24 hours: David Armstrong

BY CLAIRE ALLISON

David Armstrong is the principal of Timaru's Sacred Heart School, a position he's held for just over a year.

I'm generally up around 6.15 and do the normal stuff. I've got to get that toast and a bit of cereal in there; I wouldn't survive without it. Generally speaking, soon after that, one of my boys – he's two – will get up, and he and I will get started and do the little kid stuff, I'll help with the wee guys. We might play a few trains while I get breakfast organised for him, and get him some clothes.

I try to be at school around 7.15am, 7.30am. The kids don't hit base until 8.30am – that's as early as they are allowed on site – so that gives me a chance to sit down and get my day sorted in my head, have a look at the diary. It's always tight for time. So it gives me a chance to work out in a quiet space what I'm going to be doing for the day, what my priorities are.

And it's a really good chance to be available for my teachers if they want to come in and have a chat, which they quite often do.

Once the day starts, it's an amazing job. It can go anywhere. You never have a real idea what you are going to be facing until it happens, so you've got to have good systems.

The day is often planned well ahead, but you're dealing with people here – and little people, and they are not hugely predictable. They have good days, bad days.

So you might think you are going to get through a bit of paperwork, but maybe a junior class has done some work they're really excited about, and no principal in the world is going to keep writing a board report while that's happening.

I'm out and about most of the day. It's a fantastic job because there's so much variation. The key part of the job is people – and the people are not in my office; they're in the classrooms and around the school.

We've got 180 kids, year 0 to 8 – we're a full primary. We're running seven classrooms this year. There are probably about 15 people working here.

I often don't have regular breaks. Very often the busy times for me are what might be traditional breaks for others. I'll try to grab a sandwich or something at some stage, but I certainly don't have a lunchtime, or a morning tea time as such. Once I'm at work, it just flows.

This morning I was out on road patrol, and there were parents and teachers to talk to there.

There are quite a number of meetings to attend – helping agencies and professional groups. South Canterbury is really great. There are a lot of professional groups that work together, within education and attached to it. It's a very supportive community.

Contact with parents – by now [9.30am], I've probably talked to at least 10, 12 parents, and by the end of the day I'll probably have talked to 20 or 30. I make quite a point of that. I have to give people the opportunity to talk to me, because we are dealing with their children.

When I know there are parents in the school, I try to be out there among them. Often parents just want a quick word. And I've got two appointments today with people coming to talk about issues that are important to them.

There's always going to be something. My job is people. I've got to think ahead for the school, and work towards whatever the vision is, but to get there it's all about relationships – with the kids, teachers and adults.

The administrative load is huge. You have to be really organised with your time and have the energy and passion for the job. I'm a non-teaching principal, but I get to go into the classrooms, talk to them about the work they are doing, what they're up to, what they did in the classroom and at home.

The great advantage with a small school is that I know all of the kids – I have a little bit of personal information on every single one of them. I teach the odd programme; I taught our senior maths class here for a while. And I have some little cameo experiences – I can do a fun science experiment.

Being a teacher and being a principal are completely different jobs. But it's a fantastic job, I love the job. The administrative load is unreasonable, but that's the job. You manage that and try to keep focused on what the important bits are.

There's a huge sense of achievement in watching a child do well and a teaching team develop, watching a school move forward. A huge sense of satisfaction if you can play a role in that.

We're a state-integrated Catholic school. People talk about values, and with a Catholic school, there is a common and clear understood set of values. Anyone can have a value – you can value whatever you like. But because it's Catholic, people know what they're buying into when they come here. There's an obligation that we work within those values – it's not just a piece of paper that we parrot off.

We're part of an umbrella organisation that actively does care. Our diocese in Christchurch knows who our teachers are. We had an excellent ERO [Education Review Office] report last year, and got genuine congratulations and a tangible reward – a morning tea shout – from head office.

We're decile 5 – smack bang in the middle [of the rating scale]. We have a real cross-section of families here, from people who have everything in life to others who have very little. But when they come in here, they are all equal.

I've got a staff meeting after school today, and my teachers will expect me to be organised, and I've got two appointments that I know of already. A teacher has come to see me to see if I could come in and watch the kids and give some feedback, and I'll be out on duty for both break periods today.

So I'll be in a staff meeting by 3.30pm, and that will take us through to about 5, 5.30pm. I'll pick up one of my older boys from a sports practice, and take him home, and then do the dad things until about 7.30pm when tea's over and the little guys are in bed.

And after that I'll start working on stuff for school. I do quite a bit of that at home after the wee ones are in bed.

I don't have any time for TV. I'll spend a lot of time on the computer, because a lot of my work's on that. I play tennis regularly through part of the season – indoor, at night, because it's the only time I've got. If I'm running, I'll go out for a few kilometres at night. So my day starts just after 6am, and I'll probably be in bed about 11pm.

There's work every night. I can't imagine there's a week where there's not a meeting I have to go out to after tea. Board of trustees, school community group, maybe some other community group.

At the moment, family's really busy for me. We've got two little people at home, and I've got two older kids. I do try and keep fit, because I think that's important, but my kids' sport has started taking over.

Does the job stop on Friday night? Oh, heck no. Weekends I'll try not to work on a Saturday, although there might be something that needs to be done. But I try to confine it to late on Sunday to start getting organised again for the Monday.

It's a varied job. I've gone and kicked a door open this morning because it was stuck, I've been on road patrol, done a little bit of paperwork, I've cleared innumerable emails, and talked to a lot of people. I'm looking forward to going into a class soon, and to catching up with more kids today.

It could take over. I've got friends I try to keep in contact with and my own kids are really important to me. I could easily stay at school much later, but then I'd never see them, and I need to do the bed things to be helpful. I have to be organised with my time.

And I really look forward to the holiday breaks when there's a change of routine and a chance to do some other things – just normal things that you just don't have the time for. But I love the flexibility of the job.

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