Don Ledingham’s Learning Log

We held our last HT conference of the session. The theme of the day was "A Curriculum For Excellence." Speakers were:
May Sweeney; HMIe Phil Denning - our new District Inspector; Paul Smyth from Research Machines - who spoke about SSDN; and
Ewan MacIntosh - whose presentation he has posted as a podcast.

Here is a [...]

On the road for a lot of today - West Barns Primary sSchool for Dave Wharton's ED&R; LevenHall Nursery (Musselburgh) for Alison McNeil's ED&R; Meadowmill Sports Center for a meeting with Eamonn John and Beth McLeod about our PE, sport and physical activity strategy; Preston Lodge High School for meeting with management team to reflect [...]

I had planned to take a day off on Friday but as things turned out I had to come in to pick up on some business and it turned out be a worthwhile day.

Today has been taken up with the directorate meeting; my own ED&R with Alan Blackie; meeting with Bill Torrance the new EIS [...]

QMUC is opening its new campus in East Lothian in August 2007. This presents exciting opportunities for all of us in East Lothian. I was at a presentation today about university and Jewel and Esk Valley College. Once again I was struck by comments made about how ill prepared young people are for [...]

Employee and Development Review Meetings with Susan Smith at Tranent Nursery and Fiona Beveridge at Macmerry Primary. I was very interested to find out about learning stories from Susan - this is where nursery pupils keep a diary/record of their year in nursery - obviously their teachers and nurses have a significant role to [...]

Two ideas crystallised today.

HTs Toolkit/Manual

As readers of the blog will be aware we are looking to offer
practical support to headteachers next year by providing guidance in "getting things done" (GTD) - a time management strategy which has been very well received by the primary/nursery executive. As second strand to our leadership development strategy has [...]

We are thinking about developing a teacher's manual.

We interviewed for the Quality Improvement Manager - Inclusion and Equality - position this morning. We interviewed three very strong candidates and I will post the interview questions here next week once we have completed other interviews for the Inclusion and equality team later this week.

We have identified our preferred candidate and await the normal [...]

I'm sitting here on Sunday night just having completed my preparation for the coming week. As I've stated elsewhere on this blog I like to make sure I start each week with as little as possible hanging over me. It doesn't always work but it certainly helps me to manage my job.

I bought a new [...]

I popped into see David Scott at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary this evening. I met Donald McGillivray in the car park and we went up to see David together. I've checked this out with David and he is very happy for me to report this in my blog. David is in good [...]