Tales from an ex-Ofsted Inspector (Gervase Phinn)

Gervase Phinn was another guest speaker at the Essex County Conference for Governors. Apparently, he had been at the conference a few years previously, and was so popular they asked him to come back! He is an author, poet and entertainer, and uses his life experiences and in particular his 15 years experience as an Ofsted inspector to regale tales and tell stories.

Listening to Gervase was a real delight and, as someone else put it, had me crying with both tears of sadness and laughter. His talk consisted of letters he had received from children when he was an inspector, stories from the different schools he visited (both good and bad) and poems and thoughts on the education system and the upbringing of children.

What really struck a note with me in his speech was the importance of remembering that, at the end of the day, test scores and paperwork and regulations and policies aside, our education system should be about providing an environment for children where they feel safe and secure and can be the best they can be.

Many children in this country will be born into welcoming homes, with loving parents who care for them and help them to grow, and these children will need encouragement to always learn more and be shown possibilities in their lives. Other children will have the misfortune to not be born into homes like this, where their parents are absent or abusive or have misguided views on society. These children may need encouragement simply to feel as though they are worthy citizens, to learn the basics of decent human interaction and respect of others and to experience some sort of kindness.

None of these children are any less worthy than any others, they simply need different types of support, and if that support isn’t provided at home, school is one of the few places where all children in society should be “caught” as they grow up. This is where our schools need to stop thinking of themselves as institutions that provide certificates and test results for pupils, and instead realise the important part they could play in the healthy development of not only young children, but our future generations of adults and citizens of this country.

Interestingly, Gervase brought along the results of a survey undertaken to find out the top ten things that made a good school. One list was made from responses of teachers and parents, the other was from students. The adults’ list including things such as high test results, good progress over the years, quality buildings, a good head etc. The students’ top 3 were simple:

1. No bullying
2. Nice toilets
3. A kind adult to talk to

I just thought this was incredibly telling – we may think that school league tables and achievements are important, but for the kids to actually want to be there in the first place (and let’s face it, if they want to be there that’s half the battle to good results won already) all they want is a nice, pleasant, safe environment with adults who care about them.

Surely that can’t be as hard as getting all A* results?

Alex

Danny Crates – inspiring us to achieve greatness

Danny Crates is a Paralympic gold medalist. He’s also a bronze medalist, motivational speaker, family man, ex-scuba diver and his love of sport started with rugby. The fact that he has one arm is, I suppose, of little consequence, although everything in life makes you a little bit of what you are today (for Danny, probably quite a lot of what he is).

The thing I loved about Danny’s talk at the Essex County Conference for Governors was that, although he told a very specific story, and the likelihood was that his story was nothing that anyone in the room would ever experience, it was relevant to absolutely everyone. The essence of his talk was to inspire people to take on and do great things, and remind everyone that no matter what happens in life, you need to pick yourself up and carry on, find a new goal.

His story started at the age of 21 when he had a car accident in Australia which resulted in him losing an arm. Although this must have been devastating at the time, he pressed on the fact that, on his return to England, he didn’t wallow in misery or give up, he got back out with his mates and just lived his early twenties as they should be lived (drinking mostly I think). Over the next few years, he wasn’t held back by his disability and undertook such activities as playing for his county rugby team and, believe it or not, cleaning windows in the shark tank at an aquarium!

He then decided to start running, where he excelled. He trained with a top coach in the country and managed to get a bronze medal in the 2000 Paralympics. However, this didn’t stop him going for gold, and he finally managed to achieve his goal in 2004 in the 800m (he showed the race in his talk – he was leagues ahead of the other guys!)

He then went on to be the flag bearer at the 2008 games, but sadly could not compete due to a series of injuries. However, this did not deter him from becoming ambassador for the 2012 Olympic games and riding from Lands End to John O’Groats by bike!

His story was inspiring to me not because of what he had done (although I congratulate him on that) but because of his attitude to life. Not everyone can, or wants, to become an Olympic runner, but everyone has things they want to do in life, even if they don’t really know what those things are yet. Everyone has setbacks, but you can either choose to dwell on them and let them become your main focus in life, or move on and find new goals, new aims and a new reason for living.

I think many people believe that stories like this just aren’t applicable to them, but they really and truly are. Life is all about making choices, and not making “the best” or “the right” choice, but making a choice that you feel is right for you. If you want to achieve something, aiming for that thing from the start can seem like too big a hurdle, so look for incremental steps in getting there, and don’t forget to enjoy the journey!

Attending this governor conference was one of my incremental steps

Alex

County Conference for Governors

I had a great day yesterday attending the Essex County Conference for Governors at the Weston Homes Community Stadium in Colchester. I had absolutely no idea what to expect, being quite new to the governorship role and not attending a conference before, however I was amazed at the turnout (I think there was something like 350 people there, with a very large waiting list).

It was fantastic meeting other governors and chatting with such a variety of people about their schools, and also what they do in their day jobs. The talks were engaging and filled with useful information, and the day certainly went by very quickly.

We had an inspiring talk in the morning from Danny Crates, the men’s 800m Paralympic gold medal winner of 2004 (sounds a little random, but the conference theme was around “Going for Gold” and the Olympics). He discussed how no matter what befell him in life, his initial accident losing an arm or his series of injuries which meant he couldn’t compete in the Paralympics in 2008, he didn’t wallow in the bad luck, he moved on and found a new goal.

The afternoon keynote was delivered by Gervase Phinn, an author and ex-school inspector from Yorkshire. He was a very entertaining speaker, and a great teller of stories – I think he pretty much took everyone in the audience from laughing their heads off to having a tear in their eye during his talk. However, his important point was to remember that whatever we do in schools, in government or as teachers, it’s all about the kids and giving every one of them the best chance to succeed in life, and not just through exam scores.

I would definitely recommend governors in Essex attend this conference if they can next year, and if you don’t have one in your county suggest it!

Only downside was the food really – lunch was either some very questionable looking sandwiches or fried stuff! But it won’t put it off going next year.

Alex

Kanban flip it and reverse it….

I had a good introduction to the world of Kanban today through a new PluralSight course (http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/Courses/TableOfContents?courseName=kanban-fundamentals). So far, it seems like a really interesting and visual way to keep track of your work (I like visual stuff, particularly if it’s all multi-coloured!)

Picture of a Kanban board

The thing I particularly liked about it, which they emphasised on this course, was the need to improve FLOW in your work. I am constantly finding myself juggling between loads of different priorities and have a to do list as long as your arm, and sometimes I seem to spend so much time organising my work I don’t actually get to do any of it! However, Kanban offers a solution to this, which is to essentially have your to do list converted into Post-it notes (or cards, tickets, virtual notes, whatever works for you) that are easy to move around, and have a work flow which these tasks can be moved between. This is the first important point of Kanban – make your work visual.

The other important part of the system is to specifically ensure you only ever have a set number of jobs IN PROGRESS (they recommend 3-5). This means you are not constantly juggling 20 different job priorities in your head, only the 3 or so on your list. Every time you finish a job, it gets moved to the DONE column, and you get to pick the next most important job from the stuff waiting to be assigned.

Sounds so simple, and yet I can really see the benefit and efficiency of implementing a system like this. It’s open (everyone updates it), public (everyone can see clearly what is being worked on and suggest improvements and priority changes), easy to understand (you can’t get more simple than Post-its!) and can be tailored to however you want to structure it. Plus, you get to delight in the nice little pile of notes in the DONE column, rather than just forgetting all the good work you have done!

And if nothing else, it makes me stupidly excited about the prospect of hunting down loads of different shapes and colours for my post it notes!!

Alex

Unlimited paid holiday?!

So, this isn’t really to do with education, but an interesting talking point none-the-less. An IT company called WANDisco have just announced that they are allowing their employees to take unlimited, paid holiday days:

http://blogs.wandisco.com/2012/02/10/unlimited_vacation/

Now, to start with this may sound a little crazy…. however it’s a very interesting idea and one that should definitely be investigated by more small to medium enterprises.

In my opinion there’s both a positive and negative side to it…

• On the one hand, such a good way to show your employees that they are trusted and valued members of the team. As an employer, this would make you very attractive to everyone, including (you would hope) hard-working and enthusiastic individuals. It would also completely change your work ethos from one of “you’re here to be in the office 9-5″ to that of “we’re a team that needs to get some work done, and we’ll do what is needed to complete it on time”. No more clock-watching and waiting to go home, because you know that every hour you work there is essentially YOUR CHOICE.
• On the other hand, this sort of system is open to abuse from BOTH sides. Employers have to be careful who they hire to make sure they are keeping the right sort of people in their team who aren’t going to be taking holiday all the time and not meeting their deadlines. There is also a danger that employers could start setting tighter and tighter deadlines over time, meaning that the employees don’t get to take any holidays at all AND end up working late, without much reward.

On the whole, if you trust your team and are prepared to keep an eye on things (both what your team are doing and your workflow) this could be a great way forward for companies that want to promote a more flexible but committed working practice.

Alex

Re-imagining employability

I’ve just attended a workshop / talk / discussion of the same title as this post at my university. I think a lot of universities are having to focus on employability these days, and with good reason. I was expecting a couple of hours of being told specific things you could be doing in your teaching to help or things the University are doing to improve student employability, however I was pleasantly surprised.

The first talk from our new Director of Employability, Dave Stanbury, was much more generic, and was really focusing on trying to get the audience to think about what employability IS, before you even start looking at how to ensure students have it. You so often find these terms thrown around institutions, companies and government organisations without actually understanding what they mean, or what is meant within the context. It was refreshing to hear a talk on the higher-level perceptions of employability and what students can take with them after they leave university.

This was followed by a panel discussion of specific examples of ways departments are trying to increase student employability, and then a talk from Ruth Pilkington from the University of Lancashire which was to facilitate discussions on what we could do at Essex.

What I really got out of this session was a definition of employability that wasn’t just “lets help students get jobs”, but a far more rounded view looking at (I hate to use the phrase) “personal development” in general – realising the transferable skills students are learning, looking at what HE can give students that isn’t academically specific and helping them “grow” as people as they progress through their life at university (and not just their degree).

I think the most important thing to note is that as institutions, at all levels of education from infants to HE, we are becoming more than somewhere to acquire knowledge and gain degrees – we need to help students become enlightened members of society who are aware of the opportunities that are available to them and, more importantly in some ways, what they are learning from the actions they are undertaking already. A lot of students (myself included when I was studying) cannot merge the ideas of study and life – they are separated from a very early age, and it is therefore very difficult to make them understand that every moment of their study is relevant to where they want to go and what they want to be (as a person as well as an employee).

Although I am specifically talking here about students, this goes further and really affects each one of us every day. I think all members of society could benefit from recognising the value in everything you do, and be able to apply that knowledge to helping you get what you want in life. Even if you don’t think it right now, every single one of you has individual skills and abilities that you are developing each and every day – those that do well in life aren’t necessarily better than you, they just know themselves and what they can offer.

How will you realise your potential?

Alex

Are you a visionary?

Unfortunately, I’m not. I’m not being defeatist, just realistic and honest. I do my best to come up with unique and creative ideas, but I just can’t get there quick enough (if at all).

However, all hope is not lost.

I have recently embarked upon a professional development course at work called Essex Futures. It was created by our current Vice Chancellor, Colin Riordan, to help develop those who work in higher education, mainly academics. It covers many areas from management to understanding university finance to working with the media. Anyway, one of the things we did in the first session was the Belbin test – if you haven’t heard of it have a look here: http://www.belbin.com/ (fascinating for those that are into psychometric tests and work psychology). The test tells you in which of nine possible team roles your strengths lie. One of these roles is “Plant”. These are your typical visionaries and inventors, your Leonardo Da Vincis and Steve Jobs’ of the world. They are good at creating unique ideas from seemingly nothing.

As you can imagine, my Plant score wasn’t that high. But it’s OK, Belbin assures us that his test is not meant to be used to show good and bad people, only to raise awareness of your strengths and, in particular, show that the best teams consist of a collection of different types of people.

My top types were “Team Worker” (helps foster team spirit) and “Resource Investigator” (makes contacts and negotiates). Now this latter one I was interested in. In one description it says that Resource Investigators also tend to source ideas from elsewhere and develop them. Now, this seems much more my sort of thing! I may not be good at inventing ideas, but I can definitely spot a good idea when I see one!

As I thought about it more I realised I do this sort of thing all the time – when cooking I tend to browse a selection of recipes and pick out bits of each which sound like a good idea. If some political issue comes up I tend to compare lots of sources of information and then make my mind up from bits of what seems sensible in each argument. The way I work is a mish mash of seeing things work for other people and thinking “ooh, I should try that”, and then developing it to suit my needs. I don’t think this is me being indecisive or incapable, just resourceful.

So, rejoice those out there like me – there’s more ways to be creative than having to wait for that lightbulb to pop up above your head. Start investigating, reading, discussing and researching ideas and let the creative juices flow from there.

Alex

P.S. I would like to point out, I am in no way advocating copying or plagiarising other people’s work. Credit should definitely be given where credit is due, and if you see someone else who has had what you think is an awesome idea, well, unfortunately they got there first. However, there’s no harm in admitting that you need a little help to get started in your idea creativity – maybe working with that someone with the awesome idea would make it even better

Finding the right balance

I am struggling at the moment – on one hand, I have a very big project we have been wanting to do for a while and on the other an endless list of little to dos that keep appearing as quickly as I do them. I’m sure this is not an uncommon situation. However, I do seem to find it difficult to get these things done concurrently and still stay focused and motivated.

The big project would be great to get my head into. I’m only in planning stage at the moment (which is hard enough in itself) but I think if I could have a few days / weeks to sit down and just work it all out, draw nice diagrams, get it clear in my head and on paper what I needed to do, we could actually make a really good start. However, I have these nagging things called emails, meetings, support enquiries, colleague discussions, holiday days and little niggling jobs and bug fixes and I just can’t seem to ever make good headway on planning. It’s starting to feel like this project will never get going! I think the most amount of work I’ve done on it for a while was the last working day before Christmas when there was no other work hanging over my head and very few emails and enquiries. But then of course I was off for 10 days enjoying the festive season and now I’m back where I was before.

I wonder how the experts do it. I don’t know whether its called time management or project planning or what, but I feel I need some training in how to handle this. It feels like I’m constantly being pulled in two directions – day-to-day work one way and exciting projects and personal development the other – and I can’t quite merge the two to work well together.

I think I need a break from work to get on with some work, if you know what I mean?

Alex

The first challenge

As I’ve said, my colleagues and I got chatting about new ideas while we were at ALT-C. We talked about sessions we had seen, ideas that were shared and technologies we had learnt about. The ideas started flowing (in fact, I even made a snazzy diagram so we remembered it all) and we hoped beyond hope that we would somehow wrestle some time out of our regular day-to-day work to pursue some of these ideas without having to apply for funding and a 3 month project secondment.

And in amongst all this I had a nagging feeling that disappointment was just around the corner, that our excitement and creativity would dissipate just as soon as we stepped back through that office door and opened our email. Because no matter how much motivation you have, unless you are employed full-time as Creative Inventor of New Ideas (how cool a job title would that be) there are things to be done and emails to be answered.

So I thought to myself, if we don’t have that much time to tell people about our ideas, what we actually need is to tell people quickly. Not come up with comprehensive and interactive training on each subject with motivational speeches and fantastic demos and so forth… As amazing as that would all be, most of the time it all just takes too long. We need to plant the idea in people’s mind like a seed and watch it grow (has anyone ever seen Inception?) Spread little snippets of really useful interesting stuff that we learn that the academics don’t have time to find out about and see what takes. At the end of the day, we’re not the ones who are going to be using this stuff lecturers are, so maybe they should decide what they want to make use of.

And then, if it turns out to be popular, we’ll probably be given the resources to make all those cool demos and training I mentioned.

The key to this I think is very small, very personal and as easily accessible by all lecturers as possible. Blogs and emails could be good, but can easily be ignored or deleted. I was thinking something along the lines of dropping in at the coffee break of departmental meetings – it takes 15 minutes out of our day, none out of theirs and could be the perfect place to share ideas. For those academics who are social networkers, the odd Tweet here or Facebook status there could just spark that thread of creativity which leads them to do something new. And the best bit about it… We would be practising something which academics might find much easier to engage with – one little step at a time.

Any other ideas gratefully received!

Going back to basics

I’ve just got back from a governor’s training session at the primary school where I am a community governor. I’m pretty new to this governor stuff (it’s actually only my second meeting) and I haven’t properly got into the swing of it yet, but I’m excited at the prospect of making a change in this small community.

The main focus of tonight’s session was to discuss the purpose and structure of school visits for us governors. When I was small I always remember “the governors” as being a slightly feared and possibly even fictional body of people, so I was pleased to see that some thought was being given to how governors can get more integrated into the life of a school rather than just making lots of important decisions and spending school money without having any idea of what actually goes on. It also confirmed to me that I had made the right decision when picking which school to help govern, as they generally seem a very forward-thinking and enthusiastic group.

One of the points discussed was the benefits to governors, staff and pupils of these governor visits into schools. And we raised a point which I think is one of upmost importance with regard to this sort of position of power – getting “down and dirty” with how the system you are controlling actually works. Going right back to base level and talking to the workers, the people who make the whole place run day-to-day. I have seen time and time again examples of senior management making decisions about the fundamental workings of an establishment without actually having a clue what really goes on. It happens everywhere – schools, universities, councils, government, big corporate entities, charities, hospitals… The people who make huge decisions and implement drastic changes thinking they know it all. And they rarely do.

As a Learning Technologist, I have even experienced the management side of this on a small scale. Last summer, we redeveloped our Online Coursework Submission system. We were pretty sure we knew how people used it and what they needed – I mean, we supported people who were using it every day. Come the launch day, we realised that we weren’t completely wrong… but there was a lot of stuff we didn’t know, put it that way. A lot of assumptions had been made in its development which should have been clarified by asking those that actually used it every day.

And this was from people who DO talk to the workers – we just weren’t asking the right or enough questions. Imagine what a mess we might have made if we were second-guessing EVERYTHING.

Don’t get me wrong – I know these decision-makers are busy people. They may feel they don’t have the time to go round and chat to everyone, particularly if it’s a very large organisation. They may think “well, I’ve been there, I know how things work”. Well, it’s amazing how quickly things can change. And even making the slightest of efforts – popping your face round an office door, chatting to people in the corridor or (a techy version) allowing comments on a blog, all might just give you a smidgen of insight into the hive of your company, plus giving “the people” a chance to have a say.

I wonder how much managers, CEOs, governors, councillors and policy makers could learn from stepping back to basics and seeing how their establishment works at ground level. I bet most would be surprised (although possibly not as surprised as the workers to see them there!)

Alex

P.S. It could even result in getting on TV! http://www.channel4.com/programmes/undercover-boss/4od