Many thanks to everyone who made the national conference at Heriot-Watt a success: the speakers, workshop leaders, exhibitors, the young people and all the particpants. We will make the presentations available for your use on the website as soon as we can, so that you can use them for CPD sessions etc. Please let us have your thoughts on the conference by posting a comment. In the meantime you can find the presentation from my own workshop at www.aberdeen-education.org.uk/guidance/downloads.

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The second national conference on Personal Support in Schools will be held on Thursday 29 May 2008 at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.  Details of speakers and workshops will soon be available so please come back for more details.  We expect lots of people to be there and hope you will join us.  The conference will be relevant to people working in all sectors and at all stages of school education.

Terry

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John MacBean and I have just spent two days in Orkney presenting our ideas about good practice in personal support and discussing with staff what this means in practice.  We were made to feel at home very quickly, partly because of the excellent hospitality, but also because we felt that we were speaking with like-minded people who understand that the success of Curriculum for Excellence depends on effective support for young people.  We discovered some very good and interesting practice and also some good ideas for future development of personal support.  Would anyone in Orkney like to share some ideas here please?  Many thanks to our Orcadian colleagues and friends.

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Does anyone have good examples of monitoring overall progress of school students? We would love to hear from you. Even if you have some ideas that you have not yet put into practice fully, we would still be interested. I am sure many other people would be too.

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Are you training to be a teacher? What have you done on your course to prepare you for the personal support role that everyone has in relation to young people? How has it affected your thinking? What else do you think you need to learn about?

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There is a growing realisation that personal support and curriculum for excellence are part of the same theme. Personal support/guidance/pastoral care are central to CfE in that they are crucial in removing the barriers to learning that lead to decreased attainment and achievement. Changing the curriculum on its own will not have the desired effect without effective personal support.

However, this realisation is by no means universal, and there is still a lot to be done in helping all teachers to realise that elements of personal support are part of their role as teachers.

Have you been doing some work on this that you would like to share?

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Just to mention that the ‘Personal Support in Schools’ Project Team will now be delivering the seminar - ‘Navigating to Excellence through Personal Support’ at SETT 2007. For further information and to book our seminar go to the SETT 2007 web pages on the LTScotland web-site, look in the seminar brochure and select either primary practice seminars or secondary practice seminars or enter ‘personal support’ in the search box. Please persuade everyone you know of its importance and to attend. Look forward to seeing you there.

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The national website is now live at www.ltscotland.org.uk/personalsupportinschools. It is in its early stages at present as perhaps the most important part will be the section on interesting practice and ideas. Please let us know what you think about it and what you think should be included. We are particularly interested in examples of practice that you think should be included.

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We held a successful national conference at Jordanhill - full to capacity. Lots of interesting workshops and presentations which exemplified the wealth of excellent practice around Scotland. Thanks to everyone involved for contributing to a successful day. Please post some comments about your expriences of the day - what you found interesting, what you would recommend other people to think about, and also any examples of interesting practice that you do yourselves or know about that were not covered at the conference. You can download Alan McLean’s and my presentations from www.aberdeen-education.org.uk/guidance/downloads

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We had a very interesting national Network meeting in Glasgow. Thanks to everyone who managed to come. There was thought-provoking input on the Journey to Excellence, Glasgow’s work on personal support in primary and secondary, and health promotion. We had very helpful discussions about the relationship between the 10 dimensions of Journey to Excellence and the 10 standards for personal support, and also time to for authorities to think about their plans for the future. We also discussed good practice in authorities and look forward to receiving more examples for inclusion on our website.

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