Relief teachers have one of the toughest gigs in any school. I’ll be honest – I sometimes forget that myself, until something like this lands in my inbox and reminds me.
A relief teacher walks daily into a room full of strangers, knowing roughly nothing about the relational spaghetti they’re stepping into. Who’s friends with whom, who’s been having a rough week, who needs a particular kind of firmness and who shuts down the moment they’re challenged. The permanent teacher who knows all of that has usually spent a term or a year building it. The casual teacher mostly relies on a first impression.
Too often, they’re left to sink or swim. Most schools rely on hope as their strategy.
Mitch Stokes, who looks after relief staffing at Wyong Public School on the NSW Central Coast, decided he wasn’t OK with sending vulnerable professionals into rooms and hoping for the best.
So, he did something rather clever – he enlisted his students.
Through preparation circles before a relief teacher arrives, and response circles afterwards, each class now works through a genuine agreement. It’s focused on who they want to be that day. What they want the casual teacher to feel – respected, valued, supported. And then exactly how they’ll make that happen, in plain and specific language that the kids themselves have agreed on.
They score themselves out of ten for performance.
The next part of this story is so cool. The adults scored the classes too, privately, keeping their scores to themselves. And when the results came in, the students were marking themselves lower than the adults marked them. They were demonstrably holding themselves to a higher standard than the grown-ups. And the adults were wise enough not to share their more generous scores, because doing so would have lowered the bar back down to where the adults had set it, rather than where the kids had set it themselves.
You can’t manufacture that. You cannot make a young person be harder on themselves than you are. That only happens when students genuinely own their conduct and actively care about the experience of the stranger arriving.
It’s worth noting how far from compliance the Wyong approach is. Compliance is what you get when an adult holds the bar and the students perform to avoid a consequence. What Wyong has engineered is different – it’s students who have internalised the standard, set it higher than expected and are actively exceeding it without being compelled to.
A school that teaches its students to look after the most vulnerable adult in the room is building exactly the kind of humans our world needs more of.
And one last point – this is not a behaviour management story. It’s a culture story. And it’s the one worth replicating.
Seriously impressive work, Wyong PS.
Keep fighting that good fight,
PS. If building the culture of your school is on your agenda for 2027, now is a good time to start the conversation. With budgets and planning underway, we’re already talking with schools about what next year could look like. If you’d like to start Term 4 with a conversation about what you want to build in your school, we’d love to chat.
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