.

The results were:

Our vision:

Enabling everyone to thrive - acting with kindness, determination and respect.

Values: Belonging, Respect, Determination, Ambition, Kindness, Equality (whilst we started with 5 core values, the role of DETERMINATION meant that this was added as a sixth)

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