Friday 12th February 2016
The Area Primary Headteacher meetings will be held in February and March - see dates and venues below. The meetings will start at 9.00 am and will include, as always, refreshments and lunch. There is no need to book your place at your area meeting; please just turn up, allow a little time for parking and enjoy spending time with colleaguges.
Please find attached the agendas for the meetings (clink on the link). The spring term newsletter will be circulated at the meeting.
The dates of the meetings are:
SOUTH Wednesday 24 February Holiday Inn, Basildon
NORTH EAST Thursday 25 February Weston Homes Community Stadium
WEST Wednesday 2 March Weston Homes Business Centre, Takeley
MID Thursday 3 March Chelmsford City Football Club
The agenda will include updates from the Local Authority, including information about the current recruitment and retention strategy and the progress of the SEND reform. There will also be a presentation from Caroline Gielnik, from the Education Support Partnership, about the support that their organisation provides for headteachers and staff in schools.
In the afternoon at the South and West meetings Joel Shaljean will run a session on Essex Steps de-escalation and physical intervention
Essex Steps is designed to provide high quality understanding and training in both the management of challenging behaviour and proactive adult responses to crisis intervention. This session, for school leaders, will introduce you to the Essex approach and give you strategies to take back to your school.
At the North East meeting, headteachers will have a chance to hear from Russell Hobby, the General Secretary of the NAHT. In the afternoon there will be a session led by Google Apps for Education and Google Classroom. There will be a chance to talk with Google Education UK about what they can offer schools, at no cost, to support learning and teaching and potentially do away with school servers! They will also be bringing a demo of Google Expeditions. Bring your Computing Lead along for the afternoon if you would find this helpful.
The Mid meeting will start with an assessment and moderation session, giving headteachers a chance to share, in clusters, their work and experience of assessment so far this year. Please bring your Assessment Leader to this part of the day if this would be helpful. In the afternoon we are delighted to introudce Jeff Grout, a leadership consultant who will present a session on Building high performance teams - a Guide to Recruiting, Leading & Motivating Talent.
Contrary to popular practice, building a high performance team takes a lot more than bringing together a group of talented people and hoping for the best. In fact it is one the toughest challenges we face because it requires the soft skills of management. For many of us the soft skills are the hard stuff of running a successful school. The basis of any successful team is down to three things - the people you have, the climate you create and the way those people work together.
I look forward to seeing you at the meetings and, in the meantime, hope that you have a very enjoyable and restful half term.
Pam Langmead
EPHA Professional Officer
Pam Langmead