About Me |
I live in Charlton, England. Many people will not have heard of Charlton, unless they follow Association Football. It is about seven miles (eleven Km) to the east of the centre of London, just south of the River Thames. The Thames Barrier is situated in Charlton, and is probably its only tourist attraction. Charlton is, however, part of the London Borough of Greenwich, and most people will have heard of that, if only because of Greenwich Mean Time and the Greenwich Meridian. It was even more famous recently, as Greenwich was the site for the Millennium Dome.
I work as a civil servant, at the Office for Standards in Education, more commonly known as Ofsted. Our remit is to 'improve standards of achievement and quality of education through regular independent inspection, public reporting and informed independent advice'. We manage the regular inspection of all 24,000 schools in England which are wholly or mainly state-funded.
We produce guides and frameworks to assist those involved in the inspection process. We also publish and promote best practice advice on many aspects of teaching and school management. In addition to school inspections we undertake reviews of Local Education Authorities, inspect initial teacher training courses in universities and colleges, inspect independent schools, service children's education, LEA funded adult education and youth work.
I work for the Research, Analysis and International Division (RAI). Ofsted has the largest educational database in the world - we manage and use it. Information is generated by inspections. RAI undertakes research projects using information from the database and prepares statistical analysis as a service for other Ofsted teams. We also provide Performance and Assessment reports (PANDAs) consisting of comparative data for schools to use for self assessment and target setting, and for inspectors to use. The team commissions research and collaborates with a large number of external researchers. It also organises visits by overseas delegations and manages relations with other nations.
My main outside interests are reading, mostly science fiction books, and messing about with my computer, particularly creating and publishing Web pages. If you like the look of this site, why not contact me about creating one for you or your business?
I am a SysOp in Compuserve's Internet Publishing forum and the two OurWorld forums, helping others publish their Web pages. Unluckily, the post is unpaid; in fact I have to pay my own telephone bills for the time spent online and the normal CompuServe subscription, although I do get free access to the forums where I help out. If you are a CompuServe member, drop in and say hi! You can use this link to get to the Internet Publishing forum. Here are links to the Ourworld Classic and Ourworld 2000 forums.
Luckily, very few photographs of me exist. If you are really curious about what I look like, click on the thumbnails below. I must apologise in advance for their poor quality, but I lost the original images when my last computer crashed and had to re-download from other sites of mine that contained rather over-compressed versions.
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| This is a photo taken some years ago; note the lack of a beard then. | This is much more recent, and shows me with two of my nieces, Nicole and Yvette | A close-up of me and Yvette |