Interview: “We Carefully Follow up Our Students”

Du Vaal was ranked the best as per the BAC board ranking: what is your secret?
Being the first certainly means being the best and I will like to say here that we do a lot when it comes to projections, we are rooted in discipline, and we carefully follow up our students. We ensure that they are always ready to receive teachers. We are aware of the importance of discipline in the educational process so we are very rigid with follow up. We do roll calls and when a child is absent we call and find out why the child is not in school. Because absentism and lateness kill results.

We also ensure that we recruit teachers that are professionals and are disciplined themselves and we also emphasis on motivating the teachers all the time to boost output. The administrative follow up on teachers is also rigid. We also do a lot of strategic evolution to see the level of our leaners and do a lot of serious and intensive remedial classes for slow learners. The above cannot take place in an environment which is not secure, clean and comfortable. Our students are comfortable, class rooms are clean, large and airy and all these make teaching and learning conducive. Our success is also attributed to team work, we have a good team of administrative and teaching staff. It’s a dependable team. Our next target will be to also grab the first the position in the GCE board rankings.

What are some of the things you have to put in place to remain on top position?
As a teacher when talking I always project. No matter how good you are there is need for continuous improvement so we are working day and night to see how we can improve on performance. Although we came first we have some internal lapses that we think we can work on and if we do that we will get the best of the results and stay on the top. We have to keep motivating our teachers and intensify discipline.

We have a staff strength of over 150 teachers with a student population of over three thousand in both the English and the French sections. We are a bilingual grammar which has both arts and science. We have comprehensive commercial which is made up of Accounting, Marketing and secretarial administration. Which give room for learners to have a lot of choices.

How is Du Vaal Managed?
Administratively speaking the principal is at the head then the vice principal followed by deans and discipline masters.  We have an administrative meeting every Monday where talk about the previous week and the new week. Our activities are well coordinated as each of us send out information concerning their department this enable us  to stay at the same level of information  At the level of managing parents and students we have Whatsapp groups for all the classes where parents and school administrators are present.

The Whatsapp groups are very interactive and most preoccupation addressed by parents are addressed immediately. We know we are dealing with parents who barely have time to follow up their children. We know parents are too busy and some don’t even know what their children are doing in school or how they perform so we take all these into consideration and put in extra efforts to ensure that students.

How involved are parents in the education of their children in Du Vaal?
Parents are doing their best but you know at each point in time they have to run after their issues and to look for money to pay fees and take care of other needs and at times forget about following up students educationally. But we keep encouraging the...