How strange you may think to yourself - last month's blog was all about hair and this month it's about a hare! Is our poor ESCO becoming obsessed?  But please believe me that this 'hairy homophone' connection is purely incidental.  

Now, you probably already know that the March Hare is a much-loved character from the tea party scene in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  When the main character Alice meets the Cheshire Cat and enquires which way she should go, the worldly old cat replies:

"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "Lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "Lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

I'm sure there must be a joke in there about the similarity to educational establishments!  Let me move swiftly on before I get myself into a teacup of trouble.  Now it does appear that "Mad as a March Hare" was quite a common phrase back in Carroll's time.  Martin Gardner explains in The Annotated Alice  that this old proverb may be based upon hares' strange behaviour at the beginning of their long breeding season (this lasts from February to September in the UK if you are interested?).  But before you exclaim:

"Wow! Lucky hares - 7 whole months of mating!" then read on...

Early in the season (therefore about March time), unreceptive females often use their forelegs to repel overenthusiastic males. 

Now try and imagine this from poor old Mr Hare's perspective.   He's out there strutting his stuff, full of hare hormones and searching for some springtime action with a luscious long-eared cutie - but all he gets is a beating!

Not so lucky hey...? 

Seeing things from a completely different perspective can be a challenge even for the most empathetic of souls.  Therefore for a class teacher seeing things from the perspective of every child in the classroom must therefore be a problem multiplied by 30! 

If we then consider that each child actually only spends 15% of his/her time in school (and even less time in the classroom if you take sick-days, holidays and playtimes into account) then that's not a great deal of time to build up a true perspective of a child and the family unit that surrounds and supports them.   I believe that if you give a child a family-size tube of red Smarties, a bottle of Cola and then let them loose in a soft-play area - and that's probably nearer to the true picture of how they behave at home (...or is that just my children?) 

Joking aside; schools have long understood the importance of supporting parents as a way of improving children's outcomes, and this is supported by recent research which has shown that involving families, parents and carers in their children's learning is a highly effective way of raising standards of behaviour and attainment.   But as we are all aware - children don't come with a handy repair manual - or even a box to return them in!

At the end of February the cluster asked me to represent you at the Starting Schools Facilitator Training held over two days.  As a quick and easy way of sharing this information, in a shortest amount of time available, I produced a summary of the training which hopefully you should have received by now.  This document is also available for you to download below:

Starting Schools Document March 2008

More information about the Starting Schools Parent Information Sessions including the Primary & Secondary School Toolkits (with useful parenting worksheets for use at these sessions) is also available at:

The Family and Parenting Institute

As a bonus for attending this training, a small amount of additional funding will be available through Extended Services to support Starting School Parent Information Sessions.  With this in mind, please feel free to contact Susie if you wish for more guidance on setting up these sessions in your school setting.  Also, Susie and Les Payce (your EWO) managed to secure a copy of the Facilitators Handbook for all of the schools in our cluster. 

If you haven't received one yet then please ask for a copy!

Still on the theme of Parenting as this is such hot news at the present time I have also managed to source some Resource Kits from the Training & Development Agency (tda) about the Parent Support Adviser (PSA) Project.  This pilot project has been in response to the Government's vision that a role of an extended school is to act as a 'hub for services for parents'.   Please contact me if you have not received your PSA Resource Kit (and CD ROM) giving background information about the Pilot Scheme. 

The revised extended services 'core offer' guidance now identifies the following services under parenting support:

 

To give a brief overview of a structured evidence based parenting programme; I've provided a quick link below to a short presentation about the Triple P Parenting course from:

To support the last bullet point above regarding Family Learning, I have made arrangements to meet in April with the Essential Skills Support Unit (ESSU) for Hampshire & the IOW to discuss family learning opportunities.  It will be interesting to see how they may support us in our schools and community settings in East Fareham.  If you have any particular specifications (or wonderfully creative ideas) of how you would like to establish family learning in your school or community setting, then please let me know.  For example, Continyou have produced some useful downloadable guides called What's Cooking? for ideas on setting-up and running family cookery courses. There are lots of wonderful ideas how to engage families in informal learning opportunities - and it would be fantastic to see dads (and step-dads) encouraged to get involved too. 

You may be interested in visiting The Campaign For Family Learning Website for more information.

A rather hefty, but very useful publication produced by NIACE  (National Institute of Adult Continuation Education) about linking adult learning and extended services can also be downloaded below.  Personally I wouldn't recommend it as bedtime reading (it's not quite in the same league as Alice in Wonderland), but nevertheless it is a very useful publication.

Adding Value: Adult Learning & Extended Services

I also recently went on a fact-finder mission to meet with the Manager of Pompey Study Centre & Portsmouth's Extended Services Manager to see the wonderful work that is being done at Portsmouth's Children's University (for years 4 - 7) and The Children's College (for years 2 & 3).  It was a really useful discussion and it is encouraging that it may be possible to re-create a similar (albeit smaller scale) project in our own area.  Many thanks to Jo and Mark for making me feel so welcome and answering my endless questions over a coffee.

 

A last minute Mad March addition to this website is the:

Portchester and Cams Hill Cluster Draft Action Plan 2007-2010

 

 As this plan is representative of all of our partners in the clusters, your thoughts, ideas, inspiration and input to finalise and develop the plan is absolutely essential.  Many thanks also to those of you who attended the X-Factor in Extended Services Conference last week in Southampton.  I was pleased to see that we had a good representation from all of our partners.  If you were unable to make this event; I have copied all the presentations onto CD ROM for each school and shall be delivering these in the next week.

Finally:  

Can I take this opportunity to extend our very best wishes for a speedy recovery to Jude Ramshaw (Uplands Primary) from all of the Extended Services partners following her accident last week.

GET WELL SOON JUDE!