The ambitions for Stad & Esch are high. The mission is to prepare pupils optimally for the challenges the 21st century offers them, knowing that this century is already well on its way, and successful people require more than just a diploma. This will be a future in which technological, social and demographic developments will be moving so fast it will be hard to keep up. The underlying vision helps to make the mission happen and consists of four basic principles: Passion as the fuel for talent generation, creativity as the key to success, making the personal approach standard, and room for bravery. This led to a co-created identity of Stad & Esch, which is the heart of everything, and manifests itself through culture, symbolism, communication, and of course education. To build these four topics of identity and bring them to life, four core teams were created within the organization with the combined management team of the four locations as the leading coalition. To help them accomplish this, we have held occasional but frequent acceleration sessions on one of the topics with a diverse group of participants: Staff, management, students, and external experts. In these sessions, we create the Stad & Esch future together.

The past two days we spent working on Symbolism. And it was a tough cookie. How simple it is to say what you like, what you think is nice or beautiful, how difficult it seemed to express that in words and imagery. Of the four subjects, we learned symbolism is the toughest because of several reasons. It is difficult to see/hear/feel/smell things before with no tangible stuff if it is not your daily thing. However, when the school will be realized and the curtains are hanging, everybody will have an opinion about it. It defines whether the new location will be a fun, special, pleasant, inspiring, productive place. Or how its communication speaks to its audience for example. That makes it a quite crucial subject. We did a broad variety of workshops to create a better understanding of symbolism and how we want to have it for Stad & Esch. Looking back, you could say that the first day was to understand what it is, the second day led to good outcomes that will help literally shape Stad & Esch. All the results were harvested as input for the symbolism core team to work on. A second acceleration session follows in the beginning of next year.

Deeply enjoying working on this project with Roel, Ellen and Jaap of A2Q and of course the staff and students of Stad & Esch.