6 Leadership Lessons from a K-6 school

A Partnership story

Writing in the Australian Financial Review recently, Tim Dodd highlighted the success of a regional Australian primary school in lifting its scholastic performance.  He tells the story of “the remarkable partnership of a committed principal [John Picton] with an education policy specialist and mum [Jennifer Buckingham]” and how they have helped the school to be “significantly ahead of its peers”.

Lessons from RTPS

This uplifting story of Raymond Terrace PS – a previously under-achieving school in a disadvantaged area of Australia - to me has lessons for leaders in both government and business. These lessons are:

1. Be suspicious of  “common sense”, fashionable or theoretical/ideological approaches to solving complex social and organisational problems
2. Don’t adopt a solution before you understand what is really happening in the particular school (or hospital, or office, or factory)
3. To understand, immerse yourself in the school (or hospital, or office, or factory) and listen and observe - don’t jump to diagnosis
4. Engage with the students, teachers and parents (and patients, doctors, workers, managers) – they want to do better, but may not know how; they need you to help them
5. Entrench a culture of continuous student-centric improvement (customer-, citizen-centric); recognise that targets and performance-based pay produce aberrant responses and destroy pride amongst workmanship in students, teachers, staff and managers
6. Provide funding and resources only when those directly involved understand the problems and have determined how to begin addressing them, otherwise the money will be wasted.

The Core Lesson

John Picton believes that “low-income children are not condemned to perform poorly at school”.  Jennifer Buckingham has “changed her thinking”;  “It’s not a one teacher/one student situation”, she says, “ there are so many different factors which feed into” such complex organisational challenges as scholastic performance.
This is the key lesson for all leaders: to boost organisational performance, first understand the complete “system” from those struggling within it.