Iain White of Govan High School challenged us on the context of leadership. His slides speak for themselves.

Gillian Tee,  Director of Children and Families in City of Edinburgh Council on the issues facing a leader having to make a reduction of £16m in the budget.

She started with some guiding principles on what her organisation were about. These included:

• Protect front-line services (inc. schools and direct social services)
• Transparency of discussion of budgetary difficulties
• Engagement of people with the solutions however difficult the task
• No-blame approach

Some lessons Gillian and her team learned from the process

• Focus on improved outcomes for children
• Keep it in perspective
• Break the vicious circle of small number of children taking disproportionate amount of budget
• Keep a sense of humour

Colin Russell kicked off the mini-presentations of session 2 with a discussion on leading change.

He started with the conditions for change.  He noted that we have a unique premise, ie a coherent description of the 4 capacities of an educated Scot. Before that, he argued we had a period of laissez faire with sporadic good practice followed by, in the case of 5-14, widespread, observed non-compliance.

He outlined some of the leadership structures in Dean Park Primary School. These included

• a staff forum allows for democratic leadership
• a global leadership system but with the development of situational leadership in the school.
• Situational leaders are given authority because they have authority

He finished with an exhortation not to flog dead horses.

• a staff forum allows for democratic leadership
• a global leadership system but with the development of situational leadership in the school.
• Situational leaders are given authority because they have authority

He finished with an exhortation not to flog dead horses.
“What works, works! What doesn’t work, doesn’t work!”

From Colin Russell of Dean Park Primary School:

“A policy is a clear and unambiguous statement of what nobody does!”

Tomorrow sees the annual SELMAS conference taking place in Stirling Management Centre.  In the words of Dr Judith McClure ” It is going to be a terrific Conference. SELMAS has a strong, positive and independent voice in Scottish education and we shall all take the fruits of our sessions, discussions and networking home with us.”

The theme is Leadership Challenge.

Featured presenters and panel members include:

• Fiona Hyslop MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning
• Colin Russell, Headteacher, Dean Park Primary School
• Gillian Tee, Director of Children & Families, City of Edinburgh Council
• Iain White, Headteacher, Govan High School
• Judith McClure, Headteacher, St George’s School
• Professor Tim Brighouse, London University Institute of Education, former Chief
  Adviser for London Schools
• Matthew MacIver, Chief Executive and Registrar of the General Teaching Council for Scotland.

As we did with the Summer School, the CPD team and guests will be sharing using the blog and, hopefully, include the presentations.