CPD Team

Keith Brown opened the conference and challenged us to be creative and innovative in our approach to educational leadership.

Richard Jennings, Head of Education at East Lothian Council reviews the community vehicles devised by groups at the conference to bring a focus to their leadership agenda.

Perth High School Headteacher Jim Scott talks us through the approach he and colleagues took to implementing Curriculum for Excellence, with an emphasis on meaningful and susatainable  system change.

By Margaret Alcorn

On September 3^rd this year, educators from schools, centres, local authorities, national organisations and colleges came together for this year’s SELMAS Leadership Conference. The theme was: “Curriculum for Excellence: thinking differently to achieve success”, and as ever the delegates came to be challenged, stimulated and entertained by a range of speakers and lots of discussion and shared activities.

We were delighted that the Keith Brown MSP, Minister for Skills and Lifelong Learning started off our conference. The keynote address was given by Richard Jennings, newly appointed Head of education in East Lothian who lead a lively, interactive session on Community Vehicles, offering one strategy to get people thinking about core values and the moral purpose of their work.

Keen as ever to hear practitioner voices, we then heard from four colleagues who are leading innovation within their own workplace. Jim Scott the headteacher of Perth High School, Irene Whitford, a teacher from Kirkliston Primary School. Here is Irene giving us a great insight into the Learning Rounds Experience

Elaine McGuire the head of the Pre-5 Centre in Shortlees Primary School and Lena Gray, the head of Policy and New Products at SQA, each described an aspect of their current practice, and delegates were invited to offer questions and comments. You can link to and download the brochure which Lena mentioned here. You can see the impact of these brief presentations in the feedback given by delegates.

The afternoon began with a session led by Alison Drever of Learning and Teaching Scotland. The  “Skunkworks” process, in essence, is about innovative answers to important questions. At the conference delegates were asked to step outside the realms of education to consider CfE from a different perspective. This culminated in a CfE think differently challenge which asked them to become the Google search engine and consider what the top hits might be if we typed ‘CfE, think differently’ into the search box.
The conference ended with a moving, challenging and thought-provoking presentation by Linda Borland, a Detective Inspector in the Violence Reduction unit, who told us David’s story. The conference were left with a clear understanding of the need to work differently, individually and collaboratively to offer better life chances to young people like David, and his son.

Feedback from delegates, who were asked to identify one insight, one idea, one intention or one piece of interesting practice relevant to the issues discussed at the conference can be viewed below.

Friday 3rd September 2010

If you haven’t yet booked up for this year’s annual conference, then don’t delay. The theme is how we can think differently to achieve success for Curriculum for Excellence, and the reflections will be aided by a wide range of speakers such as Keith Brown, Minister for Skills and Lifelong Learning, Jim Scott, headteacher of Perth High School, Detective Inspector Linda Borland of the Violence Reduction Unit, Irene Whitford a teacher from Kirkliston Primary school and many more.

Places at £80 each can be reserved by contacting Ruth on 0131 474 9360 or ruth@cosla.gov.uk

We are very grateful to all colleagues who contributed to our survey of what’s happening in terms of leadership development at all levels across the local authorities.

Attached you will find the final report which includes a brief commentary from the CPD team on issues raised.

Many of you will have already seen this report when it was discussed at a recent Network meeting. As always we would be happy to hear any comments you may have.

Leadership survey Final

Thanks to CPD Managers at local authority level for returning the leadership survey. Interesting now for the National CPD team to be looking at models of leadership development within schools. Really worthwhile to hear of interesting initiatives on this to support our own observations.

We enjoyed holding our second meeting of the leadership advisory group in June.  This is a consultancy group formed with the purpose of informing and advising the National CPD Team.  From the evidence of the leadership survey we agreed some action points on leadership development designed to support local authorities. 

The experience of Margaret Barclay, Danny Murphy, Gillian Hamilton and Charlie McAteer continues to be invaluable in determining our contribution to the national agenda.  We will take forward these action points and be in liaison with CPD Managers as we do this.  One of the action points is to review and redraft “CPD For Educational Leaders (2003)” which we know many of us continue to use to provide a structure for leadership development at school and authority level.

We were all inspired by the FRH Leadership conference over two days in May.  We joined 42 aspiring headteachers from 11 local authorities and 22 professional development coaches.  We focussed on the themes of strategic leadership, coaching and personal learning plans.  We were very pleased with the positive evaluation of the programme and look forward to meeting up again withour colleagues at our next one day seminar in November. 

We have attached a copy of the FRH model for your information.

FRH Model

Jim Keegans 13.07.10

This (rather long) post summarises most of the links to our Leadership Summer School. As more links appear, we will update this post. Please share with us your own thoughts, experiences and links for the event!

The ‘official site’

You can get more information (including the programme) on the  Summer School site. Copies of all the Powerpoints will be available here soon!

Twitter

Before, during and after the 4 days, some colleagues used Twitter to discuss the leadership topics. If you want to see their links, thoughts and comments, here’s what to do:

1.       Go to http://tinyurl.com/lss09latest

2.       Read the comments made. (Please note for those unfamiliar with Twitter, each comment must be less than 140 characters. This can sometimes lead to perceptions that commenters are a tad brusque!)

3.       Click on blue links with http:// in front of it to follow a link

4.       Click on blue @ to see who is making the comment (eg@cpdscotsman will take you to Con’s Twitter account)

 Monday

Chair – Annette Bruton, HMIE

Tuesday

Chair – Tony Townsend

Wednesday

Chair – Frank Lennon

Thursday

Chair – Michael Kellett