I attended the launch of 'Connecting Communities' at Headingley Carnegie Stadium yesterday...

THe scheme is a groundbreaking new initiative under the auspices of the Leeds Rugby Foundation and aims to substantially increase the number of people from minority communities engaging in regular sporting activity. The scheme is backed by Sport England and Leeds Metropolitan University aims to devekop confidence and understanding and will focus not only on sport but on health, education and well-being. The project is led by Ikram Butt, the first British Muslim international rugby player. You can find out more about the scheme by visiting their website at foundation@leedsrugby.com.
Chris

I ended the day with an early evening meeting at the Houses of Parliament...

Cllr Richard Brett, Leader of the Council, Cllr Stewart Golton, Lead Member for Children's Services, Paul Rogerson, Chief Executive of Leeds City Council, Rosemary Archer, Director of Children's Services and I had been invited down to London to see Dawn Primarolo MP, Minister for Children, and Vernon Coaker MP, Minister for Schools, who were supported by a small army of Civil Servants. We discussed Children's Services, Children's Social Care, safeguarding, the unnannounced inspection result, the Corporate Area Assessment and the Government's National Challenge. It was a stimulating and challenging discussion and provided a great opportunity for us to talk about the opportunities and challenges we face and the progress we are making with building brilliant provision here in Leeds.

We certainly live in interested times!
Chris

After lunch I attended a really brilliant session by Larry Rosenstock CEO at High Tech High...

"Planning is for pessimists"
In an amazing non-stop outpouring of passion, enthusiasm, energy and creativity, Larry argued that understanding arises from activity and that they believe that young people should be designing, inventing, building and creating things.High Tech High's key principles are all about

• integration:
• integration of cultures and classes;
• integration of head and hand;
• integration of pre and post secondary learning;
• integration of private and public sectors.

High Tech High began in 2000 as a single charter high school launched by a coalition of San Diego business leaders and educators. It has evolved into an integrated network of schools housing a comprehensive teacher certification program and a new, innovative Graduate School of Education. They believe in a collaborative approach with small teams of teachers working together who have complete control of what they offer their young people; like in Finland they are not into command and control from the centre but believe that you should empower, engage and trust colleagues at teh front line to powerfully match work to students interests and needs. Larry believes that you don't learn anything by studying it, you have to do it and be it. Behaving like a biologist, a photographer, a writer, a designer encourages young people to do the job. They encourage their young people to work hard and have fun!

Four design principles underlie the work of High Tech High: personalization, adult world connection, common intellectual mission, and teacher as designer and reverses the separations of conventional schooling by integrating students, connecting school and community, and linking technical and academic studies. They believe that if you want to build a good learning environment for students, it must also be a good learning place for adults. The school measures and assesses the quality of the staff by the quality of the work their students produce and has achieved extraordinary success with a diverse student population, admitted by a post-code based lottery. High Tech High also has a fairly unique approach to staff development and trainingbased on the fact that ideas, energy and inspiration are high at the beginning of the day. They start work an hour before their students to provide 180 hours of training and development time every year for all their colleagues.

You can find out more about this extraordinary school by visiting http://www.hightechhigh.org/.
Chris

Before lunch I attended a workshop session on Assessment for the 21st Century...

The workshop led by Dr Sue Horner from QCDA, had sessions by Matt Buxton, from Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham, Lotta Valentin, from Kunskapsskolan in Sweden and Dr Lorna Earl, from Aporia Consulting in Canada. Dr Earl was really good and highlighted some of the flaws in our current assessment systems and the importance of open, transparent evidence based assessment which is fit for purpose and which stands up to independent and expert scrutiny. She stressed that any assessment tool should be designed for the assessment of the thing you are measuring... a student, a school, an authority... and the problems of using single indicators to measure the effectiveness of the lot. She also pointed out that unless the assessments stand up to independent and rigorous scrutiny of the evidence they were meaningless.

Sadly, our friends at OFSTED weren't here and weren't listening.
Chris

When times are challenging, I remind myself what we have achieved together here in Leeds over the last few years, of how we have released a very special magic and achieved some extraordinary outcomes, produced some fantastic materials, developed an amazing 'can do anything' culture and built some brilliant relationships and partnerships. I am also struck by the uniqueness of the place and its special people...

Talking about people and relationships, I bumped into several colleagues this week who were worried about friends and colleagues struggling against the tide of things to do, the bureaucracy, the paperwork and the rules. I personally don't think that we are any different from our children and young people because we all work best when we feel loved, valued, nurtured and understand that we are making a difference. If we live in fear and feel unloved, undervalued and unsupported we are never going to cope with the enormous pressure and stress that we all live with day in day out, and we are never going to release the magic and create brilliant learning for our children and young people. The immense pressure colleagues are under regarding standards and safeguarding alone can be simply overwhelming, and that's not to mention the other issues and challenges we are all juggling with on top of the normal day job. I know that it is at times like this that I need to recharge and re-imagine; to refresh and rethink and be inspired.

It has been another week full of meetings, briefings and updates but amongst those there were four little bits of magic. I attended a launch for Envision, a national education charity set up by young people ten years ago to challenge the stereotype of ‘youth’ as apathetic and disengaged, who support 16-19 year olds from schools and colleges in Greater London and Birmingham and are now coming to Leeds. I visited Whinmoor St Paul's Church of England Primary School, and Whitecotes Primary School, where Sheila Storey and Karen Allen, the headteachers, and their teams are doing some amazing work and achieving wonderful outcomes. And finally, I spoke at the 'RM Kudos '09' Conference at the Four Pillars Hotel at the Cotswold Water Park near Swindon. RM colleagues were simply blown away by what we have achieved together and what we are doing to release the magic and the potential here in Leeds.

So as we roll on towards Christmas, whatever we do and however challenging it is we must maintain our focus on our core business - educating children and providing them with the best possible life chances; and we must support each other through these uncertain times. This years' Annual Lecture with Ken Robinson gives us all a real opportunity to come together as a learning community; to reconnect; to inspire and be inspired, to share what really matters; and to think team. We have a chance to hear an outstanding speaker and to eat, drink and spend some time with other brilliant colleagues who share our passion, our determination and our commitment to children and young people and their learning and to simply remind ourselves why we are here.

I hope that you will be able to make it.
Chris

The next session was an international case study on 21st Century learning in practice by Timo Lankinen, director general of the Finnish National Board of Education...

As we know, Finland tops the OECD league tables for educational outcomes and Timo Lankinen talked about the possible xplanations for their success, the innovations happening in Finland and the challenges ahead for Finnish schools. He stressed the focus on quality, equity and efficiency in Finnish schools with a strong focus on individual support, high quality Masters educated teachers along side curricular flexibility and pedagogical freedom. He also acknowldege the relative homogeneity of culture, religion and population in Finland.

Timo highlighted eight factors which mark out their education system;

• flexibility of the system;
• trust, support and empowerment;
• valuing the professionalism of teachers;
• evidence based and consensual appproach to curriculum and school change;
• broad consensus about the importance of education across society;
• individual support for students and learners falling behind;
• collaborative and social-constructivist approach to learning and schooling;
• high quality learning environments.

Finnish class sizes and school sizes are also small. To sum up Timo talked about high standards, professionalism and a supportive ethos within a learning culture based on trust and respect.

Chris

'The Global Education Leaders Program' sets out a framework to cope, manage and harness the perfect storm we are currently facing in education and learning...

The framework is based on the principles of CISCO's 'The Learning Society' and is based on a fundamental transformation where we shift from running education and schools to enabling learners and learning.
Chris

Michael argued that we need 21st Century skills, 21st Century pedagogy, 21st Century technology and 21st Century reform all working together to build brilliant learning in brilliant learning places...

The questions are:

• what skills?
• what pedagogy?
• what technologies?
• what reforms?

The barriers to re-imagining learning are:

• access;
• traditional methods;
• design.

Discuss!

Chris

The second input was 'Enabling Genuine 21st Century Learning' by Michael Stevenson from CISCO...

Michael argued that we need a coherent system change involving all aspects of the system working together to re-imagine learning with strong partnerships between Government, localities and schools. He sees the key drivers of educational change as globalisation, new technologies and demography. We should develop a powerful vision for 21st Century learning, explore the skills and competencies we need to secure success and understand what re-imagined learning looks like and how we can work locally to achieve this transformation.
Chris

The first speaker was Lord David Puttnam who showed us a clip from a new film which highlighted the need for a re-imagined education and learning system...

He argued that we must take this opportunity to create better, smarter and more engaged young people who will change the world for the better. He argued that we need to grasp the opportunities that digital technology provides while maintaining the relentless and uncompromising focus on literacy and numeracy. We need to create learning environmments where young people engage with learning 24 x 7 x 365 ... whatever it takes!
Chris