Professional development for staff

One of the things that really pleased me this week was the very positive response from our newly appointed Curriculum Leaders (CLs) to a professional development 'day out' on Thursday. The facilitator for the day was George Sharpe from the Brathay trust, a company with much experience in the field of leadership development.

Following management restructuring in Edinburgh's schools, Gillespie's now has a team of  3 Depute Heads and 10 CLs. They will lead on developing the school's curriculum. Rather than being divided into Subject departments led by Principal Teachers (PTs), of which there were up to 18 in secondary schools, we now have a faculty system. Each Faculty will have a CL at the helm. At Gillespie's we will,  in order to ensure that we have the subject expertise to support teachers  at classroom level, also have Subject Leaders in each discrete subject area.

The school's pastoral support for pupils team will also be restructured in the coming weeks. Details of how this is to be done will emerge in the next few days. 

At a time of such enormous and significant change, our school needs strong leadership throughout the school to ensure that our evolving version of 'Curriculum for Excellence' meets the needs of all of our pupils and takes advantage of the wealth of opportunities we can tap into as a school. I am delighted at the 'leaders' we have in post, both in the senior team and also among the CLs. I am excited at further developing leadership throughout the school in the coming weeks and months.