School Leaders of Ambition

This seminar is about the personal performance of school leaders. We need to be ambitious about our leadership and to believe that each of us can make significant improvements in our performance year on year. We need to seize the initiative for ourselves as we want to do for our schools and to learn from our colleagues, our pupils and each other. We shall explore the ways in which we can use our professional development opportunities to gain better self knowledge and self belief and how we can transform what we can do together to make our ourselves as well as our schools ambitious for the future. This seminar will be interactive and encourage us to share approaches to our own professional review and development and activities inside and outside out schools which have helped us to improve. It will suggest practical ways of working smarter within our leadership teams and establishing learning networks, professional and business links and international contacts from which each of us can prepare a personal action plan.

Also on Thursday at 12:45 (D1H).

Judith McClure, St George’s School, Edinburgh

Judith has been a Headteacher for nearly twenty years, at first in England and since 1994 at St. George’s School, Edinburgh. She was born in Middlesbrough, the daughter of a policeman, and went to primary and grammar schools there. After various exploits, she entered the teaching profession in 1981 and has been a teacher of history and politics, head of department and an assistant head in a co-ed school. She has grappled with curriculum development, information technology and educational reform since just before the Flood and now she is becoming a confident individual and a successful learner.  She is Chairman of the Management Committee of the Scottish Council of Independent Schools, a member of the Court of Heriot-Watt University and of SEED’s leadership and CPD advisory groups and Convener of SELMAS. She cannot resist asking questions at conferences and she loves to talk about leadership and indeed most other things. She thinks Headteachers are the most important people in the world.