UFO Info Week-End

Only around five of the 71 schools will have held governors’ meetings by then!This smacks of

Only around five of the 71 schools will have held governors’ meetings by then!This smacks of an authority covering its back rather than its responsibilities.Ofsted inspectors, oddly, whilst criticising the LEA for non-delivery, say that Hackney governors have an outmoded view of what an authority ought to provide under local management of schools.In an authority where it is impossible even to recruit a complement of governors, I hope the Improvement Team will have time to consider the unrealistic burdens transferred to governors by several years of hurried and excessive legislation. Thirty six pages of internal marketspeak were sent to them at their home addresses.
Hackney’s new draft Education Development Plan was tabled at a meeting with headteacher, governor, and union representatives in July. It was sent to all Hackney governors in August, during the summer holidays. By the time staff replied, the Council discovered that only governors had the power to vary contracts, passed the buck to schools, but reduced school budgets anyway by the assumed saving I spent three days digging us out.

Six days at the Whitsun half-term was the time for consulting headteachers and chairs on the principles of trading services under which schools will buy in services such as IT and governor training. A combination of all three sources would have yielded enough information for the most conscientious pupil. A key example last year was a “consultation” over the Christmas holiday, after councillors had decided to withdraw a long paid recruitment supplement from staff, about how staff would like it withdrawn. The LEA and the core of the Council consult late and usually without much consideration for the consultee. In a passage which rang as true as any in the report by the Office for Standards in Education, the inspectors criticised the lack of consultation with schools over the authority’s plan for “transforming Hackney.” Consultation, like transformation, is a problem word in Hackney.

On the other hand, if the project had been on Montserrat it would have found lots of good material on offer, with both vivid descriptions and scientific data.While eight- or nine-year-olds could probably find basic material on the CD-Roms, pursuing Web searches would need parental hand-holding until the age of 15 or 16. Even then, the task of collating the information would be quite challenging The time taken for this task was about three hours.. I tried some more narrow searches using phrases from the curriculum, such as “boundaries of the crustal plates”, and “causes of volcanic eruptions”, but that threw up stuff that was even more unusable. “Volcanoes” is just the sort of broad topic the Web does badly.