Following the 2nd Middle Years Conference in Adelaide, a number of people in the initial I&E group picked up on the idea of clarifying bottom line questions of "educational purpose".

This lead to an open ended question, asked at the various staff meetings:
>> Within our school what do you want for our students?                    (one set of responses below)

Why ask this?
Any change relating to thinking curriculum/middle years, or school in general, is less likely to "stick" without a shared understanding of school purpose; which comes out of our beliefs and understandings about students, learning, discpline etc.

A number of models of school change place this common understanding in the center of other key issues.

(Hill Crevola Model : Beliefs and Understanding at the centre)

What do we do with it?
The idea was to start conversations about overall goals, making the assumptions apparent, rather than just working with assumed or inherited views which may no longer be the most appropriate.

The raw responses were lengthy; some were summarised into individual school charters / strategic plans.

The idea is that schools need to clear on these, to give a framework for prioritising the overwhelming and competing agendas that are present in schools.

Weeroona College's historical strengths and current aspirations, is listed in raw format as an one example of the typical responses. Later excercises clarified a set of 5 values for staff. Primary schools had similar aspirations; a lot of generic skills (communication, problem solving, confidence, creativity) were listed in addition to basic skills of literacy and numeracy. One summarised version is here