Come back again, it's almost easy (Avenged Sevenfold)

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

As promised, this post is the sequel to my meeting last week with fellow Hawke's Bay Principals.

I really enjoyed this chance to catch up with some former colleagues, some of whom have gone on to become Principals in a range of Hawke's Bay schools - Woodford House; Karamu; and Hastings' Girls.

It was also great to have a range of new acquaintances.

The agenda items were mostly irrelevant to my own context at OneSchool Global (a private school for Plymouth Brethren students) as they dealt with reforms in vocational education, what to do with bequests from alumni, external evaluation of schools (Ask Your Team*), and initiatives for Pasifika students.

But, it was fun listening to what is on top for my colleagues in the state system.

* Ask Your Team is a process for evaluation of programmes/ teachers by students/teachers' self review etc. It costs $10,000 but provides exhaustive analysis of survey responses. We use Dayforce at OSG to do similar things but without the analysis aspect. Interesting.

Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day and head back to the Milky Way? (Train)

Photo by Liam Martens on Unsplash

Wish me luck - I'm going out into the big wide world today to a meeting of the local (as in, Hawke's Bay) association for secondary school principals.

This is a rare occurrence as I spend most of my time (99.99%) inside the OneSchool Global School orbit of Campus Principals/ Associate Principals and my Regional Principal. 

Great as this is, it's important to step outside the organisation from time to time and see what's happening out in the public schools and meet other people.

Usually when these meetings are on I'm at the Gisborne campus or else my absence for a day is too disruptive to my Hastings' campus. Not that I'm indispensable you understand - more that I would need to lean on a number of staff to cover my absence and that doesn't feel right when they are so busy.

At the moment, of course, the senior students are out doing external NCEA exams so this has freed up our schedules.

I'll report back on the experience in the next post.