No progress without parents

Booked your holiday yet? If you have children in school you may want to cancel your plans and set aside some quality time to be involved in a quick consultation this August.  This week the Conservative Party announced that if they get into power after the next election they will pass legislation which... 
[Continue reading]

The November Newsletter

Dread Moment, Dead Time – the Roots of Laughter and the Prompt to Action I was in the queue at the Post Office – two positions open for business; 12 people in the queue; having to pay £5 for special delivery because of strike. The message on the QTV? ‘The only real laughter comes from... 
[Continue reading]

Never mind the quality, feel the blazer

His vision for schools?….. Or his? All of a sudden everybody seems to be interested in schools, with the two main parties slugging it out over who can be the more Dickensian whilst a major academic review of primary education (the Cambridge Review) is briskly dismissed by the Secretary of State... 
[Continue reading]

Bumper June Crop of MAC Musings

“Text cloud” for this post below, created by www.wordle.net Ruminant Rumblings It has been a bumper month for the public engagement debate across a wide range of participatory and management issues. We have sought inspiration for better management practice from an annual ritual in the Swiss... 
[Continue reading]

Parent power – just another piece of populist spin?

And their parents? A few weeks ago Gordon Brown declared that he wanted to make schools more accountable to parents. The National Union of Teachers spat back that this was just a bit of “populist spin”.  After all, they argued in their press release, “Schools already work with parents... 
[Continue reading]

Coming up to Easter Newsletter

No sooner had we posted our article about users reclaiming their own data for their own uses than Gordon Brown got in on the act with their publication on working together – see the quote below:- Enabling patients to have their say Patients can already view comparative information about a range... 
[Continue reading]

Whose schools are they anyway?

“Text cloud” for this post below, created by www.wordle.net Whose service? There has been a whole lot of very interesting debate over the last few years about who the health service belongs to but what I’d really like to know is, who does the education service belongs to?  I recently... 
[Continue reading]

November’s Newsletter: No downturn here – M-A-C blogging team’s creative outputs breaks all records

10 posts since 30th September represents an all-time record as M-A-C engages with the issues and causes dear to our collective and individual hearts. Our first ever post back in 2003 was about our central interest – user involvement. A theme echoed in this month’s output with Andrew’s... 
[Continue reading]

Schools need lessons in complaint handling

When I first became a school governor six years ago, I was taken aback to discover that the thing which the school called its “complaints policy” (when they actually managed to locate a dusty photocopy at the back of a filing cabinet) was something which would barely be worthy of the name... 
[Continue reading]

July Newsletter: New Look, Same Passions

Our passions remains the same but we have clothed our mix of news and views in new clothes knitted together with WordPress which Dan Wardle of Surveylab our adviser in these matters assures us will bring the blog into the world of Web 2.0. On www.publicinvolvement.org.uk recently… A MP has asked... 
[Continue reading]

« Previous Page