The best best way of learning

I enjoyed chairing the first day of the Education Show leadership conference in Birmingham, although the NEC is pretty horrible - vast, hangar-like within a characterless landscape.  It's interesting to see how the focal point of people's concerns has shifted towards self-governance, whether or not delegates were opting for academy status.  Top of the hit parade in terms of concerns appears to be:

1.     Self-governing schools: how schools can cope with less support from their local authority; how they can support each other; how they can become more confident in this potentially daunting environment.

2.    How to keep the focus on developing and sustaining excellent teaching, with two key elements to that craft: helping children to develop a meta-language about their own learning (ie how they can describe for themselves what they are actually doing as part of the learning process); and how teachers can be more effective in establishing peer to peer learning.  There was lots of discussion about dealing with weak teaching.

We are trying to use some of the thinking outlined above in the way we develop more effective leadership in Ten Group.  We're trying to analyse what our best team leaders do in order to be effective in their roles.  We want to help them talk about that when they are working with new team leaders - or aspiring team leaders.  It's early days, but I'm confident it will bear fruit in due course.

In the last three weeks our professional support division has won contracts to deliver our services to eight local authorities, meaning that we will be expanding by 35% over the coming weeks - to over 4,500 schools.  Fortunately we have had careful plans for doing this for a long time and are very confident that we'll do a great job.  Because our researchers are having such a dynamic impact in supporting school leadership, we are finding that we are recruiting more and more high calibre individuals to the team.  Our latest three have come from Teach First, the Institute for Government and the French Chamber of Commerce. 

On the concierge side of the business, we are now (an additional one added last week) going to be opening new offices in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Mexico City and Sao Paolo in the next four months.  Exciting and challenging in equal measure.