9.00-9.30 Met Seonad McGillivary, HT Stoneyhill, and Debbie Beveridge, HT Wallyford. They are in the office all day to participate in our new induction programme for HTs. In addition to meeting me they met, Alan Blackie; Carolyn Walker from Personnel; Derek Haywood; and Carolyn Smith, Finance. I managed to have lunch with them and showed them our plans for development planning and project management tracking – seemed to be well received.
10.00-11.00 Willie White came into the office to brief about a conference about Outdoor Education to be held in Dundee in March. I’ve been asked to give a headteacher’s perspective on outdoor education. I’ve accepted and hope to talk about the importance of such activities and how they should be regarded as core activities in the curriculum as opposed to “extra”
11.00-12.00 completed the development plan guidelines
12.00 -1.00 lunch with Seonad and Debbie
2.00-4.00 Additional Support for Learning Implementation Group – we used the project manager system for the first time. It was very well received and should allow us to ensure our action plan is properly implmented. Our agenda in the future will be to review each of the action points and focus on aresa of difficulty.
4.-5.00 Met with Anthony Gillespie, Finance and Derek Haywood and Alan Borthwick to go over how we intend to fund the additional non-contact time for teachers next session. I was pleased that we seemed to have worked out a way to ensure that funding from the executive will be passed on to schools to ensure that all teachers have 300 minutes non-contact time.
5.00-5.30 Chat with Valerie Irving about the restructuring process and how we intend to allocate duties to our Quality Improvement Officers next session. I hope to job size each of the tasks need to be done in terms of the time likely to be required. Each QIO will have a minimum number of points to reach in terms of their duties – perhaps 50. Some schools might be worth 4 points- others only 1. QIOs will have combination of school duties linked to a cluster and generic duties which will extend across the authority. Schools and generic duties will be tallied up and in this way we should ensure some equity of duties and workload. I reckon people will stay with the same duties for a three year period but a review will take place every year.