Scottish Learning Festival

Every year I book up with the intention of going to the SLF for two days, with great intentions and mostly bits and pieces turn up that mean I miss parts of the two days. I couldn’t get yesterday but managed along today and felt pretty inspired by some of the things I saw. Great reviews from people I met on Caroline Gibson and Jaye Richards sessions at the glowing lounge. Good on them flying the flag for SLC. Saw Liz Mercer doing her bit on persona dolls, which everyone was loving. Liz is one of the most dedicated and enthusiatic practitioners you could hope to meet. Caught up with Trevor Gray from LTS who will be doing an input at an event in our area on how to get to planning in CfE. He’s already done some really nice things on big question planning which are great starters for people. Was a bit embarassed to see my name on an ASG project at the SLC stall along with Caroline Gibson’s when all I did was bid for the money and she did all the fantastic work with a group of teachers across our Learning Community on rich tasks related to Africa and Malawi. I reminded her that I still feel like she’s a bit of an adopted daughter, its such a buzz to watch someone become increasingly skilled, confident and inspirational to others. That’s what this job is all about. Seeing leadership grow gives great hope for the future every time you see it.

Will have to go and catch up with some of the keynotes etc later on video links at LTS. As always so much to see and hear and time just disappears… I found it interesting to see how CfE impacted on the materials on display. It was heartening to see so much on outdoor play,  global citizenship, ASDAN  etc where a real sense of community is being worked on with our young people and the wider community.

I’m currently helping to organise a CfE visualising day for our area of Cambuslang/Rutherglen – I’m looking forward to this and we’re hoping to get several speakers including Trevor who can show how much of this we already do and how we can start moving forward making the connections and implementing CfE fully.

Last week we had our first 5-14 data meeting which hopefully the LC of Trinity found of some use. Now we have so much data available from the EA it is making tracking and monitoring and really digging deep much easier to do. Obviously there are questions as to what will replace this but in the meantime I’m keen that all our schools can be even more skilled in this area as it will become  even more crucial in many ways that we have excellent means of monitoring attainment and achievement as we move to CfE.

TESS

Jaye getting a mention in the TESS

WATCHING TOO MUCH TV

I’ve  been very negligent recently with this blog. Due in part to watching 5 series of the wire over the past few weeks in spare moments while at the same reading David Simon’s related books about Baltimore.  

 Its great to hear about Jaye Richard’s success with her big lottery fund bid. This together with a Learning Community CfE bid for a  project she will lead on will give great opportunities for liaison work across the community, sharing good practice and continued roll out of some of the great work she’s been doing. You can read more about it on her blog. This will add even more exciting transition work to the Learning Community

Cathkin Community Nursery are  in the midst of a submitting a bid too, where they hope to roll out accredited courses in conjunction with SLC college for their parents. Building Community Capacity in action.

We’re in the run up to the first of the new HMIe inspections, and the first obvious thing coming out of this is already additional joint working. With CLD alongside secondary, the links and amount of work going on within one small area are phenomenal. At the last count CLD had identified 57 partnership organisations working alongside one secondary and with the local community. It will be interesting to see how the inspection week itself proceeds.

Caroline Gibson’s blog writing about her visit to Malawi has been an inspirational read. After loving working with her at Castlefield, I’m really chuffed she is now a glow mentor on secondment for SLC and is already out and about in her additional capacity of CfE developmentwork, moving forward links with establishments on Malawi. She was out at Hallside Primary the other day in one of the Rutherglen/ Cambuslang Learning Communities where they have previously had successful links with Malawi.

Loch and Cathkin Primary have had a running start with their P1s – the teachers and SMT members have already put in an immense amount of work developing numeracy materials for planning in P1. All P1 classes in these 2 schools will be 18 or under as part of SLCs reduction of P1 numbers work. They are working on baseline assessments using tools such as PIPs and the Leuvin scale looking at engagement. The work will develop over the session.

Writing continues to be an area where many establishments have been looking at improvement work and I’ve been really impressed by the Ros Wilson materials – Big Writing  -from East Dunbartonshire where they take forward the VCOP approach – I was even more impressed by the amount of free downloadable resources to support VCOP I managed to find with a little bit of googling!

We held our Early Years Area Forum the other day which was hosted by Oakwood Nursery one of the partnership nurseries I visit. We had a good evening with input on persona dolls from Liz Mercer (you can read about the work she has done with her team in the LTS Early Years Matters Magazine) and a great tour round their newly built 0-3 facility – everyone had their notebooks out scribbling down nice ideas they saw!

So enough of this – back to my wire dvds….