Member Development – Colchester, Ipswich and Tendring Councils

Objective – Colchester, Ipswich and Tendring Councils secured Building Capacity East funding to run a project to investigate and pilot new and innovative ways to develop and equip their councillors for the challenging and changing roles that they have.

Running development programmes for elected councillors is notoriously difficult due to the time constraints they have, the very differing motivation that they have for being in their role and the political dimension to their role.  Therefore, this project needed to approach development from a very different standpoint, working with councillors to develop the programme, rather than for officers to present a programme to them.

Engagement – Initially Spirals were invited to run a workshop for the steering group to help them put the project on a proper footing after a slow start.  Spirals were then invited to extend their role after the success of the workshop and went on the write the project plan before being invited to manage the whole project on behalf of the group.

Our role was two-fold; providing strong project management to the scheme ensuring it is completed in the time scale set by Building Capacity East and secondly providing expertise in learning and development to ensure a thorough and robust development programme results from the work.

Phasing – The following outputs describe the work undertaken by Spirals, either directly or by facilitating the authorities involved in this project:

  • Wrote the Project Plan
  •  Ensured all three authorities are signed up to achieving Charter Status
  •  Delivered a Charter Status workshop in each of the authorities to explain the benefits and the processes involved
  •  Team and resources in place and working towards achieving Charter Status
  •  Run a Launch event for all 170 councillors to explain the project, share the message that their input will form the final project and begin to identify learning styles
  •  Run workshops for councillors around the 2006 White Paper and the changing role of Members and the Community Champions’ role
  •  Identified and delivered three ‘quick wins’ to keep momentum to the project (these turned out to be ‘Dealing with Difficult Situations and People Assertively’, ‘Chairing Skills’ and ‘Speed Reading’
  •  Developed a skills audit process linked to the IDeA Political Skills Framework
  •  Created a total picture of what is available together with a matrix of the access routes based on the Skills Framework competencies and different learning styles identified
  •  Established ‘Development Reps’ in each authority and provided some coaching and training for them
  •  Provided four methods of skills assessment: self assessment, peer assessment,  one-to-one assessment with a facilitator and 360 assessment, and analysed the results
  •  Developed Personal Development Plans for the senior Members
  •  Agreed the training plan for the senior Members
  •  Agreed the training plan(s) for the self assessed Members
  •  Captured key statistics
  •  Developed plans for cross authority Action Learning Sets
  •  Put in place control mechanisms linked to budgets

    Result – The level of engagement that councillors have had through this project has been excellent, something noted by the funder, Building Capacity East who has been delighted by the learning outcomes of this project.

    Spirals has been invited to talk at many events to share the learning outcomes of the project.  The project was delivered on time and to budget and Spirals are now engaged in phase two and three of the project, the delivery and evaluation.

     

     

    Ref: 000175

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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