Last night, the School Council at Rettendon Primary School attended the Meeting of the Governing Body to present their view of the school and its activities over the last term. They had put together an excellent PowerPoint presentation with photographs and images to support what they were saying.

The School Council comprises of representatives from each year group, and despite being faced with the challenge of presenting to a room of adults, spoke with confidence and conviction. I was delighted that they were able to join us and speak in a mature manner, reflecting the views of all students.

Although not a new idea, it is occasions such as these which shows that these students are placed at the very heart of this small, community school. Everyone knows each other and everyone's voices are heard. I'd very much like to see how the involvement of the School Council at Governor meetings can be developed further, perhaps having them join the formal meeting and contribute to some of the discussions. It is very clear to me that with the School Council's presence and participation, there is much to be gained. 

A discussion regarding the arrangement of the curriculum, the class organisation, future building work should involve the students, after all, it is their education we are helping to improve. Needless to say, there are challenges, for example we'd have to look at how we make the meeting accessible to them including timing, accessibility to terminology and vocabulary used, and how we'd approach items of a confidential nature. None of these are insurmountable and something to be discussed for the future.

I made an audio recording of the meeting which has been made accessible on the Rettendon Primary School podcast. 

I'd be interested to hear from other governors, Headteachers, teachers, parents, pupils about how the School Council are involved in Governor meetings in their schools.

Congratulations to all who presented at last night's Governor meeting, you made us all feel very proud of your achievements.

Rettendon Primary School in Essex have just recently begun work on an International project, linking with a small school in Little Cayman. The Little Cayman Education Service community has just four pupils, with a fulltime teacher and learning support assistant.

Pupils at Rettendon Primary School put together a PowerPoint presentation with images and annotation to show what school life is like in the UK. The pupils are looking forward to being able to compare and contrast life in Little Cayman with life in their own school. This is an exciting project which has already seen many great outcomes, from excellent use of ICT, Literacy, Social and management skills to put a presentation together, independently. Well done to all the pupils who participated in making this PowerPoint.

Watch their presentation online. (This is a Flash file, about 25MB in size. Please be patient whilst in downloads and plays in the browser window.) You can interact with the presentation by clicking with the mouse to move it forward.

Alternatively, view the presentation as a QuickTime video file (much smaller at 6MB).

As a school governor responsible for ICT and someone who has initiated this relationship, I was delighted to see the pupils creative skills be put to good use. Check back here to see how the project progresses.

I have just been accepted onto the Governing Body at Rettendon Primary School. My work on the Distributed School project at Ultralab has led me to take an extra special interest in small, rural schools.

I attended a Governor training session tonight and found it all rather interesting and enlightening. I was delighted to meet the other Governors, all of whom took pity on me being bombarded with PANDA reports, Ofsted documents on my first visit - that is until I pointed out that I had taught in a primary school for several years already! "ah", they said!

A few things I've learnt this evening are:

Ofsted have proposed a new inspection framework (Nov 2004) which is expected to come into effect from September 2005. Some of the radical changes include the following:

• Shorter, sharper inspections, lasting two days, based largely on consultation with senior managers in the school. Also, school self-assessment of the quality of teaching is the basis for the inspection, rather than through observation.
• Shorter notice of inspections to reduce stress and the amount of pre-inspection preparation associated with a forthcoming inspection.
• Ofsted have now revamped their reporting procedure. Rather than produce a draft report in the weeks following the inspection, a draft report will be available by the end of the inspection week. The full report will be available within 6 weeks.
• Inspection teams will be smaller and will be led by HMI (Her Majesty's Inspectors.) They will also take responsibility for producing all reports.
• More frequent inspections! Every three years rather than every six. Schools with concern, more frequent.
• Ofsted will now produce a 6 page report rather than the 30 page document that is produced now and has been in the past. How is this achieved? Well, Ofsted will no longer comment on individual curriculum subjects.
• Schools have 40 days in which to produce their Action Plan as a result of the inspection report.
• Greater emphasis is placed on schools' self-evaluation of their performance, attainment and standards.

This was all quite significant, as you might imagine.

Not only does this appear to be a major cost cutting exercise but also a very positive step to handing the management of monitoring the performance of schools back to the school. It also indicates a much closer relationship between the inspectors and those who run the school with their feet on the ground on a day-to-day basis.

I have felt for a long time that more trust should be placed in those who are responsible for the running of the school, and that the Inspection Service should maintain a supportive role to the school, making recommendations as appropriate.

How exciting, the future is certainly brighter!