This week, Trinity College School has been pleased to host, virtually, a team of colleagues from fellow schools for the external review portion of our accreditation process through the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS). CAIS member schools go through a thorough accreditation process every seven years, requiring the School to address 130 indicators of effective practice across 12 standards of school life, including academic and co-curricular programming, boarding, governance, finance, leadership, human resources, physical plant, admissions, health and safety, commitment to school improvement, and mission, vision and values.
The School began the internal evaluation process in 2019 and had completed a draft internal review report in March 2020 when the pandemic hit. We re-engaged with the process in the winter of 2021 and noted hundreds of “pandemic addendums” (ways the School responded to and learned from its pandemic experiences) to our report. We submitted our lengthy report this past summer. All faculty and staff at the School were directly involved in the writing of the report or had the opportunity to review and give feedback.
The next part of the process involved a four-day Visiting Committee review with leaders from other CAIS schools (both from inside and outside of Ontario). TCS is the first school in CAIS history to undertake a fully virtual Visiting Committee and our model will be studied by the other schools in the review cycle this year.
From Sunday, October 3rd to Wednesday, October 6th, nine Visiting Committee members have joined close to 100 meetings over Zoom with faculty, staff, students, parents and alumni to discuss all aspects of school operations, programming and culture. The Visiting Committee will then write a detailed accreditation report to submit to CAIS and TCS.
The accreditation process has served as a great example of the collective and collaborative efforts of the TCS community, and we look forward to sharing highlights of our learnings with the community in the coming months.
