Now We Are Back In School
Now that schools are back to normal, the maintained schools amongst us are thinking about our new budgets whilst all schools will be looking towards their resourcing for the next school year.
The task of budget setting and bidding for departments, or the spending of the rest of the school’s allocated budget in academies, is well underway. As always, the School Business Leaders amongst us are doing everything we can to achieve the best value for money.
Schools; Eco Friendly?
How eco-friendly are schools?
The environment and how to be more eco-friendly is something high on the agenda for many schools. It is of vital importance that students learn how to protect the world around them by reducing their footprint. This can also result in potential cost-saving benefits, which is always welcome news for the Business Managers amongst us!
A New Year – a new focus?
No-one would argue that 2020 wasn’t our usual year, with many challenges faced by all of us. In schools, we dealt with many additional responsibilities which normally lie alongside, but not within, our remit. With the dawn of a new year, will our focus be the same?
Covid – Round Two
We were all bombarded with advice and directives on how we would bring our students back in these uncertain times and each school interpreted them in their own style.
Primary schools benefited from the ability to create ‘bubbles’ for their year groups, often having staggered drop off, pickups and break and lunch times.
Will Snow Days Ever be the Same?
We all know that feeling, when winter has arrived and the weather has taken a turn for the worse. ‘Will it snow?’, we all ask ourselves. ‘Will we be snowed in?’ Students get excited that they have an impromptu day off, and staff are thinking they have time to do planning, relax a little, take a breath.
What Staff Need
Following the difficult period that, dare I say it, we have all endured, the ways of working to which we have all become accustomed have changed, maybe irrevocably. Some of our processes and protocols have been the same since time immemorial and probably would never have changed without something as life-altering as our current situation.
Schools Open: Two weeks in Review
We are now well into the new phase for schools. All of our planning, risk assessing, signing and deep cleaning has been achieved and schools are starting to look much more ‘open for business’.
Prior to this, teachers have been busy providing remote working for their students with support staff working behind the scenes to enable schools to continue to operate and carrying out admin functions.
Returning To School
Following on from my previous article, the well-being of our staff is a key area of consideration moving forward.
Things to Consider:
The government ‘back to school’ directive will bring with it a myriad of emotion for all school staff, whether they work with primary or secondary children, with the key question: is it safe for the children and for us? The fact that this is unanswerable in any definitive way at the moment will inevitably be causing feelings of stress or panic for many.
Back to school?
So – we are going back?
Following our significant period of home learning schools are now getting ready to go back, some sooner than others. There is a lot of work required to enable this to happen following the pandemic and a plethora of advice about how to go about it.
Remote Working - The next stage
Week 6 – I have now, along with my colleagues and many others, been remote working for almost six weeks. At the start, I wrote about my optimism about this new way of working, communicating with colleagues and managing work-load. A few weeks on and I decided to ask myself if my feelings towards it have changed.