Beep Beep! Days for under sevens Teach Road Safety and Save Lives

Every month, five children are killed and 179 are seriously injured on our roads while on foot or bicycle.

Brake, the road safety charity, has created a special event called Beep Beep! Day to help you kick-start your road safety learning, support their vital work and help to promote slower speeds and safer driving in your local communities. Whether you are a nursery, infant school, child minder, playgroup, primary school teacher or children’s club organiser, you can take part. You can choose to run your Beep Beep! Day on any day of the year.

The day provides an opportunity for you to teach simple road safety lessons to kids and parents, such as the importance of holding hands and staying away from traffic, while children do fun activities, such as making a wall poster of hand prints, singing a road safety song, or even helping to wash parents’ cars. You can also use Beep Beep! Day to help raise valuable funds for Brake and their work supporting families bereaved by road crashes.

Everyone running a Beep Beep! Day receives an information pack containing FREE road safety resources including stickers, placards, posters, wall charts and certificates for the children and tips for planning the day are available at www.beepbeepday.org.uk

For more information, or to register to hold a Beep Beep! Day, please visit www.beepbeepday.org.uk, email beepbeep@brake.org.uk or phone 01484 559909

How good are you at negotiation?

There is one way in which virtually every school in the UK could save itself a considerable sum of money each year.

Negotiation is something most of us think we are good at because we do it every day. We negotiate with colleagues, we negotiate with students. If we have a family at home we also spend time negotiating with them. (After all which parent has not at some time resorted to, “You can watch TV after you have done your homework”?)

But there is no doubt that most of us working in schools don’t have much background in negotiation with suppliers. We tend to accept the contract that suppliers offer us, sign it, and expect everything to be fine.

If we do negotiate it is usually to try to get a discount without necessarily noticing that in so doing we might actually be negatively affecting other aspects of the purchase.

And yet the contract between the school and the retailer offers an opportunity for each side to be specific about what is possible, to clarify assumptions and to enter into a relationship which is satisfactory and beneficial for both parties.

It is because many schools pay little attention to the contracts that they sign that the book Contract Matters:

Connecting the Education and Contract World has been written. It exists because many schools find it nigh on impossible to recover from having entered into a bad contract. Invariably all they can do is see the contract through and rue day it was signed.

Contract Matters contains numerous tips in everyday language for anyone in a school who is in charge of managing contracts. It lists the do’s and don’ts and prompts everyone to investigate assumptions before making decisions.

One minor change to a contract made as a result of reading this volume will pay for the book many times over.

Contract Matters book costs £35.00 plus £3.95 postage and packing. Further information is on-line
at http://shop.firstandbest.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=760

Order code: CMAAA £35.00 ISBN: 978 0 9876527 3 7

Sample pages can be found at http://www.pdf.firstandbest.co.uk/bursar/ContractMatters.pdf

You can purchase the book

By post to First and Best, Hamilton House, Earlstrees Ct., Earlstrees Way, Corby, NN17 4HH
On the phone with a school order number at 01536 399 011
By fax to 01536 399 012
On line with a credit card at http://shop.firstandbest.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=760