It is with regret that we have to inform you that the decision has been made to cancel the North of England Education Conference in Manchester in January.
We were confident that working with the City Council we had put together a wide, varied and interesting programme covering all phases within the education sector, dealing with the current educational issues and sharing innovative practice. Delegate numbers have, however, remained low and, we have determined, too low to guarantee sufficiently large audiences for all of the planned sessions. From the feedback received, the reasons for the low level of interest are a combination of several factors: time of year, costs, the length of the conference, number of conferences generally, the availability of information on line and the amount of change in general within the education sector.
We know that a great deal of interesting and topical information would have been made available through the conference and we are exploring the possibility of pulling this together in the form of a Virtual Conference including papers, perhaps in the form of short ‘Think Pieces‘ and podcasts. In this manner, education leaders and schools as a whole will still have the opportunity of benefitting from the work that has been prepared and developed. While there will be some disappointment that the conference will not proceed as planned, it will be interesting to see if a new way of working can develop as a result.