The Hidden Depths, or Shallows, of the Principal’s Welcome Page

Dear Principal

Thank you for your welcome to your website where you wrote

“As Principal I have one aim, to ensure that our school provides an excellent education.”

What a great start. Who doesn’t want an excellent education for their child?

I accept it is your main aim, but surely not your only aim?

How about aiming to eradicate drug dealing; protecting pupils from sexual abuse; supporting those in need; making the school a learning centre for the community?

How about an aim to help every pupil achieve more than they expected?

How do all these fit into your “excellent education”?

I am sure you meant all those others as well.

There’s more.

Aiming high, or missing the point

You wrote,

“For me excellence is not just about exam outcomes, although these are incredibly important.”

Great. We are getting to the heart of what I want from a school.

My still-not-perfectly-formed child has a lot of growing and learning to do, especially how to succeed in a society more judgemental and demanding than that of her immediate family.

Examinations alone won’t cut it, even though they are critical to her future.

Like all parents I want my child to reach those top examination grades in a school where there is good order, where respect is developed and shown, where differences are understood and accepted, where there is sound support when wrong turns are taken or mistakes are made.

Do you include those when you say “excellence"?

Going the extra mile, or, wandering in the dark

You describe how you grow this wider excellence -

“(our school) is also about ensuring that all our students are able to experience a wide curriculum which is both academic and enriched with experiences beyond the classroom.

Also? So, what you writ next is second to examinatios? Do exams count above all other elements?

Not in my book they don’t.

Why hide behind the teacher-talk, jargon-jingle, frosted-glass approach to clarity?

What does a wide curriculum mean?

What will it look like?

How will the school (every bit and piece and every single person) give this “wide curriculum …enriched with experiences beyond the classroom”?

Is that what your current pupils are doing when they wander around the shopping centre at lunchtime, or when they congregate in the bus depot at the end of the day frightening the elderly?

Or do you mean they can join after-school music groups, rock climbing excursions, ski trips, dance sessions, tandem skydiving, origami clubs and volunteering at the local food bank?

Where do the developing young people in your school experience this enrichment?

Do you not enrich their experiences just by teaching them in a classroom?

Or are you still teaching from books and bits of paper?

Do you live by what you say, build it into the fabric of what you do, demonstrate it in the ways you treat each individual?

Do you enrich every part of the school experience so that my lovely child will be enriched by what pulses through the veins of the place?

As a parent I know where there are lots of activities you might look to for enrichment experiences.

But you never ask.

Do parents get a look in?

I give this singular and unique little person called, ‘my child’, far more out-of-school experiences than you ever could.

Will you value what I offer?

Tell me how you will work with me to soak my precious child in experiences so that their path to adulthood is richly strewn with keen and wide learning, empowering example, telling encouragement and all the elements that nurture character, build intellectual success and justify public acknowledgment in whatever form it comes?

I have put in hard time over many years to nurture my well-loved little person. I don’t want to throw away all that work now.

Reassure me you can do what is needed to take her down paths I never walked in my growing up and towards places I only glimpse but you know are beneficial.

Your welcome page doesn’t reassure me you see those places, never mind that you can or will go there.

So many issues and we haven’t even met.

Principal, you and I need to talk.

Am I still welcome?

(c) Ted Dunphy

19.11.2023