Leadership+ Issue 116 December 2020

Leading a small, growing school

SARAH RICHARDS PRINCIPAL OF WHITECHURCH NS, RATHFARNHAM, DUBLIN 16

In 2012, I was appointed as teaching principal of Whitechurch National School; a small school in Rathfarnham nestled between the suburbs and the foot of the Dublin Mountains. Previously, I had taught in both a fourteacher school and a single-stream eight-teacher school. My new school was right in the middle of those, with six mainstream class teachers. I had just about found my feet juggling between teaching and the everexpanding leadership and admin side of the school, when the Board of Management decided to expand, and apply for additional classrooms to be built at the school to meet the everincreasing demand for places.

What followed was an extremely busy period of four years going through ‘developing school status’ - waiting on tenterhooks each time a circular on threshold numbers came out. Then we would be hoping that we would have the required number each year to get the extra teacher; based on the current year’s numbers, rather than having to wait the extra year based on the previous year’s numbers.

After much back and forth negotiating with the DES Building Unit, and thanks to the support of a persistent and seasoned chairperson, and an expert architect, we were approved for two extra classrooms, two offices, a reception area, two additional SET rooms, an extended parking

area, upgraded heating/plumbing system, and a septic treatment plant. Thankfully, the year the building work started, I was made an admin principal. What followed was an exciting year for our whole school community. The staff were amazing and put up with all of the temporary disruption and noise that the building work brought. The Student Council regularly inspected progress in the new part of the school on visits with me; all of us wearing hard hats and looking very official! We had a page on our website with regular photos of progress to keep the whole community up-to-date. And as every principal who has ever gone through a building project knows, you become an overnight repository of knowledge on all things schoolbuilding related, with building issues competing strongly with time spent leading teaching and learning!

One reoccurring concern that had emerged from discussions with parents and staff at the school about our expansion plan was, how would we keep our small-school feeling, which we treasured so much and thought of as one of our defining features. I began to try to tease out what exactly was it that made our school feel ‘small’ and how could we protect that sense of community?

We had a close working relationship with parents; developed through lots of volunteering at the school for activities such as ‘helping to hear’ reading in the mornings in classrooms, helping at book fairs, with the school garden, the library etc. The PTA were a very active partner in the school. All of the pupils knew each other, with older pupils taking on roles such as Games Squad, helping to organise activities for the younger classes in the yard. I realised that it was vital to actively protect those things and to seek out more ways we could develop our school community as our school grew.

Did we lose our small school feel? No, our school is as community-centred and as welcoming as it ever was - the only difference now is that we are a bit bigger. We’ve moved from 10 to 24 staff. Some things have changed, but we’ve managed to keep that sense of ‘small school community’ going! The moral of the story, in our case anyway, is that it really doesn’t matter what size school you are; if you keep a clear goal of maintaining and developing a strong sense of community, and you make a deliberate attempt to encourage and foster activities that align with that goal, you can grow but still be a ‘small school’ in the most positive sense of the meaning!

If you would like to get in touch with Sarah in relation to this article, you can email her at office@whitechurchns.biz.