Focus on Dimension 1 – Vision and Values

White Tree Preschool

This case study from White Tree Preschool demonstrates how the Bristol Standard helped the team to identify an action and work towards sharing their vision and values:

The priority target was to create a section on the website to promote their vision and values. Manager Liz Carr talks us through what the team did:

We held a staff meeting on 10 February 2017 led by our Chair of Governors, Helen Clark to work together on creating a Visions and Values statement. All staff felt it was important to agree a shared vision not only to promote our ethos on our website, but also to underpin our pedagogy to benefit the children.

The whole team researched visions and values statements from preschools locally, nationally and internationally. We discussed aspects of early year’s ethos that we wanted to communicate as well as unifying our new staff team with a shared vision which informs the way we interact with parents, children and the community.

We envisaged what the future world would be like for children leaving our preschool and the skills they would require to navigate this new world. We found that we had strong ideas about the importance of laying foundations in the early years and how our preschool supports this. Through animated discussion we agreed on the word “thrive” to summarise our main vision of what we want for the children attending our preschool. We realised that the letters of the word represented the key skills and characteristics that we wanted, to foster in the children at preschool so we decided to create a unique acrostic based on the world thrive.

We discussed the values of our setting to see how they linked to our ‘thrive’ vision. Staff prioritised our main values based on the benefits to the children. We created a values statement to accompany the ‘thrive’ vision. Finally, we created a new Vision and Values page on our website (http://www.whitetreepreschool.co.uk). This clearly communicates our message to prospective families.

The benefits to the children are as follows:

• we have a strongly focused and unified staff team
• prospective parents will be able to choose our setting if they agree with and support our Vision and Values. This link between home and Preschool will help children to feel secure and settle quickly as their parents will be positive, confident and relaxed about their child attending our setting.