When something goes wrong at a school, it rarely happens at a convenient time. An incident occurs. Parents start asking questions. A journalist rings. Staff are looking to you for direction and this often happens before all the facts are known.
In those moments, the pressure isn’t just to respond, but to respond quickly. What you say or don’t say early usually shapes how the situation unfolds, how the school is perceived, and how much stress sits with you and your staff in the days ahead.
Under pressure, even experienced school leaders tend to fall into one of three patterns. Some say too much, filling the silence with detail that later needs correcting. Others say nothing, hoping the situation will settle on its own. And some say something instinctive but not thought through.
This is why a Crisis Communication Plan is such a vital part of a school’s preparation for negative events. Most have an Emergency Management Plan of some sort, but few have any plan on how to communicate.
A Crisis Communication Plan doesn’t need to be a huge document, but it does need some clear areas of focus. One of these is a selection of holding statements. A holding statement is a short, preprepared response used when a situation is still unfolding. It is not a legal document, not spin, and not a final explanation. Its purpose is purely to acknowledge what has happened, reassure the school community, and create space to gather accurate information before saying more. Because these are short and don’t say much, they can be prewritten on specific scenarios and briefly edited on crisis day.
Why the Need?
In these days of 24-hour news and social media, your success in controlling a crisis or negative event is largely determined by how quickly you respond. If you are not ready when media call, the first story will say something like, “The school has refused to comment.” That then goes up on news websites where your community sees it. Their assumption will be that you either don’t know what’s happening or you are hiding something.
With holding statements, you can inform your community first, before responding to media. Without them, it may be three hours before you are ready to communicate.
That’s three hours of your community not knowing what’s happening, sharing their views on social media and news organisations speculating on what’s happened and sprinkling their stories with angry quotes from selected parents. Then when the school is ready to communicate, people have already made up their minds whether you are a victim or a villain. If you communicate early and get into those first media stories with statements like, “Our thoughts are with all the victims”, or “We are doing all we can to support our students and their families”, you are far more likely to be seen favourably, even though you won’t have all the answers.
This is often misunderstood by school leaders who either wait until everything is known, freeze out of fear, or decide to call in a public relations company. By then, the horse has often bolted. There are other areas of a Crisis Communication Plan that need to be included, but drafting some holding statements is a great place to start. I’ve seen far too many principals find out how important they are the hard way.
About the author
Pete Burdon has worked with hundreds of school leaders across New Zealand over the last 15 years. He helps school leaders master difficult conversations, handle tough media interviews, and communicate confidently in crises. You can learn more about Pete and his services at www.mediatrainingnz.co.nz