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Birmingham, West Midlands, UK. An LEA of around 275 primary schools. A network of blogs especially for the area.
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We want to and will make it easy for schools to keep their staff, pupils, parents, partners, other stake-holders and wider community informed, updated and engaged.
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
30 day free trial
school website yourself. What will you write today's school news to be?News Departments
Archive page for Tuesday, 11 March 2008
Tu, Mar 11, 2008Ed Balls used the word 'horrified'
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Fewer pupils offered preferred school place: "Abuses included schools asking parents to commit to making financial contributions [of many hundreds of pounds per term] as a condition of admission, asking [banned questions] about the marital, occupational or financial status of parents, and ignoring the priority for admission that schools are legally obliged to give to looked after children.Other cases uncovered included schools giving priority of places to family members who are not siblings and interviewing children before making an admissions decision."
Shock over schools 'breaking law': "The general secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, Chris Keates, added: "It is also likely, and entirely understandable, that parents of pupils past and present at these schools may seek legal redress to recover monies inappropriately taken from them.""
Ministers in a mess as schools flout admission rules: From the public comments:"Count the schools where the uniform is available only from one shop, and where it is `preferred' that sports gear is embroidered with the child's name, so removing at a stroke any second-hand value or even the ability to pass it to siblings."
What's happening? I'm horrified at what sharp elbowed parents will do, or have to do. Anything to keep the oiks out?
Follow up: inspection evidence
I've received some feedback from yesterday's post: inspection evidence. It seems like there are boxes around after all.
Please note! Take pictures of your work, do not spend a whole bunch of time scanning. Pick a nice flat, well lit area and snap away.
I was asked where to store the virtual boxes. I replied: there's two places...
As a department
You could create a new department, just for that box. Say, art, which takes up lots of space as a box. Then, email into that department all your art works. Categorise them as you see fit. Perhaps by date, perhaps by class, perhaps by topic. Use the subject line, which become the title and the body of the email which becomes the body of the news item. As usual, change the file names to captions.
The disadvantage is that it will appear on the front page as well. IMHO, this is not a disadvantage, everything should go on the front page. And you can only see the last 30 items, without delving into the archives. (I could fix this.)
As a folder
As above, but this time it doesn't or need not appear on your front page. It becomes a page deep into your site structure. (At the same time a news item is created and links to the page, thus you can point to the new page which would otherwise be lost and unvisited in your site structure.)
Glendale do this already.
Downside is that the pages are categorised according to when you posted them. Newest at bottom, though you can change this through Editors only:==>Prefs==>Advanced==>Site Structure. And, over several years, you will need to tidy this up, manually. Which isn't really a biggy.
I'm guessing / thinking that the folder option would be the better solution. In this way you can whack all your old stores of boxes into the site. Certainly, they don't need to go onto the front page if they've got whiskers on.
You could email them into a folder called:
/art2006/autumn
/art2009/spring
/artAutumn2006/class1
/artAutumn2006/class2
/artAutumn2006Class1/patterns
/artAutumn2006Class1/shapes
Your subject line may, then, look like this:
[h149] Shapes [news story] [pending] [[Subject Art]] [[[artAutumn2006Class1]]] [nc]
Review the how to for a detailed explanation of the above. In a nutshell, you're saying: keep all the images to a height of 149 pixels so I don't have portraits and landscapes looking odd. The page name will be shapes, I want a news item and a story page and for the news item (a short, one liner) to be in the art department. Put the story into the folder artAutumn2006Class1. Oh! And don't add any captions.
(It doesn't matter which order you put all these switches. But you should make post-it notes or even stationary in Outlook, if you're going to be doing lots of them.)
With the site structure, it's fairly easy to re-jiggle all your folders and pages at a later date. Doing such will take only a minute. You may for instance re-jiggle everything into:
/art/evidence/2006/autumn/class1/shapes
Please note! Take pictures of your work, do not spend a whole bunch of time scanning. Pick a nice flat, well lit area and snap away.
I was asked where to store the virtual boxes. I replied: there's two places...
As a department
You could create a new department, just for that box. Say, art, which takes up lots of space as a box. Then, email into that department all your art works. Categorise them as you see fit. Perhaps by date, perhaps by class, perhaps by topic. Use the subject line, which become the title and the body of the email which becomes the body of the news item. As usual, change the file names to captions.
The disadvantage is that it will appear on the front page as well. IMHO, this is not a disadvantage, everything should go on the front page. And you can only see the last 30 items, without delving into the archives. (I could fix this.)
As a folder
As above, but this time it doesn't or need not appear on your front page. It becomes a page deep into your site structure. (At the same time a news item is created and links to the page, thus you can point to the new page which would otherwise be lost and unvisited in your site structure.)
Glendale do this already.
Downside is that the pages are categorised according to when you posted them. Newest at bottom, though you can change this through Editors only:==>Prefs==>Advanced==>Site Structure. And, over several years, you will need to tidy this up, manually. Which isn't really a biggy.
I'm guessing / thinking that the folder option would be the better solution. In this way you can whack all your old stores of boxes into the site. Certainly, they don't need to go onto the front page if they've got whiskers on.
You could email them into a folder called:
/art2006/autumn
/art2009/spring
/artAutumn2006/class1
/artAutumn2006/class2
/artAutumn2006Class1/patterns
/artAutumn2006Class1/shapes
Your subject line may, then, look like this:
[h149] Shapes [news story] [pending] [[Subject Art]] [[[artAutumn2006Class1]]] [nc]
Review the how to for a detailed explanation of the above. In a nutshell, you're saying: keep all the images to a height of 149 pixels so I don't have portraits and landscapes looking odd. The page name will be shapes, I want a news item and a story page and for the news item (a short, one liner) to be in the art department. Put the story into the folder artAutumn2006Class1. Oh! And don't add any captions.
(It doesn't matter which order you put all these switches. But you should make post-it notes or even stationary in Outlook, if you're going to be doing lots of them.)
With the site structure, it's fairly easy to re-jiggle all your folders and pages at a later date. Doing such will take only a minute. You may for instance re-jiggle everything into:
/art/evidence/2006/autumn/class1/shapes
It was 'homo' in my day
Homophobic abuse endemic in schools, says teacher survey:
"The word "gay" was reported to be the most frequently used term to put someone down, followed by "bitch" and "slag".
Half of teachers have also witnessed gossiping or the spreading of rumours about other pupils' sexuality."
I don't get this 'big news.' It's old hat. Change the name and it's all the same as 30 years ago. I bet you change the name again and it would have been the same 60 years ago.
[Disclosure:] I went to an all boys grammar school in the South Wales Valleys.
