Laurie O’Donnell

Early start on Monday for our Corporate Management Team in Glasgow. CMT covered a wide range of issues including corporate risk, staff pay, leadership and Glow. I then had to dash back home for a 4.30 S2 parents evening. I used to organise these events when I was an assistant head and I always enjoy the experience of sitting on the other side of the table as a parent. Still not convinced schools have got the right model for parental consultation but the constraints on teacher’s time mean that pragmatism rules.
Tuesday was a morning in Dundee followed by a drive to Edinburgh for a key partners dinner hosted by our Board as part of the organisation’s outreach work. The dinner was followed by a discussion on the major issues in education and how LTS can improve the leadership and support that we provide.

This morning was a Board meeting in Edinburgh then off to the airport for the 1410 flight to Bristol. Before boarding I managed to have a chat with Stephen Heppell about the enhanced role he is going to play before and during our Learning Festival in September. At Bristol took a hire car the 90 miles south to Torquay and am now sitting at the annual NAACE Conference in the Riviera Centre listening to a discussion on the future of the association.

In the morning I am giving a presentation on Glow. Still need to finish writing it! After my presentation I am phoning into a Glow Executive Board which is discussing how best to organise Glow mentor training. Then it’s back up the M5 to Bristol and a flight back to Edinburgh and the drive home. Would have liked to spend more time at NAACE but this week is just too busy.
Friday morning will be a later than usual start but it’s back to Glasgow to meet Anne Eastgate and Andy Pendry to look at how BBC Jam can support learning and teaching in Scotland.

Just finishing off a long weekend and feeling great. Managed to play golf, take one daughter swimming, play badminton with the other one, watch a dismal game of footie at Tannadice and take our dog out for a couple of long walks in the country. For a change I managed to escape from my inbox and get some respite from work related tasks.
This is always a difficult time of year at work. Despite having secured the flexibility of programme funding for ICT and Glow we are still very much in the public sector and end up having to deal with the madness that is the end of the financial year. That means chasing contractors and their invoices and trying to get as much work completed and signed off by 31 March. At same time we are planning and preparing for next year’s work and of course re-engineering some of our business processes.
I will start back on Tuesday in our Dundee office then I am off to meet Sally Fulton, Education Officer Stirling Council and chair of the local authority ICT advisers (SICTDG), to discuss progress with Glow. After that I need to be in Glasgow to meet some of my team leaders to review programme documentation and get ready for an LTS Glow Board. Finally I have arranged to meet my friend and former colleague John Connell for a pint and a catch-up. John is now working for CISCO and I want to get some advice on ICT in sub Saharan Africa. Also just want to find out how he is doing and to keep him informed about Glow.
On Wednesday and Thursday we have a LTS senior managers strategy meeting in Troon (not easy to get to from Dundee!). The agenda covers everything from communications and branding to corporate strategy and international education. Feels like a long time to take out of the office right now but I am sure it will be worthwhile.

Back to Glasgow on Friday to meet with my programme directors, Ian Graham and Marie Dougan. We will look at our finances, pick up any issues and plan next week. My last appointment of the week is an internal LTS Glow Programme Board in Glasgow and we have a busy agenda that includes a review of LTS ‘readiness for Glow’ as we get closer to to the launch of the service in the autumn.

Meant to post this one as couple of weeks ago. I was the lucky parent helper chosen to visit the Scottish Parliament with two P6 classes on 1 February. Apart from school buses with 5 seats in each row and seat belts not much has changed since I was in P6 … maybe the teachers look a bit younger than I remember

Anyway the highlight of the day for the pupils was not getting to sit in their MSP Shona Robison’s chair or getting a guided tour round the wonderful building but the spectacle of a protestor being removed from the gallery for disrupting First Minister’s Question Time. Made me think about intended and unintended curriculum outcomes.
My own highlight, apart from just having a day out with my wee girl, was a comment made by a girl during a question on school discipline and exclusions. She said ‘they are so rude to each other, they just keep shouting out and not putting their hand up’. From the mouths of babes …

Left home at 0715 and remembered to take my jacket with me this morning

Work started just after 0845 meeting Sally Fulton, Education Officer with Stirling Council and chair of the influential local authority ICT advisers network SICTDG. Sally wanted to update me on Glow funding issues and get a general update on progress.

Next was the LTS Advisory Council. The first major item was led by Carolyn Hutchison on ‘Recognising Wider Achievement’. How do we re-balance schooling to ensure that attainment is located broadly within the context of the wider achievements of children and young people? How do we ensure that the curriculum does not become distorted by focussing too much on the external summative and not enough on the internal formative? … Great discussion and a lot to think about.

Next up was May Sweeney looking at curriculum development in Victoria,Tazmania and Ireland. What are the lessons for a curriculum for excellence: need to build on research base; need to retain flexibility/adaptability; better if we take account of ’student voice’; develop collaborative approaches to planning … What struck me was the fact that we are all struggling to renew the curriculum in the context of a rapidly changing world. All that is different is the local context, the history, culture, values, structures etc that have been transmitted from previous generations. The challenge for us all to reinvent our education system carrying forward the best of the past in a flexible and dynamic way that helps us to build a sustainable future.

After May’s presentation Craig Thomson, principal of Fife College, led a discussion on ‘vocationalism and a curriculum for excellence‘. How useful is the term? To what extent is vocationalism captured within the four capacities?

After lunch my colleague Stuart Ritchie, Director of Curriculum, and I met with Philip John and Gerry Toner of SCHOLAR. We discussed how SCHOLAR might develop in the context of a 3-18 curriculum, assessment is for learning and Glow. We also discussed how LTS might play a more influential role in the development of SCHOLAR.

My final meeting was with Marissa Lippiatt of NESTA. We discussed the Scottish education system and how LTS and NESTA might collaborate to support and encourage innovation.

After that it was a drive back home through the sleet and the snow. Got home just after 1830.

Had an interesting meeting today in West Calder High School in West Lothian.

On way down I remembered that I had left my suit jacket and tie hanging in the hall at home. I managed to pick up a tie from my mother on the way to West Calder and then borrowed a pen from Allan Ryan as I dropped into to meet Graham Donaldson of HMIe.
The meeting at West Calder High School was looking at an implementation of Sun Ray technology being tried out by West Lothian Council in partnership with Sun Microsystems. The model is not new, the processing power is at the server end with only a dumb terminal rather than a computer at the user end. Sun call the user devices ‘virtual display devices’ but they are effectively ultra thin clients.

In my previous post with Dundee Council we tried Citrix thin client devices in business studies departments and eventually had to replace then with PCs . However, technology and the ICT infrastructure in schools move on and it’s important that we keep an open mind on this.
I saw an S4 class running ‘virtualised Windows’ and MS Excel as if they were running from the desktop. For the moment we need to collect more evidence of how Sun Ray works in schools and across local authorites. I am particularly interested in local bandwidth issues and how the Sun Ray server copes with the spikes of activity that characterise school ICT usage.

Sun’s mantra is ‘the network is the computer’ and this resonates very closely with our own view as expressed in Glow v1.0 that the web is the platform of the future. It may be that we are getting close to point where schools can begin to realise some of the long promised environmental, economic, support and sustainability benefits of thin client technology without compromising the quality of the learning experiences of our children and young people. I will keep you posted!

January seems to have flashed past. Xmas and New Year are always busy, followed by most of a week in London at BETT, then my great friend and colleague John Connell left for a new post with CISCO, followed by the recently retired Stuart Robertson returning on short-term contract to help organise the Learning Festival … Meanwhile the end of the financial year approaches and we need to complete tasks, meet deadlines, chase invoices, deliver programmes and of course re-engineer our business processes . All fantastic stuff and I get paid to do this too
My football team, Hibs, have lost another captain to Celtic (third captain in three years – Ian Murray (Rangers), Gary Caldwell (Celtic) and Kevin Thompson (Celtic edit LO’D: oops meant Rangers, thanks Derek)) and still manged to progress in both cups and do reasonably well in the league. Just shows that investing in young players who want to play great football is the right thing to do! My hopes for John Collins as our new manager have already been exceeded.
Glow is getting closer to launch, almost there but not quite. We will come under much closer scrutiny as the dream becomes a reality and starts to feature higher on the agenda for the Scottish Executive, the local authorities and our other key stakeholders. Like every other ICT programme its success will lie in the hands of people. I am confident that our technology partner, the recently renamed RM Education, will deliver a working solution. The trick that we will need to pull off is to make sure that we develop the educational front-end and focus on realising benefits for learners and teachers. We have taken a balanced approach to Glow and been careful not to oversell it. We will see over the next period if this strategy has worked. A key strategic risk for Glow has always been managing expectations. Too high and many will be disappointed at the launch and difficult to win back. Too low and Glow will not even be on their radar.

Must dash but am going to be working with our computer games and learning Tsar Derek Robertson in the morning and hope he is going to advise me on how to develop my blog and screen out the stream of spam that has started to appear in my comments.