Balancing Act
Mrs O'C is a deputy head at a secondary school. Her job is a balancing act, involving policy decisions, parents' evenings, data analysis, assemblies, advising colleagues, timetabling – and, of course, teaching.
Parent Voice
My busy but positive week continued with a Parents Forum on Tuesday evening.
This wasn’t my project so all I had to do was turn up and help respond to parents questions.
The school gave updates on various projects, fed back on progress since the last project and then invited parents to discuss ‘whatever they wanted’ in small groups before feeding back.
I don’t know how to put a positive spin on the fact that we only had around fifty parents turn up in a school with over 600 children. It is also quite demoralising to have the majority of issues raised being quite negative but I suppose that’s the nature of the beast. As my colleague Nigel says ‘we have too many drains in the room, we need a few radiators’ – I’m not sure whether he’s been reading a book on management or whether he’d started a bit too early on the wine we had ready to serve parents after the event
Stakeholder consultation
I wonder how best to gather information on what we’re doing right as well as what needs development? It’s especially hard to hear about things that we know are wrong and are just starting to get to grips with (but where it’s just too early to share anything with parents).
I think the main reason our Head continues with these forums is because it looks so good for Ofsted in terms of gathering the view of stakeholders – I think I’d be happier if all we had to do is gather views, the next bit of the process is forming a response and positing it on the website with deadlines for action. I like the evenings because they’re a chance to meet with parents in a setting where there’s no change of conflict over an individual child (unlike at parents evening when you’re trying to find a delicate way to put your point across).
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Comments: Keeping pupils motivated
Following my earlier post about my "G1" borderline cohort I've been giving some thought to some of the other Year 11 students.
Equality
This scheme has led to some resentment from other Year 11 pupils as they see a small cohort gaining prizes for effort and wonder why they can’t be included in the scheme.
I think I’ve fudged that a little bit with them by saying that fair doesn’t mean treating everybody the same and also talking about limited resources and that the ultimate reward will be success both in their exams and then in later life – I’m not sure they were buying any of it and I feel bad that I have to do it but at this stage we have to concentrate on keeping the borderline candidates on the right side of the border.
At my last school we managed this by having schemes running for a number of different cohorts – A*; Working Well; Borderlines; SEN – we managed to fit every pupil into one of those categories but at my current school we just don’t have the capacity or money to do it.
After the mock exams the borderline cohort will have changed – some pupils will have far-exceeded the 5 A*-C goal and I can move on to the next group. I just hope that none of the B Grade students will have moved into the borderline category because they felt unsupported by the school.
Getting staff's goodwill
Today’s Think Positive staff briefing will again include music.
It’s Feel Good inc by Gorrilaz as we will be having our second Feel Good Friday tomorrow.
Senior leadership team have decided to thank staff (and try to keep the cover bill down) with lunch on a Friday throughout November. It’s only cheese, quiche and snacks plus plenty of cake for pudding; we also make sure there’s plenty of health giving fruit juice included. It’s a nice way to encourage staff to meet up in the staffroom on a Friday lunch-time rather than them debating whether they have time to nip to the chippy or worse still the pub and make it back in time for afternoon lessons.
We’ve also found, and I think this is universal, that free food is such a hit with staff that the seventy or eighty pounds spent is worth so much more in terms of good will and staff morale.
We are, however, trying to think of non-food related feel good hits – so far Indian Head massage and lunch-time pilates or salsa lessons seem to be favourites. I think January may see the need for the resurrection of Feel Good Friday and maybe, after the Christmas excesses, a bit of salsa will be just what we need!
Submitted by Mrs OC on 13 Nov 2008
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Topics in this blog
- A Levels
- assembly
- assessment
- assessment for learning
- behaviour management
- career progression
- cover lessons
- curriculum
- discipline
- end of term
- enterprise
- exams
- fundraising
- Games and activities
- GCSE
- GCSEs
- gifted and talented
- government policy
- governors
- governors visits
- homework
- inclusion
- inspections
- leadership
- levels
- literacy
- marking
- mathematics
- motivation
- music
- parent forums
- parents
- performance management
- planning
- professional conduct
- professional development
- revision
- safety
- school trips
- school uniform
- specialist status
- standards
- teaching
- teaching and learning
- thinking skills
- time management
- tools and resources
- transition
- work life balance
- work-life balance
