2022 and beyond at Tintern Grammar – Our Forward Strategy and what does it mean for students and families?
As we move towards the end of term, Christmas celebrations, and the end of the year, we are also moving towards the publication of the School’s “Forward Strategy Towards 2030” document. This will be available for all families and will also be a public document on our website. It is only intended to be a summary document that can be read without significant knowledge of the School and is supported by a detailed Operational Plan overseen by the Board through the School Leadership Team.
While detailed knowledge of a school’s strategic direction is not important for everyone, the significant amount of community consultation undertaken through this planning phase will have ensured interest from a larger group than usual, I suspect. While I look forward to being able to deliver this to families (hopefully prior to Christmas), I think it is important to outline what it will mean for students, families and the broader Tintern community from 2022 onwards.
Our forward strategy is based on three fundamental elements that in many ways will look familiar to families who have been at the School over recent years:
- Care
Care will underpin all decisions and actions of the School as a fundamental underpinning of our Forward Strategy Towards 2030. This will apply of course to all matters involving students but will also encompass decisions and actions regarding our wonderful staff, our families, and our alumni, as well as our broader partners, educational and commercial. It is care that will steer achievement, growth, emotional intelligence, opportunity and options, financial management, and every other aspect of the School’s activities.
Supported by this underpinning of care will be the two foundations of the student, staff, family, and alumni experience at Tintern.
- Learning
This will continue to encompass highest quality academic learning for our students, with the goal of enabling every student to achieve their own personal excellence, as has been a key priority for Tintern for many years. It will also emphasise the development of general capabilities essential in our modern world and workplaces, collaborative capacity, critical thinking, creativity and innovation and conceptual intelligence. Values and ethical understanding and action will continue to be key to the growth of students and our community, and we will be consciously developing self-awareness, empathy, and broader emotional intelligence as part of the “Learning” foundation of our forward strategy. And we will continue to emphasise the importance and significance of ethically and morally appropriate decision making and action as part of being an educated citizen of the modern world.
- Wellbeing
As our second key foundation, wellbeing will be prioritised both proactively and responsively. The decline in pre-adolescent and adolescent mental health over the last 30 years has been distressing and alarming, and this will have only be amplified by the pandemic over the last two years. Healthy social and emotional wellbeing is a pre-condition for achievement and success for any person, and we must seek to build this into our young people in a deliberate and conscious journey from our youngest in the ELC to our Year 12 leavers. At the same time, addressing the effects of the pandemic on the younger and older members of our community is going to be a multi-year project in our wellbeing domain also.
Our goals in the wellbeing domain will also encompass the development of confidence and resilience, and a deep sense of belonging, key attributes for future success in a rapidly changing world that they will move out into after school.
The aim of the forward strategy and operational plan will be to ensure our graduates are prepared for their future not our past. The world they will be working in and influencing in 2030 and 2040 will be very different to our current one, and if they are to be prepared to face the challenges of a future we cannot see, they will need more than excellent academic knowledge and understanding.
They will need to be able to learn and unlearn, to be creative and adaptable, to be courageous, ethical, and resilient, and to be able to understand themselves and others in order to collaboratively address the key challenges of their future.
You may already have seen in my email sent today (Tuesday 7 December), that we have also reviewed and reallocated roles and responsibilities in the senior leadership team to ensure our organisational structure also fully supports the new Forward Strategy. This is a key step in achieving our strategy.
While our “Forward Strategy Towards 2030” public document will not set out our forward strategy quite as I have above, these are the fundamental points as they will affect students, staff, families, and alumni. I hope that this sneak preview for our current community paints a future for our school that excites you as it does me!
I wish you a wonderful end to the year, a Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it, and I hope you and all your loved ones get time to have a much-needed step back from what has been a chaotic existence for the last two years, as we all try to truly re-charge our batteries!
Factis non verbis
