Govas Update and Financial Consultations
 Dear Colleagues,
A warm welcome back to everyone, even if the warm summer days (yes, we did have them) may seem an eternity ago. At GOVAS we are busy making plans for next year's conference. Given the success of the last conference, and the realisation that, geographically, Stockport is not that large, so no-one faces too long a journey, we are pleased to announce that we will be returning to Marple Hall High School. The conference will take place on the morning of Saturday 7th March. We have already held a meeting with the LA officers to discuss the content and will continue to work on this, but would welcome any input from our members during this process. We would also like to highlight the recently announced School Funding consultation. This consultation feeds in to the decision on how Stockport publicly funded Primary schools are financed, including academies, so should be of interest to all governors. Last year, however, less than half of Stockport's primary schools responded. In our recent '3 Challenges' survey, school finances was by far the biggest area of concern, and yet a large number of Primary schools are not engaging with the process of how they are funded. It is also disappointing to note that the first training session of the new school year to be cancelled due to lack of interest was on finance. There would seem to be a trend here! School finances are not going to improve in the short-term and we all need to take account of how we are funded on a Local Authority basis, as well as an individual one, and how we can better use the resources we have. For slides on the consultation training session -click here- (this powerpoint presentation is only available for governors running office 2010 or later) For the original consultation document stockport financing schools documentation and for the appendix (spreadsheet) financial information schools stockport consultation (requires office 2010 or later for both documents) We note the proposed changes to funding for resourced children in the borough could lead to serious hardship for some of the settings that care for our most vulnerable children, whilst accepting the logic of making the process more uniform we would welcome a re-think on the implementations of the changes. Finally for now, GOVAS has made the ground-breaking decision to embrace (or more likely, an arms-length touch) the world of social media. For some time we have had the capability to 'tweet', but now we are actually going to use it. It will make us more accessible and instantly update you with relevant information. Click on the following link to follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/Govas_org_uk or use the button on our website - click here - Please contact us if you have any ideas for the conference, or if there are any other issues that you would like to bring to our attention, contact us -using this link- Stu Foster Chair, GOVAS |
