Oasis Staff Conference - Monday July 16th

Group reflection after afternoon session



Lunch in the canteen




We're all pleased with our new Oasis lanyards

If you eat that you won't have space for your ice cream ....

This event was, for many of us, our first experience of the wider Oasis family. Many of us probably did not know quite what to expect from this day at All Nations Bible College at Ware, but everyone by the end of the day were pleased to have attended.

Overnight we reflected on our experience and thought about how we can retain and develop the unity and purpose that we have gained as a staff over the past few weeks.

There were features of school life in some of our previous establishments that we wished to avoid, namely :

• We want to retain a positive outlook and avoid slipping into a negative mindset where criticisms stop being constructive
• We want to promote a collective spirit where we avoid statements like "it's not my job to ...." at the same time as taking a strong professional lead in the areas for which we are responsible. There are times when we will all need to roll our sleeves up and get stuck into the general "to do" list.
• It is not our aim to have a culture where it is a slight on someone's reputation if they express a need, or ask if something blindingly obvious could be explained again.
• We want to avoid any tendency to label "them and us," be that another subject area, another local school. another area of Oasis or the Leadership Team. Such division detracts from what we are about. At the conference it was mentioned that "the quality of our relationships is more important than the work itself."

We don't want to appear pious in these statements of what we wish to avoid. We all know that we have indulged ourselves in plenty of this kind of thing in the recent and more distant past. It's just that we now sense an opportunity to grasp for something far better, and at the same time as saying what we want to aim for, it is useful to be equally explicit about what we want to avoid.

We are looking to establish a number of traditions that can continue to "set the tone" for the way that we relate together as a staff. Some of these might not be manageable in the long run, but as of 17th July 2007 these seemed worthy of note :

• Opportunities to eat together - family barbeque, cakes on Friday, end of terms nights out, bring and share lunch.
• Cards and cakes on birthdays - for both staff and kids
• Staff welfare team that go beyond usual bouquets and leaving presents, focusing instead on more general aspects of staff well-being
• After-school staff football, other sports and pastimes eg a book club
• Photo and video biographies of staff in the foyer and on the website
• Staff prayer group
• Interaction with parents eg "Dads and Lads" football tournament
• Establishment of Academy archive

Finally, we thought about the kind of school that we wanted to be in five year's time, and what we can do now to make that a reality :

• We spoke about the need to develop genuine partnerships with other secondary schools, primary schools, the local authority and other arms of Oasis.
• Making a "soft boundary" with the community
• Developing and retaining high-quality staff
• Continuing to recruit effectively, getting the "right people on the bus and finding them a seat"
• Gaining a reputation for high academic standards (a likely outcome of a high-trust environment)
• Keeping the feeling of fam-a-lee as a high priority
• Telling our ongoing story as it develops down the years
• Forging interdependence as a hub and across the Oasis organisation