The aim of the trials was to test the practicality of the standards which were designed to support principals to improve school leadership standards and thus improve the level of student achievement.

The School Based Management Team at the Ministry of Education in Vanuatu organized four schools from across the country to take part in the trials. One school in Santo, one in Tanna and two from the Port Vila area were selected. The four principals came to Port Vila for intensive training on the standards to ensure they fully understood the purpose of the standards and what they hoped to achieve. Each principal then selected a standard they would work towards achieving prior to the visit from the School Based Management team and the UNESCO representative.

As part of SBM team the School Improvement Officers (SIO) were also included in the workshop. The inclusion of the SIOs was to ensure that they also had an understanding of the standards and to prepare them to take part in the capacity training of the principals and the monitoring of the standards.

The training workshop was opened on Tuesday 28th October 2014 by the Acting Principal School Improvement Officer (PEO) of the School Based Management Unit, in his opening remarks he stressed the importance of the standards as the bench mark for every school principal to achieve.

The standards need to be seen as a guide to help principals improve the leadership and management in schools in order to contribute towards raising student achievement. The standards are in both English and French to accommodate the dual education system in Vanuatu.

The next stage of the trial was to visit the four selected schools and carry out an appraisal with the principals on their selected standard to see how the monitoring and evaluation tool was able to meet the requirements intended and interview the principals in depth about how they found the process. Overall the principals found the tool very useful in that it provided guidelines and information on how to strengthen their leadership and school management. The four principals were clear about how using this tool gave more focus to their job and helped them see how to improve their practices.

In each case the principals wished that they had been able to take part in this kind of professional development prior to taking up their positions. The standards provided a clear guidance as to what was expected of them and in general the standards were very easy to follow and self-explanatory. Each of the four principals selected different standards to work on depending on what they perceived to be of primary importance to their school and their needs.

One principal stated that she had found her role as a school principal overwhelming initially and having these standards to work with helped her to think about her role in the school and how to work together with her senior staff and teachers to improve the achievement in her school.

Overall the trial was very successful and work will continue under this Japan Funds-in-Trust project in 2015 to provide capacity development for more school principals in Vanuatu to enable them to make maximum use of the professional standards for school principals to benefit their students.