I’ve just had a very positive meeting with some senior colleagues from Queen Margaret University. The new QMU has just been built in East Lothian and has been named as one of the top 10 modern universities by the Sunday Times Good University Guide. It’s mission statement reads as follows:
To enhance the quality of life and serve communities, through [...]
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Posted in Accountability, Culture change, Finance, Ideas, Management, Planning, Public Services, Strategic, Unions, honesty on May 28th, 2008 4 Comments »
The challenge of providing a high quality education service at a time when expenditure is growing faster than the available budget means that change, in some form, must take place.
There is a tendency in education to always reflect upon such an issue from the moral high-ground and simply state that more money must be forthcoming! As the person who [...]
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Posted in Children's Services, Conferences, Culture change, Ideas, OUtcome agreements, Parental Involvement, Partnerships, Planning, Public Services, Strategic, Uncategorized, Using data, school based management on May 15th, 2008 4 Comments »
I’m attending the Association of Directors of Social Work conference in Crieff.
One the key themes emerging is that of personalisation of services to users. The social work field is light years ahead of education in terms of using a mixed economy system for delivering services, by commissioning others from the private and voluntary sector to [...]
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I came across the concept of a social return on investment last summer when Jim Honan explained the Program Logic Model.
The model seeks to find a way in which public services can actually have a greater impact by focusing upon the things that will actually lead to a return on social investment. The tendency in [...]
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The power of our strategic groups came to the fore this week at our 3 -18 Strategic Learning and Teaching Group.
This group has 25 members who represent a wide cross-section of those of us involved in education in East Lothian. I know its accepted logic that such a large group can’t operate successfully but it’s [...]
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We had a meeting on Friday where we looked further at how we could use outcomes as drivers of our new service improvement plan.
It was good to give this topic a significant amount of time and it looks like we are making progress.
We have agreed that each part of our plan will have:-
- an overall outcome, [...]
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We had a meeting this afternoon where we were considering our Curriculum for Excellence strategy.
One of the concerns voiced by teachers, parents and pupils is what does ACFE actually mean? There are concerns that it’s too woolly and won’t actually change people’s practice.
Perhaps there’s something to be said for the government’s outcome agreement approach - which [...]
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sculpting.ppt
I’ve been invited to lead two seminars on the Seven Sides of Educational Leadership at the Association of Headteachers and Deputes Scotland national conference this Friday. Here’s an outline of what I might be doing. Learning Intention – We are going to learn how to use the seven sides of educational leadership to help us [...]
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It’s peculiar how sometimes things just seem to come together in an unexpected and unplanned manner but I had a meeting today where that very thing happened - and I would put it down in no small part to the discipline of keeping a Learning Log.
The various elements of this web of connections are as [...]
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I’m on the steering group of the Dynamic Earth/ Scottish Seabird Centre Outreach Programme
Krista McKinsey, the current schools communicator, has done a wonderful job but is leaving us in September to take up a job at Durham University.
At the steering group meeting on Friday we explored how we might go about replacing her.
One of the options [...]
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