After starting a new role in September I can stop and reflect on making it half way through my first academic year.
My American Experience – part 5: Lessons learned
My trip to the US lasted for 5 days and what a memorable experience it turned out to be. After the first day I felt greatly at ease and relaxed amongst the new colleagues I'd met. The next four days that followed were filled with carefully selected education sessions such as a session on "a …
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My American Experience – part 4: Mingling and Mixing
Day 2 of the conference started with a visit to a High School. It was one of the things I was keen to do on my visit overseas so made sure that I signed up for it before I even got to the US. I boarded a coach with 18 other delegates and off we …
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My American Experience – part 3: Let the learning begin
It all begins The conference started for me on Thursday at 4pm. I joined the other Emerging Leader Scholarship winners and we all introduced ourselves and talked a bit about our background and what we hoped to achieve from the conference and what we could contribute. Aside from the conference staff we were also introduced …
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My American Experience – part 2: Making preparations
On 28th June I found out that I was a winner of ASBO International's Emerging Leaders Scholarship. The only problem was that the conference wasn't taking place until 24th October and so I had just under 4 months to distract my mind and stop myself bursting with excitement. Luckily, two weeks prior to receiving this …
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My American Experience – part 1: Taking the plunge
It all started with a tweet in January 2019. The Association of School Business Officials (aka ASBO Intl) advertised their professional development scholarship offer to attend their annual conference. I cheekily replied to the tweet asking if it was open to overseas applicants. “Yes”, came the unexpected response. Well, that was the start of a …
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The first six weeks
I've just completed exactly six weeks in my new role as Business Director in a large South London secondary school with almost 2000 pupils on roll. The school I was in immediately prior to this was a small primary with 275 on roll. You see the difference here? I started my new role with a …
Sensational September
As we move into October, I'm looking back on the first month of term with a smile on my face as I realise it's been a successful month. September started with me taking up a new role. I made the move from SBM in a smallish primary school (275 on roll) to Business Director in …
We are wonderful
Over the last couple of weeks I've discovered just how wonderful SBMs are. Recent weeks had been very HR focused for me (recruiting is not my favourite part of the job but that's life). More and more I was starting to fall into a pattern of coming in super early and either working solidly until …
What’s next?
There's nothing like being short-staffed to motivate me to learn new things. For the last few months I have been without my Premises Manager and boy have I learnt a lot. I was joined at my most recent premises meeting by our governor with responsibility for Health and Safety. In her report back to …