Tag: Strategy

Greg’s coming over in a bit, so I thought it would be useful to get my thoughts down about what we need to get done. Then I thought, “and why not put them on the blog?” It puts a bit of pressure on us to actually get things done.

I’d suggest this is an excellent thing for school councils and other action groups in schools to do: Make your action plans public. You could set up a blog for your team (you can get free and easy to use ones at Blogger, WordPress.com or Edublogs – specially for people in education) and take your minutes directly into it. It allows other people to comment on them too, which is a great way to get some extra people involved. It also makes you realise that you need to keep things interesting and relevant, there’s no point writing a blog if no one’s going to read it and there’s no point doing something on your school council if no one outside of the council thinks it’s worthwhile.

Anyway, back to what we’re going to do today:

• Write a communications plan. Think we might start this as a mindmap and put it on the site so others can contribute to it too, we’ll probably use mindomo as I’ve used it before, but open to suggestions for better software/apps.
• Add stuff to the website. We’ve had some great ideas for little bits, like a simple ‘how good is your school council’ quiz that provides customised help afterwards – want to get that up today.
• Create a survey. We hope this will give us a better, broader insight into what people involved in education (staff, students, policy-makers, etc.) want in terms of support for genuine pupil involvement.
• Phone meeting with Futurelab. I love working with Futurelab, their approach to education is very closely aligned to my own. I’ve been on the advisory group for the Greater Expectations project so I want to hear what Alison, who’s running that, thinks the learner voice field needs.
• Visit Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). I’m doing some research for the SSAT on mapping pupil voice in the curriculum and I need to take some info in to them today. Hope to get the final report up on here in the new academic year.
• Start working on two (or more) funding models. We need to have a couple of different plans for how this site is ging to keep going, they need to be fully costed and have their risks assessed. I very seldom see school councils looking at risk, but it’s very important and a great lesson to learn. Don’t assume that becuase you put something in a budget that it’s going to happen. What other possibilities might there be? Might you sell more tickets, or fewer, will you be able to cope?

Wow, now I’ve written that all down, it seems like a lot to get through, so I’m glad you’re there to hold us to it.