Sunday morning, early, everyone is asleep and I am sat on the veranda with the cats and a cup of tea. It’s already warming up and it is going to be another hot beautiful day here in Cayman.
It has been a busy couple of months here with lots happening at work. In the last to weeks we have had two being and very public exhibitions and an inspection. We have SATs looming.
The school year is broken down differently so the pattern of terms and half terms I have been used to for twenty years has been somewhat changed and having had no summer break to speak of last year it has been a slog at times.
The year starts around the 17th August with senior staff returning for strategic planning, teachers begin about the 20th for 4 to 5 days of in service training and preparation.
The preparation is longer because we basically pack the schools away for the summer break so if the building is needed as hurricane shelters it is ready. For the rest of the season we are on 48 and 24 hour notice to clear away but with the majority of teachers off island over the summer we have to pack up. Yes the threat of hurricanes flavours everything.
Around the 24th we have an induction day for new students and on about the 25th kids are back and the year starts properly.
We have a long haul to Christmas with the usual half term but the term is much longer especially for staff who have already put in a couple of week before the kids are back.
Schools here run with a much smaller staff, no dinner ladies fewer Teaching Assistants and ancillary staff. Most primaries have one executive officer (school secretary) so the head and the deputy have much more admin to do on top of our normal duties.
The idea that the smaller school staff is offset by some functions being handled centrally (e.g. building management, finance and recruitment) is actually a fallacy.
In reality in the U.K. we would have had a business manager, a welfare officer and one if not two secretaries who would have done much of the grunt work that the central team does here in both cases the input from the head is actually about the same and so the increase in admin is an increase in real workload.
One point to note is that in reality we could not manage the recruitment and hr here and this has to be done centrally as international recruitment is so much more complex. But again in the U.K. the local authority or academy head office do much of this and we would really only be involved in identifying needs and the interview process. So there is no net loss or gain here in reality.
But because we have much smaller teams and essentially the same work to do the net result is that everyone works much harder.
For instance we are all on duty for lunchtimes and breaks, before and after school most of the time, as the normal duty and supervision load has to be shared over a smaller group. We have no SMSAs (dinner ladies).
At my school parents have over a number of years been allowed to drop their kids of early and collect them late and the school has just coped. This creates an additional load in terms of managing child care and supervision. this something that I have been working on all year. In essence saying to parents they can not just leave their kids at school and expect free child care, that they have a responsibility. It has been like turning a tanker!
There are no supply teachers.
I’ll let that sink in.
If a member of staff is out you can not pick up the phone and call someone in. You have to cover internally. Now imagine three staff are out. Schools in the uk would really struggle with this…. true?
There is no PPA entitlement. 10% of the time table in the UK is allotted for planning time, for non contact time. This has become, rightly, sacred cow. Here we do give staff planning time but it is not protected (it will be going forward but not yet). We have specialist teachers who come in and teach ICT, music, Spanish and PE and teachers have this time for planning but if the specialist are off or are sick or involved in inter-primary or the NCFA (more in a minute) then there is no release time… and this year that has had a BIG impact. Plans are afoot to remedy this but we are not there yet.
So the first term is a long one.
Christmas break is a few days longer than the uk, maybe 3. And then back to school for the middle term. Now this term has, until next year, had no real half term break just a long weekend. But the term is very disrupted by the National Children’s Festival of the Arts, sports day and inter-primary.
These last three are wonderful and are a big deal here but they have the potential to derail the curriculum completely.
The NCFA includes art shows, dance contests, singing contests, choral speaking, poetry recitals, music performances and all sortsit is, as I have said, a wonderful event and a great opportunity to enrich the children’s learning experience and there is huge pressure for schools to participate and expectation from the community that they do.
Inter-primary is also a massive deal a full in on two day athletic contest between all schools. Plus two sports days and a parallel basketball contest. Oh and sailing.
Like I say massive enrichment but potentially a huge disruption in terms of curriculum teaching especially if these opportunities are bolt on or extra curricular, which they have become in many schools.
But change is a reality here and people listen. I have already worked with the department for education and the ministry of education to help write next years Callender and we have stated that all of the preliminary events building up to the main events and the main events for NCFA will take place in the afternoon next year allowing us to ensure we can teach English and math uninterrupted.
We have moved inter-primary slightly to create more space and less disruption. The department for education is also negotiating with the sports leaders to spread out the events calendar to reduce the hit we take from competitions. But most importantly we are working to make these opportunities a planned part of our curriculum not something additional.
And that’s the good thing here we as principals and particularly those that want to, so me, can work directly with the Department for Education and the Ministry. We can even talk directly to the minister and we can actually have an impact and we work together for change. I have been involved with setting the direction of national policy and practice from day one and that is very gratifying!
Back in the UK I was always involved at the Local Authority level as either a rep to the education council or to the schools’ forum, working for the union (branch president for four years) or being centrally involved in the trust and its policy direction but here it is even more so! I get to put on my CV that I worked directly with the DES and Ministry of Education.
Easter is a short break, a week and then the Summer term… no half term break but a whole gaggle of long weekends and bank holidays to break it up. The year ends with June!
Now don’t get me wrong I am really not moaning as living and working here does have its compensations and they do far outweigh any downside! The school and community are great, there is a very real sense here of being embedded in the community that you only get in the UK if you work in rural schools these days. Education in the UK has become very impersonal. Here it has retained that sense of ‘we are all in it together’ ok that means attending more community events and being involved more weekends but, you know what, it’s actually fun. Here there is a sense of everyone mucking in and you get to know more people and it is appreciated. Something that seems to be missing back home…
And when the weekend comes or you get out of school at 5:30 / 6:00 you are done for the day. We live where other people go on holiday, so we hit the beach and swim, sit in our deck chairs and have a beer and we watch the sun go down. We unwind. Weekends are like being on holiday!
We don’t spend the weekend gardening or doing housework and diy. We ring the landlord and we have a cleaner. Out time is our own, so there is real time to decompress and relax.
So when Monday comes we are recharged. Sunburnt but recharged. Maybe we are solar-powered…
Living where we do means we do stuff at weekends like kayaking, paddle boarding, walk-a-thons, beach days, snorkelling, diving, sailing and this month we are training for the Flowers Sea Swim a big event on island.
Being part of an expat community you become a tight bunch quickly, surrogate families to each other brothers and sisters and friends all rolled into one so there is company when you want it and a real social life.
In the next few weeks we are off to see Footloose (Vic said I have to go), yes it am-dram, but it is the only show in town, literally, and everyone will be going so good, bad or indifferent it is a big event and yes it will be fun.
As a sidebar, my bank card got blocked last week. I wrang the bank and they said they were worried about fraudulent activity so had for security reasons blocked it. I asked what happened and they said “someone tried to buy Footloose tickets with it and we could not believe it was you…”. Now that is personal services! My bank manager really knows me.
We have coming up in the next few weeks karaoke, relax I won’t sing! I take on my usual Waldorf and Staddler role of watching and making arsenic comments. We have the Cayman National Choir Performing (we know half the people in it!).
In the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of being invited to the Governor’s residents for drinks, attended a steel pan competition (my school won). Poppy and I go walking twice a week, mostly exploring and being nosey but we love it. We have had four carnivals the last two of which were eye-popping!
Crab season is around the corner so we are building a cage to catch and purge some for our crab supper night that’s coming up.
Oh the hummingbird is back, no this is not code, I am sat here watching a tiny bird hovering by a flower not five feet away, a gentle breeze is blowing and it is just taking the edge off the heat. 9:30am now, the family are storing so I think it must be time to put my trunks on call Paul and head out to do my training swim. Like a I said I am getting ready for the Flowers Sea Swim next month.
So ten months in I guess we are settling into the rhythm life.
Wish you were here?
Under an Endless Sky 