The Meshing of Two Primary Schools

written with Cathy Byrne
3rd Update: 11 September 2004

 

 

'The Parks' is one of the most complete project reports on the use of Spiral Dynamics anywhere in the world and many people have suggested that I must have been much more involved than the report suggests. Well, I wasn't! This is Cathy Byrne's story, not mine.  My RED would love to report that Cathy was on the phone to me every night asking how to do *this* and how to handle such-and-such a person. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like that. My influence, as Cathy has acknowledged widely, came through the training programme and then as an occasional adviser in the background.

 

I like to think of the remarkable story of The Parks as being a first class example of just how much you can accomplish when you really grasp these concepts at an intuitive level.

 

 

Most afternoons Cathy Byrne, Headteacher of The Parks Primary School on Hull's Orchard Park Estate, sees her pupils off the premises with something of the pastorly air of a vicar bidding farewell to the congregation as they exit a church service.

 

However, most mornings Cathy is also in the playground, welcoming her charges into school with equal warmth.

"It also gives the parents the opportunity to speak to me informally," she says. 'Mrs Byrne, while I'm thinking, can I just mention….' That sort of thing."

 

This air of deferential approachability is just one manifestation of the way Cathy has, in Spiral Dynamics terms, made herself something of a PURPLE shamaness to the local community.

 

She says, "I can't say that I automatically think in a Spiral Dynamics way; but I usually find, upon review, that I have been!"

So it was that Cathy found she intuitively recognised the structure of vMEMES - and could relate it to her own experiences - when she attended my workshop programme, 'An Introduction to Spiral Dynamics & Related Models of NLP', staged at nearby St Mary's College during June-July 2001.

 

At the time Cathy was Headteacher at Danepark Primary School on Orchard Park.

 

As part of its BLUE rationalisation programme to cut the number of surplus school places, Kingston Upon Hull City Council had determined that either Danepark or neighbouring Court Park must close. (Of the other two primaries on Orchard Park, the Council had already decreed that Shaw Park was to close, with its children (and some staff) being offered places at Thorpepark.)

 

At the time Cathy attended my workshops, the Council's preference was for both schools to close and a new school to open on the Danepark site. Children and some of the staff from both schools were to be offered places at the new school.

 

In addition to this plan obliging her to apply for the job of Headteacher at the new school if she wished to continue, Cathy recognised that it brought its own problems – particularly at the PURPLE level of integrating two tribes.

 

Orchard Park Estate is often compared to the nearby and larger Bransholme on Hull's north-eastern boundary, with similar levels of poverty and deprivation. A key indicator is that over 50% of children on Orchard Park are entitled to free school meals. The other usual indicators are high: unemployment, debt, gang violence, burglaries, prostitution, drugs and alcohol abuse, levels of sickness, malnutrition, etc, etc. Many claim, though, that Orchard Park is a tougher and more violent estate than even Bransholme (which has a reputation for it!). (Two young women were brutally murdered in separate incidents on Orchard Park in 2003.)

 

The estate breaks down into a number of sub-areas – Danes, Courts, Thorpes and Shaws - each of which had its own primary school until the Council's rationalisation programme began. These geographical sub-areas are characterised by PURPLE tribalism which, combined with deprivation and the drugs trade, fosters PURPLE-RED street gangs.

 

The Council's BLUE consultation process on the schools had set the PURPLE of the Courts 'tribe' against the PURPLE of the Danes 'tribe', with those whose self-expressive RED was strong taking the reins of leadership and all too often demonising 'the other side'. The consultation meetings, which were conducted with each school community separately, enabled some very confrontational expressions of this purple/RED demagogy.

 

Almost from before the consultation process began, Cathy Byrne worked with the Danepark parents to not only soothe their concerns as best she could but also to help them learn how to express their anger and resentment in less confrontational ways.

 

It was clear that any merging, in whatever form, of children from Danepark and Court Park, meant bringing together two quite distinct tribal identities.

 

It had been the Courts community's complete rejection of the merger by arguing that there simply was no room at their school for the Danepark children which had swung the Council in favour of locating the new school at Danepark. Undeterred, they mounted a legal challenge which temporarily halted the merger process.

 

                                                                                                Goodbye to Danepark
By October 2001 the merger was back on. Now, accepting that they could not prevent a merger, the PURPLE/red of the Courts community was determined that the new school would be on their 'territory'. They proposed to create the extra space they had said they didn't have by evicting the Youth Service from their building in the school. As Court Park was more central to the Courts and Danes catchement areas than Danepark, the argument now swung in their favour.

 

After some consideration and with her sense of mission for Orchard Park not yet completed, Cathy Byrne determined that she would apply for the position of Headteacher at the new school. Encouraged by friends, colleagues, local organisations and Danepark parents, Cathy started to put together her strategy for merging the schools. She drafted in help from several sources, including calling me in, to look at the situation from a Spiral perspective. From that session, Cathy recognised the need to multi-manage all the vMEMES in play from 2nd Tier thinking.

 

At her interview before the Temporary Board of Governors, Cathy revealed her vision for the school: "I promised to put the children at the heart of everything I do, think the best of everyone and expect the best from everyone, and merge the two schools keeping the best of both and creating a new school for the 21st Century."

 

Once appointed, Cathy found herself effectively working in 3 directions simultaneously:-

• dealing with the way Hull City Council's Directorate of Learning was handling the closures and the creation of the new school
• managing the last months of Danepark
• forging an identity and an organisation for the new school

 

With regard to the demise of Danepark, Cathy felt it was important to honour the PURPLE sense of belonging, tradition and history at Danepark. She arranged for a collection of Danepark memorabilia to be gathered and the school was even given a formal farewell ceremony. "Our aim was to keep stability at the school and ensure teaching and learning continued uninterrupted while at the same time closing the school with dignity, acknowledging its place in history and the contributions of many individuals over the years."

 

However, as well as burying Danepark "with dignity, giving it its due place in History - lots of PURPLE", Cathy was also working on preparing her people for the new school. "As soon as the merger was announced I let a decent interval of mourning pass and then started getting my community not only to accept but to welcome the idea. At first this had to be by allegiance to me - 'we'll go to the new school if you will, Mrs. Byrne'; then I weaned them off the dependence on me - in case I didn't get the job. I managed this with most parents, not all but in the event that didn't matter."

 

                                                                                                  Hello to The Parks!
Almost from her appointment, Cathy was working on her strategy to develop an identity that both Danepark and Court Park could buy into.

 

This included building community confidence for the new school by such things as:-

• sending regular newsletters to all parents, community organisations and the LEA (Local Education Authority/Directorate of Learning)
• involving all the community in choosing the name, logo, uniform, start and finish times, etc - but in such a way that nobody got too upset when their idea was not chosen
• getting both communities together to push for a Puffin crossing on Hall Road (a busy road adjacent to the school) and then choosing the best location for it
• organising visits by Danepark parents to the Court Park site

 

A name was chosen – 'The Parks' – which alluded to past identities yet also was a completely unique and new name for the new school. Cathy got funding from the local Area Committee to give free school sweatshirts (bearing The Parks logo) to all children so they would all start the September term in the same brand new uniform. She even created a school song – writing the words herself to music by the Hull Learning Music Support Service.

 

To help the Danepark children start to associate their PURPLE safety needs with the Court Park site, Cathy "arranged visits for the Danepark children to meet the Court Park ones and find out where the loos are, where the lunch is served, where the playground is, etc."

 

Cathy and her new Parks staff worked furiously over the Summer to set up the new school at the former Court Park site – putting in 39 days more than the limited (and fixed!) LEA support allowed for.

 

In recalling the practicalities of the move, Cathy says: "I think with the LEA I have gone along with their 'BLUE' – e.g. they demanded a detailed inventory. I asked how detailed they wanted – did we have to count the staples?! And they replied no but we had to count the staplers."

 

The Parks was formally opened by BBC TV Look North presenter Helen Philpott on 3 October. (The Governors preferring a celebrity to a politician or a representative of the LEA.)

 

Cathy's strategy of seeking to honour the old PURPLE identities of Danepark and Court Park while fashioning a new PURPLE identity (in a strong BLUE structure) for The Parks appears to have been most successful with the children. In spite of their books and equipment like overhead projectors and computers bearing the names of the closed schools as a ready reminder, to the knowledge of staff there has not been a single Court/Dane dispute amongst the children.

 

Given the interest the children from Court Park were taking in the Danepark memorabilia which had been brought into The Parks, Cathy started asking people to bring in items from Court Park days with the intention of creating an equivalent collection of memorabilia.

 

One outcome of this was that one of the former Court Park parents produced a CD of songs that school used to sing. With the aid of three Year 6 boys who taught everybody the actions to the songs, The Parks unearthed some of the old Court Park PURPLE at the rate of one song per week and incorporated them into The Parks identity – so that they become 'Parks songs'.

 

While the children from the two closed schools seemed to be accepting of each other, not all of them were so accepting of the new authority structure. Cathy had brought the majority of the Danepark teachers with her; but most of the teachers from the already-understaffed Court Park had not applied to join the new school. Thus, as Cathy pointed out: "Some had lost their teachers; others had lost their [Danepark] building."

With their PURPLE security and stability needs compromised, "The RED came out fairly early on in a few children openly defying our authority," Cathy says. "I excluded more than I liked to but it needed to be done to show how far is too far."

 

Work on building a new staff team had begun in the last term of the old schools. "We had been meeting last term already," Cathy relates, "and then on the second of the two training days we had a lunch with all staff (caretakers, cleaners etc.) and governors. I stipulated that people had to sit with others they don't normally work with and there was an extremely happy atmosphere. As the time approached we were so busy that I started to resent the time for this lunch but realised that it was an essential part of the PURPLE."

 

The us-and-them was also minimised by the arrival of four new teachers – including the Deputy Headteacher – with no remembrances of the closed schools.

With staff, Cathy says: "It was hard at the beginning not to say things like 'we used to...' and we tried as much as possible not to mention the 'Court' or 'Dane' words."

 

Where she did meet some resistance was with the midday supervisors. "At the first meeting they sat in two distinct groups so I asked them all to stand up and when the music stopped to sit next to someone they didn't previously work with! It had the effect of defusing that first meeting."

 

                                                                                         The trouble with parents…!

Cathy found that the people having the hardest time accepting the change were parents who – outside of the school's BLUE structure (school song, identikit sweatshirts, etc) – retained their strong tribal loyalties.

 

"The former Court Park parents thought they had 'won' because they had kept the school. They didn't realise that the important thing is not the building but the people and they were upset when things changed - eg: assembly times."

 

The Courts tends to be a marginally more affluent sub-area of Orchard Park than the Danes and a number of former Danepark parents found it difficult to go onto unfamiliar territory – as Cathy comments: "The ex-Danepark parents felt intimidated by the admittedly more articulate ex-Court Park parents."

Some of the former Danepark teachers too felt intimidated by the more expressive RED culture among the former Court Park parents – as Cathy recalls: "There was a perception that the ex-Danepark staff didn't know how to treat 'bright' pupils and the ex-Danepark staff were huffy about the assertive parents. I had to convince the staff that concerned parents are a GOOD THING because at least they care. I had to persuade the parents that, of course, the school would cater for the more able but that, at the beginning, the teachers were finding out about the levels the children were at and didn't want to alarm them by making the work too difficult."

 

In this charged atmosphere day-to-day humdrum incidents took on a much greater significance. "I have had to deal with many 'complaints' which are really very minor…Where the teacher is an ex-Court Park one, the ex-Dane parents tend to complain and vice versa. There are fewer complaints about the new teachers."

 

Things reached a kind of head in the immediate run-up to the 3 October 2002 ceremonial opening, as Cathy recalls: "I heard rumours that some of the parents were threatening to disrupt our opening ceremonies so we had an open meeting to clear the air. The rule was you could say something negative but then there had to be a positive comment about the school following it."

 

Following this sub-Jahari Window session, relations with most parents improved significantly, as more peopled realised Cathy's readiness to honour the traditions of both closed schools.

 

When, as part of Hull LEA's OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) inspection, The Parks was visited by an Inspector on 24 September (with the school open less than two weeks), "he said – as have all our visitors – that it doesn't have the feel of a new school."

Nevertheless, a small hard core of former Court Park parents remained steadfast in opposition to the former Danepark head being in charge of the school on their territory.

 

Cathy realised just how entrenched some of those parents were when one of them told her: “The trouble is, Mrs Byrne, that you don't know how things are done around here.” PURPLE, clinging onto its territory, was telling her in no uncertain terms that she was the outsider!

 

However, as she increasingly gained the confidence of other former Court Park parents, Cathy learned that this opposition was as much about RED power and influence in the local community as it was to do with PURPLE tribalism. Cathy's management style, based on enabling all rather than positioning a few favourites, was perceived to be eroding the power and influence of these disgruntled parents.