Hereoa: Clarifying goals and plans using Spirals of Inquiry

I think that developing the coherence across the cluster, coming up with our key goals has really given us a direction to head in, has given us a focus. Whereas before, although we had a plan and we had a lot of things in our plan, we were getting a little bit bogged down in all the details. So this has really clarified things for us, shown us the way forward and we’ve found it’s just made our planning within our own schools, as well as across the cluster, so much easier. I think the Spirals of Inquiry work has been really helpful. It’s been hard at times because we’ve been held back in the scanning but we’ve needed to, but we didn’t know because we were ready to rush ahead. And I think now we’ve got greater perspective because we did that. So that has been a really helpful tool. As a group of leaders, we are leading by example, by engaging in an inquiry ourselves, our future-focused inquiry. And I think it’s really powerful for the staff to see us engaging in this inquiry so that we’re modelling to our staff what a future-focused leader is involved with and is engaged in. For me, the early childhood services have actually contributed a whole lot to our group. We’ve got several services that are involved, but there are lots that are not and I think for a lot of clusters, that is the elephant in the room. Our centres have persevered when things haven’t quite fitted for them and I think hats off to them because they’ve done a wonderful job at staying as part of our team and continuing to bring their perspective to enhance what we’re doing and to help them but there are times that I think they were probably ready to think why are we doing this?