Hello and welcome to Heads Up
I have only been in Warwickshire for a few weeks and yet, already, I have seen so much happening. The Send and Inclusion Change Programme is moving forwards at a terrific pace and it was good to see so much engagement last week at the Head Teachers’ Conference. I can only reiterate what was said; that we want to work closely with you on this to deliver the very best outcomes for these children and the way to do that is to work together. It was good to see so many links made between schools and the local authority.
Another major piece of work that I have seen in my time here has been the new look web pages. Our Education settings webpages have been given a style refresh. Just click on the picture below to take a look.
They have been designed especially for education settings with the content maintained by subject matter experts. New features include:
We hope that these pages provide a useful landing page for schools and settings and a useful link to the services that we, as a local authority, provide to support you. Please explore for yourselves and share the resource with colleagues.
We always want to work with you to provide a better service and these new pages are no exception, so if you have any suggestions for what else could be included or done differently please send them to educationservices@warwickshire.gov.uk.
In other news, the national landscape is dominated, quite rightly, by the events at the COP26 UN Climate Conference. I do believe that children and young people can have a huge influence not only in the behaviour of their peers but also their other family members.
It would be so powerful if we were to harness some of the ideas and energy of our young people in the county’s fight to tackle climate change, details of which can be found at another new page on the council’s website so I am going to take this opportunity to challenge schools and settings to get behind this effort and share their stories of good practice around the climate change emergency.
If you have schemes in your schools that are doing their bit to make a change, let’s shout about that. Please send any news on schemes that your schools are doing to Headsup@warwickshire.gov.uk and we will look to profile them. If this proves popular and we get regular content, we will make it a regular item so that you can share best practice and give the schemes some richly-deserved recognition.
As I stated above, children and young people are fantastic drivers for change. We can only marvel at their energy and creativity but we need to remember that they are also vulnerable to the stresses and turmoil of life. Notwithstanding the challenges of the last 20 months, this can be a very difficult period in their lives and we want to reinforce the message that you are not alone in supporting our young people if they need help.
Please can I remind you that Warwickshire’s Educational Psychology Service offers critical incident (CI) support to head teachers/senior leadership teams within schools and settings. This is available free to all Warwickshire settings. In the event of a critical incident, the primary aim of Warwickshire Educational Psychology Service will be to offer short-term psychological support to the school management team to appropriately manage the event. The approach taken will include advice and support around communication, practical arrangements and managing emotions within the community. This work is in order to promote a sense of safety, calm, self and community efficacy, connectedness and hope. If you require the support, please contact the EPS on 01926 742921
That’s it from me. Have a good weekend and I look forward to seeing you all again soon.
Chris Baird