Bourke Public School: Strategies for improvement

Paul Loxley has been Principal at Bourke PS for ten years. He tells his story of making changes.

The teachers thought I'd been sent here to turn the place upside down and rebuild it, which wasn't at all true, but that was the word that was out. That's not a conducive environment to work in, particularly in a school as isolated and remote as this one — low levels of teacher expertise, no programs, no guidelines and those sorts of things.

The first thing I did was that I tried to win the kids. I thought if I win the kids, at least someone will be saying something nice about me.

A basic teacher day is worth round $170. So I look at everything in terms of casual teacher days, because in the past we haven't had a lot of casuals. But I used to think, like, for a casual day I could buy fifteen soccer balls, and when I first came that's what I did. I bought a heap of equipment. I just bought a mixed assortment of 200 footballs so that basically every kid could have a ball. People were thinking — what's this goose doing throwing all this equipment on the playground! — without realising that for about ten teacher days I'd just won nearly every kid and most of their parents. And I went out and helped them kick them around.

Then I had a dingo's breakfast, a good look round to see those people that were doing a good job, were good practitioners and might be able to help in relation to literacy delivery. Initially, that's all I looked at — plus student management. But I couldn't do it myself. I had to find a core of people that wanted to go on that road with me, because you're not going to do any change of its direction by yourself. You've got to take people with you. So I just picked people up and those people took on responsibilities. I made sure they had the support and the resources to do what they wanted to do.

After eighteen months I think people saw that I was here for the kids. People saw that what I was saying and how we were gearing up was all about outcomes for kids.

In my first two years here I used to get phone calls all the time about what teachers were doing in classrooms. Something would pop up so I'd fix it. It was all reactive. But that was the only way I could go to start with. And I could understand their frustration.

So we started by putting the handbook together — the rules. Our Core Beliefs emerged out of this process.

Read the Core Beliefs…

I'm not a big one on paperwork, but if people are going to understand whether they're playing tennis or football, you need a grip on the rules. And school's no different. You play by a set of rules and everybody can enjoy the game.

That was a fair bit of work and I had a number of very capable young people that came on and started to help me, and the snowball got bigger and bigger and bigger to a point where we had nearly everybody on board. Weight of numbers shifted a few reluctant people. What we did we did well. Fair dinkum stuff.

So then we thought what else can we do to improve what we do? And we took on student management.

We took all the different aspects of student management - anything, people just tossed them in - and we put them into categories. All I did straight up was to say — righto, we're going to do this in an appropriate time frame. We're not going to rebuild it overnight. We're going to prioritise. What are the most important things to do? What are the easy things that we can fix right now? What are the medium- and longer-term things?

We set that up through the school management plan. Right from the start we worked with well-laid out plans with performance indicators, appropriate time frames — all the right things. I've got a file here that has every management plan for the last nine years in it, and you can see where one thing's just rolled into the other, all based on defined need. We've been chipping away.

Read about Bourke's 2001 goals and indicators…

The other important aspects were professional development — that's always been important — and delegation of responsibility.

You can't tell people that you want them to participate if you're not going to give them things to do and support to do it. So right from the start, the priorities and the responsibilities in the management plan have been linked to school-wide and personal professional development plans.

But apart from all those things that were happening, right from the start the most important thing I did was respond to any phone call or any request from a parent immediately.

When parents come and see me I say — you talk and I'll listen. Do you mind me taking some notes? I take the notes. I learnt very early that once they're going, you shut your mouth. It might take forty-five minutes or an hour. But you just sit there and listen. Then I say to them — right, to fix things up I need to do this, this and this. I should be able to get back to you by tomorrow lunchtime. But if I haven't got back to you by tomorrow lunchtime, I want you to ring me.

Right from the start I never made a decision about any kid without consulting their parents, and I think that's a major issue, particularly with Aboriginal kids.

You've got to empower people, you can't just rock up and say — your kid's done this. They're suspended for four days. Then a second short suspension that goes to a long, then expulsion. You know the story. It's being written every day in the schools of Australia.

By establishing those links with parents, and more particularly Aboriginal parents, at least I had some credibility. They hear my side of the story and the kid is always there so I can say — righto, what's your side of the story? — and then we'll make a decision. Take the emotiveness out of it.

Read on about the central strategies at Bourke…