School Admin News

The response the SEA gained was very varied, ranging from comments that it was the practice to vet everyone, including parents and visitors, to schools where the statement was “we would never vet parents.”

It became very clear from this that the interpretation of the laws has become extremely varied, and it is just possible that the new set of changes being introduced can help regularize matters in England.

The schools secretary in England, has bowed to pressure from some quarters (but obviously not from others) to announce that the full vetting and barring scheme, due to come into force this coming summer, will now be changed. 

That policy would have made the actions of schools who force parents who take children to sports events to be checked.  Now that is being scrapped and new amendments to the law will be introduced.

In the new version a person working with children will have to undergo vetting if he or she has contact with the same group of under 16s at least once a week.  So now school visitors such as those brought in to give talks, famous ex-pupils, local footballers, theatre companies, school photographers and the like who might pop in just occasionally do not have to be vetted.

Further, 16 to 18-year-olds who help out will not be required to register. Nor will  overseas visitors who bring groups of children to the UK, unless they stay for more than three months.

And in a big clarification, parents who make any form of private arrangements with each other’s children will not be required to register. 

This will disrupt the activities of Ofsted who managed to ban a policewoman from looking after her colleague’s daughter because she was not a registered childminder.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority was created in 2006 and came into being this year.  People who are employed will have to pay £64 to register; volunteers can register for free. 

When vetting people, the ISA will use records of convictions and other information held by the police, including unproven allegations.   Everyone who passes will receive a registration number which lasts until withdrawn because new evidence comes to light.  The ISA is duty bound to monitor every registered person all the time and seek new information on them.

You can read more about the work of the School of Educational Administration and the courses we run for school administrators at www.admin.org.uk 

One of the more repetitive and tiresome duties of any school’s IT staff is the resetting of student and staff passwords. And as password policies become more complex, so the volume of passwords resets increases. Industry analysts estimate that around 70% of requests to the helpdesk are password related.

Today’s educational environment has an increasing “on-line” flavour, with both pupils and staff needing network access not just during school hours, but also remotely during evenings, at weekends and during the holidays – times when it is not normally possible to reset forgotten passwords or unlock accounts.

Self Service Reset Password Management (SSRPM) from Tools4ever offers a simple solution to these issues by allowing students and staff to reset their own passwords by successfully answering a number of challenge questions.

SSRPM

Is simple to deploy
Integrates fully with the school’s existing password complexity rules
Supports multiple VLEs for remote password resetting
Can be configured differently for pupils and staff
Works with XP, Vista and Windows 7
Frees up valuable IT support resources
For more information on SSRPM, just click on the link below:

www.passwordreset.co.uk

Alwyne Sinclair
Tools4ever UK
Office: 01452 384870
Mobile: 07912 843281
www.tools4ever.com

The School of Education Administration warmly applauds the development of UK Education News, and is encouraging school IT Departments to put  permanent links to the news service on the school web sites.

It seems as if a growing number of schools have now following this idea and are putting links to the service on their sites, so that administrators, bursars, members of the PTA and governors as well as teachers and managers, can keep up to speed on developments in the world of schooling.

The SEA would like to encourage every school to follow this idea and have a permanent link on its web site and/or learning platform.

There’s more information on the School of Education Administration and its courses at www.admin.org.uk 

The simplest way to save half an hour a day

All schools suffer from an influx of unwanted email aimed at teachers. Most are rubbish, but the problem is that one in every 50 or so emails can be of relevance.

To overcome this problem the School of Educational Administration has set up a system whereby we invite organisations that have a legitimate reason to mail teachers to use our system which directs email straight to the personal email address of the relevant teacher.

We give two absolute guarantees with this:

a) We will only forward one email per week to this individual
b) We will never, ever, release these email addresses to anyone else.

So far around 4000 schools have signed up to this service, and it means that it saves administrators hours of time each week.

The system is totally voluntary. All you have to do is invite your colleagues to go to http://tinyurl.com/yk2pvu7 and tick one box. We don’t ask for your school name, details or anything else.

At the moment we are only running this service for headteachers, deputy heads, Year 1 teachers and Year 6 teachers. If the experiment is a success we’ll extend this to all teachers in the school. Remember teachers can give us either their internal school address or their home email address – as they wish.

Last point: every email carries an “unsubscribe” button, so if the teacher doesn’t like what he/she gets, the service can be stopped at a moment’s notice.

I do hope you will find this experiment helps you, and that you can work with us to help make it grow.

If you want to know more about our work, there are details on www.admin.org.uk

Tony Attwood
School of Educational Administration.

It seems that Manor Community College in Cambridge which has 350 pupils aged 11 to 16, has become one of the first schools that states that anyone visiting the school will have to be accompanied unless they can produce a CRB check.The principal, Ben Slade, said signs have been put up around the school.  The signs read,  ”We do not allow anybody who is not fully CRB checked to enter the college premises or to work unsupervised.  This includes volunteers, visitors and contractors.  If you do not have a CRB (full disclosure) or you do not know what this is, please ensure that you contact a member of staff for further information.”

Apparently the rules do not apply to parents, who sign in as usual at reception, even though the signs seem to contradict that exception..

Mr Slade said: “It’s not saying people aren’t welcome into the reception, it’s just saying they can’t wander round the main body of the building unaccompanied without a CRB check.

“We had a safeguarding review which suggested we should make it clear to people who are entering the building they are not to walk around unsupervised or work with children if they haven’t been CRB checked.

“You don’t need a CRB check to enter the reception or go to an adult education class, and it doesn’t mean people are not welcome to come into the school.

“But you need to catch people’s attention. Taking risks on safeguarding children is not something I’m prepared to compromise on.

“Ofsted makes the rules up, not me, and a lot of schools have failed their inspections for not safeguarding pupils.”

The details of the signs emerged after parents escorting children from nearby Somersham Primary School to a carol service were asked to undergo CRB checks.  More than 20 parents who had volunteered to walk pupils 500 metres down the road to nearby St John’s Church were affected.

Details of this story appeared in the weekly newsletter sent to school administrators by the School of Educational Administration.   You can sign up to the newsletter at www.schools.co.uk/subscribe

The School of Educational Administration is doing research into what happens in administration when schools amalgamate

The SEA was contacted by a school administrator who raised an interesting issue in this regard.

It relates to the amalgamation of two schools, with the resultant moving of two sets of administration into one office, and a resultant redundancy. In this case one of the two schools is a special needs school, the other not.

The SEA is collecting data on amalgamations and what happens to admin staff, and if you would like to share any thoughts on this – thoughts which might be about positive outcomes, and maybe thoughts about things that one should look out for and avoid.

Sources of information are never revealed by the SEA.

If you would like to contribute information please write to Tony@schools.co.uk

There is more information on the School of Educational Administration and the free services it offers please visit www.admin.org.uk 

Cutting costs in education means creating efficiency

The DCSF is approaching the issue of education funding on two fronts.  First they are looking to claw back money that schools are not spending with a rigorous implementation of the policy that they have only toyed with over recent years.

Second they are demanding efficiencies.

The question is, who is going to spend time looking for and implementing efficiency savings?  Certainly getting a group of teachers or managers to look for efficiency savings is itself going to be highly inefficient, for the only people who can really judge what is and what is not efficient is an administrator.So it is more than likely that most schools will make the issue of efficiency an issue that is dealt with by the school administration.

The only problem is that most administrators are not trained in efficiency.

The only courses that are available for school administrators and which deal with efficiency are those run by the School of Educational Administration.   Their courses focus on developing the knowledge and insights that one needs in order to make the school run more effectively, and therefore make efficiency savings.

Since headteachers and their colleagues are now getting strict instructions on efficiency savings, and will need someone to turn to who can actually have the right sorts of insights in this area – and anyone who has been on the SEA courses is going to be in this arena.

The next date for applications for the next intake on to the QCA validated, one year distance learning course leading to the Certificate in Educational Administration is 1 February, and closing date for applications 22 January.

The next intake for this two-month Work Management and Administration distance learning course (which is one module of the full National Certificate course) starts on 22 February 2010 – closing date for applications is 12 February.

Full details can be found on www.admin.org.uk

Cutting costs in education means looking for efficiency savings

The government’s approach to cutting costs in education has been made clearer with its recent announcements about recruitment services, energy meters and the like.

What it confirms is that the main emphasis is going to be on efficiency savings in education rather than straight cuts.

The question therefore is, who is going to spend time looking for efficiency savings.  Certainly getting a group of teachers or managers to look for efficiency savings is itself going to be highly inefficient.

But there is an alternative.  To make the issue of efficiency an issue that is dealt with by the school administration.

The only courses that are available for school administrators and which deal with efficiency are those run by the School of Educational Administration.   Their courses focus on developing the knowledge and insights that one needs in order to make the school run more effectively, and therefore make efficiency savings.

Since headteachers and their colleagues are now getting strict instructions on efficiency savings, and will need someone to turn to who can actually have the right sorts of insights in this area – and anyone who has been on the SEA courses is going to be in this arena.

The next date for applications for the next intake on to the QCA validated, one year distance learning course leading to the Certificate in Educational Administration is 1 February, and closing date for applications 22 January.

The next intake for this two-month Work Management and Administration distance learning course (which is one module of the full National Certificate course) starts on 22 February 2010 – closing date for applications is 12 February.

Full details can be found on www.admin.org.uk