School Management
Structure and Organisation
The Iona School Association is a company limited by guarantee and a registered charity. Ofsted provides the legal framework for the practice and development of Steiner Waldorf Education at The Iona School.
One of the founding questions at the beginning of the school in 1985 was that of finding an organisational form that would help to support appropriate working relationships between parents, teachers and trustees (governors) so that the needs of the children could be met as fully as possible.
The purpose of the association is to represent the long-term interests of the school by holding an Annual General Meeting in which the school Governance Team (Trustees) is appointed and held accountable for the effective governance of the school. Accounts are approved, and auditors are appointed at this AGM (Annual general meeting).
The College of Teachers is responsible for pedagogical governance and works closely with the School Management Team, who have overall reasonability for the day to day running of the school.
The College
The College holds the overview and responsibility for safeguarding the ethos of the school, maintaining and nurturing the spiritual basis of the schools approach. It comprises of teaches who are established at the school and who are committed to its long-term development
The School Business Manager and support team also work towards the schools’ overall aims.
There are two main aspects to the work of the College:
- Management of The Iona School ethos
- Pedagogical Oversight and the Development of the Education
The Management of The Iona School Association
This part of the meeting involves the teacher members, the School Business Manager. The meeting receives a general overview of the school’s finances, prioritizes repairs and renewals, discusses safeguarding and other areas of compliance, receives updates on pupil recruitment and deals with day-to-day management issues which are not part of the normal routine and where there is a need to consider the school’s ethos in the decision-making process.
In this meeting, the school managers are helped to contextualize their work with regard to the educational aims of the teachers who are, in turn, supported by managers to understand the financial and legal implications of their academic planning.
Pedagogical Oversight and the Development of the Education
From time to time the teacher members of College meet separately to discuss issues relating to children and pedagogy which may have arisen in the weekly Teachers’ Meeting and require further deliberation regarding the school’s ethos before a decision is made.