UPDATE NO 249 05 May 2017

Topical Peer Challenge Round 10

Bookings for Topical Peer Challenge Round 10 are now open. The first taker is Wokingham (Virtual School).

Please let me know if you would like to join in Round 10, the field work for which will be undertaken in late 2017 or early 2018.

SEND Data Benchmarking

The 2017 Q3 SEND Data Benchmarking Report is now available in the ‘Restricted Reports’ page. Thank you to all of the LA’s who provided data. All questions should be addressed to Alastair Lee (contact details below).

This report contains restricted data (unaudited etc) and must not be shared with external partners, or members of the public. Members of the Data Benchmarking Group have access to the restricted section of the website.

What’s the Protocol? – 1 June 2017

Paula Whitehouse of West Midlands SLIP writes

“Dear Colleague, our national event on managing the agency market is on 1 June. We’ve got an interesting and useful spread of people signed up so far, and we’d like to have more, especially from our more northern regions. We’ve got space for several reps from the regions covering the different disciplines. There are some real possibilities for more work nationally as well as regionally on this and it’ll be stronger if we have people from all corners of the country. Can you please encourage via your appropriate networks?”

A flyer for the event can be downloaded here. 

Any colleagues considering attending this event should first contact Mark Evans (details below) who is coordinating the South East MoC. (More details of our project can be seen here)

Children’s Workforce IR35 Tax Changes

This newsletter has previously covered the impact of IR35 changes on Agency Workers. Now comes a request for sharing information on the impact of the changes for Locum Educational Psychologists.

Thanks to Vannessa Burgess who works in HR at Bucks CC for getting in touch.

There must be other groups of workers in the children’s workforce where these changes are having an impact, please let us know.

We are treating this as a workforce issue, and so Mark Evans (contact details below) will be the contact point for collecting and sharing information, questions, concerns on this and related IR35 points.

Leadership Development

We continue to offer our successful portfolio of Leadership Development Courses all of which have been positively evaluated by delegates.

We are offering LAs the opportunity to train their own trainers for all our courses. Our aim is to increase the capacity and capability across the region  to ensure future sustainability within LAs. Courses can also be delivered with adult services and/or for schools. Please contact Di Smith, details below, if this is of interest to you. 

All courses are run in-house in the LA who provides the venue. Each course is accompanied by a range of training resources for the delegates including a comprehensive handbook. The current courses on offer are as follows and details of each course and the costs for each can be found by downloading the April 2016 Leadership Development Prospectus. 

Coaching to Improve Performance

Embedding a Coaching Culture

Leading Change in Times of Austerity

Step Up to Leadership   

We can also arrange one-to-one coaching, especially to support newly appointed 2nd and 3rd tier managers

If you require further details or wish to book a course please get in touch with Di Smith (contact details below)