Improving Standards

I recently read Jackie Beere's book, 'The Perfect Ofsted Inspection '. There are some real gems of advice given from the head teacher of a large primary school which will help to drive standards of teaching and learning.

• Spend time together with your staff wisely through giving them time to share good practice and generate good ideas. Regular mini-Teachmeets will help with this.
• Give teachers opportunities to plan together, prepare and assess together.
• Give the middle leaders time together to share the strengths and weaknesses in teaching and learning in their phases.
• Engaging the skills and knowledge of the support staff about the children they work with is vital. "Identify what the targeted group of children are finding difficult and then working on the issues and measuring the impact."
• Make sure that teachers are given time to watch each other through a buddying system based on their strengths and development needs. I hope to introduce 'teaching trios' this year.
• Take your pupils and staff to other schools to observe teaching and learning.
• Always allow your staff and pupils to take risks together and make learning exciting! Let them make mistakes and learn from them!

Courage and Resilience

I recently read Jackie Beere's book, 'The Perfect Ofsted Inspection '. I loved the advice given on courage and resilience.

This is what I will look for from all members of my team:

"Being creative means breaking the rules - finding new solutions and pushing back the boundaries. This takes courage and confidence as it may go wrong."

Teachers can't be outstanding if they play by the rule book alone. They have to try something different - it will make them unique. 

"It feels good to be familiar and comfortable but exceptional teachers enjoy pushing themselves outside their comfort zones and helping students to do the same. Being ambitious for your classes means having to try new ways of working, particularly for groups of children that don't learn easily."

Teachers who try something different will be remembered by their pupils. Their lessons will engage, excite and motivate. The children will learn.

"Courage helps you to be resilient. You need to be courageous to want to take advice and to seek out feedback from leaders, pupils, parents and colleagues about your performance. You then need the resilience to act on feedback."

For this reason, it is important that feedback is fair, consistent and encouraging.

Embedding the habits that will make the difference

I recently read Jackie Beere's book, 'The Perfect Ofsted Inspection '. The first chapter is about embedding a vision. 

There are a lot of tips about embedding habits that I found really helpful. These are based on suggestions from a headteacher of a high school in Kent. Here are my favourites:

• Create a culture from which achievement can grow
• The physical environment is crucial
• Nobody learns (or teaches well) if they are unhappy
• There is no contradiction between order and discipline and a belief that being at school should be full of laughter and joy.
• Ofsted success is based on replicating during inspection the good practice that occurs all the time, not on attempting to introduce last minute changes.
• Recruit, develop and promote outstanding staff and let them get on with it.
• Create a system that links CPD to individual classroom performance and personal need as well as whole school priorities.

If my school can follow these pieces of advice then it will be a clean, happy, disciplined, high performing, forward moving school. What more could I want?

Growing the vision and culture with everyone

I recently read Jackie Beere's book, 'The Perfect Ofsted Inspection '. The first chapter is about embedding a vision. 

We are asked 'What is your school famous for? What is your head's vision for the school? What are the key priorities for improvement? Which are the underperforming groups and what is being done about them?'
We are told that everyone in the school needs to know the answers to these questions - everyone! At first I thought this would be making sure that the school's mission statement and vision are clear and appears where ever appropriate. 

"No matter that the vision is expressed in a slogan on the school badge, no matter how many times you have repeated it, the vision isn't embedded until it runs through the school like the lettering in a stick of rock."

It reminded me about a motto that I heard once - "We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen." The speaker explained how clearly the motto is understood by everybody working in the hotel. It was evident in the way the staff spoke to its customers. It was clear in the decor of the hotel. It could be tasted in the food. The motto tells of high standards and, in particular, high standards of customer service.

That's what I'll be looking for - a simple message that will be shown in everything that we do.

I recently saw this mission statement on Twitter and thought it was brilliant(!):

The author is right - every school has similar aspirations - so what is special about our school? Our message, our vision, our culture needs to be clear, and everyone should be part of it.

Building a Vision

On my NPQH course so far I've learned a lot about embedding and building a vision for your school.

I found the chapter 'Embedding Your Vision' in Jackie Beere's book 'The Perfect Ofsted Inspection', therefore to be useful. The book is well worth a read.

She describes eight strategies:
1 Growing the vision and culture with everyone
2 Embedding the habits that will make the difference
3 Embedding the seven habits of highly effective teachers and pupils.
4 Getting middle leaders to buy in
5 Ensuring effective performance management and continuous professional development
6 Engaging with the whole school community
7 Rigorous self-evaluation
8 Using the self-evaluation form to produce a live school development plan

Over a series of posts I'll reflect on some of these strategies.

Budget Meeting

One aspect of headship that I find daunting is the budgeting process. I've been told different things about what to expect: everything from, 'you don't need to worry about it - the authority will help you balance the books' to 'it's the worst part of the job'. Over the last few months I've tried to get involved with the school budgeting process as much as I can.

As many schools are, due to certain changes in funding, our financial figures haven't been quite as straightforward as they could be. So it was interesting to watch the head, bursar and finance governor go through each budget code, discussing the predicted spend and if it needed to be reduced or increased. The authority's budget officer amended the figures as suggested and then gave a final amount at the end.

The process was logical and considered, and it made sense. Of course, though, the budgeting meeting is the easy bit, I guess. The hard part is staying in control as the year goes on.

When I'm a headteacher I would want to know the finances regularly so that I am sure of our position. I can do this through regular meetings with a business manager and my finance governors.

The Great British Food Festival

Today we visited the Great British Food Festival at Walton Gardens. We had a really nice day, sampled some amazing food, bought some great souvenirs to bring home and we managed to avoid the rain!

The place was absolutely packed today!

Here are our favourite people of the day:

• We bought some lovely pies from http://orchardpigs.co.uk/
• There was some good music from http://havoc51.com/
• We bought some new Strawberry and Lime flavour Ginger Beer from http://www.crabbiesgingerbeer.co.uk/
• I had the best hot dog ever from http://liverpoolfoodblog.co.uk/2012/08/29/castro-grill/ (no website)
• We bought delicious sausages from http://pigandco.com/
• We bought some some Pickle Power (the best cheese ever) from http://www.snowdoniacheese.co.uk/
• We bought some lovely cupcakes from http://endoftherainbowcupcakes.co.uk/
• We bought some amazing pies and treats from http://shirleyspies.com/

Castro Grill
We Are Castro hot dogs.

Well worth a look!

Leading Change for Improvement

Today I attended the NPQH module, 'Leading Change For Improvement'

We talked about stages of grief that staff members may go through whenever changes are put in place. This Simpsons video sums them up in a funny way:



Tuckman's model of change was used as a model for how to work through change in schools.



When I am a headteacher I hope that this process may look like this:

Forming
The main thing about this stage of the process is to work together to agree common goals. I hope to pull people in the same direction by involving them in the goal setting process and giving them ownership.

Storming
Like in the video, I want to avoid 'arguing' and have the 'right sort of arguing'. This means that the storming session will set roles and responsibilities that will help us to achieve the goals. Our common goals will be our guiding principle to help us to achieve what we want, without straying off at a tangent.

Norming
This is when we'll try things out. We might make changes and we might rethink some of our strategies. But we will continually refer to the goals that we want to achieve, and the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the team.

Performing
Sometimes changes take days. Sometimes they take years. But an important change must perform well and if we can get the three earlier stages right, the school will perform.

I loved this quote from the day: "Relationships are the key to change." This is completely right. There has to be happy, healthy, productive relationships within the stakeholders for the change to work.

I'm not too sure about the message in Resistance to Change. But I imagine that I will bear this in mind when I am first appointed in a school. Maybe some members of the team of staff that I take on will be resistant to change. Maybe over time I will be able to bring in new members of the team that will work with us on our goals.

Producteev

I live by To Do Lists. I've always been a fan of Toodledo. However, on getting my Nexus 7 at Christmas and discovering that Toodledo doesn't have a compatible Android app, I've been forced to look at alternatives.

For me, there are some criteria for any to do list tool:

• It must have a website version, a compatible Android app and an iPhone app.
• It must have recurring tasks.
• It must 'feel' right.

I eventually settled on Producteev. This seems to meet all of my criteria. I like the way I can create different workspaces, so my home tasks don't appear at school. Although I don't take advantage of the facility, you can collaborate with other users. Adding subtasks and notes is easy too.

It could be improved by allowing tasks to repeat from the completion date, not just from the due date. But for now I'm happy with it.

Monthly Review: January 2013

After a lovely long Christmas holiday it was quickly business as usual!

Potholes
On my way home after the first day back at school I hit a pothole and damaged my car. I burst a tyre and damaged my alloy wheel. Luckily my brother was able to repair the wheel and he found a tyre that we can use. It inconvenienced me, but it ended up costing nothing. The borough council were sent a letter explaining that I would be seeking compensation for damages but I didn't need to pursue this after all. I'm sick of all the potholes around at the moment. I have been reporting them all online. I live in one unitary authority but work in the other. One contacted me within days to say they were investigating the potholes I had reported. The other has said nothing.

NPQH
I had another day out of the classroom on my NPQH course. It was a good day but I'm concerned that I've done absolutely no additional work for the course. I need to get on with this.

Snow
I hate snow. We had too much of it this month and it lingered for too long. I don't want to say any more about it.

Knee
I've been given the all clear from my consultant, so my knee is on its way to full recovery. I have got to keep up with the physio.