What are your Core Values?

What does your school value? What is their number one value? How do you know as a member of staff what to prioritise?

These are questions that most staff would have asked at some point in their career.

The culture of a school is a key component to the success of their students, the wellbeing of their staff and ultimately how effective they are as an organisation. The problem with creating a positive culture in schools is the external pressures placed upon them. For example, a school may value developing all students holistically and will build opportunities into the curriculum and extracurricular programmes for them to push themselves outside their comfort zones through activities such as trips, sports, arts and drama. Most people would agree that this is a valuable culture to have as a school, but what if an inspection then identifies under performance on academics? Does the school stand by their values and risk the leadership team losing their jobs due to poor inspection results or do they compromise their values and focus more on results and less on developing ‘soft skills’ such as leadership and inquisitiveness? 

These are the pressures that school leaders face wen trying to create a ‘winning culture’ within their school.

One of the key problems is that whilst staff are normally aware of the schools values, they don’t necessarily know what their priorities are.

In ‘The Barcelona Way: Unlocking the DNA of a Winning Culture’ author, Damian Hughes, highlights the importance of prioritising the organisations values and ensuring all staff are aware of these through looking at Disney’s model.

The organisations’ values are:

1. SAFETY
2. CUSTOMER SERVICE
3. SHOW
4. EFFICIENCY

The organisational values are ranked in order for a reason. To use Damian Hughes’ example; if a member of staff is trying to help a customer, but they see something unsafe happening, i.e. a child climbing over a safety fence, they know that safety is their number one priority so can easily make the decision to stop what they are doing and ensure customer safety.

How often do the teachers in your school feel conflicted when they are deciding what actions to prioritise? Do they go on the school trip that will support student’s developing softer skills if it means they miss a lesson with an examination group or do they stay in school and focus on ensuring every student achieves high grades? How do they know what the right thing to do is?

As an organisation it’s important that a school has a set of core values, but to my knowledge not many rank them and share this with staff. If a school wants to embed a culture throughout its structure then every employee must be fully aware of the values and their level of importance to the organisation.

What are your schools’ values? Academic success, student safety, holistic development, staff wellbeing? Why not ask staff to vote on what the schools priorities should be? Decisions that come from staff are powerful and create a level of ownership that allows the school to drive towards creating a winning culture.

This blog is based upon the content of The Barcelona Way: Unlocking the DNA of a Winning Culture by Damian Hughes