A Contagious Positive Ethos

At the beginning of the school year, most teachers spend the first day or so getting to know their new class and, in turn, their new class gets to know them and their expectations.

At the start of my teaching career this used to involve writing the set of class rules, worked on together so they were agreed but not imposed. Each year in my teaching and headship roles I’ve seen this done but in the better schools, I identified a not so subtle difference between what was included and what was left out, together with thought-provoking wording of the class contract.

This year, I did my usual rounds of the classes on the first day and found this activity taking place in each classroom but it was the first year that I noticed the dramatically different style from previous years.

One factor I put this down to is the increasing stability of our primary staff, all have been with us for more than three years so they’ve developed an understanding of the heartbeat of our school and have become attuned to how it impacts on behaviours within the school.

The terms of the class contracts were all positive; instead of the typically seen: ‘no bullying, keep your hands to yourselves, say please and thank you, don’t take the belongings of others’ etc, we saw statements such as ‘We will help others to do their best, We will never give up, We will play a positive part in the life of the school community’. The focus away from the negative has a very strong influence on the life of the school and this year, the theme was universal.

Since becoming the Principal at TLC Private School, one of the roles I rarely, if ever, have to undertake is that of a disciplinarian. Through a comprehensive programme of developing personal standards we have grown into a community where disruption, poor behaviour and bullying runs contrary to the role the students have in our school community. You might expect that this takes some time to learn or develop but new students joining our school soon embrace this esprit de corps and become part of the almost utopian learning environment we all enjoy. It could be said that perhaps like-minded families are the ones most likely to seek places at TLC but I still believe there is a strong element of a contagious positive ethos that infects all who join us.

The net effect of this is that TLC Private School is a highly enjoyable place to teach and learn. Students know the social expectations of them and are now translating that into the academic expectations of themselves too. We have just had the cohort of students who first encountered this philosophy pass through their exam years and they achieved our best ever results  and they are now moving on to their A levels. Alongside their enthusiasm to learn, they have an enthusiasm to succeed, not because of the rewards it can bring but in many cases, purely for the pleasure of knowing they’ve achieved their best.

I often say I wish I could bottle whatever the essence of the school is and, if I did so and passed it on, much of the apathy, poor behaviour and hopelessness that pervades education across Europe would be solved in an instance. For now I’m simply content to know I have the honour of being the leader of a school where every single child does their best to learn but also to be a contributing member of the best school community you could ever imagine.

Next year, I wonder whether we’ll need class contracts at all?