I spent today at the AHDS (Assocation of Headteachers and Deputes Scotland) Conference where I led a couple of workshops about the Seven Sides of Educational Leadership.
I’ll posts a series of short posts about elements of the conference and I’ll kick off with something which Jim Reid (one of the founders of Wolfson Electronics) said about [...]
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I was listening to someone recently who was talking about educational attainment in Scotland and the need to close the gap between our lowest attaining children and the rest - our 20%. This goal has taken on a mantra-like term in Scottish education - although much easier to say than to do.
The additional comment was [...]
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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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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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The dilemma “Would you sacrifice occasionally excellent for consistently good?” has stimulated a fascinating variety of responses.
The motivation for creating this dilemma was a conversation I’d had with someone who had said that they would tolerate weak teaching as long as it was counter-balanced by excellent teaching in the same school.
I think it’s fair to say that [...]
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Unless you’ve been there I don’t think it’s possible to imagine the anxiety which teachers, principal teachers and head teachers experience at the time Scottish Qualification Authority (SQA) results are published.
I’ve been in there in all three roles and now in my wider role as Head of Education.
Over my 27 years in the business I’ve experienced [...]
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So often in education we focus upon the hard data - figures -statistics - numbers.
So it’s really useful sometimes just to stop and listen to people’s stories.
If you want to read an interesting story about a mother’s perspective on her child sitting his Standard Grades a year early tune into guineapigmum.
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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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We’ve completed the template which schools can use to complete their Standards and Quality report.
The background and rationale behind to this development can be accessed here
We will be launching the new format for all schools on the 21st March at our Head Teacher Conference. Those schools who volunteered for the on-line version will receive additional [...]
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We made a decision last year to introduce Midyis baseline testing for all our secondary schools for a test which all S2 pupil sit. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been analysing the data and its has thrown up some very interesting results.
Such has been the success that we have now agreed to use the [...]
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