MrsBills' Blog

So nearly 6 months into my first headship time  to start juggling something else! At the end of this month I will start my CofeNPQH (church of England version of NPQH) and I couldn't be any more excited.  I am looking forward to discovering more about myself as a leader but also how I  can become the best head teacher both where I am now and for the rest of my career. I have to start a journal as part of the process so here is step 1- my blog will be my journal. Notes on reading, the process, looking at how to improve schools both 'home' and 'away'. It will all be here! First two days are at the end of the month which is coming around very quickly. Watch this space...

Sometimes it feels like whatever direction I turn I can't make the right decision. Someone is going to be unhappy. I know leadership isn't about making people happy however having a demotivated staff and making them unhappy helps no one. So how do you turn around the morale and feelings of frustrations? I have tried listening and adjusting the timetable- starting after Easter- and I think it will work and be a better timetable. But I also feel called to address work/life balance. Especially after reading this article. So what's the solution. I think I need to start by looking at what the expectations are. How much above and beyond teaching are we asking. I admit I think it might scare me. As part of the difficult decision I will be job sharing a class instead of doing cover. Half of me is excited, the other half is terrified. Yes I've balenced the leadership responsibilites with class ones before but I also get attached. I want to do the best for my class. I see tea...

As part of a middle leadership course I am doing I wrote this blog post about my experience. As its far to early and I cant sleep I thought I would share it with you. Through my action research project I started off looking at how pupils in year 3 were seeming to make little or no progressduring the year. This was particuarly true in literacy. A culture of blaming the previous teacher or the ks1 SATs was common. The general feeling was that children were making progress however it was not being demonstrated by the assessment. Is that through our own school assessment practise? Was the assessment in year 2 accurate? There seemed more questions than answers when I first started this action research. I soon found I was not alone. However we are not an infant- junior school where there is much documented evidence about this problem... year 2 and 3 are even in the same building working alongside each other all year. As the middle leader in charge of year 2 and 3 I felt some responsibility...

Well today I face the reality that, despite 6 weeks holiday, I am still suffering from post viral fatigue/chronic fatigue. As a busy, highly aspiring teacher accepting that I can not do everything is really hard.  As I learn to cope with this I hope that blogging, something I reguarly do with children will help me on this journey.  As this is my first blog post a bit of introduction to me...    Over the last 5 years that I have been teaching never have I felt like this.  I have always enjoyed the challenges of teaching and the further I progressed the more exciting opportunites have come up.  At the start of my second year I started leading ICT. It was fantastic because we were in the final stages of planning for a move into a brand new, state of the art, building.  I got to work alongside other staff to design what state of the art ICT would look like. We made some great decisions and some that haven't worked out quite as we would like....