It is a fact of life that most people who work in schools believe that their school is both effective and efficient.

And, of course, in many cases they are right. The school is indeed effective in doing what it wants to do and efficient in the way it goes about it.

But, as with most other things in life, there are grades of efficiency. Indeed, most people who have studied efficiency would argue that no organisation is ever totally efficient. There is always some wastage of physical resources, time and energy.

The problem is that the more efficient one gets, the more difficult it is to see where extra efficiencies can be made. But when these efficiencies are found and made, they can save the school thousands or tens of thousands of pounds a year.

The route each school chooses is always different. For some it involves changing school meal providers. In others it involves checking the way leasing contracts are being handled. Some simply change their email system so that the time taken to check the school’s emails each morning is reduced by half.

The key issue in all this is that of how the school goes about looking for efficiencies.

Staff who are asked in general terms to come up with ideas for efficiency tend not to find many such ideas. But where a very particular four-step approach to efficiency is followed efficiencies are always found.

These can often come as a surprise to the school – and they invariably save either time or money. Sometimes both – and quite often the savings are significant.

The four-step approach to efficiency was evolved by the School of Educational Administration and Management which was founded in 2005 with financial support from the Department of Trade and Industry and help from the University of Northampton Faculty of Education.

Since then the SEAM has worked with thousands of schools to establish which processes work in saving schools money, and now many of our findings are reported in one volume: “The Efficient School.”

This book reveals not only many of the projects that schools have introduced in recent years in order to achieve efficiencies but also explores areas in which savings can be made. It also reviews the way in which the whole issue of changing well-established processes and habits can be built into the school’s ethos.

The Efficient School is available in copiable form (as a printed volume or on CD) so that it can be distributed to all interested members of staff.

ISBN: 978 1 86083 811 8 Order code: T1803emn – please quote with order.

Sample pages can be viewed at http://www.pdf.firstandbest.co.uk/education/T1803.pdf

• Photocopiable book, £24.95 plus £3.95 delivery
• CD with school-wide rights: £24.95 plus £3.95 delivery
• Both the book and the CD: £31.94 plus £3.95 delivery
• Prices include VAT.

You can purchase the report…

• 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
• By email to sales@firstandbest.co.uk with a school order number
• On line with a credit card at http://shop.firstandbest.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=784

What is the most effective way of teaching teenagers about sex in the classroom?

When a photograph of a breastfeeding baby appeared on the cover of an American parenting magazine in 2008 there were complaints from readers.

This point is interesting and indeed relevant to the whole issue of sex education as it raises one specific element in debating sex and sexuality: the issue of context. In this case most of the readers of the magazine were mothers of young babies, and yet many of them were shocked to the point of complaining upon seeing this picture.

Which raises a multiplicity of questions. Is context everything? Are nudity and sex the same thing? What determines the appropriateness or otherwise of any picture or behaviour? What makes some contexts more or less appropriate than others?

Considering this topic helps to lead us towards the most effective ways of dealing with sex education – for it reveals that by focussing on a very specific topic or issue, it is possible to lead into much more productive and insightful discussion and reflection, than through the use of less focussed activity.

In fact the issue of the cover of a parenting magazine, accompanied as it is by a range of activities and discussion points, comes in the chapter “Nudity and the Media” within the copiable volume “Sex and Sensibility”, the sex and relationships course for secondary schools.

It is one of 60 such topics gathered together in 12 modules, ranging from the opening section on “Being human” through to modules on “The Right Pace”, “Peer Pressure”, “Sexual Orientation”, “Sex and Language” and “Sex in the Media”.

Each topic contains a whole series of activities for the students to participate in, which can be used as either whole class or small group discussion topics, as research topics and for written assignments.

Each area within the volume is itself used to explore wider connotations – and thus includes such areas as following fashion, one’s own look, influences, being oneself, how we see ourselves and so forth.

There are around 100 pages of activities and materials for the students, as well as over 20 pages of teaching notes and further information.

Sample pages can be viewed at http://www.pdf.firstandbest.co.uk/pshe/T1760.pdf

Publisher’s reference: T1760EMN ISBN: 978 1 86083 754 8

Prices

• Photocopiable report: £24.95 plus £3.95 delivery
• CD with school-wide rights: £24.95 plus £3.95 delivery
• Both the Ring Binder and the CD £31.94 plus £3.95 delivery
• Prices include VAT.

You can purchase the report… please quote the order ref: T1760emn

• By post to First and Best, Hamilton House, Earlstrees Ct., Earlstrees Way, Corby, NN17 4HH
• By fax to 01536 399 012
• On line with a credit card at http://shop.firstandbest.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=40&products_id=734

Diagnosing dyscalculia is just the start.
It is also necessary to identify the type of dyscalculia the student has got.

Research by the Dyscalculia Centre, which has been published in SEN Magazine, has shown that there are five different types of dyscalculia – although inevitably many young people suffer from a combination of the types listed below.

Type 1 dyscalculics report significant worries about maths. As a result they feel themselves living in an alien world in which everyone else can grasp maths, but they can’t. Self-doubt becomes so strong that it gets increasingly difficult to persuade the individual that with proper support they might well be able to undertake and understand mathematical calculations.

Type 2 dyscalculics also experience this deep concern but have found strategies for understanding and coping with basic maths – yet they feel that they don’t have the automatic grasp that others have and often take twice as much time (or more) to do a maths problem as a non-dyscalculic person.

Type 3 students have a profound difficulty in comprehending and dealing with the concept of time. Sometimes this issue appears on its own, sometimes in combination with types 1 or 2 dyscalculia. For such people time itself makes no sense and they are quite unable to estimate “five minutes” or any other time length while questions about timetables and the like are also quite meaningless.

Type 4 dyscalculics may not always be dyscalculic in the genetic sense, although they display many of the symptoms of dyscalculic people because they have short-term and long-term memory problems. These students generally have a problem with all sequences – and this, of course, affects their ability to handle maths perhaps more than any other subject.

Type 5 dyscalculics tend not to see numbers as in any way related to the real world. In one sense most of us have this problem; after all, what is “six”? We know what six sheep are. But “six” on its own is close to meaningless. For such people, maths can be learned automatically, but when it gets to issues such as fractions, decimals, and percentages then life gets difficult.

Fortunately all these types of dyscalculics can be helped through different types of multi-sensory learning of maths, and this is the approach we have set out in our series: “Dyscalculia Activities”

Each volume contains a vast array of activities which a teacher or assistant teacher can undertake with a small group of pupils, and involves turning the abstract concepts of maths into physical experiences. No special equipment is needed, apart from paper, scissors, small cards and some ludo type counters. (We can supply the cards and counters if you don’t already have them).

Each printed volume is copiable, and so only one copy is needed per school.

There are details here including sample pages

• Dyscalculia Activities 1: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division http://www.dyscalculia.me.uk/teacher.html#5
• Dyscalculia Activities 2: Shapes, fractions, percentages. http://www.dyscalculia.me.uk/teacher.html#9
• Dyscalculia Activities 3: Time and Timetables: http://www.dyscalculia.me.uk/teacher.html#8
• Cards and counters for use with above books: http://www.dyscalculia.me.uk/teacher.html#6

If you have any enquiries please do call 01536 399 000 or email Tony@schools.co.uk

You can place orders on line (there is a link from each of the above resource pages) or you can go straight to the on-line shop here http://shop.firstandbest.co.uk/index.php?cPath=29 You can also order by post and fax:

• By post to First and Best, Hamilton House, Earlstrees Ct., Earlstrees Way, Corby, NN17 4HH
• By fax to 01536 399 012