Notes from schools
What directors, clerks, and a chair actually said after a briefing or a pack — including the meeting that ran long.
We had the leaving cohort’s Unified National Examination results in a folder the office was proud of. Nino asked for the year before as well, then drew both on facing pages. The governors stopped arguing about one weak mathematics paper and looked at the size of that year group. That was the useful hour.
The attendance picture for January still bothers me. Tamar was clear it was a bus route and a flu week, but the chair wanted a single sentence and we did not have one that was honest. We used the pack anyway; we just spent too long on that page.
I asked for papers only, not a half day. The one-page note was the right length for our agenda. I would not have understood the chemistry page without the tiny caption about the cohort of eleven. Print was a day later than promised because I sat on the proof.
Three village schools, three different ways of storing marks. Giorgi would not merge them. The morning was slower than I had told the resource officer. We did leave with a shared vocabulary for ‘too small to print,’ which I had not been able to get from email.
A Wednesday in Saburtalo
The director had asked for a full school performance briefing ahead of the March governors’ meeting. The extract arrived as examination-office spreadsheets, an attendance export with every session marked, and a caution that year 12 had been a small cohort.
We drafted sixteen pages. The director struck two of them: a subject with four candidates, and a pastoral flag that would have identified a family. The briefing ran from 09:30 to 13:00 in the staff room. By the end the senior team had agreed to put three pages in the governors’ pack and to keep the rest for the departmental meeting the following week.
What changed in the room was not a new number. It was the facing-page comparison with the previous year, which showed the mathematics dip sitting inside a larger leaving group, not inside a new scheme of work. The director still had to explain staffing to the board. She did it with those two pages instead of a verbal tour of the folder.
Papers for a chair who reads on the marshrutka
A clerk in a small private school commissioned a governor meeting pack and asked that it fit in a bag. We pictured the leaving cohort, winter attendance, and English — the three items already on the draft agenda. The 45-minute call happened on a Thursday evening because the chair teaches until six.
The clerk later said the chemistry caption (a cohort of eleven) mattered more than the chart. That is typical. The pictures are there so the sentence underneath can be short.