Written by Gloria Wong, Sketch Group.
What happens when a school’s values exist on paper but struggle to live in the hallways, classrooms, and daily conversations? For Specialised Assistance School for Youth (‘SASY’) — a school in South Australia dedicated to supporting students who have disengaged from mainstream education — this was the challenge they set out to solve.
In 2025, SASY partnered with Sketch Group to do something different: to turn their values into something you could see, point to, and take ownership of.
Starting With the People Who Know Best
The project began not with a brief, but with a conversation — and then a half-day workshop.
Sketch Group brought together teachers and facilities staff from across SASY’s community to dig into something that can be surprisingly hard to articulate: what do our values mean to us, in practice, right now?
Rather than presenting a polished concept for feedback, the team was invited to sketch. To draw their own visual interpretations of each value. To put pencil to paper and see what emerged when they stopped reaching for the “right” answer and started reaching for an honest one.
“Values students could see themselves in, connect with, and take ownership of.”
This approach matters. When the people who live and breathe a school’s culture are involved in shaping how its values are expressed, the outcome carries a different kind of weight. It isn’t something handed down from above — it’s something built together.
Throughout the workshop, the team kept one question front of mind: what do we want SASY to look and feel like in the future? The sketches weren’t just about the present — they were a bridge between where the school was and where it was heading.
From Sketches to a Shared Visual Language
The ideas generated in the workshop became the material for something more permanent.
Sketch Group’s illustrator took the themes, images, and interpretations that emerged from the session and crafted a suite of individual value illustrations — one for each of SASY’s core values. These weren’t generic icons or clip-art stand-ins. They were purpose-made visuals, grown directly from the thinking of the SASY team, designed to feel authentic to the school’s community.
The illustrations were then brought together into a single cohesive poster, anchored by SASY’s mission statement at the centre. Practical, printable, and designed for display across the school — in classrooms, common areas, offices, and anywhere students and staff gather.
The poster does something quietly powerful: it makes the invisible visible. Abstract ideas about respect, growth, curiosity, or belonging become something you can point to. Something that sparks a conversation. Something a young person can look at and say, “That’s me.”
What Changed for SASY
SASY now has a shared visual language around its values — something that didn’t exist before. Students are better able to recognise, reference, and reflect on the behaviours these values represent. They’re not abstract anymore. They’re illustrated, posted on the wall, and woven into everyday conversations.
For staff, the illustrations serve as an accessible touchstone. A teacher can reference a value mid-lesson without stopping to explain what it means — the visual does that work. A conversation about behaviour or aspiration can be grounded in something tangible and mutually understood.
Perhaps most importantly, the process of creating the values system — the workshop, the sketching, the collaboration — reinforced the values themselves. SASY demonstrated, through action, that student and staff voices matter. That their perspective shapes the school’s direction. That they are seen.
What’s Next for SASY
The partnership between SASY and Sketch Group didn’t end with the poster. In 2026, the two organisations are building on this foundation in meaningful ways.
A VisionSketch™ poster is in development — a visual blueprint of SASY’s vision, paired with a supporting video that will bring their story to life for students, families, and the broader community.
A Lesson for Every School
SASY’s story offers something valuable for any school grappling with the same challenge: values that sound good but don’t quite land.
The shift they made wasn’t dramatic. They didn’t overhaul their values or hire a communications agency to polish their messaging. They invited the people who live those values every day to draw them — and then made those drawings visible.
What they gained was ownership. And ownership, in any school community, is what makes the difference between values that are displayed and values that are lived.