manager's briefcase

Help at hand

If you've not come across the Manager's Briefcase before you are in for a pleasant surprise. Every month this site will be refreshed with new pro formas, exemplars, model policies and summary documents to help you manage your school.

Whilst we appreciate that every school is unique, these ready-made templates and time-saving resources can be downloaded from our website and modified to suit your own school.

visit School Leadership Today (mst)

Auditing your TAs

In order to improve teaching assistant provision you need to know what's happening now. This questionnaire is intended for TAs to complete to clarify what their current role is.

TA confidence

How do your teaching assistants feel about the work they do? This questionnaire is aimed at establishing strengths and weaknesses and the preferences that your staff have.

briefcase 2.4

Deployment of Teaching Assistants

Once you have completed your audit and you have consulted with your staff, then you need to bring the information together and present your ideas for discussion.

TA training log

This training log can be used to help plan future training needs for your teaching assistants and how they will be delivered

Performance review for TAs

Use this pro forma to discuss the successes and achievements, areas for development and training needs of your TAs.

TAs - action planning

How do you plan for improvement in the way your TAs work and are deployed? This extract from an action plan suggests how you might identify your intended outcomes and set your success criteria

previous briefcases

Our successful learning model

The children at Melcombe are able to articulate how best they learn and understand and can discuss the school's model for learning to each other and to outside visitors to the school. Click here to see more...

Learning Bags

In KS2 the children at Melcombe individually bag their most important learning for the week and these weekly reviews of learning are then put in their learning journal so that children are building up a record of their key learning. To see the learning bags...

Chatterbox Criteria

At Melcombe Primary School children are given opportunity to ‘Chatterbox’ about their learning. These are the criteria that the children use for this activity..

Key Questions

Each topic and unit of work in maths and literacy begins with a Key Question which the children will answer at the end of the unit of work. Children are then set the challenge of raising a range of questions they will need to ask in order to answer the key questions.

Achievement reports

Self-assessment is central to the school's practices. Children need to have total ownership of their learning and need to be able to assess what they have learnt and what they need to do next. Click here for examples of achievement reports...

Target reviews

At the end of a unit of work the children review their targets, identifying which ones they have achieved and what they still need to improve on.

in the latest issue

School Leadership Today (mst) cover image

Cover story: Can the coalition crack inequality?
Trend: Concerns about the introduction of the ‘pupil premium’.
The role of body language in teaching.
Is the Early Years Foundation Stage too restrictive?
Towards a coaching culture.
Positive discrimination.
Heads and schools – finding the perfect match.
How unhappy are our children?
Understanding the impact of technology.
The magic ingredient: parents!
Social enterprise for schools.
Why I want to start a free school.
Laying foundations for outdoor learning.
Search Me.

subscribe here

education zones

Subscribe to RSS

links to all RSS feeds

browse