Started the journey as a Briscoe and continuing on as a Campbell
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 …
Continue reading "My American Experience – part 1: Taking the plunge"
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Most people try to form new habits at New Years - joining a gym, dry January, giving up meat etc etc. I tend to make my resolutions on each birthday as it's a more meaningful date for me. Since working in schools however I find that I am reflecting on things much more frequently. At …
The last day of term finally arrived and then whizzed past in a flash. Everyone counting down to home time in a state of end-of-term-delirium. True to form whilst everyone was winding down I beavered away to the last minute. Having started working at the crack of dawn I was determined to make it through …
A few weeks ago I tweeted about how long this half term felt and how Christmas was so far away. This past week the music leader in my school sent an email round to let everyone know that Christmas Concert song practice would start in December. It's an unwritten rule at my school that we …
Continue reading "It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas…"
So far I have been a Business Manager in two different schools. When I think about things like Ofsted ratings, demographics, borough, roll numbers I can see glaring differences between the two. But what they have in common (as with all schools I hope) is the drive and desire to make it a wonderful experience …
I quite often qualify my SBM Twitter posts with a variant of "I'm still new to this". It seems to type itself without me even thinking about it but something unexpected happened recently that made me re-evaluate this assessment of myself. I got a call from one of the Senior HR officers at my LA …
