8.00-10.00 Work at my desk.

10-12.00 Nursery/Primary Excutive Meeting. An overcrowded agenda – I’ve agreed to meet with Patrica McCall to put the agenda together prior to the meeting – we are going to explore whether or not we could roll this meeting inot my monthly meeting with AHTS. The meeting was very positive and we made progress on a number of areas.

12.30-1.00 Meeting with a parent

1.00-2.00 Met with Alison Wishart, Sheila McKendrick and Valerie Irving to discuss the session at next week’s HTs conference. Alison will give some examples of Curriculum For Excellence and give some ideas for how we might be taking it forwards in East Lothian – the workshop session will require HTs to focus on ideas they could implement in their own schools. The session will be followed up by a seminar teasing out the principles behaind the curriculum for excellence. We agreed that the strategy we wish to adopt for CfE will follow the model provided by formative assessment – i.e. a bottom up development which will match the principles of CfE with teachers aspirations.

2.00-4.30 Again too crowded an agenda – I think it’s a function of where we are in our development in that there is so much to update HTs. I hope that this will be the last time that agenda's need be so full as we can perhaps start to focus on two or three key areas in future meetings which link with our long term strategy.

4.30-5.00 I had three individual meetings with HTs following the meeting. An HT colleague made an interesting observation that I need to be careful we don’t try to take too many things forwards at once – this has been a recurring comment throughout my career – particularly in the early stages of a new job. I was able to show my colleague that everything we are taking forwards featured on my original agenda when I took up post. I’m confident that we can draw these apparent disparate threads together over the next couple of months.

5.-6.00 Met with Alan Ross, Alan Blackie and Cathy Marshall (health) about the changing children’s services fund – heid buzzing!

7.00-8.00 Meeting at Cockenzie School Board – I’d been invited to speak about primary/secondary transition with particular focus on maths. I spoke about our 5-14 plans for improving the reliability of our assessments and stadardised testing and then explored the 5Cs strategy with a particular focus on consistency and collective responsibility. I enjoyed the meeting and found the discusion to be worthwhile in helping to confirm the direction of travel we are taking.