Got some time to get out and about

It’s been a busy year, first book out, second one half written, Becta Excellence Award, made 3 films for Becta, spoken at ICT Register Showcase, BETT, SSAT Rural Dimension Conference, ASCL Online reporting events, Becta Online Reporting Events, BSF events in Whitehall and Westminster, been in every paper in the country (and a few in China and India) over students’ use of mobile devices and asked to join various research groups and networks as well as keep up with a steady flow of schools wanting to visit us (normally to look at Online Reporting or Learning Platforms or get advice around BSF).

The amount of interest this is generating in the ICT work at my school, which has had a record breaking year for results, has meant more and more request for my time so the time came to renegotiate my contract with Notre Dame and I now have more freedom and time to work out of school.

This means I’m now offering more consultancy slots, speaking and training work and hopefully will have the time to get stuck into supporting a client rather than turn up, do a presentation and contribute to an event and then clear off but actually guide a client through a new development from concept to impact.

I’ll have more time to work with the usual suspects like Becta, SSAT, National College and ASCL who all run excellent events but as school support moves away from Local Authorities , national agencies and quangos people will increasingly be sourcing their support from the successful schools and getting help from the horse’s mouth and we want to be well placed to offer that.

Now this is nothing new to us, we host a City Learning Centre, have Specialist College Partner Schools, most significantly through our Leading Edge role, have Becta Consultant School status and are an ICT-Register Focus School and always contribute to SSAT events not forgetting the big daddy of them all we are a National Support School and currently provide a Headteacher to a National Challenge School but this move to set up an in-house commercial consultancy is a new string to the bow, offering a very bespoke service as well as marketing seminars and school visits.

The keys areas I’ll be promoting are

• BSF negotiating the right ICT deal for you
• BSF what do we do with all the ICT money (to get an impact on learners)
• Strategic Leadership of ICT (essentially the old SLICT days at our school)
• E-learning/ VLE stuff
• Parental Engagement/ Online Reporting
• How to foster a culture of innovation in a school
• Hand Held Learning and using students' own devices safely
• Sustainable Schools issues
• Becta Self Review Framework/ moving towards ICT Mark
• Data driven school improvement through Information Management strategy- tracking pupil progress etc.

Drop me a line if you’d like to know more, we’ll have a proper web site running soon

phaigh@notredame-high.co.uk