Heads Blog - Week Ending 25 November 2011

I have enjoyed watching a lot of PE lessons this week.

It was good to see the discipline, expectations and established routines of Mr Potter's class, as they arrived on the top field – they knew exactly how to start without being told. Then into groups for a warm up led by their peers, while Mr Potter demonstrated the learning to group leaders. The group leaders then went back to their peers and did the teaching! I went from there to Mr Lynskey’s class, where the success criteria was really clear. This meant that even though the boys were by this stage playing in a game situation they didn’t have to win to make progress in their learning. I also observed Mr Swales, Miss Blakey and Mrs Pill in their Sixth Form PE lessons, most notably watching the young people devise fitness plans for a variety of different clients; I didn’t say too much, but I recognised my ‘fitness profile’ in one of the pieces of work being done ... but I really didn’t like the advice!

It was also a week for visitors to our school, the first was on Monday when Sue Rumbold, the new Chief Officer for Leeds Children’s’ Services visited. It was a great opportunity to share with her all that is going on in our school and to let her see the school in action. This was followed on Wednesday by our Family of Schools meeting, where we were addressed by Paul Brennan, the interim Head of School Improvement for Leeds. With so many legislative changes impacting upon us fast, these are particularly important meetings; the support that school leaders provide for one another in the locality will be fundamental to sustaining levels of achievement for our children.

Our next visitor was Brian Dean, formerly of Leeds United and Sheffield United, who met with Mr Martin to talk about a new project where Brian might draw together his coaching skills and his links with Universities to prepare a mentoring scheme for some of our young people. It was great to meet him and to hear of his plans to be involved in our school. For Mr Keens, the only Sheffield United fan on our staff, it was a great personal moment ...

On Friday morning we had two visitors in school, Ken Tonge, our School Improvement Partner and Alan Key, one of our School Governors. Ken is Head of the Ashington School Partnership and Alan is the recently retired Headteacher of Abbey Grange School in Leeds. In his role as our School Improvement Partner, Ken is an independent and external voice who reports to both the local authority and our Governors about standards in our school; because we value his role Governors have chosen to retain him despite the end of the SIP programme. Alan Key has been appointed to our Governing body by the Trust and is bringing significant experience, wisdom and challenge, based on his time as a Head of two secondary schools. Some of our longest serving members of staff remember Alan as an eager young Languages teacher at Boston Spa School!  We had a variety of agendas to follow for the morning and it was valuable time spent, as well as allowing Alan the opportunity to visit classes in Science, Maths, English, Languages, PE, Politics, Art and Geography.

Many of our male staff have been supporting the ‘Movember’ initiative, by growing facial hair to raise awareness of men’s health issues. I think our young people have been very resilient in their patience and forbearance as the appearance of their staff  has altered (deteriorated? declined?) through the month. With the December shave soon to arrive, I thought it was important that we captured the moment for posterity; but only those not easily frightened should continue to scroll down ...