The school’s values are not showing up in everyday decisions and behaviour
The values are clear and agreed, but they are not what anyone would infer from how the school actually behaves.
The values were defined carefully and everyone can name them. What is harder to see is where they change anything: which decisions they have settled, which behaviours they rule out, and what would look different if they were removed. The gap is not between the words and what people believe, but between the words and daily practice.
Presenting symptoms
- Staff can name the values but not a decision that was made because of them.
- Decisions are explained by circumstance or precedent rather than by principle.
- The values appear in documents and on walls more often than in conversation.
Possible causes
- The values may be written at a level of abstraction that cannot settle a real decision.
- Leaders may be applying them in their own choices without ever saying that is what they are doing.
- Leaders may be making visible exceptions for themselves that nobody has named.
- The values may have been adopted rather than agreed, so nobody feels bound by them.
In decisions. Nobody could point to one the values have settled.
Your most useful next step: Settle the next contested decision explicitly against a value, out loud, in the meeting where it is made, and say afterwards that this is why it went that way.
Lead behaviours
In behaviour. What adults do does not match what the school says.
Your most useful next step: Choose the one behaviour the values most obviously require, define what it looks like, and follow it up consistently for a term rather than launching a values campaign.
Lead behaviours
In the values themselves. They are too general to rule anything out.
Your most useful next step: Test each value by asking what it forbids. Rewrite with staff any value that forbids nothing, grounding it in something this school has actually done.
Lead behaviours
In leadership. The clearest exceptions are made at the top.
Your most useful next step: Name the expectation leaders most often exempt themselves from, and stop exempting them, visibly enough that staff notice the change.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
A value is only doing work when it has settled a decision that would otherwise have gone the other way. This behaviour is the difference between holding values and using them.
The gap widens through small acceptances rather than through decisions. Each time something falls short of a stated value and passes without comment, the value is quietly redefined downwards.
Values become real through repetition in ordinary moments rather than through relaunch. Anything applied unevenly is read by staff and students as optional.
Staff read the values from what leaders do when it is inconvenient. One visible exception at the top costs more than a term of briefings recovers.
Closing this gap is follow-through work rather than communication work. The values rarely need restating; they need enforcing in the specific places they are currently being ignored.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where a decision has been made on a value and nobody outside the room knows that is why. An unexplained decision teaches nothing, however principled it was.
Use this where the values are too general to rule anything out. Values grounded in this school’s own history tend to forbid something specific, whereas abstract virtues forbid nothing.
Use this where the values were adopted rather than agreed. Values written for a school by its leaders describe an intention, while values written with staff describe a commitment.
Use this where the exception is a person rather than a system. Values enforced for most staff and not for a few are worse than no values, because the inconsistency becomes the lesson.
A useful first action
Ask your senior team to name one decision in the last term that went a particular way because of a school value. If nobody can, the values are not yet in use.
Suggested approach
- Establish whether the values are currently deciding anything, by asking leaders for one specific decision a value settled.
- Test each value by asking what it rules out. A value that forbids nothing will not close any gap.
- Settle the next contested decision explicitly on a value, out loud, and say afterwards that this is why it went that way.
- Remove the exceptions leaders make for themselves before asking anything of anyone else.
- Follow up the one behaviour the values most obviously require, consistently, for a term, rather than relaunching the values.