Bath and North East Somerset hold a dance festival every year, aimed primarily at schools, though there are also some dance clubs taking part.  This year’s event happened on Wednesday evening this week.  As a chair of governors I get invited along and I always try to make it.  It’s a fun evening, even if my own kids haven’t taken part for some years.

If nothing else, the excitement and enthusiasm of the children taking part is amazing.

This year’s best dances, IMHO, were Widcombe Infants and both the Newbridge Primary offerings (though I guess I’m biased in choosing the latter).  Whatever, the Newbridge upper-school dance looked to me to be one of the most well rehearsed and together dances of the night.

Well done to all concerned.

Sara and I went out for a meal afterwards to Yak Yeti Yak, a Nepalese restaurant in Bath.  Lovely food and not bad prices either.  The dahl and watercress and spinach curry were both especially good.

According to the NASUWT I am unlikely to be “fit for purpose” in my “well-meaning” role as chair of governors of my local primary school. They might well be right - certainly in the general case. Schools, particularly the larger ones, are complex organisations with a complex set of funding, pedagogic, staffing, social and political pressures to navigate. Keeping on top of it all in your spare time, while also trying to do the day job, is a non-trivial undertaking.

The union wants the government to look at other modes of governance, e.g. that used in the UK health service.

I have to confess that I don’t quite know what that means… but, it seems to me quite likely (to badly paraphrase Winston Churchill) that using “well-meaning untrained volunteers” to help run schools may well turn out to be the worst option, apart from all the others.

The Self Evaluation Form (SEF) is the mechanism by which schools in the UK judge their own performance and capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. The form is a public document, typically developed by the school’s senior management team, in collaboration with governors, staff and other stakeholders. Intended as a living document, updated at least annually, the SEF is used as one of the most significant inputs into the lightweight inspection regime currently adopted by Ofsted.

There’s an interesting post on the Primary Teacher UK blog suggesting that Ofsted inspectors are not always rigorous enough in challenging the claims made by schools in their SEFs. I can’t really comment, other than to say that in the current environment it is understandable (though not necessarily acceptable) that schools will try to spin the system to their best advantage whenever they can.

In the case of the newly amalgamated primary school where I am chair of governors, we self-evaluated ourselves as ’satisfactory’ prior to our first Ofsted inspection and this was duly endorsed by the inspectors. We had little option. As a new school, however good we thought ourselves, we didn’t have the necessary evidence to back up any other claim… and the reality is that so much work is currently in hand, both in terms of setting new policies and practices and in terms of aligning pedagogic, assessment and other teaching and learning approaches across what used to be two schools, that to claim anything other than ’satisfactory’ at this stage would be unreasonable.

I noticed in the Guardian earlier on this week that the government is thinking about entering into a consultation period about whether school’s governing bodies should be made smaller.  I guess this is partly in response to those areas where finding governors proves to be difficult - not something we tend to suffer from at my school (or in Bath generally I guess).  Ignoring that particular issue though, I tend to think that, within reason, smaller and more focussed governing bodies tend to work more effectively than larger ones.  We currently run with 16, for a primary school with ~420 pupils which I think works quite well.  I certainly wouldn’t want it to be any bigger and I suspect that it would continue to work just as effectively at, say, 12 or so.

My only concern with getting much smaller than that is that it might tend to work against the efforts that schools are expected to make to become more involved in their local communities?

Some readers will know that I’m currently chair of governors at my local primary school in the UK - Newbridge Primary School - and that I helped construct the school’s Web site using bits and pieces of Web 2.0 technology. One of the things we do is use Blogger to maintain a set of blogs for the school. These are pulled in dynamically and displayed as though they were locally held content.

Gina, the fairly new ICT coordinator at the school, ran an INSET day session yesterday afternoon, trying to encourage all teachers to write for their class blog. The long term aim is to get the children to do this as well… but we need to take baby steps and nothing is going to happen until the staff feel comfortable writing for their blogs.

I think the session went pretty well. People seemed impressed by how easy it was to add content to their class blog using the Blogger editor. We’ll see how it goes. There’s not going to be a short term miracle… but I’m confident we’ll get there in time.

As part of the session Gina played a couple of videos - Shift Happens and CommonCraft’s Blogs in Plain English. This kind of material is pretty much the norm now in higher education but I was impressed with the background work Gina had done in preparing for the session. Good stuff. She has big plans for the school’s use of ICT, including getting teachers and pupils podcasting.

At some point we’ll need to run other training days looking at the use of Flickr and del.icio.us - both of which are used to hold content for the Web site. But yesterday was a good first step and I’m quite excited about where we can take this stuff.

I blogged earlier over on eFoundations about plagiarism which seems to have hit the UK headlines in no uncertain way today. I have a personal as well as work interest in this. In my role as chair of governors at Newbridge Primary School I guess I need to be encouraging some thought about what the school’s policy is (and should be) in this area.

In general terms I think staff are pretty good about information skills and, as I mentioned in the other post, they certainly encourage children to create a short bibliography at the end of longer pieces of topic-based homework, indicating which sources of information have been used. This is good.

The evidence from the recent JISC report on information skills seems to be that the earlier these kinds of skills are addressed, the better. So in some ways, primary school level seems like a good place to start thinking about it. But it clearly needs to be backed up and enhanced as children progress through secondary school, college and university.

My guess is that even at primary school level the copy-and-paste habit is already beginning to be learned. The school probably needs to be explicit and consistent in not encouraging that to happen?