Can international schools learn from Australia’s Indigenous People’s approaches to land management?

School management has not escaped our zeitgeist of short termism, and all too often, disposability. ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ tells of a view of time, people, and management that had a continental perspective and was carried out over millennia in symbiosis with the world in which the aborigines of Australia lived. Grasping this concept, albeit a little, has helped me reimagine the frame of my own life, and the systems by which we manage.

The Aborigines’ perspective was passed down and across tribes.  Their land management resulted in the natural production of soft soils for water management, leading to water conservation in ponds, lakes, and billabongs in which fish and fowl were plentiful. Their use of fire, creating pyrodiversity, produced green grass that attracted game even at the height of Summer, managed the tree scape to channel the game they’d attracted, made fruit trees accessible, ensured ease of movement across the land, and by removing the leaf litter, fallen wood, and young saplings, limited the devastating fires that Australia experienced in 2020. Removing certain types of trees from the environment through the hot or cold fire cycles not only stopped devastating fires being started by lightning, but they also created a quilted pattern of landscape and biodiversity, which could take the lifetime of a tree to create; up to 500 years. Depending on the land and desired result, fires were lit in cycles that went from once a year to two or three times an aborigine’s lifetime. The colonisers who’d admired the park like landscape they found in 1788, Capability Brown et al being their frame of reference, soon began to lament the loss of that after applying European land management to what they thought had been a naturally occurring landscape.

Good international schools also manage their environment and create an excellent environment for growth, and of course, bad management ruins. Good management allows neither a flammable environment to build up in their school, nor the creation of one that is  toxic. Effective school owners select senior managers that have a positive growth perspective, value their staff, and listen to the business environment. School owners and COOs maximise the pull factors that keep their best staff in the school, whilst minimising push factors that lose them their best staff. They also recognise that some people and some systems create toxicity, and effective managers remove the sources of that toxicity, as well as the combustible material that can damage their business.

However well led an international school may have been doing in the period up to 2020, Covid-19 has been the stimulus for well led and managed schools to re-evaluate their practices, principles, structures, and direction. And this should also be the stimulus for those that have fared poorly in the Covid fires of 2020 to do the same. ‘How well has the school been led?’, and how have we managed Covid 19?  Reenrolments were challenging for schools in 2020, how much more so in 2021 – 22? This needs to be right, right now, so that the school can build into 2022-23, as I think it’s likely that some schools will not have the reserves to last into 2023 if they lose pupils to other schools around them. There will be many changes in the educational landscape caused by the fire of Covid-19. Good management leading up to 2020 would have enabled schools to withstand that fire more effectively than ones poorly managed up to this time.

Re-evaluating the factors that increase the retention rate of good teachers and managers, and eliminating the factors pushing out talented staff should be high on the list of a school owner’s priorities, given the increasing competition for staff, the issue of visas,  and the costs associated with hiring them. Thinking of how to deliver a full curriculum despite class teacher shortages must also be factored in. And of course, parents choosing another school in 2020, 2021, and 2022 to the one they were in before Covid 19 is likely to result from a long-ignored pattern that managers hid, or school owners ignored.

The time is right to bring in consultants to evaluate historic patterns, and past effectiveness; to strengthen what has worked, and review what hasn’t. Learning from the Aborigines means understanding the landscape you are in and knowing how to maximise the outcomes of that landscape. Judicious management establishes the  processes necessary to attain what you want to achieve, a process that requires experience and expertise. If you’d like to chat with us about analysing your school’s performance to improve it for the future, or indeed the management of your school or schools by outsourcing them to IGE, then please get in touch via our website