Retain Project UK Valorisation Meeting Agenda and Minutes

Midland Hotel

Bradford 26/03/08

UK

Agenda

09.30      Introduction to Careers Europe

09.45   Retain project presentation

10.15   Young project presentation

10.45   SpiderWeb (Watch/PPS) presentation

11.15   General discussion

11.30   Close

Minutes

Meeting rearranged from 18/3/08 to 26/04/08 in the hope that more people could attend. Unfortunately due to the Easter period and other commitments many people had to pull out.

Kindly Philip Garner, director of professional development programmes for teachers and others associated with children and young people; research & teaching relating to aspects of social and educational inclusion of young people who present challenging behaviour at the University of Northampton School of Education and the National Director of Behaviour4Learning, attended the meeting along with the hosts Mick Carey and Cecile Besrest-Butler of Careers Europe. Due to the small group the meeting was informal but very informative.

The Retain project was introduced to Philip and the feeder projects Young, SpiderWeb (including Watch/PPS) and a general discussion was held throughout the meeting. Northampton University leads a consortium named Behaviour4learning which has other partners both commercial and educational. The group acts as a support network for teacher trainers and their trainees to tackle behavioural issues in the classroom and learning. www.behaviour4learning.ac.uk has a plethora of articles, training ideas, useful links for support for trainers and trainees. In fact the website has over 200 downloads a day. A high percentage of established teachers as well as trainees are registered users (registration is free). A lot of thought has gone into the website such as ensuring users can find what they are looking for in no more than 3 clicks of the mouse which means the information is well organised and saves users getting lost in the internet. Philip mentioned also that Bradford Youth Offending Team were working together with the Dyslexia Trust and could be interested in our project. Philip also evaluates a number of different projects and wondered what were our measureable outcomes on the impact our project might have. He would like to take an active rather than passive role. Warned us to be a little careful with Learning Styles or other research and make sure this is backed up with hard evidence. Spoke about research that looks into what keeps students in school with similar profiles to students that truant or dropout rather than vice versa. Behaviour4learning has a user network of 10,000 users and he would be happy to put a link to our project on there.

Retain Project PowerPoint    Young Project PowerPoint    SpiderWeb PowerPoint (including Watch/PPS programmes).