 My background is training up our centre principals for our eight different summer centres. But to give you an idea of what I mean by principal or does, I know in some schools I can see yes, the principal does everything, they manage the transfers and the accommodation. Here when I say principal I'm talking academic, so managing the teachers and managing your classrooms and things like that. So, we have a look at what do we need to focus on? So obviously the academic side of things is really important. You need to make sure that your teachers know the syllabus and they understand how to use it and they're delivering lessons in the way that your school markets itself. Or the students speaking a lot is everybody active in the classroom. You need observations and you also need some exam preparation. This is all the obvious stuff that we know we need to focus on, but what about all the other stuff? And that's the stuff I'm going to talk about today. There's a lot of behind the scenes things going on in our centre that if you haven't been a principal before and suddenly your school drops you in as a school principal, you get a big shock to the system as to what's expected. A huge part of being a Dalser principal in a summer centre is paperwork and keeping a really clear track of paperwork because inspections can happen at any moment. So, if you're an ASL school a spot inspection can happen and you need to make sure that everything you're doing is being tracked and evidenced. Logistics and communication is a massive part and child protection very much at the forefront over the past couple of years is really important and then your group leaders. So, these are the people that come over with the students and they're your customers as well as your students. These guys are looking for a quality experience. So, this is all the stuff that you might not be expecting if it's your first time running a centre and this is the stuff that's tricky to get your head around. So, the talk today is about the reality, so what you need to know to survive. This type of information I normally deliver across a two-day induction, I've got about ten minutes now, so buckle up. First, we're going to start with your staff room. So, if you're opening a summer centre from scratch in a secondary school or university, you have nothing there. It's not a year-end school for you, so you have to make it look like your staff room, make it look like your school. This is really important as well, if you're an ASL school and inspectors walk in, they want to see that your school is well set up, is really well organised and the best way to start with that is your set up before your teachers even hit the ground. So, if you have a look at this staff room here, we've got lots of examples of paperwork and how it should be filled in. Teacher paperwork is all colour coded and laid out really clearly. There's areas for teachers to hand in their paperwork at the end of the day. There's principles, areas where you find your paperwork away and you can see the resources down here. This is a really important thing that your resources are laid out by level and clearly marked. So, you're imagining the space that you're in for that four weeks, make it look like a mini school as much as possible. That's really, really important for a smooth start. So, the next thing you need to plan in advance are your logistics. And if you get these right, if you get this set up before day one, you will have a really smooth start to your centre. So, you need to think about how your students have been pretested or are they going to test on site. If they test on site, are you going to split them into classrooms to test or will they test in one big lecture hall? Your classroom locations, this can catch people off guard because you have no control over what classrooms are booked. You could be in DCU or UCD and you have five classrooms in this building, two classrooms up, five floors in the library, another three classrooms in the science building. You as principal don't really have control of that. That comes from head office. So, get your head around your classroom locations and then do a really good teacher orientation so that the teachers know where to go on the first day. There's no headless chicken running around. Your classrooms are named clearly with your logo of your school and a nice thing to do for students is to name your classroom after something in Dublin, like the River Liffey with a picture of the River Liffey. So, for students with English as a second language, they're not coming in looking for J117 in the science block. They have a visual, they can remember, oh that's my classroom, I remember the picture. All those little things can be set up in advance. You need to think about your lunch and break times. You need to liaise very closely with the canteen possibly to make sure that your lunch and break times line up. If you have a huge number of students, maybe you have 500 in the centre, you might have to think about staggering your lunch and break times. So, half go, 15 minutes before the other half. This may not be given to you as a task, but I know in some schools it is given to the principal as a task and this sort of problem-solving that you might not expect that you have to do before you start your centre. And then this is really important. It's again linked to inspections, but just logically, have your signs really clear so that students know where to go. If your students know where to go, they come on site and they can see where to get to the principal's office or how to get to a classroom, then you know that if inspectors come on site, they can find you too. One of the biggest problems when you get a spot inspection in a summer school is the inspectors don't know where to go and the first thing they say to you is, if we don't know where to go, how do the students know where to go? So, we'll come back to that in a moment with signs and directions and making sure everything is clear. It's really important. So, your paperwork. This is really important for tracking students and if you get an inspection, it depends on who inspects you, but they might come in and say, OK, I want to see the paperwork for Mark O Da Vinci and you have to find that student's initial test score. Their speaking ability, their overall level, the comments on their first day, are they in the right level, do they need to move up? So, if you have a needs analysis or day one sheet, that's something where all that can be recorded for every single class. You also need to have registers that the teachers use as working documents. So, in our normal schools year round, it's really easy because all of this is centralized. But when you're in a summer center, there isn't a central system usually. You're working off spreadsheets or you're working off handwritten paperwork. So, it's really important if you're managing teachers to make sure they have a handle on their registers so that they're neat, they're updated, they have full names on there and if you need to find a student, you can use your electronic register and it'll match up to their handwritten register or whatever register they use. This will all be checked as well if you get a spot inspection. They want to see that you're keeping on top of it. Lesson records are really important. So, teachers aren't expected in summer schools to write full lesson plans for every day, but they do need to record what they've done in each lesson. And it's also important for them if they're team teaching, if they have a partner teacher and they're swapping classes, can the evidence that they plan together? Is there something on the lesson record that they can cosign, maybe they share a lesson record to show that planning happens together? And finally, you're the person overseeing the paperwork in the summer centre. So, it's really important that you put procedures in place to help you keep track. Who has handed in the attendance records? Do I have all my progress reports at the end of the week? Am I missing any day one sheets? Because if you're asked to track a student and you might be asked by a group leader to track a student how have they moved, where did they start and where are they now at the end of their course, you need every single piece of paperwork to track that. So, have a collection or a paperwork drop system. Display examples of your paperwork in your staff room. So, use your wall space to make sure that teachers can see how paperwork is filled out and how you want it filled out properly. And have a filing system for yourself so that tracking a student is a clear and simple process for you. So, whatever works for you, but stick to it throughout the summer so that you can always trace back the progress of the student. So, I talked about teacher registers. So, a teacher going into a class with a handwritten register of students ticking off every day is essential for pastoral care. But you can't just go off those registers. You need to have electronic registers yourself. So, if your students are coming and going, rolling enrolment, every week you get new students filtering into classes and every couple of days you might have a student move up or move down. There's a lot of movement in summer centres. You need to make sure that you have those registers filed electronically. Every time there's an addition to a class, add the student electronically. Every time a student moves, copy and paste them out. This is easy in new round centres because we have things like class, we have systems where we can do this by drag and drop. Most summer centres you don't have that luxury so you really have to be on top of this. And you can do it on a word or Excel spreadsheet and you need to update it every day. You can keep a hard copy for teachers to check, but for GDPR your hard copy needs to be safely stored. Because if a stranger walked into that school, they pick up your registers, they see a name of the student and the location as to where the student is, that's a breach of data. So if you keep a hard copy, keep it safe. It can't be stuck on the walls or out on the desks. It's really, really handy to have your laptop or your iPad ready with your electronic registers at 9am and at the break time and after lunch because you will absolutely have a student wandering around, especially if you're somewhere big like DCU and they will not know where they're going. You're not going to remember off the top of your head, so have them to hand so you can quickly look up a student and direct them to go. It's these little things that will make your life easy in a summer centre because at one time you could have a teacher asking you for resources, a group leader asking you for progress tests, and then a student wandering around not knowing where to go. Was that the one minute? Excellent. Okay, colour code your registers. So this is really good if you give out certificates. If your students are in closed groups and they come for two weeks and nothing changes in that class and then they leave at the end of two weeks, certificates are easy. But if you're in a rolling and rolling centre, certificates are not easy. They're leaving all the time, they're joining, you really need to keep track. So colour code, students in red are leaving on Friday, students in green leaving on Thursday, students in blue leaving early next week. So you have a track of who needs their certificates, when the teachers need to hand them in or when you need to print them off, whatever way your certificates work. Okay, very quickly this is really important. Attendance check is a huge part of pastoral care and a lot of schools miss this. So after the first break, oh sorry, excuse me, in the first ten minutes of class the teachers need to take the register and you have to tell your teachers that that is essential. It's a legal requirement that they take the registers of under 18s in the first ten minutes. And then either you, or if you have an intern, or if you have an assistant, needs to have a system to check who's missing from class. So that could be going around the classrooms or it could be a WhatsApp group that they text the name of the student who's missing. I'm a little bit of a control freak so I go around the classrooms because really if a student is missing for an hour in the morning and something has happened that student and you didn't know about it, that is a huge disaster for your summer and for you. You just don't want things like that happening. So I would suggest that you go around the classrooms and you collect the names of those missing and then you follow up on it. If you have individuals with no group leader, get them to sign in with you. So they need to sign in to say, I'm here, I'm okay, I'm going to class. That attendance check should happen at the start of the first lesson and the start of the second lesson because they can wander off after the first lesson. And the minimum that you need to do is to get your teachers to do the online child protection training. They get a little electronic certificate and you keep that in their file. That's the minimum. They really need to have that before they deal with under 18s. I know I'm really over time, I'm sorry. So health and safety, this is really important as well. All of this is linked to logical, practical things that you need to do anyway. But if an inspector walks into your centre, they will ask you, when have you done a fire drill? Who is the health and safety officer? They won't just ask you, they'll also ask your teachers. So if your teachers don't know the answers to this, they'll say your systems don't work. So that's really important. You need to have a fire drill schedule. Everyone needs to know about it. It should be displayed. Again, your individuals, they'll ask you, how do you manage your individuals? And you need a solid procedure to show them this is how we look after our individual students. And finally, your designated liaison person, your emergency contact, your first-aider, all of these people need to be on signs around your centre. And your staff need to be able to say, Laura is the DLP and Peter is the first-aider. If your staff can't say that, then what's the point of having them? All of this needs to be really clear. So in everything you set up, communication with your staff and with the students as well is the key to making it work. Because you can have all sorts of procedures, but if the people that work with you don't actually know those procedures, it's not going to roll out as smoothly as possible. So, some overall tips. If you come away with anything, I would say these tips will help you survive if you're managing a centre for the first time as an academic manager. An organised staff room and a really clear set up, signs everywhere, your fire drill, first-aiders, paper work reminders and examples and group programmes. A strong induction, that's really important. Train up your teachers before they get on site and make sure they're confident with the procedures. A teacher handbook is really useful. Weekly teacher meetings and they can include some teacher development. So 10 minutes on error correction or 10 minutes on active learning. Group leader meetings. So make sure your group leaders understand your procedures when they arrive. They know when they can contact you, where they can contact you and get a group leader request book. Otherwise, they will ask you a lot of questions all day long and your head will spin. So make sure that you have somewhere where they can write the requests in. And then finally, the handy notebook. Always have a notebook in your hand because people will come up to you with random questions, requests, oh this student needs to move and you could be in the middle of two or three other things. So have your notebook, note down anything that people ask you once it gets quiet in the afternoon.