My school, Bordesley Green Girls’ School and Sixth Form works with the Bishop Challoner Teaching School Alliance (BCTSA) alongside a further 50 primary and secondary schools. Its a great place to start your teaching career and our alliance has a long and successful record of initial teacher training. We are pleased to be working with BCTSA and …
Continue reading "Train to teach with us in Britain’s second city"
A leadership style is a leader’s style of providing direction, implementing plans, and motivating people. There are many different leadership styles that can be exhibited by leaders in the political, business or other fields. Have you reflected on yours recently? When I started at my current school, I had to introduce myself to my new …
Continue reading "Rock Star or Conductor"
Things move fast don’t they? Staying in the loop, in any education organisation, is becoming harder and harder. Policy changes (and politicians) are coming thick and fast. Increasingly, I find that I spend a significant part of my working day just catching up with movement and changes in the sector. Like many school business leaders, …
Continue reading "The pace of change"
Overreliance on social media would be a worrying development. The open access, unlimited nature of such platforms gives one or two determined individuals the ability to effectively wage war on schools. It is the digital equivalent of camping on the school’s doorstep without the discomforts. By all means request that schools use social media to …
Continue reading "Ofsted to use monitor social media"Today I wrote to the Department for Education to express the concerns of a number of school business leaders. It was both an easy and also a hard letter to write. It was easy because I wanted to make the case for sufficient funding for all schools nationally. It was easy also easy because it’s something I strongly …
Continue reading "A cut too far?"
I’ve been working to find some diagnostic tools around leadership styles and leadership behaviours to use with leaders and middle managers in schools. I’ve settled on the tools offered by Leadership Matters because their offer gets the balance right; a simple set of questions which result in a really good feedback report written in clear, …
Continue reading "Analyse your leadership style"
In this article for Optimus Education’s Insight Magazine, I set out the results of a survey I undertook into the mood of the SBM profession; what is worrying them and what they are doing about it.
Continue reading "How are SBMs really feeling?"
All over England, school business management professionals are worried. They want to know if they will have a job at the end of the year. Each day brings a fresh round of claim and counter-claim about the pros/cons of a fully academised school system. Is there a future for single-site school business managers? This is not …
Continue reading "Is there a place for the single-site school business manager in a fully academised system?"SBMs have more impact when they join together
Continue reading "SBMs join together"
If you follow me on twitter where I opine regularly as @MidlandsSBM, then you have probably realised that I believe in the power of collaboration. It’s a passion of mine and why I enjoy working in/for/with multiple different organisations. I work for charities, schools, social enterprises & also, on occasion, big business; but the thing …
Continue reading "The trampoline effect"