9 months ago, the brilliant staff at the International School of Ulm / Neu-Ulm (ISU) approached me to collaborate on their DEIJ journey (thank you Nunana Nyomi for linking us up).
As a small international school, the ISU team has a growth mindset and is making it a key objective to ensure equitable outcomes for its students and colleagues. They aim to strengthen the realisation of their school mission—to provide ‘an engaging and challenging education in a caring, supportive, diverse environment where students aspire to fulfil their potential’.
The academic leadership team, Luke Osborne, Lee Rawlinson, and Charlotte Balsom, are endorsing and spearheading this work. Each conversation with them has demonstrated a mature and reflective approach which aims to create systems and procedures that lead to consistently equitable outcomes for their students with consideration of all the identity labels represented in their community.
This is how Systemic Equity begins.
Luke and his team have embodied the approaches needed for them to flourish and create meaningful change.
They:
- Take time intentionally to enable their school context and goals to be understood through rich, exploratory meetings with key members of the educational team.
- Recognise that the popular structures for DEIJ work were not designed for small international schools. The ISU team appropriately centres their scale, cultural context, and accreditation requirements at all points when we collaborate.
- Ensure the success of their work by collaborating on analytical audits of key data and relevant impact indicators, which enables them to monitor their progress and adjust as necessary.
- Review the successes and failures of previous actions and ensure the learning from each of our meetings informs their next steps.
It’s a privilege to work with ISU and their leadership team and I am excited about our continued collaboration into next year as we begin to deliver customised CPD to support the implementation of the strategies that the team have created.
If these approaches sound like something that your school could benefit from, send me a message at www.dsinclairwriting.com
