Posted in Accountability, Culture change, Ideas, Leadership, Leadership Dilemmas, Management, Partnerships, Planning, Policy, Power/influence, Public Services, TESS, professionalism on Jun 8th, 2008 5 Comments »
Every educational leader, regardless of position, has to wrestle with the powerful temptation to intervene or to meddle in the business of those whom they manage. The logic is fairly simple - “I’m being paid to manage and to be accountable for the work of others - so it’s reasonable that I take action in order [...]
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Posted in Children's Services, Communication, Conferences, Corporate, Early Intervention, Early Years, Integrated Children's Services, LAAC, Leadership Dilemmas, Parental Involvement, Partnerships, Public Services on May 6th, 2008 1 Comment »
We held a very successful “Corporate Parenting” Conference today at the Marine Hotel, North Berwick. .
Adam Ingram MSP , Minister for Children and Early Years gave a well informed and committed keynote address and emphasised the need for us to collectively address the needs of Looked After and Accommodated Children and to focus upon the improving [...]
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Leadership Dilemma: You are the head teacher of a school. A child swears at a teacher in front of other children. What do you do?
Does such an occurence automatically mean that the child should be excluded from school?
It’s certainly one of the most common reasons for exclusion.
My own point of view has always been to treat every situation [...]
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I’ve received number of e-mails this week from parents pleading with me not to establish composite classes in their schools. A composite class is one where a primary school class is composed of children from more than one year group, e.g. P3/4 composite class.
The common theme in all the e-mails is that if I care about children then I can’t allow [...]
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Should one of the key criteria for becoming a headteacher or school principal be that the person must have been an “outstanding” teacher in their own right?
Now I suppose this will inevitably lead to the question and some argument about the constituent elements of an outstanding teacher and headteacher.
It might even help to turn the dilemma [...]
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In East Lothian we are expanding our edubuzz community at an exponential rate - with the intention of creating a place where people learn from each other by opening up an interface between users and providers and between the professionals at all levels in the organisation.
So at this stage in it’s development it might be worthwhile exploring a hypothetical leadership [...]
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Following on from the first Leadership Dilemma here’s the second on the series.
You are a newly appointed Headteacher/Principal (two months). The Depute Headteacher/Vice Principal applied for the post and was unsuccessful. You have gone out of your way to accommodate the Depute’s opinion and to be sensitive to her/his feelings.
You have been told by someone you trust that she/he is making [...]
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I’d welcome your opinion in relation to this very hypothetical situation:
Imagine you are the Head Teacher of a school with 40 teachers. In that school there are 10 excellent teachers, 20 very good or good teachers, and 10 weak teachers.
Excellence = teachers who enable all children to consistently achieve and attain well beyond what might be predicted; the children develop a realistic [...]
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