Educating the Dragon

Yep, just as I thought, a ‘quick meeting’ at 8.50 am in the staffroom. We all got together for the feedback session with the Senior Management meeting last night. We all knew that it had gone pretty well because the Chair of the Board came into school at about 6 am this morning to put up balloons, she even taped little encouraging notes over the staffroom windows. She too did an amazing job. According to report she spoke very elloquently of the school and encouragingly of our school, its staff and the programmes we run.

Some highlights were: Gifted and Talented provision, Maori and Pacific Islander provision, Our development of Discovery time, and our childrens response and openess.

A large part of the week has been focused on ‘formative practise’ specifically in writing books. They found a good system engaged throughout the school, students really did know about their ‘next stap’ learning… they even noted that the approach was beginning to be used in other curriculum areas like maths and reading even though that is our focus for next year.

So overall a very positive report. I will be including a link to the actual report when it appears online, more to be clever than expecting you to download it.

On a personal note, I really appreciated the flexibility of the inspector who visited my room yesterday. My head was not all on ERO having found out that my mum was involoved in a car accident back in England… when I had to talk to the inspectors I had not had a chance to talk fully with my mum and did not know the full story of the accident. But all is well, and I am relieved, 12000 miles away is a very long way away when stuff like that happens.