Impressive apprenticeship figures and the importance of coaching

The Skills Funding Agency have just released the final end of year apprenticeship starts figures and it’s fantastic news for Wiltshire.

As you know our target for 2015-16 was 5,600 but we have achieved 6,440 starts, which is even higher than the target number for 2017-18, which is 6,300.

This represents a growth of 19.5% in Wiltshire.  Swindon had a growth of 7.3%. Wiltshire’s statistical neighbours on average had growth of 2.6% with some actually seeing a reduction. Compared to all the Local Education Authority’s nationally, Wiltshire had the second largest growth, only being beaten by Darlington who saw an increase of 26.1%.  

The figure is provisional and we don’t have a full breakdown yet in terms of age, sector and so on. However it is the officially published figure from the SFA but we won’t get the break downs for a while so it is hard to analyse what has made the difference this year, but clearly we are on the right track with the comprehensive programme of work, development and support for business and our colleges which we have in place. 

I am keen that we ensure these opportunities are open and available to our looked after children, so will be making this a personal goal over the next twelve months.

New coaches required. Since 2013 we have had a successful programme offering coaching to all managers and staff supporting them to achieve positive outcomes. We currently have a pool of 19 qualified coaches and due to increasing demand we are looking to offer the opportunity to five people to undertake a level 5 qualification in coaching and mentoring and become a part of the pool. 

Coaching (and mentoring) is a very important part of the role of all managers and leaders. I currently coach five junior managers and staff from across the organisation and it’s a chance for us to be part of growing the skills, capabilities and talent that the organisation needs to become more successful and to deliver its business plan. It’s also a lot of fun too as well as contributing to our own personal learning and development.

For further information please go to Coaching - the way forward in HR Direct and read the section, Becoming a coach for Wiltshire Council. All applications need to be returned to Amanda.Collyer@wiltshire.gov.uk  by Monday 31 October 2016.

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Looking at next years' budget

This week for me has been dominated by the budget, which always happens during the autumn term. Having said that it was punctuated by an excellent evening on Tuesday with the officers and soldiers of 21 Signal Regiment at Azimghur Barracks, North Collerne where I watched their beating retreat ceremony and we were entertained by the very impressive Band of the Brigade of Gurkhas. The army always do this so well.

Yesterday I met with all of the leaders, managers and team leads in the services which I manage to update them on the key corporate work, our performance position (strong) and budget (under pressure). We also had two excellent presentations from Sarah Butler and Laura Symons on Information Governance (a very important subject that belies the title) and John Rogers & Ian Baker on digital change and how it will impact on our services over the next few years. More on both of these anon.

Back to the budget. As at period 4 (end of July) this year we are currently projecting a potential year end overspend of around £8m (2.5% of our net budget). We have to get this under control to finish the year on balance so Carolyn and I have implemented two immediate actions. We will freeze all recruitment unless this is in areas of health and safety and protection for vulnerable people. Any other recruitment will need a conversation with us to determine the impact of the freeze. Secondly, we have reduced all service budgets by 1.5% for the remainder of the year. This achieves the balanced position and ADs are identifying the corresponding trade-offs in performance and work which will need to stop to achieve this.

Next years’ budget is just as tough. We have to reduce net expenditure by £13m to off-set the government’s reduction in our Revenue Support Grant coupled with the increased demand in key services such as children’s social care, adult social care and waste management. We have currently identify potential savings of £9m and continue to work on the gap to close. The good news is that we are 3 months ahead of where we were last year with this task and the senior management team are working very well together to tackle this.

Your ideas on how we meet these challenges are very important to us. Please share any thoughts you have in these areas directly with Carolyn and I.  

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton

Return from holidays and looking forward to the future

“This week I returned from two weeks holiday – Monday morning was quite a shock. As were the scales when I jumped onto those. More weightwatchers and cycling required and in very quick order.

My third shock of the week was that I spent a full day interviewing for a new PA yesterday as after ten years working together Jane has decided to retire. Fortunately I had five excellent candidates and I was refreshed to see just how good our staff are under some tricky questioning. I shall announce who my new PA is in due course.

On Wednesday we had a good session led by the Programme Office on the subject of my last blog – Wiltshire 2021, what we need to achieve over the next 5 years and how we will deliver that. I have had a number of comments and observations from staff which we have built into our work. We are working towards sessions with Cabinet and the Associate Directors over the next few months. We will also of course engage with all of our staff on this so your thoughts about how we achieve this will be greatly received. 

To those of you about to embark on your holidays I hope you have a great time.

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton"

My thoughts on what the focus should be over the next 4-5 years

This week I attended the annual local government association conference in Bournemouth with colleagues and politicians. As you can imagine, in a post Brexit referendum world there was much talk about what next for the country, local government and financial and social policy generally. There is much hysteria around the subject which I think we need to cut through and focus on doing the right things for our county and its communities. Hers’s my view on what we should focus on over the next 4-5 years. I would be very grateful for your feedback and thoughts on this.

 

These “thought starters” seek to kick start discussions around our approach to a wider programme of change and improvement across all aspects of the council. They seek to addresses the wider issues of the major challenges we face in Local Government, the outcomes we seek to achieve in the county, how we might address these and organise ourselves effectively to meet the challenges ahead.

 

All councils face similar challenges over the next 5 years or so. These are widely accepted to be focused around the following areas:

 

a) Demand management (adults, children, waste) including prevention.

b) Devolution (to us, from us) and linked to this associated economic and housing growth (the premise being that we can grow our economy and housing market faster with increased powers).

c) Health and social care integration; and other public service integration; these being in the context of resource reductions affecting all partners directly, so they face heavier pressure to withdraw services and have fewer resources to design and develop integrated services.

d) Continued significant reductions in finance (grant income, particularly removal of RSG and move to increased business rate retention). This may accelerate post-BREXIT.

 

These four challenges should shape not only our next Business Plan, but also the manifestos of the parties standing in the 2017 election. These are the “wicked issues” which politicians, at least at the local level, need to address and have a plan for. Additionally, all of these problems exceed the ability of any one organisation to resolve them – they can only be addressed effectively by acting jointly with other partner organisations in our system.  

 

Previously, this organisation has been ahead of the game in identifying the challenges it faces and bold and innovative in terms of how it meets these challenges. Examples at the organisation level would be the move to a unitary council, in-sourcing ICT, asset utilisation and disposal (now over £90m), integration of Public Health and leisure, our organisation-wide response to CSE, and at the service level there are multiple examples including Help-to-Live-at-Home, our Ofsted improvement programme, and the planning transformation programme. Peer review and external inspection evidence for all of these interventions is strong with a positive direction of travel.

 

As an organisation, we should consider the need to design, develop and launch an integrated programme of continuous improvement and change to specifically address the areas identified above. I specifically don’t use the term “transformation” which fails to acknowledge that every service and every manager is currently involved in some form of transformation. We need to see this programme of work as organisation-wide, involving everybody.

 

As leaders in the Wiltshire system, part of our role is to enable the development of the strongest system possible within the constraints we face. Some guidelines that could lead to this would be as follows:

· We, as system partners, would do less service delivery while enabling others to do more, overall increasing prevention and early intervention.  That is, we should do only the right things for the right people, agreed with citizens and with our system partners. This would mean a new citizen-provider “agreement” that re-balances citizen and state roles while also reaching agreement with partners about which people receive what help from the system.

· We as partners together with the VCS are the providers of the citizens’ system – it is their system for their purpose, not ours. (We derive our purpose from Wiltshire’s citizens, in any case.) We should be acting jointly as normal service delivery rather than focusing our collaboration primarily on “rub points”.

· We, as partners, are stewards of system assets rather than organisation assets. Increasingly we view property in this way, but could (should) extend this to people and process assets?

 

In return for citizens and communities doing more and the system partners refocusing our services, the system partners would act much more collectively, reshaping our activities (and staff roles) to maximize the assets put to the service of citizens, for direct service delivery. The return on investment in integration should result in a smaller net system workforce with minimal duplication between partners.

 

These changes would have to be done with full appreciation of the legal constraints and mandated changes required of each partner, and also with the creativity and determination to minimize their impact on collective service delivery. The same applies to the very significant cultural differences between the partners: health, for example has a markedly higher professional and cost management mentality, when compared with the council’s relatively higher client focus. Informed collective risk management will be an essential element.

 

Delivering this would be a major enterprise and hugely challenging. It would require exceptional political and executive leadership and the hearts and minds of our staff, who would have to think and operate in a very different way to the present, both during and after the changes. I believe that this would be a natural progression for many of our staff, who have shown outstanding change resilience and engagement over the last ten years.

 

Delivering these changes would, over time, evolve the Wiltshire system into something very different to its current state.

 

This agenda to accelerate and focus change on the four areas above needs an external and internal perspective; driven with pace, visibility and an identifiable brand so that all staff and partners can align with the programme, its objectives, and more importantly the outcomes.  It should be the very DNA of the organisation moving forward both internally and externally. Just like our One Council programme 2006-2009.

 

It should be focused on Wiltshire’s people (its citizens, residents, customers, clients and  businesses), Wiltshire the place (economic growth, jobs, housing enabled through long term spatial planning but acknowledging and protecting the special place that is Wiltshire) and Wiltshire Council and our partners, the organisation in terms of improved efficiency, productivity, higher performance with less money and people.

 

Outcomes need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound) and aligned to the national and local political priorities, 2017 manifesto commitments and emerging Business Plan 2017-21. They should be few in number and focused around the following:

· Customer, client, citizen, business satisfaction

· Improved, robust and reliable service performance on an appropriate business infrastructure

· Collective  ‘organisation-blind’ operations/delivery with our partners, especially at a local level

· A more effective and efficient organisation: services designed round customer purpose with people doing the right thing more of the time; more automation of delivery, lower cost, increased productivity

· A reshaped workforce: (i) lower numbers across the system with a different mix and skills; (ii) management with a more outward/outcome focus than the current inward/reduction focus

· Demand which is jointly predicted, modelled and controlled

· Commissioning which creates a stronger system for citizens, rather than individual elements within the system

· Growth across the county (new business, existing business, jobs, housing)

· Strong communities; who can look after themselves wherever possible

· Devolution (to us from Whitehall and from us to Town and  Parish Councils)

· Innovation (what do we want to be the best at and stand out for?)

· Leadership at all levels, both political and organisational

 

This is about systems leadership and I would welcome your thoughts on this thinking and approach as we develop it together over the summer.

 

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton

A moment in history

“Tomorrow is one of those moments in history that I suspect we will all remember for a long time. The referendum starts at 0700 when the polls open and they close again at 2200; 370,000 people are registered to vote in the county, an increase of 20,000 since the end of 2015. This is very positive for democracy in the county as well as a good cleanse and update of our electoral register. We then start the verification and count tomorrow night at 2200 and I expect to declare a result for Wiltshire somewhere between 0430 and 0530 Friday morning. The national result is likely to be declared a little later at breakfast time in Manchester.

Whatever the result, the outcome will have a profound effect on our lives, businesses and the prosperity for the county and country. So historical indeed.

Could I just say thank you to the election team for organising tomorrow. It’s a mammoth feat of programme management, technical knowledge, logistics and overall organisation. And they have done a brilliant job as they always do.

And thank you too to you all – 850 of you working tomorrow all day at the polling stations and a further 400 working at the four count venues through the night to get us to the result. 1,250 staff involved and I am very grateful to each and every one of you. Good luck tomorrow.

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton”