Consider these 5 ideas to embed vision and values in your school.
Are you trying to get your values message across to staff and students?
As school brand experts, we have helped schools and colleges across the country discover how they can embed their values in their buildings to be more effectively communicated to staff and students.
In this post, we share five of our top ideas to consider when planning your values project so that you can get the most impact and even save money along the way. We will assume that you have your final values and vision text ready to go. Let’s dive in.
Creating a strong values design and message is a powerful school improvement tool
Why display values in your school?
Creating clear values messaging is a powerful school improvement tool
Your vision and values will be an important part of your school development or behaviour plan and if you have these written down somewhere, the chances are that they took a lot of time and effort to formulate. But this is still the easy part. Getting your staff and students to become familiar with your values, understand why they are so important and make expectations clear around the behaviour for each value is the real work and this takes time, patience and lots of communication (read: repeating yourself).
Finding ways to keep your vision and values visible is half the battle. Signs, posters, graphics, and displays will never do the work for you, but they can help serve as a daily reminder of the messages you and your team deliver.
1 . Use dual coding
Dual coding can add meaning and context to your values message
Dual coding can add meaning and context to your values message
Values usually get distilled down to a word or short phrase. Adding an image or icon that sits alongside each value increases the viewers’ ability to process and understand the value message; we find it easier to remember things if there is an associated image for us to hook onto. A good image will be one where if the word was missing it would still make sense, or is guessable. This can be easier for some values than others, but it’s well worth the time and effort to do.
Employing dual coding in your designs can also be an effective way to provide additional context or a deeper meaning than the words cannot convey on their own.
2. Find the best spaces for maximum impact
The most impacting location isn’t always the biggest one.
There is little point in investing time and money into promoting values that won’t be seen. Take the time to walk around your building and look for areas to give you the best impact. Sometimes these areas can be obvious (your hall or visitor areas), but your building will be full of other spaces that may be less obvious.
You may need to take a fresh look at the spaces you want your message to be displayed in. If you are very familiar with your school, it can be hard to see things with fresh eyes, but it’s worth doing. Getting the perspective of a visitor (or even a teacher who wouldn’t usually visit the area) can help you here.
While it’s true that bigger usually means more impact, you can save a lot of money by placing smaller graphics in key areas like stairwells, or on columns or pillars that are in high traffic areas.
3. Declutter
These clean, punchy Wallboards get the message across effectively.
Finding the right place for your message is important, but if your walls are already covered in other messages, then adding yet another message will likely be drowned out in the noise. If you want to get the maximum impact, consider removing displays or decluttering some areas if you have a lot on your walls already.
4. Keep it simple
It’s always tempting to think that you should say as much as possible at every opportunity. This usually results in weaker messaging that is easy to miss, that is too long to read, or that means you have to reduce the font size to fit everything in, reducing the impact.
If you have a good long-term strategy for your organisation's values, then how you embed them in your communication and physical spaces should be more about reinforcing than educating. Repeat, repeat, repeat. There will still be key areas that you will want to add more information but resist the urge to do this everywhere, and your overall message will deliver more punch.
5. Be consistent
Have the same passion for how your values are presented as you want them discussed in your school. Once you have your values, colours, icons and graphics in place, it’s a good idea to make sure that your whole team knows your expectation on embedding them everywhere and know where they can find the relevant files and images. If they should appear in your weekly newsletter, make sure that the staff member in charge of publishing understands how this should appear and how frequently etc. Using the same designs across different areas of your school or communications will help keep your message clear and have maximum impact.
“ Messaging around your building reinforces and makes more visible what your staff should be doing to live and breathe your school values.”
How much does it cost to embed school values through your building?
With projects like values, which are unique to each organisation, the costs really vary from school to school and depend on how many values you have, how much of an impact you want to make, and how large your site is. Get in touch via our contact channels to get a quote for your project.