EXTENDED SERVICES he business


school’s community and can create a real sense of pride and involvement. At the same time, to drive a shared vision it helps


to have a champion for the project or initiative to maintain momentum and see the vision through to fulfilment. This is often the headteacher, but that does not necessarily have to be the case. If the champion is not the headteacher however it is important that the head is fully supportive of the project and the role that the champion will play. Not all resources and personnel needed to set up a


social enterprise need to come from the school itself. By forging links and relationships with local community groups and organisations, schools can both enhance their networks in the community and make use of other resources and skills already available. Staff who have an existing knowledge of business


or who have a skill for enterprise are important for success. This could be existing school staff, new appointments, or business leaders from within the community.Ultimately, a social enterprise is a business and like all businesses will need careful business planning to prepare for all eventualities to ensure that the service is going to be of use to the local community, and to ensure that the cost of running the extended services will ultimately be sustainable. The most important thing to remember when


engaging with social enterprise is to keep the social need of the school and the local community at the heart of it all. Extended services have been a great asset to schools across theUK and through careful management they need not die out due to a lack of public funding.


SecEd


• Neil McIntosh is the chief executive of the CfBT Education Trust. Visit www.cfbt.com


Independent thinking Innovation vs regulation


GOVERNMENT EDUCATION reforms continue to be announced; quangos are being toppled and more freedom is being offered to schools. We in the independent sector remain uncertain as to how such changes might affect us. Apparently, “outstanding” state schools will no


longer be inspected by Ofsted, unless something triggers a special visit. Meanwhile, we continue to brace ourselves for the three-yearly inspection visit (two days or five days in length) and the heavy focus on the almost 200 regulatory requirements imposed on independent schools by the previous government. Can it be right for school leaders


the food cost of their breakfast clubs, it enables more parents who may not usually be able to afford the cost of the clubs to benefit from the service. This particular approach will be beneficial to


smaller schools with fewer resources available to dedicate to extended services and social enterprise. Doing some research into social enterprises working in your area can offer a great opportunity to continue to offer extended services which can be financially sustainable. For schools with more resources, schools working


in collaboration with other institutions, or schools that have a particularly niche need there is also the option of establishing your own social enterprise. Beacon Hill High School in Blackpool serves


around 700 pupils primarily from the central districts of the town, which are deprived and densely populated. Blackpool’s economy is largely driven by tourism and employment patterns generated by the tourism industry are typified by low pay and short-term contracts. It is not uncommon for schools to experience a 20 per cent annual pupil turnover, this pattern is disruptive for pupils and has a knock-on effect in relation to community cohesion. Beacon Hill has developed numerous innovative


activities to benefit pupils and the wider community, pushing the boundaries of the conventional school offer. To establish the needs of local people, the school held a community consultation prior to designing its


SecEd • June 24 2010


extended services programme. The ideas put forward led to the start up of many of the services that are now in place at the school, including a hair salon, a beautician and a community café. With any surpluses made, the school continues to try new classes and activities requested by the community as well as subsidising activities for families in need. The school also rents out rooms to generate income


to sustain its services, and where possible tries to include an opportunity for educational and vocational development in the commercial services that it runs. For example, painting and decorating is taught as a qualification and also delivered as a trade out in the community, and the hair salon operates three-days-a- week as a commercial salon, and three-days-a-week as a training salon for school pupils. When getting involved in social enterprise for


schools, there are five critical success factors which should be in place: a shared vision and passion; a champion to drive the agenda; creative use of community linkages and networks; skilled and enterprising staff; and careful business planning. A shared vision is needed across the school


and its wider community to ensure that everyone is motivated towards the same goal. Without the support and backing of the wider community, a social enterprise has less chance of success. This is also a great opportunity to improve relations and communication between different groups of the


to have to jump through quite so many hoops and expend quite so much energy on repeatedly updating policies to ensure compliance? For example, one week an anti- bullying policy is only compliant if it explicitly warns that bullying may cause suicide, the next we are allowed merely to refer to “causing significant psychological harm”. In many ways, this type of hair-


splitting accountability replicates the narrow tick-box approach to which many public examinations have now been reduced. Creativity is constantly urged


upon us, but no-one would dare to show creativity when faced with writing school policies to meet the government’s rigorous standards, nor when confining oneself to the specific trigger words which will ensure high marks in an examination. We used to pride ourselves on an education system which produced innovative designers, inventors and engineers, while looking askance at the more formal and rigid methods of instruction used in other countries – but India and China have surely now overtaken us in the field of innovation. Meanwhile, information-sharing has become


more widespread as parents and pupils need access to everything via the internet and real-time reporting looms on the horizon. But this too leads to reduction – if something is going to be in the public domain then either so much care is taken to make it perfect that one’s output is significantly reduced, or much less detail is included than in the


past to provide less scope for criticism. If every parent is really going to receive a “real-time” report on their child’s progress all-day, every day, there will be little, if any, time or space left for teaching. It is true that the focus now is far more on learning than on teaching – but we oldies still believe it is quite hard to nurture and sustain one without the other. The third leg is of course assessment – a word which is on every teacher’s lips this term in particular. We now have a relatively new kind of assessment: controlled assessment. This has replaced coursework partly because it had become increasingly difficult to ensure that coursework was a candidate’s own unaided work and to control the amount of time which some candidates might choose to devote to the project at home, with or without the aid of parents, siblings, tutors


or the internet. The full horror of controlled


assessment is only just being realised. First, students taking 10 GCSE exams, for example, might end up being supervised in a room full of computers for many hours on end in a relatively short space of time, since every subject has its own quota of controlled assessment. However, the rumours are also rife that candidates can bring in a near- perfect version (“one I prepared earlier”)


to the final one-hour computer session and blithely type it in. How is this different to the discredited coursework system? We may be losing a lot of teaching and learning time for


assessment of dubious value. Now, if the new government was emboldened


to decimate Ofsted and school inspection systems, to remove most of the pettifogging school regulations, to reduce drastically the amount of formal assessment pupils have to endure and to abolish league tables in England (the last country in the world to have them?), then I might really believe that it was keen to promote innovation and creativity in education.


• Marion Gibbs is headmistress of the independent James Allen’s Girls’ School in London.


Lighting fires


“To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest: we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and


vary the song.” Henri Frédéric Amiel


“To me, education is a leading out of what is already


there in the pupil’s soul.” Muriel Spark


“A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own


expectations.” Patricia Neal


“If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counsellor, caution your elder brother, and hope


your guardian genius.” Joseph Addison


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