Schools are on the mid-term break yesterday and today so not as much e-mail traffic as usual. I spent most of this morning working with Derek Haywood, School Business Manager, trying to finalise the budgets for primary and secondary schools.

Worked on SELS from 11.00-1.00 this system will allow us to actively engage pupils in providing feedback on the school exeperience. We are going to put the student data onto the system for schools which should make it much easier to implement the on-line questionnaires.

2.00-4.00 Met with Alan Ross, Sheila Ainslie and Raymy Boyle to consider how we can develop our cluster approach to integration. We discussed the twin challenges of promoting a culture of inclusion and the structures and processes necessary to enable it to be effective.

TFT number 3

In the course of the conversation I was struck by the following question ” Can a teacher, or for that matter a school, really live up to an inclusive culture if they don’t try to adopt a
positive perspective towards children, such as that I described on Friday, i.e. unconditional positive regard? – I think it’s almost impossible to do so without such a perspective. If we are overly influenced by the likeability of a child, or their commitment to the education process we can’t really be successful in changing their behaviour (we’ll just want to get them out!) I thought the section in the Educational Psychology service section of the website relating to motivation and
Maslow’s motivation theory to be very relevant to this debate.