By Simon Leese
Principal, Prince of Wales Island International School, Penang
Former Headmaster at Christ’s College, Christchurch, New Zealand
Schools typically invest a lot of time and effort in refining documentation which sets out how they will respond to a critical incident. Often legal advice is taken. The process of examining a school’s operational effectiveness is always useful, and much of value will emerge.
They hope they will never need to test their systems. They can never be sure all the carefully prepared stages will in fact eventuate. They are, however, confident that having the plans in place, and making a conscientious attempt to act on them, will insulate the school and its officers from criticism and perhaps litigation later.
A plan which proves to be a flawless route map through a critical incident has yet to be written. A scenario which exactly fits the response process, and is successfully resolved in all aspects because of it, has yet to be created. And so the process of anticipation becomes ever more detailed, and the response procedures, more specific and less likely to be appropriate.
So what is the real secret to the successful management of what constitutes a crisis? It is at the moment of the unexpected, the unanticipated confrontation of an emergency, that a school discovers just how deep and secure are the foundations of the school culture.
It is at that time of chaos and dislocation, that the character of the school, and all its constituent members, emerges. Whatever the action plan may say, it is the reaction of individuals (not just the designated school leaders) which determines what happens next. The file with the response plan is on a shelf somewhere; the ability to cope is embedded in the people.
In February of 2011 Christ’s College in Christchurch New Zealand experienced what was to prove a deadly earthquake. There had been some others previously – a sequence completely unexpected – which had caused damage and disruption, but which most thought had spent its extraordinary energy.
Builders were on site fixing damage from the previous events. It was just at the start of the lunch break. Most of the school streamed out to an open space in the middle of the school – but from some buildings only narrow passageways, already strewn with rubble provided a route to that central area.
Staff held students back and sent them through the gaps in small groups – judging their opportunities between aftershocks. The whole school was soon assembled.
There was no plan, but senior pastoral leaders collected their House groups of 70 students around them. Within five minutes, all could report that all students were accounted for.
How did that occur? How did we know if members of year 13 had sneaked off into the adjacent Botanic Gardens during their private study period? Who knew who had just been taken to the off-site clinic unexpectedly an hour before?
The detail of how that day unfolded, amidst terrifying aftershocks, raining down masonry and human tragedy elsewhere, is not the subject of this article. What was clear was an action plan would have been meaningless and irrelevant; it would have added nothing.
In the most challenging of circumstances the outcome was the collective initiative, composure and professionalism of staff, the good sense, cooperation and support of six hundred students, and the ability of those to whom the crisis management fell, to convey confidence and decisiveness.
None of that can be written into a plan. A crisis is a blood test for a school. All the indicators of a healthy school need to be present and it is the wrong time to discover a latent weakness.
The strength of a school community, and its sense of collective and mutually supportive well-being, must always be there, ready to confront the unimaginable. The preparation for high drama, is not at all dramatic. It is in the deep quality of everyday interactions and relationships.
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