I had a great visit this week to King’s Meadow Primary School in Haddington. At the beginning of my visit I had a chat with Headteacher Donald McGillivray about boy’s writing. Donald has done a fascinating analysis of boys’ attainment across the school and the statistics show that boys’ writing is of a much lower standard than [...]
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There are three points of focus that I’m taking during my school visit programme:
Self-evaluation;
Distributive Leadership; and
Learning tasks.
I’m going out to Kingsmeadow Primary School tomorrow. HT Donald McGillivray sent me a paper which outlines how they know their school and how leadership is distributed right across the school.
It’s really helpful to get this kind of detail.
Self Evaluation [...]
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Following one of my recent posts about political scrutiny I was thinking about whether or not we could expose ourselves to further scrutiny.
I was further provoked in this area when listening to Professor Michael Fullan during yesterday’s Scottish Learning Festival where he was talking about one of his Six Secrets of Change. Michael Fullan has had a significant [...]
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We had our second Policy, Performance and Review Panel (PPRP) Meeting of the session this afternoon.
The panel is made up of elected members who are not part of the political administration. It’s their job to publically scrutinise the work of the department.
I was delighted that they have agreed to focus upon our Standards and Quality Report. [...]
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A group of us (some Secondary HTs and Quality Improvement Officers) met this afternoon to consider how we might develop attainment targets for schools.
One of the things we are all agreed upon is that the notion of plucking figures out of thin air and saying to a school “this is what you need to achieve [...]
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I’m putting three half days aside each week next session to visit schools. I intend to make my visits much more focused than last year - where it was just a general review of learning and teaching.
I’ve recently written out to all Head teachers with the following letter. It will be interesting to reflect upon [...]
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I got back to Scotland on Friday.
So what did I take from the Harvard experience?
There are ten inter-related things I’d like to do as a consequence of attending the course:
Identify and remove all things which erode or prevent a sense of belonging - in schools and the authority
Reduce the variance in the quality of learning [...]
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A week since my last post. It’s just that time of year.
Appointment panels, report writing, presentation preparation, e-mails, Integrated Children’s Services Plan and meetings — lots of meetings.
We held our last Head Teachers’ conference of the year today and it proved to be well received - although I think we pushed it a bit in [...]
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One of the tasks we need to complete this week is the Service Improvement Plan update. This is the document which provides guidance to schools about any priorities they should be including in their own School Development Plan.
Our Service Improvement Plan covers a three-year timespan and uses the National Priorities as a scaffold to give our plan some sort [...]
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We had been out at the weekend and I met two teachers who work in different local authorities - neither of which are East Lothian.
One teacher talked about their authority’s Curriculum for Excellence co-ordinator and the other referred to a School Review which she was going back to after the holidays. It made me think about [...]
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