Although this blog will no doubt be cleared following my departure from the school, I just wanted to put a couple of parting thoughts down. It has been a great adventure at Fahan. It is wonderful school with a great community and one that consistently punches above its weight when it comes to a whole range of involvements.
Given the period of time that has passed since I commenced, at the risk of criticism, I want to put a few thoughts on the record. I have already written on what I consider makes a good school but at a personal level, for me it is the open and smiling faces of young people who appear so excited by the journey ahead of them. This is what really sets the flame alight – it is what makes one want to be at school each day and it is what ensures one sticks to the task, even when things are not as rosy as they might be. It represents a clear indication that something is going right.
Our staff has been brilliant. They are a particularly dedicated and generous lot in the main and manage, almost without exception, to bring out the best in the students, both academically and in their broader lives at school. The school is richly blessed with the caliber of personnel who work here.
I do, however, have two concerns about where education is going. The first relates to the role of parents in the lives of their children. I emphasize these are broad strokes with which I am painting and certainly do not apply to every family. The vast majority of our population are excellent parents who are clearly in turn raising some absolutely brilliant and delightful young women. However, it worries me greatly, that across our society generally, the level of accountability to which our young people are held continues to drop. Less responsibility taken by some parents for the performance and general upbringing of their children is often leaving their offspring adrift from life’s realities and without a fair and reasonable set of parameters within which to operate. A willingness to jump to their defense when they err and a more concerning failure to allow the processes of fair and reasonable consequences to be applied to them, masks a weak attempt, in some cases, for parents to cover for what ultimately may well be their own failure to play a more consistent and active part in their child’s upbringing.
This situation further amplifies itself where young people move into the world beyond (and even while still in) school, without understanding that when one does something wrong there is a consequence. They have not been allowed to accept accountability for their actions, therefore they are effectively graduating with a strong sense that they are bullet proof and untouchable. The resultant behaviour around the streets, in the malls, on the buses, late at night around the club scene are, in my view, the direct result of this failure to be proactive, fair, strong and consistent with our expectations of them as they have grown up. It is further accentuated with a failure of our court system to impose consistent and strong consequences for those who misdemean.
Parents need to reassert themselves in their family environments. Saying “no” as appropriate is a legitimate and reasonable way of starting the process. Children need to understand and appreciate their boundaries and this little two-letter word can assist. Despite what one may be lead to believe, the fact is that schools cannot continue to take on more and more of the fundamental responsibilities which should still be and remain in essence within the domain of the parents.
The other major concern I have for the future is the level of political interference that continues to creep into the operations of our schools. Mostly the work of bureaucrats, who may have at some time had an association with schools, whose knowledge and understanding of the current, day-to-day challenges involved with the education of children would be lucky to occupy as much as half the space on a 3c postage stamp (note, they no longer exist, which further emphasizes my point!), this increase in regulatory, dumbing down of a school’s operations provides an unnecessary, often irrelevant and short sighted attempt to fix all that is wrong with the system as it exists. Well pardon me for saying so, but it’s true! Apart from all of that, it amounts to more and more paperwork, an act in itself that obviously does little more than keep some of these people employed and pushing paper from one desk to another as the micro brains of government attempt to sure up their political manipulations with little more than the next election in mind!
My view is that the question of school effectiveness and as a direct correlation, the performance of our young people can be more positively influenced if we are able to solve my first concern. We are, after all, independent schools and as such we must stand on our record. We are audited, we register and re-register every six years, our staff are registered, we complete a variety of time consuming accountability requirements that are directly linked to our level of government funding (including having a flagpole!) and so the list goes on…. Above all else, we exist, sinking or swimming in the educational market place so long as we are producing the goods. What more powerful a model of accountability can there be? Nothing more needs be said.
No doubt any of the anti-independent school proclaimers who read this will take some alternate view. However, when the time comes (as it hopefully will) that governments realize every child is entitled to a good education and the provision of this can be directly related to parental choice AND then supports families, by allowing them to use their funding entitlement to make that choice, then we will see which schools and their staff perform up to the standards we all might reasonably expect.
Enough from me. Thank you for allowing me the privilege to lead this great school for the past thirteen and a half years. Bye for now.
