grumpy_git

Which demonstrates how petty it is! I've done work from home - for the sole reason that rather than staying an extra half hour, I'd prefer to go home, have tea, put my feet up for a couple of hours - and then log on and do some paperwork, deal with email, set a machine rebuilding remotely etc. I'd not dream of claiming expenses for it - if I wanted to I could easily do it from school, but I make the decision not to as it's easier for me. Plus it would be silly - if a teacher pays £X (fixed) per month for internet access, how can you define the cost of what they spend to access school remotely? You'd no doubt end up subsidising their personal use...

I've applied for a postal vote (as I am currently staying 300 miles away from where I am registered)... got one for the local mayoral election, but nothing for the EU one. Woman at the council says "Oh well I'm afraid it's not our problem, you see it's our printers, I can ask for another one to be sent out...". So yes, your vote counts - if your local authority can be bothered to give you a ballot paper!

The whole process is pretty slow, we fill in a requisition form which goes off to finance, assuming they don't lose it it gets typed in and sent off, when the goods come in we have to give them the invoice and they give us a piece of paper to sign to say it's received, then they write the cheque and post it! We can buy small things on petty cash in certain circumstances - have to be below £35 and has to be a reason why it can't go through the normal system (eg - need batteries today not next week, or finance staff on holiday for 6 weeks).

Ceiling tiles! - I'd forgotten quite how much I dislike them! Nothing else can get you covered in fibreglass so easily - I've taken to wearing goggles when moving them because of the amount which seems to go in my eyes.

Welcome! Indeed, it's quite a bugger, especially to be thrown in and try to learn it all! One of the things our ex-head did was create a "Dictionary of Teacherspeak" for staff and parents alike - so we all knew what CVA, TRLP, GLEA stand for. Apparently UPS is the name of a teachers pay grade - this one caused a bit of confusion when explaining the process of moving the server room to a teacher once!

Although I work in a secondary school, when I was in a kid at primary school we had a class teacher, but then specialists came in for PE, music and cookery. (Early/Mid 1990s so the limit of ICT was an Acorn at the back). Does this still happen?

Computer Misuse Act 1990 (I think!).

Wouldn't it be "reasonable" to look at a pen drive to identify the owner? Similarly if a folder was found abandoned in a room, we might look inside to see who it belongs to. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and look in their folder, but if it's left abandoned you've got a reason to do it - to identify the owner. However, if someone does know of a law against it I'd be interested to hear, so that we can write it into the AUP. All pens which are found in school end up in our office, and we try to identify them (which can sometimes mean opening up documents to identify the owner) - they then get sent an email / slip in the register. As you say I think you are bound to report anything of that sort which you find during the course of your duties.

I presume the argument for letting them take them home is that kids who can't afford their own machine at home won't be disadvantaged. We have plenty of publicly available machines during the day and up until 6pm so if there are students with no access at home they have a good 2.5 hours per day in which they can use school equipment to work on homework. Only laptops we give to students are some ancient "alphasmart" word-processing things for those who have broken an arm or something and can't write with a pen.

Surely it's a major dereliction of duty for teachers (esp. SMT) to let kids get away with it?

I think the locker analogy is good for students home directory on a server (eg it's provided by the school, for the student to store things in - but staff might need to look in it (as they would with a locker if they suspected you were keeping things you shouldn't be in it), or equally may need access for maintenance (as they would if your locker was damaged and the site staff needed to fix it)). But I'm less sure about pen drives. Surely they're like a students ringbinder - they buy it, for school use, but might also keep things from home on it. I suppose that once they plug the pen drive into a school computer, we're allowed to set rules on what can/can't be on them. So if students want to bring in pen drives full of porn or downloaded music, that's nothing to do with the IT department - but if they stick them in a school computer it is. More of concern IMHO is the number of staff who store confidential information on pen drives, but I don't think anybody is going to worry about that too much until it gets lost and the sh*t hits the fan.

In our AUP for both students and staff there's mention of not using the network for personal use - including social networking. Outside the school, we don't say/advise anything re: social networks - I think SMT said something along the lines of "don't be friends with current students on them" though this doesn't stop at least one management member being friends with a few students.

I wonder if you could put a few bat files together to do a similar thing? Thus have the extra fonts stored in a temp folder and copy them when you need to use them for graphics stuff, then copy them back when you're finished.

Probably; I reported a relatively minor H&S issue a few weeks ago. Apparently, it's well known and is often reported, but "I doubt anybody will sort it out until there's an accident". Hope those concerned make a quick recovery.

Our school meals are run as a profit-making enterprise by one of County's cowboys - sorry, contractors. I think the school gets a cut of the profit, and has certain leeway regarding the operations and prices. The food is alright though nothing to write home about, but they never cook enough - obviously wanting to avoid waste. Thus kids who have a lunchtime activity and go in last, don't have much if any choice and have to buy sandwiches at break. Last time I bought food there (nigh on 2 years ago now) it was about £1.80 for a dinner, then another 80p for a dessert, 60p for a tiny bottle of drink. Only times I go there are inset days when it's free!

On the contrary we have a "School Administrator" - when I heard the post mentioned I thought it would be someone shuffling bits of paper around, but it's actually one of the most senior roles in the school (still shuffling around paper, just more important bits of paper ).

There's already bother over the LSC funding - we've had a cut of nearly £90,000, apparently. Unfortunately, the first staff to be shown the door / have their hours cut are those of us on temporary / variable contracts... meanwhile the finance manager continues to argue that she deserves a bigger pay packet, and money is spent on frivolous tat.

This is what we do at the moment, with the addition of a quarterly one which goes offsite to the NM's house (others kept in a fireproof safe).

When I first moved outwith Yorkshire I found that, if I said something like "you're in a right mardy!" everyone would look at me as if I was talking in a foreign language. It was only then that I realised it wasn't a nationally known term!

The council are actually pretty good in that we can put paper, bottles etc all into the SAME bin - they do the splitting at their end. At home, in a different local authority, they have a right mardy about it and you have to put it in a specific box yourself...

Do your local council offer a recycling service? Ours uplift our recycling every week, there's a recycle box in each room and (in theory) the caretaker empties them into the main bin. We did go for about a term in an IT room without recycling, the amount of paper thrown away was ridiculous.

I shouldn't have read this whilst eating lunch !!

Like it, certainly makes a change from what I remember of assemblies - listening to a teacher sullenly reading a script!

We're almost at 1:2 if you count (number of pupils) / (total number of workstations). However this includes teacher laptops, classroom teacher machines, admin machines, office machines etc. If you take them out, you're looking at about 1:3.5.

Sounds like one of those reactionary things to make it look like We're Doing Something - however pointless it may be. Surely there's far greater risk from things like door handles, switches, tables etc than a keyboard? Here we are responsible for cleaning screens and keyboards etc, they're probably some of the cleanest things in the school given the calibre of our cleaning staff!