THIS WEEKEND... KEEP IT SIMPLE!

Why is there is so much negativity, criticism and unpleasantness around. Education, schools, teachers and colleagues, some working in some of the most challenging contexts, are constantly criticised in the media, by OFSTED and by the DfE. We need to change the culture surrounding education and learning to create a more positive, reflective and supportive framework and critically we all need a rule book to help us live our lives. Interestingly, I re-read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” recently. It’s a great book, first published in 1937, and things don’t get any clearer than this:

SKILLS FOR LIFE AND WORK MATTER!

This review by the early Intervention Foundation looks at the evidence of links between social and emotional skills in children and how they fare as adults. It find that there are many programmes across the UK that have set out to improve social and emotional skills; we also find that some of them have rigorous evidence to prove their effectiveness, and that many do not.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESS!

Over the last twenty years I have seen so many extraordinary places and learned so much about success and achievement. It seems to me that successful organisations, successful schools and successful teams, all have the following characteristics...

HARD TIMES AND TOUGH ISSUES REQUIRE BOLD, BIG AND BRILLIANT SOLUTIONS!!

Whether it is care for the elderly, unemployment in young people, concerns about special educational needs and inclusion or the underachievement of looked after children; hard times and tough issues require bold, big and brilliant solutions... anything to shake things upand challenge the status quo. It's interesting that in so many places, people create hugely complex problems so that anyone looking to change things is discouraged by the enormity of the challenges they might face. I am always reminded of the line about how you might eat an elephant... one bite at a time! The real challenge we face is to break problems down into manageable bite-size chunks.

IT'S NATIONAL WOMEN IN ENGINEERING DAY!

  The aim is to celebrate the work that women do in engineering, and to showcase the great engineering careers that are available for girls.

LEADERSHIP MATTERS!

It's a struggle to recruit and retain leaders in many organisations and the lack of leadership skills means that we are finding it harder and harder to fill headships. The challenge of course is that leadership demands a very different set of skills to management so the really strong and highly effective managers don't have the skills needed to lead, shape and drive culture and practice.

PLEASE READ THIS: WHAT WORKS BEST IN EDUCATION: THE POLITICS OF COLLABORATIVE EXPERTISE

In the previous paper, 'What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction', John Hattie argued that the aim of schooling is for every student to gain at least a year’s worth of learning for a year’s input. He further argued that many policy-makers and systems are persistently drawn to the wrong kind of education interventions – distractions that do not help us realise this ambitious aim. Hattie argues here that we need instead is a defensible and compelling narrative that leads to long-term, coherent and focused system-wide attention on student learning. He calls this territory ‘the politics of collaborative expertise’. Its premise is that there is differential expertise across our schooling system and that there can be wide variation within schools. At the same time, there is a remarkable spread of expertise that can be identified, nurtured, esteemed and brought together to reduce this variance. The aim of this paper is to begin describing what a model of collaborative expertise would look like and what we need to get done to make it a reality. 

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

READ THIS: 'WHAT DOESN'T WORK IN EDUCATION: THE POLITICS OF DISTRACTION'

This report is the first of two linked papers by John Hattie on what doesn’t work in education, and then on what does. In this paper he describes the confused jargon and narratives that distract us from the most ambitious and vital aim of schooling: for every student to gain at least a year’s growth for a year’s input. He outlines the policy responses commonly used by systems aspiring to be in the world’s ‘top five’ for education and argues that these responses are ‘fixes’ that fail to address the important questions, and so are unlikely to make a difference, despite costing many billions of dollars. Such responses are part of what Hattie calls the ‘politics of distraction’.

EVIDENCE-BASED APPROACHES NEEDED!

It's strange how every great organisation, every great school and every great teacher asks themselves constantly...we all want answers to these questions...

• Is what we are doing working?
• Are we making a real difference?
• What else can we do? 
• What could we do differently?
• What can we learn from other people?
• What can we learn from other places? 

HAPPY SUNDAY... HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY!

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.

Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour. 

William Blake

REMEMBER TO START EARLY!

As with most things in life, the earlier we start to learn the easier it is to succeed. 

FIVE STEPS TO RELEASE THE MAGIC!

If we are really serious about changing the culture and creating a culture of excellence we must incentivise and reward co-operation, teamwork, collaboration, networking and partnering. Here are five steps that help to release the magic!