Staff Audit exercise – A tool for exploring the strengths and needs of your school
Guidance Notes:
This audit is a comprehensive but simple tool designed to be used as a staff exercise. It is for ALL staff to participate in – the more the better. Ideally, you would run this by inviting the teaching and support staff, plus as many others as you can e.g., maintenance, catering, admin, governors.
This exercise will;
• Engage and help all staff to explore the kinds of things that build resilience across your school community
• Get a sense of how well you are doing within school in relation to the evidence base (what works) in building resilience
• Gather together in one place all the good practice already happening in your school; and
• Generate ideas, which can be later used for developing action plans for improvement if needed.
The idea is above goals will be achieved through promoting discussion and reflective thinking. In addition, this is a good pre-OfSTED-visit exercise because the areas you are enquiring about will be evidence based in terms of what actually works. It also shows commitment to building resilience through a broad range of strategies – on both whole school and interpersonal levels.
What to do;
1. Identify and evaluate the strengths and needs of your school using this online tool. The auditing process is a vital part of the Whole school Academic Resilience Approach , to hear and learn from ALL staff about their perspectives and opinions in your school community.
2. After obtaining individual contributions, ask small groups (5-10 staff) to focus on different sections of this tool for further thinking; this will encourage lots of discussion and generate ideas. The aim of this exercise is to bring staff together to promote discussion and reflective thinking on why and how to build resilience across the school.
3. Ask someone in each group to record the discussion. This is essential for documenting and actioning in the future.
4. Collate the answers and use them to form the basis of your action planning. Don’t forget to let staff know the outcomes and next steps.
5. Remember to acknowledge that good practice already happening in your school but keeping track of all those pockets of activity is difficult. This is not a new fad or more performance measures…much of the approach is about endorsing the common sense things we can do as a school to create a supportive, positive school climate and promote resilience and well-being in all school community.

NOTE; this exercise is designed as part of a wider whole school audit to gather other views across the school community. However, even if you just did this one thing with staff you will come up with good stuff to build on.