Dear Colleagues,

Week 5 has arrived and Term 4 is clearly racing away. Last week we began our collaborative strategic planning with schools across the system. I attended cluster meetings in Warialda and Wee Waa and witnessed first hand the capacity of our school leaders to think strategically.

The CSO Leadership Team has previously developed its draft AIP 2025 through meetings of the Leadership Team, CSO Teams, school principal meetings and the Armidale Catholic Schools Board. The School Performance Leaders are now working with school principals on their plan and school leadership teams are presenting their draft plans in cluster meetings across the Diocese.

In the system of Armidale Catholic Schools (ACS) our focus has always been on creating and maintaining the right culture based on positive professional working relationships. The feedback from school principals is that this has been a contributor to improving school performance, The importance of a culture of trust between the central office and the school leaders has always been the highest priority.

Following the establishment of a positive culture that reflects ‘systemness’,this is strengthened through collaborative strategic planning. The relationships grow in the work as personnel from the central office work with school leaders to reflect on school performance and areas for strategic improvement.

This reflection process requires the school principal to annually identify:

Their areas of greatest influence in the previous year
The targeted interventions undertaken the previous year and their impact
The leadership challenges for the following year
How the central office can assist in meeting these challenges
The current thinking about the 2 or 3 most significant improvement goals for the following year

These reflection conversations with the school performance leader are supported by the ACER National School Improvement Tool (NSIT) which assists leaders in asking the following questions:

How are we going? (self-rating);

How do you know? (evidence);

What are we going to do next? (planning).

The diagram below summarises how as a system of schools we engage in the school review process in a way that supports a culture of continuous improvement. This process balances capacity building and accountability in a way that maintains positive professional relationships between the school and the central office.

The initial step of planning focuses on collaborative annual strategic planning which is then supported by capacity building. This involves the use of the NSIT and all available data as evidence.

The second phase requires the leaders and classroom teachers to be involved in action research as an ongoing model of site-based professional learning. The formality of this stage will vary according to the local leadership and context. It is an activity that happens in professional learning teams as the non-negotiables of a professional learning community are being implemented and embedded in schools. Teachers as researchers in the classroom are investigating the impact of the change described in the AIP as they implement it in their classroom practice. A successful action research outcome has been shown to result in a change in teacher beliefs.

The third accountability phase relies heavily on the work of the school principal and school performance leader as they consider the data available in the data ecosystem, relevant surveys and ongoing collaborative case management of schools.

I am confident that the growing sophistication of our strategic planning processes is a major contributor to school improvement. The conversations in the cluster meetings last week were extremely professional and collaborative with a real emphasis on the evidence of impact that leaders were looking for at the end of 2024.

My thanks to the principals and school performance leaders for their commitment to this very important work. I look forward to the remainder of the cluster meetings over the coming weeks.

Best wishes,

Chris

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