Weatherhead Projects Ltd
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Drawing upon their combined 30 years of headship and over 60 years experience of teaching, Rod and Yvonne Weatherhead offer a wealth of practical experience and knowledge in all aspects of education. Rod and Yvonne retain an infectious enthusiasm for working with children, teachers, governors, school leaders and support staff. Together they plan and deliver leadership and learning training and conferences for early years' practitioners, teachers with teaching and learning responsibility posts, school support staff and primary leadership groups. In 2004 they established a professional learning community network which focuses on the development of distributed leadership. The network was recently awarded a national Leading Aspect Award for its work in “raising achievement by working as a Professional Learning Community to promote, develop and support high quality leadership at all levels.”
Yvonne Weatherhead has been the headteacher of Marland Hill Primary School for sixteen years and has led the school through three very successful Ofsted inspections. She has been a federation headteacher of two schools and found this to be a very successful and challenging experience. Marland Hill received a DfES achievement award in 2003 and is a leading literacy school for Rochdale L.E.A. It is also a lead school in behaviour management and serves a socially disadvantaged community.
Yvonne has for many years led in-service training in circle time, behaviour management and literacy throughout the North West region. Yvonne has developed and written both literacy and circle time books. Yvonne’s enthusiasm for the arts has encouraged many school visitors to comment on the creative and lively approach to the teaching of music and the interactive assemblies. The school was awarded an Arts Mark award in 2006. Music, dance, movement and drama are used as a stimulus in all of Yvonne’s books. 'Enriching Circle Time: Dream Journeys and Positive Thoughts' was published in 2004 by Lucky Duck Publishing. Yvonne's second circle time book will be published in November 2008 by Sage Education. Yvonne's latest upper Key Stage Two literacy book 'Starfly' was published in August 2008, and a further book entitled 'The Learning Walk', which is linked to the Every Child Matters agenda will be published in 2009.
Rod Weatherhead was the headteacher of Heybrook Primary School in Rochdale for twelve years and led the school through three successful Ofsted inspections. Previously he was the headteacher of Darnhill Primary School in Heywood for nine years.
Darnhill School served an all white disadvantaged community with a high proportion of the pupils having special educational needs and displaying very challenging behaviour. Heybrook is a very large school with over five hundred pupils from Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage communities in Rochdale's most deprived ward. All of the pupils have English as an additional language. Heybrook School received a DfES achievement award in 2002 and in 2003 was named in the one hundred most improved primary schools in England.
Rod qualified as an Ofsted inspector in 1993 and has experience of inspecting English as an additional language, special educational needs, school management and all National Curriculum subjects. He is a specialist mathematics teacher and has led teams of both primary and secondary mathematics teachers.
Rod was a prominent member of the Pioneers Educational Action Zone from 2002 to 2008. In 2003 he completed a post-graduate certificate in educational leadership development and consultancy at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Educational Leadership. He was an accredited external advisor to governing bodies for the annual performance review of headteachers for three years, and is now an accredited school improvement partner (SIP). He currently works with primary schools in Manchester and Bradford as a school improvement partner. Rod has worked as a trainer, facilitator, assessor and tutor on the National College of School Leadership's (NCSL) National Professional Qualification in Headship (NPQH) programme since 2004 and also works as a facilitator on the Leadership Pathways programme. He has worked for Rochdale Local Authority as a workforce reform consultant and is an accredited Leading Aspect Award verifier. He is facilitator and associate consultant to the Inspirational Professional Learning Community Network, a network of five Rochdale primary schools. In September 2008 he left headship to work full time as an independent leadership and learning consultant.
