Week 11

Dear Parent,

I attended Coffee Mornings at Fairlawn and Kilmorie last week and continued to learn about the schools.  The fascinating thing, of course, is that this process of learning about the schools never stops, nor should it stop.  Schools are by their nature dynamic places.  Things inevitably change over time.  The task of school leadership is to remain in tune with the community, respond to shifting landscapes, anticipate the future… and try to make coherent sense of it all in terms of policy and practice.

 

The Heads of School and I attended the Lewisham Headteacher’s Conference this week.  The highlights were talks by Prof David Hopkins and David Cameron (not that David Cameron) about research-informed practice and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence.  These talks provoked thoughts for us all about further developments and enhancement for all our schools.

I had a conversation with Lewisham Heads about the future of our partnership Teaching School.  The Teaching School is a ‘Virtual School’ that aims to develop teachers and leaders in schools and act as an Action Research hub.  The Teaching School has a great deal to offer the community of Lewisham schools and vice versa.  The Teaching School is now actively recruiting Schools Direct teacher trainees to train with us in 2013-14.  The idea here is that the schools have far more input into the development of trainee teachers than was previously the case.  This enables us to bring a constant stream of new and exceptional teachers into our schools year-on-year. 

Please share with friends, family and neighbours the fact that we are actively seeking graduates with the drive, energy and passion to be outstanding teachers to join our Schools Direct training programme for 2013-14.

These are exciting times for all of our schools.  I look forward to keeping you informed of developments, as they happen.

Have a great weekend,

Mark Wilson