Saturday 27 June 2009

blog visitors

Thought it's time for an update on the blog's visitors...
according to google analytics, which I registered the blog with a couple of months after it was started, and which is quite a strict 'countng' system:
1 122 different individual people have visited the blog. The average time spent on the blog is 2:39 mins. and the average is 2.02 page views - not bad considering there's upto 20 posts on each page. People from 53 differnt countries have come onto the blog!
The longest active visit recorded was someone in Jan08 who spent over 32 minutes on the blog. Just this month alone (June 09) 138 individual people have visited the blog, looking at 306 pages, and spending over 2 minutes on average.

Tuesday 16 June 2009

How everyone looks now

It's about time we posted some up-to-date photos of everyone so you can see how gorgeous you all are.
1 2 3
1 Mark and the long-suffering Nickolas
2 Lisa and Den with a very happy Max
3 Chris with a less-than-cheerful McKenzie
4 5 6
4 Brett and April with Kailum and Harvey
5 Pat (after a hard day's work!) with Tash and Harvey
6 Congratulations to Josh and Terri on the arrival of Alexia
7 8 9
7 Dan, Zuzu and Henley-Jai
8 Tash and Lee with Leo sleeping off his feed
9 Anthony and Chelsey with Leila
101112
10 Marcus and Charlotte with Harley
11 Ben and Georgia with Joshua James

12 Aurora and Will with Connor, another new arrival
13
13 At home with Stuart, Leia and Jess

14 And last, and at last, Steven with Jamie

Friday 12 June 2009

Young Mums To Be

Although this blog is focussed on U-Too's work with young dads-to-be, this work would not have started without the foundation of our work with young mums-to-be. The quality of this has always been of a very high standard and this is reflected in a recent External Verifier's report on behalf of the NCFE:

"... learners ... continue to praise and value the support they receive from U-Too and the opportunities now open to them. U-Too has, over the years, developed very effective teaching and additional assessment resources and demonstrated their commitment to their continuing professional development and best practice."

So this an opportunity to acknowledge the work of Carolyn and Gail over the last six years, as well as that of our current team of tutors, Alison, Jayne, Lesley, Sue and Zoe.

Centre for Social Justice filming

Our CSJ contact, Juliette, arranged for a cameraman to visit us again so Murray, and his sidekick, Toby, came to Wiltshire on Tuesday. The idea was to put together a 'story' about U-Too that will be shown at the Awards Ceremony on 1st July. So here's Murray at Bridge House in Trowbridge making life interesting for members of the Young Mums To Be course, Rebekah, Roxanne and Lynda, together with tutor Jayne.


When that ordeal was over Murray and Toby went over to the Rachel Fowler Centre in Melksham so that they could film Will and Aurora, who were interviewed by Juliette. This was a bit special because both Aurora and Juliette are 'expecting', Aurora next week and Juliette in 5 weeks' time, so they had plenty to talk about.



Having finished filming on Tuesday, Murray and Toby were back again yesterday to film Den and Lisa at their place in Swindon. This proved a bit of a challenge as Max had decided views about his willingness to be an actor. All this effort was for a 90 second (very) short and I'd like to thank all the interviewees and Jayne for their patience in dealing with Murray's needs.