Policy and Practice: Governors

On the 23^rd of January we had a guest speaker due to Andy’s absence. Steve Gullick took the session. He gave us an insight on the role of governors today, he spoke about the role a Governor has and what it indicates and the purpose of a Governing body.  The department of Education describes the main purpose of a Governing body is to “help the school to set high standards by planning for the schools future and setting targets for school improvements.” (2011)

Steve Gullick told us that Governors were volunteers, which I found particularly interesting as they make such broad decisions such as the school budget, the start and finish time of the school and teachers salary. Which showed how much power governors have. He then went on tell us about the arguments that there are about Governors. One argument is that Governors should be experts about the decisions that they make, then on the other hand that Governors should not be experts but they should be people who live near the school such as the Parents and the Council as they want the school to do well. Another argument is that maybe Governors should be paid but the concern with that is that it may attract the wrong type of people to be Governors people who just want the money and don’t really care about the school but recently the new chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw cited on the BBC news said that "My view is that when a school is doing poorly, we need to think about paid governance.” (2012)

The Governing body is currently made up of people who have a steak in the school these can be

• Parents
• LEA’s
• Teacher’s
• Staff for example a Care Taker
• Community
• Headmaster

All Governors can only be Governors for 4 years and then another election takes place. School Search UK  “The full governing body meets at least once a term to discuss the running of the school.” (2006) This gives everyone who wants to be a governing a fair chance.

References

Department of Education (2011) Retrieved on 25^th January from

http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/leadership/governance/a0056625/the-role-of-governor-within-the-governing-body

Education and Family ‘Pay school Governors’  (2012) accessed on 1^st March from

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17204548

Schools Search UK (2006) School Governors retrieved 28^th March from

http://www.schools-search.co.uk/school-governors.php

Visual Communication- Metaphors

This theme took place over 2 sessions. The first session we were put into groups of 2-3 and we had to create a collage. The theme was sense of place. Kate and I made a collage representing us individually and our lives. We put images such as make up, money, food etc. We had a section about university and a section, which was about us. It represented the journey of being in university and the responsibilities we had that we may have never had before such as finance, being able to budget our money for food and accommodation. During the next session we presented our collage to the class, we talked about the images representing university, which gave us a sense of freedom and then why different images were significant to us.

We then went on to discuss metaphors as a class, the first task we had was to think of artists that used Metaphors in their lyrics in different songs, It was surprising to see how many do. Some examples that Kate and I came up with were ‘The ice inside your soul’ and  ‘Baby you’re a firework’ we then talked about how metaphors are used to send out a powerful message. Not just in songs but also as images. Susie gave us a number of images to look at, one, which I found particularly powerful, was the image below.  Which is about animal testing.

At the end of this session we watched a video by Martin Luther King which was about his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and looked at the different types of metaphors that he used to emphasis on things that he was saying.