As I look up from writing this I have 19 students staring back at me. It’s 10am on Saturday morning.
Following on from yesterday’s meeting – I nearly put my foot right in it today.
Earlier on in the day, Kate, the Head of English, and I met up with Helen’s parents for a review meeting.
I’ve just come back from the first Music Concert of the year. As we’re a thriving specialist music college this is a big deal.
Well I nearly called this post ‘What the bleep are school governors good for?’ but just in time I remembered Libby, who always seems to keep her perspective and is clearly working hard to support the school’s staff and systems.
So what is it that, in one school, finds 5 members of the senior leadership team in the National Gallery at 4 o’clock on a Friday (following my second INSET of the week) swapping notes on their favourite artwork and trying to decipher the messages that this sends out about them; and in another finds at least 3 members of the team up a mountain (I think it was Ben Nevis – no doubt my friend and former colleague
I didn’t get to talk to William today as he’s off sick (no comment!).
When I think about pay and the fact that everybody at our school is underpaid (pick any job role and you could move to another school within a few miles that was paying more money for less responsibility) I still come to the conclusion that what I really want is job satisfaction.
I’ve been on INSET this week. On Wednesday, Nigel the pastoral deputy and I learnt about methods of searching and screening for weapons in schools. Working on the outskirts of a major city means that we haven’t been able to avoid the horrors of rising teenage crime.
One incident last term involved a students getting cut by a ‘blade’. We don’t know what sort of blade and we haven’t found the culprit. That and the incident involving
I suppose I should consider myself lucky. I my last job I had part-share in an admin assistant (one day a week plus I could book out another day if I knew I had a big project coming up). In my new school I fought, successfully, for a personal assistant to be shared between the two deputy heads.
Monday – staff meeting apologising for why the class-lists were late at the beginning of term and why the Year 7 set changes still haven’t taken place (I’m blaming SIMs and sticking to that story).
