Jak Kearney explains the purpose of a school vision and the ways that community engagement can help promote and encourage this vision
My name is Jak Kearney, I am the Head and CEO of Sotogrande International School in Spain. We are an IB world day and boarding school based in Southern Spain. We see ourselves as more than just a school, but as a learning community. We educate students from over 50 nationalities and have a transient student body. As families come and go, we work hard to create a sense of community, with the school as a central connecting point. To cement community cohesion, we needed more than events, fundraisers and other opportunities to connect.
At Sotogrande International School, we worked hard to use all stakeholders to review and create our vision. A vision drives us, it can be used to define a company. If you read Simon Sinek’s’s recent posts, he believes that we no longer need CEO’s, we need CVO’s. In business a ‘vision’ can be proposed by company executives. It can be imposed by people from above, which works, especially when we as consumers buy into this vision through our actions and behaviours. However, I feel that a different stance is needed in the area of education if we are to build school communities rather than just schools.
Schools can be seen as providers of a service; parents 'buy into' a school’s vision by choosing to send their children to the school, or in many of our cases, pay us to educate their children. Often this is where the relationship ends. Are these parents buying into the vision, or are they buying into the service and the outcomes?
When was the last time you honestly looked at your vision? Did it make sense? Did it sound like your school?
For some reason, schools for too long have kept with vision statements that were written at their conception. If a school is 40 years old, hasn’t life moved on since then? School communities are ecosystems of stakeholders. If a vision is to be truly effective and believed by all, we need buy-in from all stakeholders: staff, students, parents, alumni and board members when creating our vision. These people see the school from many different angles as the deliverers, the experiencers, the supporters, the products and the guardians of the vision. If we are to create a truly compelling vision that acts as guides for the future of a school, three hundred and sixty degree feedback is critical to enable a school to co-construct a vision with their community.
Gaining feedback helps you make useful adjustments and realigns energy which helps the community move in the right direction
Why is it crucial?
A vision should be the guide to the strategic plans, the decisions of where a school will be putting their energy and finances for the next 3-5 years. Being part of the creation of a vision, enables support and connection to a strategic plan. This establishes a feeling of connectedness, protectiveness, ownership and loyalty to a school.
Loyalty to international schools is critical; often student turnover is high and we need to find ways to retain the families that we have. I believe that when we start to include all stakeholders in vision creations, we grow a sense of community, which increases loyalty and makes departure harder. I also feel that using stakeholders to measure the impact you have made towards achieving your vision is equally important. The evaluation process is core to success; gaining feedback helps you make useful adjustments and realigns energy which helps the community move in the right direction. When we all move in the same direction, growth and development happens faster, more efficiently and leads to transformation.
So to summarize, when we ask the community to help create the vision, we generate better support, we create a sense of belonging, make change happen faster and ultimately retain more families.
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