Informal vs. Formal Communication in a School Environment

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Recommended: Introduction to school culture

The aim of this assignment is to establish whether informal communication is just as important as formal communication in a school environment. My hypothesis at the start of the assignment is that both will be essential in order for a school to run efficiently and for a healthy culture to exist in an educational establishment. However, I first need to outline the nature of the school used for this study.

The school is a popular non-denominational 11-18 Comprehensive High School for girls, with some boys in the Sixth Form. There are approximately 1670 students on roll with the Sixth Form making up 370 of this number. The school, formerly on three sites in a leafy, middle class suburb, has occupied a new single site PFI funded building on the outskirts of Wallasey since 2003. The change in location means that the school now serves a more diverse socio-economic catchment area, including Birkenhead North. The new nature of the student intake reflects this. The school now has a higher than average numbers of girls who are entitled to free school meals. The majority of students are White British but the school also has students with English as an additional language. As a comprehensive, the school caters well for students with learning difficulties and physical disabilities and even though the proportion of students with identified learning difficulties is the same as those found nationally the school currently has fewer students with SEN statements than in previous years.

The school achieved Foundation status in September 2009. This means that it is a state-funded school and the governing body has greater freedom in the running of the school than in community schools. This follows on from the school successfully gaining Media Arts st...

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...d more when instigating change. If time constraints had not been so limiting I would have preferred to conduct one-on-one interviews with staff, as this would have allowed me to draw out greater details regarding individual experiences. What became clear from staff responses is that communication is viewed as a key tool in school but that informal communication methods are slowly being eroded away by changes that have occurred over the last five years.

The initial hypothesis for this assignment was that in order for a school to succeed then a mixture of both formal and informal methods of communication are needed. The evidence collected from examining literature based around this subject appears to concur with this idea so the next step was to analyse the data gathered from the questionnaire to see whether staff opinions in school supported my original hypothesis.

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