Last week Kurt Cobain would have been 50. More frightening than that, it will soon be 23 years since he died. I was about half way through college when Nevermind was released and for a while it was the soundtrack to student life. While Nirvana never made it into my top ten bands half a dozen or so of their songs still revolve around my playlists.
You can draw your own conclusions as to why think this track and band makes a really interesting introduction to the blog post. The tweet below set the tone for this week’s staff training and was used by Sir Harry Burns at the Raising Attainment for All conference a couple of years ago, the focus being on raising attainment and reducing inequity.
This quote will be a feature of our staff training tonight. pic.twitter.com/CIRjs3vqOa
— Easter Carmuirs (@EasterCarmuirs) February 22, 2017
I was part of the Raising Attainment for All programme in my previous job and heard this introduction live. It was a very powerful, moving and inspirational talk and I’ve linked to it below. If you have half an hour spare, watching it will be half an hour well spent.
As you might have read in previous blogs I really believe that understanding the context of the school is one of the keys to driving improvement and reducing inequity and this talk provides a really clear picture of the national context. Watching this as a staff and then considering what it means to our work was a fascinating experience and really drove home to me the emotional involvement all of our staff have in their work. While we considered strategic direction and possible interventions to improve attainment and reduce inequity, the conversation inevitably turned to how this will make things better for our children. Everything we do in school should always have an impact on our children and the challenge at the moment is establishing what the impact actually is. We will be developing our use of the model for improvement and a cycle of Plan Do Study Act. Using this approach will provide us with a really useful evidence base for our work and highlight what interventions are working and,just as importantly, what interventions are not working.
Anyway Italy v England beckons on the TV…..
