Employee and Development Review Meetings with Susan Smith at Tranent Nursery and Fiona Beveridge at Macmerry Primary. I was very interested to find out about learning stories from Susan – this is where nursery pupils keep a diary/record of their year in nursery – obviously their teachers and nurses have a significant role to play but I was struck by the idea of how similar learning stories are to what I was describing on this blog yesterday. Now if we could just explore a learning journal/story/project which followed a child up from nursery through until they leave secondary school!!

Both Susan and Fiona liked the idea of a headteachers manual.

I had a meeting over lunch about the development of a 360 degree review system for headteachers.

The afternoon was spent with the secondary headteachers. Very positive response to the Getting Things Done approach – looks like we will be following this up with all HTs who are interested next year; similar positive nod to the manual idea. All agreed with the investment in the upgrading of the bandwidth to schools – despite the investment. We had a discussion about our SQA budget which is currently held at the centre but which is due to be delegated to schools. As someone pointed out this does involve a transfer of risk – but at least HTs have some control over the presentation policy in schools – having said that we are going to look at developing authority guidleins on presentations. We also agreed that the authotrity shoucl develop guidlines for school uniform. All in all a very postive meeting.