1. How will mission drift be prevented?
While it is impossible to guarantee that mission drift will not occur there will be a number of structures that are established to minimise the risk, including:
- A sound statement of faith written into the Melos Education Ltd constitution
- A clear requirement placed on directors by governance policy and the constitution to ensure the core faith component of our members is maintained and developed
- Policies and practices at the Group and member level to bind and enforce staff level commitments to the Christian ethos of the Group
- Where applicable, mission partnerships with a member’s founding Church
2. Origin of the Statement of Faith?
The originating Statement of Faith comes from that of Christian Schools Australia’s Statement of Doctrines, Tenets, Beliefs and Teachings that is an extension of the Statement of Faith originally developed by Christian Community Schools Ltd.
3. How do we acknowledge the uniqueness of individual school communities?
Melos Education Ltd seeks to honour and preserve the unique history, culture and structure of each members. We do not seek to clone any one model and apply it across all members. While we will provide templates for many aspects of school operation and seek to operate under a common Christian educational philosophy, we enjoy and appreciate the uniqueness of each individual member.
4. How are the interests of the founding Church and school retained?
The Melos Group acknowledges the significant investment of time and often resources that have been contributed by founding Church members to see a school established. A number of strategies are in place to honour and enhance the ministry connection many schools and Churches enjoy.
a) development of a founding Church/School statement of Mutual Cooperation and Respect to define the respective roles of each institution and ministry expectations and framework for future partnership. This document to be reviewed and re-signed annually as a mutual commitment to each other.
b) Church representation on the selection recommendation panel for the appointment of the school principal
c) The establishment of a Principal Advisory Group with the possibility of Church member representation.
5. What are the financial implications of joining the Melos Group?
All schools are required to operate with an appropriate level of resources to support their academic functions. In addition, all schools require access to certain higher-level functions including governance, compliance, business, financial and IT services as well as policy development.
When considering that each school must provide all this for itself, it seems clear that cooperating should lead to a cost savings as expertise and services are share. This also enables smaller schools to access higher level expertise in these areas than they may otherwise have had access to.
While members will remain semi-autonomous, it is proposed that certain functions will be centralised so as to gain cost savings. This may include bulk purchasing deals for items such as insurance, telecommunications, banking services and equipment.
All members will pay a base fee which will be a percentage of their Government income to cover such items as governance costs the employment of Group employees and office overheads while other services such as finance operations support, marketing, IT support etc will be charged to individual schools at a rate commensurate with their use of the service/s.