Met Judith Kyle, Depute HT, Dunbar Grammar, at 8.30am to discuss comptency frameworks. Judith spent some time last session shadowing at the Royal Bank of Scotland. She observed some very interesting practice which has potential for our schools. I showed Judith the 360 degree framwork for senior managers and we agreed that many people will find this very useful. I'd like to explore a more rigorous framwork for teachers to use for their Employee Development and Review on a voluntary basis. I will be discussing this further with the staff development group.

Chaired the Additional Support for Learning Implementaion Group at 9.00am. We went through the plan and clarified who was going to do what. We are going to use GANT charts to plan our work for the coming session and try to get detailed figures for eny planned expenditure. Then met Sheila McKendrick and Derek Haywood to learn more about their meeting with staff from Scotish Borders and Midlothian which had looked at ways in which we could share expertise, systems and good practice.

12.30 lunch with Head Boys and Head Girls from our six secondary schools. I was hugely impressed by our young people who seemed to really enjoy the opportunity to meet their peers. We considered how each school used their senior students and a number of points came up which were common practice. There were far more similarities than differences and
I was taken by their common commitment to improve their schools and the opportunities of younger students. We looked at possible actions for the future and agreed that we would like to meet on a regular basis throughout the session. We will try to vist two very different schools with a view to learning about the different challenges and practices in these places. It was suggested that we go to Castlebrae High School In Edinburgh and Lorretto School in Musselburgh. I will try to make contact with both these schools. We also considered an S6 conference but with 500 S6 students it might be difficult to organise – but it is an option. They will all be attending each others Christmas dances – above all else they are keen to promote links betwen their various towns and to challenge the idea of traditional rivalries. It was good to work with young people again!

Policy Procedures and Review Panel at 2.00pm- 4.00pm. We shared the scorecard with the councillors and stressed our commitment to use the process to measure our performance as a department.

Depute Headteachers seminar at 4.30 – 6.10. Another excellent session. We started the meetig by everyone telling us their professional life story – the narrative (see last saturday) was exceptionally powerful. We agreed that we wished to continue with such meetings throughtout the session. The idea of coaching was well received but there were concerns about a talent identification system. Hopefully we can get some volunteers from this group to keep a weblog?