How to improve school culture without another values poster

If you have searched for how to improve school culture, you are probably not short of advice. Some will tell you to rewrite your vision statement. Others will suggest a staff away day or a new set of values on the wall. None of these are bad ideas. But in my experience, culture rarely changes because of what a school says about itself. It changes because of what people do, day after day, when nobody is presenting.

Culture is simply the way things are done here. It is how a new teacher is welcomed in September, what happens when a lesson goes badly, whether a student feels known by name, and how leaders respond when someone disagrees. So where do you start?

Find out what your culture really is

Before you try to change anything, you need an honest picture of where you are. Leaders often have the least accurate view of all, because people tend to show us their best side.

Ask staff and students, and listen carefully. A short, anonymous culture survey can help, as long as people trust that their answers will be read and acted on. Walk the corridors at different times of day. Sit in the staffroom. Notice which stories get told about the school, and which ones people would rather forget. What do new colleagues say after their first month, before they have learned what not to mention?

You may not enjoy everything you hear. That is the point. You cannot improve a culture you are not prepared to see.

How to improve school culture, one habit at a time

Once you know where you are, resist the urge to launch a big programme. Choose one or two values that matter most, and ask a simple question: what would this look like on an ordinary Tuesday?

If one of your values is respect, what does that mean for how meetings are run, how emails are written or how behaviour is handled in the corridor? If you value collaboration, do teachers actually have time to plan together, or are they expected to find it in the evenings?

Turn each value into two or three visible habits that everyone can describe. Then make those habits easy. Culture improves when the right behaviour is the normal behaviour, not the heroic exception.

Leaders set the weather

Staff watch what leaders do far more closely than they listen to what we say. If we talk about wellbeing but send messages late at night, they notice. If we ask for honesty but react badly to bad news, they learn to stay quiet.

So start with yourself and your leadership team. Which of your own habits support the culture you want, and which quietly undermine it? Agree a small number of commitments as a team and hold each other to them. It is uncomfortable at first, and it is also the most persuasive thing you can do.

Middle leaders matter just as much. Much of what a teacher experiences as "the school" is really their department or year team. Investing in those leaders is one of the quickest ways to shift how the whole school feels.

Give it time, and keep checking

Culture does not change in a term. Over more than twenty years in education, I have come to believe that the schools with the strongest cultures are rarely the ones with the most impressive launch. They are the ones that keep going, quietly and consistently, long after the posters have faded.

Come back to your survey in a year. Ask the same questions. Look for what has moved and what has not. Then choose the next habit.

What is one thing people in your school do every day that you would most like to change? And what would it take to start there this week?

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