I wanted to write at the end of another amazing year to thank colleagues for all your hard work and to encourage you to celebrate our many achievements over Christmas and the New Year. These are not mediocre times and your contribution to the Education Leeds story has been one of passion, commitment, energy, courage and hard work and I am really grateful because the impact has been fantastic.

We have had another incredible year… as well as delivering the last two PFI buildings, we have seen the opening of the first three new BSF buildings at Allerton High School, Pudsey Grangefield School and Rodillian School, with Allerton High School being officially opened by the Prime Minister. We have also had notification from the DCSF that our Primary Capital Programme proposals have been agreed with some minor amendments, which means that we can start work on an ambitious programme of work that will deliver another £100 million capital investment across the city. Our continuing success has been recognised through our nomination for the Carl Bertlesmann Prize, the extension of our Beacon Status for healthy schools, the Leeds Transformational Project celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade which secured £450,000 of lottery funding and the success of our ‘Find Your Talent’ bid, which has secured around £2.5 million of lottery funding.

We launched our emotional health and wellbeing toolkit, and our Investors in Pupils programme has moved to a national roll out. We are continuing to develop our sustainable schools programme and held our first Leeds schools green day. We achieved and exceeded our 2007-08 PE and school sport targets, launched our "Happy Healthy Active Lunchtimes" initiative, and established ‘Spirit Alive’ as our response to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.We were the first authority in the region to gain re-accreditation of our Inclusion Chartermark, and our visually impaired service achieved Quality Mark as well as successfully tendering and winning the contract to develop a visually impaired service for British services abroad. We also developed, organised and successfully delivered the first national Gypsy, Roma and Travellers History month and poster competition and more recently we won two of the national BSF Excellence Awards for the ‘BEST LEP’ and ‘Innovation in ICT’.

The STEPS programme continues to develop with more and more targeted parents and carers benefiting from the programme, and 39 clusters of schools and partners are working towards delivering the core offer of extended services; which has been commended by the DCSF for good progress. We have received recognition from the House of Lords for our work with International New Arrivals as well as recognition from Ofsted through one of their thematic surveys which identified good practice on social responsibility and community cohesion. Our Chinese Supplementary Schools have also been recognised as providers of excellent practice by the House of Lords. Many more of our services have achieved Chartermark and the company was the first to achieve the cabinet office’s Customer Service Excellence standard. We have achieved our best ever GCSE results; fantastic results at 5 A*-C, 5 A*-C including English and mathematics, 5 A*-G and 1A*-G , and our feedback from the Audit Commission survey gave us the best satisfaction rating we have ever had from our schools.

Finally, we held our first ever 'Spirit Awards' at Elland Road on Friday night to recognise the brilliant achievements of our coleagues. Thank you to everyone who attended, well done to everyone who was nominated and to those who made it into the top three, and congratulations to the winners: Ann Lomas, the BSF team, the Operations service, the Health initiatives team, Kaya Barker, Eve McLeish and the VI team, Peter Saunders and Sally Bavage - you really are fantastic, wonderful, brilliant and talented colleagues, and now you have the awards to prove it!

Thanks to everyone for your persistence and determination to make a difference. Our brilliant schools, and our fantastic children and young people, have achieved more than ever thanks to the energy, patience, and commitment of the many talented teams working so hard across the city. Together, here in Leeds, we have made a tremendous difference and we must continue to find, nurture and release the magic. We must continue to celebrate our schools’ successes, and work to create an even better tomorrow for all our children and young people.

I hope that this Christmas brings you and those you love… delight and simplicity, foolishness and fantasy and noise, angels and miracles and wonder and innocence and magic… we have certainly proved this year that you are talented, brilliant, gorgeous and wonderful!
Best wishes
Chris

It has been a quieter week but I still had a great week...

A week when I remembered that we must:
· Keep on with doing the business and doing it brilliantly;
· Stick to the basics and keep it simple!
· Continue to manage by wandering around and seeing what is happening;
· Be absolutely straight with people, especially those at the front line;
· Ensure that we keep promoting our 'no blame' culture and all take collective responsibility for what we do;
·Banish "satisfactory", "fine", "gloomy", "negative", "boring" and "can't do" from our vocabulary, even if it kills us!
· Have a positive mental attitude; AND
· Know our strengths, and turn our challenges into opportunities and successes.

Dirk and I had lunch with the amazing visually impaired team before I attended the Leeds Schools Music Association Christmas Festival concert. I visited Boston Spa School and met some fantastic young people before I attended executive board to get approval for an important series of papers. The snow came on Thursday morning, and while I got to the David Young Community Academy no-one else did, so I had breakfast with the academy colleagues. Later, I met with Helen Plimmer and the hugely successful partnership development managers for PE and school sport from the PE specialist colleges. Even later, I attended and chaired another wonderful Leeds Mentoring Celebration at the Civic Hall before I attended the 6th Leeds Peace Poetry Competition and presented awards to some talented young poets. And finally, I attended the leadership forum session at Weetwood Hall and I visited Crossley Street Primary School to see their fantastic new classroom block.

Weeks like this, and a distinct lack of sleep, have given me time to think about the challenges and opportunities facing us as one year comes to an end and another new year rapidly approaches.

Are we doing all we can to ensure that all the resources at our disposal are deployed and targeted on the things that create the most value and make the most difference? Are we making it absolutely clear to everyone who works with us and for us that the only thing that really matters is achieving brilliant outcomes for our children and young people? Are we thinking enough and spending enough time looking for opportunities to build brilliant provision and develop the talented colleagues we work with, and using our ongoing successes as an opportunity to attract the very best colleagues to join us? Are we constantly recognizing and celebrating the achievements of those colleagues and teams who are working hardest on getting things done and building effective relationships? Are we using, adopting and developing "face to face" contacts as the key medium for delivering good, tough, or any news to colleagues, and our partners? Are we doing everything we can to keep all our colleagues and partners fully informed of our plans and our strategies? How tuned in are we to the health and emotional wellbeing of our colleagues, our teams, Education Leeds and children's services? Are we doing our best to stay out of negative and unproductive conversations and away from negative people, and how are we stimulating positive and productive conversations and people? And finally, are there any ways in which we can re-engineer what our colleagues are working on in order to make better use of their strengths and abilities?

Why not make a list of the things you want to achieve in 2009 and then let's get on with achieving them now?

Chris

What difference are you making?

After yet another week where we re-invented what we mean by successful and where it is hard to believe everything that has happened, I want to urge everyone to continue to put in the hard work so that we continue to make a real difference for the children, young people, families and communities we serve...

It was a week of brilliant events and great visits. I went to Windmill Primary School to listen to the 'Sing Leeds South Choir' which draws children from eleven South Leeds primary schools and to the brilliant 'Talking Leeds Talking Success' event organised by our talented young people at The Met Hotel. I visited the young people's leadership and management project at the Carnegie Stadium where I met some fantastic young people from Freeston Business and Enterprise College in Wakefield. I visited Lawnswood, Ralph Thoresby and Allerton Grange High Schools where I met committed, passionate headteachers and colleagues who are making a real difference. I attended the primary headteachers conference 'Making Learning Irresistible' at Elland Road with around 200 wonderful colleagues working to release the magic in our younger children. I attended the 'Global Citizens for Peace/PeaceJam' event at the Civic Hall celebrating the amazing young people and colleagues from six secondary schools who had attended the PeaceJam event in Los Angeles with Nobel peace laureates including Desmond Tutu. And then on Friday I attended the official opening of the brilliant new Allerton High School building by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls before dashing across Leeds to the 'Meet the Cabinet' session at the Royal Armouries. I was also delighted that Penny Fields SILC won the 'People's Millions' and that we won two wonderful awards at the 'BSF Awards for Excellence'.

We are doing amazing things here in Leeds but to continue to achieve real excellence we need to understand the world in which we now operate. We need to build BRILLIANT learning places in localities with strong community engagement and powerful and modern governance. We need to build deep learning in all our learning places. Deep learning to equip our little learners with the functional and personal and social skills they need to be successful bigger learners in a world that is increasingly automated, and where the routine, the repetitive and the ordinary are done by machine. We need to powerfully use ICT and local networks to develop and nurture excellence and share good practice and great ideas. We need to nurture talent, creativity and imagination… wherever we can find it and we need to share and network the things that work.
It seems to me after such an incredible week that successful organisations, successful schools and successful teams, all have the following characteristics...

• a vision, values and sense of purpose which shapes the way colleagues behave and helps everyone know they are making a difference;
• the courage to set challenging goals and to develop new and cutting-edge solutions;
• an innovative and creative culture that values people and makes them feel special;
• an innovative and creative culture that trusts, empowers and engages colleagues' distinct and unique talents;
• a rigorous and relentless approach to evaluating performance and individuals’ contributions;
• a concern for the wider community and the bigger picture;
• a reputation for excellence, hard work and passionate commitment; and
• excellent long-term performance.

After all, as Tom Peters said... "Leadership is the process of engaging people in building the future, creating a legacy of excellence and making a difference"... so what difference are you making?
Chris