Guest speaker on the 6th of February 2012

In today's lecture we had Steve Gulleck again. He went on to go explain in greater  detail about the governors. After last week I thought that I had been given enough information about the governors to understand their job but it turns out there was a lot more to learn. Some additional facts about the governors that I learnt are that there are 23,000 governors within Wales, the governors must meet at least 3 times a year with the school, also that they have to deal with incidents at school. For example if a teacher is ill then it is their responsibility/job to make sure that there is a supply of other teachers to take their place, and if there are fights or accidents with the pupils they must sort it out. When it comes to training for governors it takes a while before they come experts at this job because you cant go from okay to being an expert within a day. 

After we had a lecture we had a seminar session later on in the day. This was a fun session because we got given a task to do within a group. The task was to discuss and list what are the important things to do when it comes to health and safety for children in school when they are going on a school trip that is outside of the school. Some of the things we came up with were : - First aid kit, register, medical details of children, contact details of parents and many more things like these. Once we had done this we then had a class discussion to see if we could add more to our list. Steve then went on to explain why some of these where so important. Some of these examples are that if you are going to note down the parents contact details then you should have a reserve number as well incase the parents phone do not have signal or their mobile phones aren't on, or other similar issue, and therefore they can get hold of the reserved number. Another thing that is very important is a register, this way you can keep track of each child and make sure that no one gets left behind. 

This session was very good because we got to see the responsibility that the governors have to deal with and it got us to think about what to expect when we go into this career path of teaching.