Monday, December 7, 2009

Happy Birthday Linas.

It's Linas' birthday today. I haven't actually seen him since this morning when he came into our room for a ceremonial opening of his presents. These days he lives most of his life through the web , talking to friends all around the world during the night and sleeping in the day. Perhaps my sweet little lad is transforming into a creature of the night. He has become much more settled these days.I only think it is such a shame that despite having a degree in IT (web design & stuff) he, like thousands of others, is unable to find any sort of job.



( He won't thank me for this picture but I loved his long hair, now reduced to shoulder length.)


And these are some of the reasons I'm writing my blog late at night when I should be tucked up in bed. Tonight's staff meeting was to acquaint us with a 20 page Raise-on-line document and more graphs and charts from Smiley ?! These show how our school is doing versus national data in lots of areas. We are supposed to be familiar with the contents of these documents so that if OFSTED should make a sudden descent we can demonstrate that we are familiar with how our school is doing nationally, where we differ from the national data, what are the reasons for the differences and how we are addressing any issues arising. This is additional to the APP /tracking data which we have to update twice a term for reading, phonics, literacy and maths - all entries on these documents have to be colour coded for gender & further high lighted for 3 more categories. All very good for data analysis but cuts heavily into teaching and planning time but the government must have its data. Oh, and new systems seem to come on line with monotonous regularity. Oh woe is me!