Clip 6: Management support

Trevor:

Without that active engagement and involvement of senior management, it’s not going to work. And I think it’s a really interesting example in this school. Jo is clearly the professional leader in relation to the literacy work. But whenever we have had offsite work, whenever we have been in the school working, both Pauline and Eleanor are very visible participants.

Eleanor:

One of the changes in terms of professional learning is that our staff have become more accepting of “This is what our school does”. We are not just here to teach students, we are here as learners ourselves and we need to keep learning.

Our vision is that we can tap into the expertise that we have within the school. We’ve got a lot of staff here who have specialised in pedagogical areas, have got expertise that they can share with other people, and that they can lead cluster groups, cross-curricular cluster groups. So that their passion or their expertise isn’t contained in one area but can be distributed and shared right throughout the school.

Pauline:

And I think for a school like ours, which is a little bit isolated, it’s a very valuable way of developing staff expertise – using the expertise within the school itself rather than having to rely on always experts from further afield. And you don’t always have the ability to have immediate contact with other experts. It takes time to do that.