Susan Monks' Story

The path to principal
Prior to being appointed as a principal, Susan’s background was a bit unusual. Throughout her career she had spent long periods in schools, in both teaching and leadership positions but in between had stepped out to take support roles in the Education Department. She used this experience to her advantage in her appointment as the first, and therefore establishing, principal of a southern suburbs R-10 School. She knew how schools worked, but she also knew how school support worked, and how to negotiate staff and facilities, which was critical.

At the beginning she had two big challenges. The first was establishing a relationship with the School Council. Although the school had not opened when she was appointed, the School Council had been in existence for two years and had made decisions such as what the school uniform would be. To some extent the Council saw itself as the only decision making body. As staff were appointed, and enrolments began this would have to change.

Her second challenge related to the nature of a new R-10 school. The school was in an area of new housing and high population growth. It would begin with primary enrolments and expand to Year 10 as these students moved through the school. It was important to conceptualise and plan the school as R-10 but the initial staff would be primary. Susan’s secondary school background challenged many of the assumptions of some initial staff.

In an appointment like this Susan had no precedents. There had not been a principal to follow and very few examples of similar schools to learn from. It was very hard work. She drew on her experience from both previous schools and from her knowledge of the Department to get things done but she also had to balance the demands and assumptions of primary, and particularly junior primary, teachers with the need to shape the school for secondary students. There was not, at the time, a large number of female principals of secondary schools and few primary school principals with a secondary school background. She had a lot to prove, and no ready-made support structures.

The community of the new school was different from communities where she had previously served. These had been either poor or established middle class. In this new housing area there were parents who were highly ambitious for their children and looking to education to improve their future. They were determined their children would do well.

Growing in the job
You largely had to find your own way. There were no principal training courses; no mentoring programs. You assumed if you had not got something right it was your fault.

Enrolment proved to be a continuing challenge. The school constantly outstripped its enrolment predictions. Enrolment would be predicted at 100 and 400 would enrol. There was always a large number of contract teachers. At the end of the year they would leave and permanent teachers be appointed based on predicted numbers for the following year. When school re-opened more teachers would be needed. 

What Susan describes as “the in and out nature” of her career (meaning her history of moving between school and support role positions) enabled her to describe vacancies and plan staffing so she could reappoint the best of the contract teachers and be as efficient as possible in getting the extra equipment – desks, chairs, classrooms – that she was constantly needing. She understood the school’s needs only too well, but she also understood the constraints and pressures of the resource arms of the Department, and how to work within their constraints and pressures. She found herself defending either side to the other. Both had a point of view and both were right. She often had to duck, and many in the Department felt she haunted them – but she needed to and knew how to do it effectively.

These days there are fewer opportunities for aspiring secondary principals to get experience in support roles outside of schools. It served Susan very well.

Excitement!
The most exciting thing was that she was there! She had wanted to be a principal but her chances as a female secondary teacher had not been great. She had also wanted to start a new school. And here she was. She never got over the excitement and appreciation of it. Every morning when she drove around the corner and saw the school and students for whom she had to ensure an education she was energised. She had trouble believing it and thrived on it.

Challenging times
There were a few challenging incidents. One day Channel 7 reporters and cameras appeared outside the school for what turned out to be an issue about school zoning. Susan rang the Area Office and followed procedure.

Incidents like this were insignificant in comparison to the daily challenges of getting appropriate teachers and resources to ensure every child in the ever-expanding school had a space, a desk, a chair, books, a library and a learning program that would take them to Year 10. She was constantly preoccupied with intake, builders and staffing. The impact of getting any of this wrong constantly dragged her away from teaching and learning matters.

Then there were the layered views about curriculum within the school. There were three distinct views from the R-2 teachers, the 3-7 teachers and the 8-10 teachers that had to be thrashed out and reconciled. She recalls a staff meeting that some junior primary teachers declared a waste of time while secondary teachers declared it the best staff meeting they had ever attended!

There were behaviour management issues, not just of students, but of some staff appointed with warnings of problems. Performance management was stressful because there was not, at the time, a clear set of procedures for dealing with it. The fluid nature of staff numbers and contract appointments added to the uncertainty and stress.

Financial management was a challenge. Because the school began with primary enrolment, the financial officer was not a qualified bursar and funding was constantly fluctuating. While there was an establishment grant, the unpredictability of enrolments – and the fact that they constantly grew faster than forecasts – meant constant financial challenges with little expert help. There were no financial training programs for schools at that time.

Support
What Susan most needed was someone of whom she could confidentially ask stupid questions. She remembers early on in the job ringing a trusted principal colleague to ask how you got the school bins emptied.  She used to go home, pour herself a drink, cry or laugh, then get on the phone to her friends who were also new principals to talk over the day.

It was as much as anything an issue of confidence. Where do you get the confidence to know you’ve got it right?

Advice and Comments
With hindsight and added experience Susan would do it all differently today and would have much greater confidence. She decries the lack of training for principals at the time. She would take every training opportunity, drawing energy from the students and the privilege of delivering their education. 

Ken Cock's Story

The path to Principal

Being a Principal was something Ken had decided he really wanted to do. He had, in his term, “grown up through the game”, and understood that being a teacher prepared him for administrative roles in schools. He made an early decision that he wanted to be an educational administrator, feeling that he could do the job better than many administrators he encountered! He knew that was where he was heading and along the way he had learnt to differentiate good and bad educational practice. Knowing his goal, he did a Graduate Diploma in Educational Administration while he was a Senior/Coordinator. From that course he learned about power relationships and the difference between power and authority.

He had several early experiences in acting positions and learned from these that he had skills in working with colleagues. He thought he was a better administrator than he was a teacher. This was reinforced by positive feedback about his performance in acting roles.

His first principal appointment was a promotion within a difficult school. He felt that being promoted within the same school made his job easier because he could see how controversial situations had arisen and already had considerations to ponder how it could be different. The situation called for greater awareness of the rights of individual staff, especially young teachers. It was important to support their learning.

Ken didn’t begin with a powerful vision of teaching and learning but over time realised the need to articulate a vision with the underlying principle that education is for all. He quickly saw that a principal has to be able to support learning not only for students but for teachers, support staff and parents. It was his responsibility to ensure that every individual student, staff member and parent/guardian could participate.

He found there were people around him who did not believe that. For example, some parents  objected to mixed ability classes because they believed their child was brighter than others and should be grouped with only ‘bright’ children. He realised that as principal he had to set the rules but also provide the understanding, otherwise people would work against his direction and vision. The vision was important, but no use without the support to achieve it and the respect for other points of view. The vision with respect and support gave people confidence to change.

Growing in the job
Ken used as a touchstone the difference between power and authority. Key to his growth as a principal was the understanding that, in the role, he was always going to win any argument. He had the final say. Strategically he did not need to override, bully or dismiss concerns. He had seen from experience, as well as study, that people who are treated dismissively or backed into corners by an authority figure work against and undermine that authority. People need to feel supported. He tried to understand other points of view, to bring people around and help them understand. He spent his first few years learning that the principal’s job is about relationships, developing and maintaining them.

When he arrived at his second appointment, in Adelaide’s south, with 1700 students and suspension rates of 10-15 students a week, from the relatively small school in the Iron Triangle, he thought, “My God, I can’t do this job, it’s too big!”. In his experience, it is normal, in any principal’s job to have self-doubt and ask yourself: “Can I do this?”. You are known as the Principal of a particular school and it is daunting. You do, however, have skills and experiences to draw on and you gain confidence and grow into the job.

Excitement!
Managing major change was the thing he found most exciting as a principal. When, after 12 years as a principal in Australia, Ken took a job as principal of a private school of around 300 students in Indonesia, he walked in confident in what he needed to do to improve the school. He had a great time and achieved an enormous level of change, raising the quality of the teaching, he believes, from quite poor to really good. He knew how to go about creating change and how to get people working with him rather than against him.

The worst thing about being principal, in his view, was the feeling that you are working against the tide. He realised, after he left his southern school, that although he had made good and significant improvements for students, there were things he had not achieved, such as improvements in the Year 12 results. There is always more to do and you can always improve your performance.

In Indonesia he planned curriculum change over five years. It took five years to introduce the International Baccalaureate. He understood that he had to get the community – teachers, assistants, parents and students – committed to it, confident and competent to introduce it. There is no way the school could have done it when he first arrived. With preparation and planning it was highly successful and transformed the school.

Challenging times
When Ken went to his southern suburb school there were 159 staff, many of them highly committed to education and to achieving outcomes for disadvantaged students. Others, however, were less able to identify and address the needs of specific groups or individuals. Establishing and carrying the vision for a unified approach to improvement became a challenge. He needed to get the school community on the same page to work together for a single vision.

At the first staff meeting he explained his vision and then held a series of community meetings to clarify and renew a mission statement for the school. The school community finally unified around the motto ‘Education for All’. This really helped focus the school’s work. When the Chemistry teacher came in to argue for new stools with high backs for the lab, he did so on the basis that kids were being educationally disadvantaged by the old stools – and won his argument. The suspension policy was changed so that a school leader who suspended a student, personally took the student home to explain the situation to the parent and negotiate a return program.

Education Department policy at the time decreed that practical classes – for Home Economics, Craft, Science – should not be greater than 20. This meant that Maths and English classes were around 34 students. After a year Ken decided this was not good enough. Students were not getting enough help in the core curriculum areas. He worked out the school could average class sizes to 24 across the board. He talked to the timetable team. They did a dummy run and it worked. He then explained to the staff that class sizes would be 24. There were arguments that ‘these kids’ needed the practical subjects because they ‘don’t like Maths and English’. The arguments were worked through and extra teaching assistants provided in the practical classes to improve the ratio of adults to students. Ken met with every faculty and then introduced it. The change was instant. Immediately the withdrawal rooms had fewer students removed from class.

This, he believes, was the most successful change he made, and the one with the greatest impact on teaching and learning.

At the same school a group of students went on strike. There was no warning. One recess time about 200 students didn’t go back to class but sat on the oval. It appeared to be an issue of student voice. After a bit they left the school and walked into the local town centre. Ken followed them on foot – partly because he needed time to think. When the strikers got through the shopping centre and moved to the local park without incident, he returned to school and got the deputies together. They decided that as long as the strikers weren’t causing problems in the community they would let the strike run its course. They also believed that there were some staff members indirectly associated with the action. They sent some empathetic teachers to make sure the strikers were OK – with a reminder of responsibilities and duty of care.

At lunchtime, Ken went to where the strikers were gathered. By then there were reporters and a media helicopter overhead. Reporters spoke to the students and to Ken. After that the students dissipated. Many of them went back to school. The Education Department CEO rang Ken. The Department came behind him and was very supportive. The next morning the admin team made it clear that any students who didn’t return to class would be suspended. About 30 didn’t return and were suspended. Eventually all returned. Ken and his team talked to the student organisers about the impact on the school, as well as their issues.

On another occasion a disaffected parent went to This Day Tonight with a (completely false) claim of “Aboriginal gangs” at the school. At 11am in the morning a parent rang to ask about it because of a promo she had heard for the program. Ken notified the Chair of the School Council, who rang every Council member, all of whom rang the television channel to correct the story. The Council members rang others and the Channel was inundated with parents supporting the school. In the end the story was reduced to one minute on air and the community support spoke volumes for the school. Ken recalls this as an amazing experience. Even so, he didn’t sleep well on Sunday nights for about six years!

Support
Initially Ken did not find much support from principal colleagues. He had, he believes, to stand on his own two feet and get support from within. Ken needed someone outside the school that he trusted and could talk to, be open and honest with. He needed and got his District Superintendent’s support. In his experience, local principal networks were competitive and prone to jealousies and power plays. Deputy principals too, formed a supportive team. Much of his support came from home.

Advice and Comments
Ken is conscious that he is now looking back on his experience from a distance. Had he been asked while doing the job, he may have responded differently. From a distance, his advice would be:

      • make sure you have a vision;

• make sure you use authority rather than power: respect everyone in the school; be strong about what you believe; be able to explain why and how; don’t back people into corners;

• recognise and admit you are not always right - you won’t be, and you won’t always be successful; and

• don’t hold a grudge; have an argument by all means but don’t prolong it and don’t hold a grudge. 
  

Lorraine Young's Story

The path to principal
Lorraine’s first principalship was a promotion within the Open Access College. She won a promotion from assistant principal to principal of the R-12 School of the Air. Over time, she came to realise that transitioning to the principalship in this way meant that she did not make a conscious effort to establish herself as a leader in the new role. She realised that she did not make sufficient effort to relate to staff and parents in a different way. Staff continued to relate to her in the old way and social interactions were, in fact different. 

Everything shifts and a new principal needs to make the role her own – not just follow in the footsteps of her predecessor or extend her previous leadership behaviour.

Growing in the job
When Lorraine won a principal’s job in the State's southeast, part of her preparation was reflecting on how she had undertaken her first principalship and what she wanted to improve. She decided that she wanted to be more definitive from the beginning about what she wanted to achieve. This extended from an overall vision, to her interactions with people, to what she expected of them – and of herself.

The school had had stable, mature leadership for 20 years. She wanted to think carefully what she could bring to the school. She wanted to articulate her vision. She understood by now the fine line between having a vision and bringing people with you. She held interviews with all staff about what they thought and factored in appropriate aspects gleaned through the process. It was a very established small school. People loved being there but societal needs were changing and the school also needed to change.

Excitement and Greatest Achievement!

What excited Lorraine was the potential for young people. The kids were fantastic. The school had a strong academic focus and yet there were some students less well catered for. There was a quaint cottage on the school grounds that the school was in the process of selling. After talking to the school community and DECS, Lorraine stopped the sale and with the help of keen staff and community members, set up a Food and Hospitality course, converting the cottage into a restaurant that operated one day a week. The school also had a vineyard and a struggling viticulture course. This was a base to be built on. It had a knock-on effect. The community valued the academic emphasis of the school, but this added dimension allowed kids who needed something else to stay at school beyond compulsion and pursue credible alternatives. The course gave the students skills and confidence that often resulted in employment within the local community. It could be linked to other  schools in the District and serve them as well.  Eventually both the viticulture and food and hospitality courses attracted a range of state VET Awards. Seeing kids succeed is what gave Lorraine her satisfaction.

Challenging times
School buses were an ongoing challenge. One route in particular attracted complaints and eventually a question in Parliament. The driver, when he believed kids were misbehaving, would pull the bus over, call Lorraine and she would drive to the bus and supervise the rest of the route. She had issues with the driver’s conduct and requested that DECD not renew the contract. Despite concerns this did not happen. In the end the matter was resolved by installing video cameras in the bus – after consultation and agreement with parents and the Education Department. Getting support was not easy but good documentation and continual consultation was the key. Lorraine would review the footage each day. This reduced the issue and made it manageable.

Another of the school buses travelled across the State border into Victoria. On one occasion there was a bushfire on the Victorian side of the border. Lorraine and the primary school principal discussed the bus journey with the Victorian State Emergency Services whose advice was that the bus route was OK, so Lorraine approved its departure. It was not OK and the driver took the bus through a fire zone. There were, understandably, parental complaints. In these circumstances information is everything and you need very, very good information services. 

Fire information services have improved but principals still need to exercise extreme caution. After the fire incident the school developed and ran their own training course for bus drivers. Through experience Lorraine learned the need for initial and ongoing training for bus drivers is a critical factor in successfully managing school buses.

Another challenge was managing the poor performance of a newly appointed,inexperienced teacher. While there were teachers at the school whose performance was at times marginal and needed encouragement, management and training to meet expectations, the school had not, in living memory, known a teacher who was unsuited to teaching and did not appear to have the capacity to perform. Managing the process of supporting the teacher to improve, supervising, documenting, and finally having their services terminated, was difficult, time-consuming and stressful. DECS provided central support however managing the process day to day was extremely frustrating and took a toll on Lorraine and the staff support person.

Support
Colleagues were Lorraine’s prime support. The Open Access College had many internal support mechanisms because of its size and unique delivery demands. The southeast school was small. Lorraine was the first new principal in the district for a long time, there were not many small local secondary schools and she was the school’s first female principal. It was not easy to find people who understood her situation.

In the case of the poorly performing teacher, the regional director was very helpful and supportive. Amongst other things, he organised observational visits for the teacher. The local AEU branch, particularly the area organiser, was helpful. A colleague who had dealt with a similar case in another school helped her to remain strong through the process. 

Throughout the process, Lorraine attended to the needs of the affected students and parents, but not so much to staff. When the teacher left the school staff morale was at a low ebb so Lorraine organised monthly staff meetings at a local winery to build staff connections, confidence and relationships.

Advice and Comments
The greatest challenges are personnel-related. Identifying people who can help is itself challenging. In small schools single teacher faculties make it hard to surround teachers with appropriate support. You need to identify people who have lived it and can help.
You need strong and extensive networks linked to your context and be able to work those networks to find the human resources that you need – for yourself and for the school community, particularly staff.