Yesterday my day ended with a celebration... I attended the Higher Level Teaching Assistants Celebration Evening at Weetwood Hall. Another group of our brilliant, talented, gorgeous and wonderful colleagues have completed the training to become HLTAs. This now brings the total to 244 across Leeds with another two group son the way which should mean that we have 350 HLTAs in place by the start of next year. The really amazing thing is how quickly this transformation of the school workforce has happened and how powerfully these wonderful colleagues are impacting on standards, attendance, behaviour and outcomes in some great schools.

It is also remarkable that these colleagues tend to be juggling home, family and work as well as completing the activities, the training sessions and the portfolio for this qualification. I wonder sometimes at how much colleagues can do but the reality is, of course, that our expectations of each other, and of what we can do, are simply too low. The real truth is that their is actually no such thing as genius, no such thing as talented and gifted... with a little bit of flair and ability, a good helping of teaching, mentoring and support and a lot of hard work we can do almost anything we passionately decide that we want to do.
Simple and no excuses... if you believe you can, you can and if you believe you can't, you can't.
Chris