Finding your own purpose is hard enough... but a whole school's?

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I was listening to my former German course classmate on a podcast this week. Thomasina Miers more than once scooped me out of a German literature hole or two in a seminar group so small it was hard to escape the truth of my lacklustre preparation. She was one of those young women who just seemed to get everything right, set for great things.

Until I heard her this week, I didn’t realise that she’d left university feeling down, depressed even, completely unsure as to what she wanted to do. Her twenties were spent, like mine, looking at friends settling down into incredible careers while wondering herself what she was meant to do.

In the end, it was food. That was her passion, her purpose in life. It became her mission.

Thomasina is the chef founder of the Wahaca chain of incredible Mexican restaurants, which have arguably been single-handed in elevating the tastebuds of the Great British public from Tex-Mex to the savours of different corners of actual, ahem, Mexico.

And when she talks or writes about food in her regular columns, her passion comes through in every sentence, every ingredient backstory or origins story of the recipe. She’s also on a mission to get Chefs in Schools , and to save the world’s soil, which gives us most of what we eat but which we’re destroying at the pace of three football fields a minute.

Purpose like that is hard to find, even for incredible people like Thomasina.

There are many people working in schools whose purpose might be inferred or assumed, rather than declared.

The general idea of people’s purpose is there - to teach children - but the nuance, ambition, direction each individual brings to their purpose creates a varied tapestry of motivation in every school in the world.

Finding collective purpose with that richness is even harder.

You might call it your mission, vision, aspiration, core values… you might have words under all four of those headings.

But we just call it purpose.

You should be able to start a purpose sentence with: “We exist to…”

And schools can express this in three ways.

The first is appalling, and remarkably common. It’s a description of goods:

“XYZ is a truly international school that delivers a K12 all rounded blah blah blah.” Or “XYZ is a comprehensive and inclusive school challenging every learner to reach their full potential.”

Don’t do that.

This description of goods has no feasible opposite and this is what renders it useless as a rallying call of purpose.

There are no monocultural international schools that you’re competing against, nor exclusive state schools. No school on the planet is encouraging learners to coast and underperform.

The intent of the description of goods is well-meaning, but leave the writing of your school profile to the marketing team, seeded with your ideas, current initiatives and vision once you’ve had a chance to start setting it.

The second variety of mission is a 100 year one.

“We exist to create peace and justice in the world.”

It’s unlikely ever to be realised but it doesn’t matter. Trying is what matters.

Thirdly, there are missions that express a burning platform.

Something is in terrible need of a community effort, and there’s a sense of urgency about it. It’s a mission that marks a (subtle) change in tack for the organisation. It sounds like this:

Yes, we’ll do all the things schools do (we promise) but we’ll always do it in this way (eg with complete environmental sustainability).

The last burning platform mission is full of potent purpose, a rallying call that actually requires a new strategy, distancing everything from what has gone before.

We do this kind of work every day, but anyone can make a start right now. Here are four things you can do to start seeking a common purpose across your community, while eliminating the useless language and ideas that will make you sound defensive or dull:

1. What should this school just be doing really well anyway? Let’s write it all down and hand it to marketing for the website. Then forget about it - it’s not our purpose; it’s our service description and features.

2. What is the school’s most recent or current purpose? Is there any sense at all that is unique? Is the opposite version of it also a reasonable possibility to consider (for us or for any school)? And is it something everyone is already behind?

3. Is there a need to express something new about the school’s purpose? Is there an outside pressure that is more than something a few years’ work of strategic planning can cope with? Is there a sure bet that everyone wants to bet the house on?

4. Is there anything from the school archive that could give us something to rediscover and refresh by building on our roots? This is always fascinating and gives relevance to brand new ideas because it ties them to the heritage of the organisation. Fashion labels and tech cos do it all the time. Schools can do it, too.

And if you want a hand through these questions, and a ton more, our team at NoTosh will engage your community, synthesise all their wildly opposing opinions, and write you an award-winning statement that everyone can get behind.