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Regulations for school governance procedures

An explanatory note to the School Governance (Procedures) (England) Regulations 2003 says that they “deal with the procedures to be adopted by governing bodies of all maintained schools (including maintained nursery schools) in England from 1st September 2003, whether or not the governing body has yet adopted a new constitution under the School Governance (Constitution) (England) Regulations 2003 SI 2003/ 348.

Part 1 provides for the Regulations to come into force on 1st September 2003 and contains interpretation provisions and provision for service of notices.

Part 2 deals with the appointment and removal of officers of the governing body, and their functions. Regulation 6 deals with delegation of functions to the chair or vice-chair in cases of urgency. Under regulation 8 the governing body is required to appoint a clerk to the governing body, and has the power to remove the clerk from office at any time. Regulation 9 sets out the functions of the clerk to the governing body.

Part 3 provides for meetings and proceedings of the governing body. This part includes provisions for access to meetings, convening meetings, quorum, minutes and their publication. Decisions on all matters are to be made by majority of governors voting.

Regulation 14 and the Schedule deal with conflicts of interest and the circumstances in which governors and others who are otherwise entitled to attend meetings of the governing body or its committees must withdraw and not vote. The general principle is that where there is a conflict between the interests of such a person and the interests of the governing body, or where the principles of natural justice require a fair hearing and there is any reasonable doubt about that person’s ability to act impartially, he should withdraw from the meeting and not vote.

Regulation 15 sets out the circumstances in which a governor may be suspended from meetings for up to 6 months. Regulations 16 to 18 relate to delegation of governing body functions.

Part 4 deals with the establishment and proceedings of committees of governing bodies, including clerking arrangements, convening meetings, quorum, voting and publication of minutes. Committees exercising delegated functions relating to the appointment, conduct and discipline, capability, suspension or dismissal of individual school staff are excluded from this Part of the Regulations. Schedules 16 & 17 of the 1998 Act will continue to apply to the exercise of these functions until new Regulations are made under sections 35 & 36 of the 2002 Act.

Regulation 22 deals with the appointment of associate members to committees.“

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Themes in medical device risk management

I ran a quick search of Google Scholar for papers which have the terms ‘medical device’ and ‘risk’ in their title. The themes that emerge are shown in the figure below. I wonder if any of these are of interest to ‘A’ who is struggling to focus her research.

Notes
Human factors including practitioners’ knowledge of device safety considerations.

The clinical setting includes risk profiling and assurance supported by use of a risk assessment tool such as Medical Device Risk Assessment (MeDRa).

Models and methods include Bayesian network model, FMEA, fault tree analysis and HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points).

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December tutorials

A useful few days at Warwick University for tutorials with my group. Day 1 was a session with the whole group . We started by asking each person to explain the purpose and design of their project so far and then letting the group discuss and critique the approach. Many good points emerged and people were reassured to learn that similar worries and concerns were being experienced by everyone. We concluded by talking about ethics and clarifying the process for obtaining ethical approval for people’s research.

Day 2 was spent on individual tutorial sessions. My aim was for the student to clarify to what extent they had mapped out the context of their research topic and hence get a feel for how much of it was still, for them, uncharted territory. As a by-product I wanted them to identify the key concepts involved and begin assembling these into a theoretical framework along the lines we had discussed in the November tutorials. Some of the results are shown below.

This model helped us to unpick the meaning of sustainable project management.
IMAG0441

exploring the concept of sustainability

It focuses on the sustainability of project outputs rather than of the capacity to manage projects. Points of particular interest were: (a) the concept of sustainability ended up being related to impact and perhaps outcome, ie to to programme-level concepts, rather than to the direct project output; and (b) ‘efficiency in the use of resources; is an example of a variable concept, ie one which has a range of values, quantities or amounts.

This model explores how stress affects project performance.IMAG0444

Exploring the concept of how stress affects project management

It very helpfully draws together ideas contained in Beehr & Newman’s model (which I don’t much like) and the insightful model by Harrison. Some key insights to emerge were: (a) stress is caused by a misfit between a person’s self-assessment of their capability and their understanding of the nature of what they are required to do, neither of which are necessarily correct perceptions; (b) linkage to project performance is via the effect of strain on the actual (objective) performance of the project manager as compared to the performance required to meet project needs; and (c) methods for managing stress can be preventive or adaptive (reactive).

This model explores sources of risk in the context of medical devices. IMAG0443

Concepts relating to the development of medical devices

This model is beginning to frame some of the concepts relating to project success.IMAG0445

Early thinking about the meaning of success

On Day 3 we took the opportunity to listen-in on what is being taught in the Research Methods module.

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School value added

I am researching the ways in which school performance is assessed and have focused for a while on ‘value added’. The initial findings from my research are shown here, which looks only at the whole school measure. I hope the style of presentation communicates what the numbers are saying in a way that is easy to understand. Something for the Performance Working Group to develop further?