Supporting your School SRE Coordinator
Have you ever seriously considered what is involved in being a School SRE Coordinator? You may already know how vital your Church SRE Coordinator is when it comes to establishing SRE in your local school. This is the person who recruits, trains, organises, equips and encourages SRE teachers, negotiates with the school, and motivates the team throughout the year.
However, the other crucial person in making SRE run well is the School SRE Coordinator – the teacher who has been given the job of implementing SRE in their school and communicates with all the SRE Providers coming in. I suspect that churches and SRE teachers don’t understand nor appreciate this role enough. I recently interviewed three School SRE Coordinators - Tanya, Natalie and Catherine - hoping to understand their role and to explore how churches and SRE teachers can better serve them.
All these women are full-time public school teachers and active Christians. In their workplace, they saw an opportunity to help SRE run smoothly and volunteered to be the SRE Coordinator. (Readers can find their job description in paragraph 3.4 here). It didn’t take long to realise that establishing and maintaining SRE for a school was an enormous amount of work for each of them. This was all on top of their full-time teaching load.
School Coordinators have a lot to do at the start of the year. Each of the Coordinators I spoke with had to:
1. liaise with all the different SRE providers (often across cultures) to finalise the SRE options for the year*;
2. send Participation notes to every school family, receive and collate these details and answer parent questions;
3. communicate with the Coordinators from the churches and other SRE providers, gather and check the authorisation of every SRE teacher and cross-authorisation forms;
4. assign every child to a class, sort out class numbers, allocate rooms according to class sizes, roster supervising teachers, generate class rolls for normal classes informing the staff where students were to go for SRE, as well as rolls for the SRE teacher and class teacher and organise changes to bell-times;
5. meet, welcome and induct the SRE Coordinators and teachers; and
6. communicate with staff and students to make sure that everyone goes where they should.
When SRE was up and running, it took constant attention to keep it going smoothly. . They had to inform supervising teachers if an SRE teacher was unable to attend, provide suggestions for Non-SRE activities for students, and handle occasional conflicts between supervising teachers and SRE teachers (for Anglican SRE Coordinators handling complaints from the school, there is a Complaints Handling Policy).
There were other complex challenges in their role too. Tanya spoke of the need to be an advocate for SRE, when other activities such as school carnivals or excursions gave the school an excuse to cancel SRE for the day.
Communicating with SRE teachers is also a real challenge, as it’s almost impossible for School Coordinators to take calls from teachers when they are teaching all day. Time to return the calls is very limited too.
What could we do to make their job easier? How could we change our behaviour or practises to help them implement SRE well in their schools? Their answers addressed the need for us to be professional, to communicate and to build a partnership:
- Appreciate that schools run according to timetables.
- Be punctual and finish your class on time.
- Be trained to teach good lessons with variety in presentation methods and age-appropriate activities.
- Clean up after yourself.
- Keep working on classroom management – don’t be afraid to tell children that bad behaviour is not okay.
- Possibly try to bring in a classroom helper for difficult classes.
- Be relational with the students and work on creating a safe and loving space.
- Let the school know if you can’t make it and give the school as much notice as possible (even 30 minutes is better than no notice at all).
Additionally, there are times when we as SRE Coordinators and Teachers can actively love the school and benefit from strong relationships, outside of the structured SRE time. Tanya mentioned a time when a SRE teacher sent her classroom teacher some flowers because she heard that she was sick. A number of SRE Coordinators gave gifts of coffee vouchers or food hampers to school staff during the midst of Covid lockdowns. Occasionally, parents would even ask Tanya where they could go to church. If the church has a strong relationship with the school, then the gospel is served both inside and outside the SRE classroom.
Sometimes SRE teachers are the only Christians that the classroom teachers come into contact with. As SRE Teachers and Church SRE Coordinators, we want to make sure that our relationship with the School Coordinators reflect the gospel: it should be gracious, considerate, personable, honest and open.
Let’s continue to thank God for those who serve as School SRE Coordinators and show them his love through our actions.
*(Ed: According to the government’s instructions mentioned above, the tasks in point 1 above ought to be done in term 4 of the previous year, and those in point 2 were not necessary as SRE choices for students carry over from the previous year. This would reduce the large workload for the School Coordinator and potentially enable SRE to start earlier! There’s a role here for Church SRE Coordinators to meet with School Coordinators sometime in term 3 or 4 to helpfully commend a change of practise.)
