Tuesday, 29 July 2008

Dr Maqsood Siddiqi runs an successful Educational Support Group for local Muslim schoolboys to offer additional teaching in Maths and Science. He has run the scheme without external funding for fourteen years and produced some impressive results. This morning I met with Dr Siddiqi and with Fatima Ikram who operates a similar scheme (Muskaan) in Dacorum. We were brought together by Bina Radia-Bond to discuss opportunities for collaboration. We soon identified that whereas Fatima’s group was properly constituted, Dr Siddiqi’s group has operated successfully for fourteen years without a constitution of any kind; this is something we should help rectify.

At lunchtime, Angelo (our IT chap) arrived to lead the first workshop on our new IT systems. For this first workshop, we only had CVS staff involved as guinea pigs. The training itself went pretty smoothly and the new web environment performed well. Our only problems were the extreme humidity and the ancient IT systems – both of which were out of our control.