Balfron Matters 

Dear colleagues,

I hope you have had a restful and enjoyable weekend.  Two long weekends in a row has been a rare treat!

Thanks to those of you who found the time to complete the inservice evaluation (7 responses). Key themes that emerged were:

• input is good/relevant but too much information in short time

• build in more time for discussion, particularly in relation to SIP

• consider splitting the sessions morning/afternoon where possible

All of the presentations are available in last week's BM should you wish to refer to them.  We will definitely adapt in future given the feedback - thank you! 

As you know, Network Meetings are scheduled for this week. I have been advised that feedback from the previous meetings in February highlighted that some subject areas would like flexibility in setting their own agendas for this week's meeting.  In addition, the following areas have been added:

1.   Impact of return to full course content and assessment for National 4 to AH SQA course.

2.   Subject network priorities for next session.

Thanks for your input, comments and suggestions on our school values - we have had 52 responses with some interesting and insightful comments.  Many staff stated that they like the school values and they should not change.  For fun, a word cloud of all of the values/suggestions offered by staff is below.  The next step is to include pupils and parents in the discussion. You have access to all of the staff responses here (staff shared - school improvement) 

The words Ready, Respectful, Safe are not intended to replace our school values, but to give us a shared language that we can use in relation to managing behaviour. Pivotal suggested that these three covered any aspect that we may have to plan around or respond to.  To be fair, I am not sure if we have reinforced and clarified this given that the training was just before the pandemic.  We certainly have much to consider. I will be running some pupil forcus groups this week - apologies for the inevitable inconvenience that might cause.

Massive thanks to colleagues in Flexible Learning for the warm welcome for Open Doors.  Mark Young and I had a positive time observing and joining in.  There is a short video below. Looking forward to visiting Technologies on Thursday.

Have a great week.

Elaine