LOOKING AT OUR SCHOOLS from every angle

DAMIAN WHITE PRINCIPAL OF SCOIL SHINCHILL, KILLEIGH, CO. OFFALY AND IPPN BOARD MEMBER

Many years ago, on a cold, blustery early Spring morning, my father was on top of our tractor diesel tank, struggling to get a flow going into the tank of his thirsty Massey Ferguson, when his flat cap blew off. He looked down to where it had landed, where stood two well-dressed young proselytisers who, on spotting that they had his temporary, if impatient, attention said ‘Good morning, Sir, would you like to talk about peace?’

Now, my father is, and always has been, the mildest mannered of men. Peace could be his middle name. But in that moment, the wrong question had been posed at the wrong time and, with an oily vise grip pointing towards them, our young missionaries discovered the virtues of the saying ‘A good run is better than a bad stand’. Peace would descend once he could sink his plough and leave brown earth behind him.

That little memory came back to me this week as I interrupted my writing of my Principal’s Report to complete a survey on how we are planning to use our Looking at our School (LAOS) document this year. I always use the IPPN PIMS template for my reports, and had completed the list of extracurricular activities when my own mostly hidden trait of concentration deficit drew me to the LAOS questionnaire – a relatively mild exercise in gazing at the navel of the school and outlining plans for the coming year. It was one of those questions that asked us to expand on a previous answer, which shouldn’t have triggered me but it did. I ranted to myself about the list I had just made of all the activities available through the school for our pupils, which have all continued through the worst subs crisis I have seen in almost 30 years as a school principal. I agreed with myself that the person who wrote this question didn’t sit watching ‘Smother’ on a Sunday night, tenser than monied matriarch Dervla Kirwan with fear and dread of the next phone call or text.

I finished the survey with a scowl, using the opportunity to vent a little in one of the expanding boxes, and finished my Principal’s Report without further incident. There are 12 headings and 36 sub-headings in the PIMS prompter, which upon counting them, set me thinking again.

‘Looking at our School’, I thought, is something that I do every day, is something our ISM team does every day in their own areas. It’s something the teaching staff does every fortnight during Croke Park Hours. It’s something the SEN and SNA teams do on the regular occasions on which they meet. A school is a living, breathing organism with multiple moving parts interconnected regardless of where the school is, its size or its circumstances. It has evolved over time to be where it’s at today.

The school I’ve been in for the last 29 years as principal has grown from 6 teachers and a cleaner in 1994, to a staff of 37 people today, including teachers, SNAs, ancillary and cleaning staff. Enrolment has risen in line with demographic shifts. It’s our story and one which is similar to many others across the country. For other schools in areas where there is population decline, the story may be about a struggle to survive and the small victory of a slight growth in enrolment to match a drop in the retention figure in a given year. In each case, we as school leaders are constantly ‘looking at our schools’, predicting enrolments based on known factors and figures, and planning in accordance.

Regardless of the size or situation of the school, whether you are a longserving and experienced school leader or someone just in the door, looking at your school and seeing what needs to be changed, improved, switched or introduced requires a lot of thought, consultation, communication and time. Eating an elephant, were you that way inclined, can only be done in bite-sized chunks. Today your school is living and breathing, and only by dealing with the changes necessary in agreed, manageable chunks, can you be best positioned to do the same.

Looking at our Schools is an admirable lens and a structured framework for focusing on areas where we think changes may be needed in our schools. We must remember to give ourselves credit however, for the changes we make regularly and may not document, which positively affect our schools and the well-being of our colleagues and pupils.

And when someone arrives on that distracting, crazy day with an awkward question, make sure you have nothing in your hand to hurl at them!

NOTE: The PIMS Templates can be downloaded from www.ippn.ie

Damian.White@ippn.ie