For too many teachers, creating forms can become an end rather than a means. Formbank, a CD-Rom from Heinemann, provides 100 forms covering many secondary school needs: staff employment matters; reporting and monitoring; health and safety; outings and events. All are available in Word 6 format, and can be customised and printed. Lists of keyholders, claims for petty cash, detention reports and collective passports - all bureaucratic life is here.
pound;29.99 plus VAT from Heinemann Educational, Halley Court, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8EJ. Tel: 01865 311366 (orders 01865 888080). Email: secondary.marketing@repp.co.uk Greenwich and Ghana, for all their obvious differences, are linked by an imperial past. Seven schools in south-east London and seven in west Africa have jointly produced an anthology of children’s writing called Sharing Time. The young writers’ work is the product of an extended exchange of ideas, information and stories. It compares families, festivals and football as well as more challenging notions of hope and morality. The murder of Stephen Lawrence and internecine strife in Ghana also find a place. But the overall effect is an optimistic sense that future world citizens can be physically distant but close in spirit.
pound;2.99 from The TASTE Project, School of Education, University of Cambridge, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2BX. Tel: 01223 369631. Email: educ-inst-tutorial@lists.cam.ac.uk The growth of teenage smoking is of grea concern to parents, to teachers and to many teenagers themselves. The charity QUIT has produced Break Free, an interactive resource pack that aims not to preach to young smokers but to enable them to make informed choices. It contains 70 pages of photocopiable fact-sheets and activities. There are histories of tobacco and its uses, analysis of the chemicals in cigarettes and medical statistics, and suggestions for debates, role-plays and investigations about “cool” lifestyles, treatment of smoking in the media and environmental issues. It will help to clear the air, metaphorically and literally.
Teacher’s pack pound;30 from Beccy Russell, QUIT, Victory House, 170 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 0HA.Tel: 020 7388 5775. Quitline: 0800 002200. A website will be launched next month at www.quit.org.uk For the past 10 years, the Menerva Educational Trust has emphasised the potential and achievement of women and promoted ways in which girls can learn to take leading roles in positions of responsibility. The trust is offering two prizes of pound;500 and pound;250 for the best essays on the theme: “There has been much change in women’s lives but little transformation in women’s status.” The competition is open to 16 to 19-year-old students - male and female - in schools and colleges.
Entries should be sent by July 15 to S A Marston,The Menerva Educational Trust, Smith’s Wood Studios,62 Endcliffe Hall Avenue, Sheffield S10 3EL. Tel: 0114 266 4449.
