For those who continue to deny that there’s a crisis in our schools then the latest workforce survey carried out by the DfE for me says it all. Compared to last year, England’s schools have 5,400 fewer Teachers, 2,800 fewer teaching assistants and 2,600 fewer support staff despite the fact that our schools have 137,000 more pupils to teach.
What’s the point of governors? It’s not an easy or simple question to answer. Many countries have effective education systems high in the PISA rankings which don’t have governors. Indeed, very few countries have a model including governance like England and Wales. So why do we bother? The number one reason governors exist is to champion the very best education for every child in school, nothing more.
Sally, now 20, believes her mental distress should have been spotted years before she received treatment that helped her. She says she became ill when she first started secondary school. Teachers noticed, describing her as “an odd child”, but in the end it was Sally herself who had to ask her doctor for help and she was 16 and on the edge of suicide before she got any effective treatment. “If the government is serious about improving children’s mental health services it needs to guarantee increased long term funding and place more emphasis on preventing mental health problems from developing.”
“Grammar schools are a part of many people’s identities: having won admission to a selective state school plays an important role in the story of their life, especially if they came from a less privileged family. But, as a way to raise standards or to close the gaps between rich and poor, it is hard to find evidence that they are effective.”
So, why do so many meetings go wrong or are just plainly a waste of everyone’s time? To answer that question we must first understand that there are different types of people in meetings and understanding their behaviour and motivation is key to ensuring the meeting is effective.
Promoting the moral development of pupils is difficult, but the challenges it poses are not insurmountable. Ensuring children subscribe to common morality, and understand the reasons for it, is a task schools must not shrink from – society depends on it.
Like politics, leading a school can be messy. Can school leaders learn anything from political leaders?Teachtalks invites Jill Berry to look at why leadership is so important in these testing times….
