Happy New Year

The full team returned to work today. It was particularly nice to welcome Caroline back from her travels in the Far East.

There are two main tasks facing the team in the forthcoming year. Firstly, we have to finalise the revised HNDs, which were recently validated. And secondly, we have to commence the reviews of NC Digital Media Computing and PC Passport. So 2013 looks like it will be as busy as 2012.

Our resolution for the coming year is to further develop our use of social media. The recent satisfaction survey revealed that you were very happy with the quality of communication, mainly thanks to our use of social media such as mailing lists, Twitter and, of course, this blog. But we hope to experiment with new social media tools to see if we can improve it further. Look out for more information in the near future. An immediate target is to increase our Twitter following to 500 so, if you don't already, please follow us on Twitter.

One change that I will implement immediately is to change the way we deal with comments (on this blog). Up until now, anyone could post anything. But I am getting a lot of spam as a result, so I plan to activate comment authentication. The comment facility is rarely used (which is a pity) so I don't imagine that this change will mean much to anyone.

The vocational educational sector is going through a period of huge change so there will be many challenges in the coming year. These challenges will be easier to deal with if we work together. Me and my team are here to help you.