Mal Lee
Every school’s website provides a telling insight into where it sits on the international school evolutionary continuum.
Within minutes those conversant with the school evolutionary stage indicators – as discussed in the last post – can obtain an insight into the school’s current position.
Possibly unwittingly your website invariably provides all interested a window to the school’s workings.
Vitally it also provides an excellent insight into the school’s leadership’s thinking.
Have you looked lately at the message – intended and unintended – your school website communicates?
In researching the evolution of schooling in the UK, US, NZ and Australia over the last 5-6 years, in exploring the impact of digital normalisation on school transformation I’ve had occasion to examine many, many school websites.
It has become increasingly apparent, particularly now the first schools are moving into the Digital Normalisation stage that astute educators and parents globally – current and prospective – can and do increasingly use the school website as a quick and valid indicator of the evolutionary stage the school is at and if it is a school where one wants to send the children.
Governments and education authorities like to perpetuate the perception that all of their schools are the same. Most moreover seek to reinforce that myth by trying to have all ‘their’ schools use a standard website.
The reality is that schools are by no means the same. There is now immense and growing variability. All sit at different points along an ever-evolving, ever lengthening continuum, where the difference between the schooling provided at each end of the continuum is already dramatic and growing daily.
Variability is the new norm, fostered by the moves nationally and internationally to devolve greater autonomy to each school.
That variability is readily evidenced in the school website.
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