Bradford Vision Organisational Learning and Development Plan

What was the stimulus/need?

Approach to neighbourhood renewal strategy

Bradford Vision is the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) covering the Bradford Metropolitan District Council area. The LSP partners have adopted a radical approach to Neighbourhood Renewal (NR), set out in their strategy, 'Starting with People' which stresses community engagement and public service improvement. This involves innovative work across the District, focusing on a number of communities and parts of the public sector.

On community engagement, the first round of annual Area Conferences was held in 2002. There were five, on a constituency basis, involving people working on the ground to improve neighbourhoods and communities (volunteers, voluntary sector staff, community activists and frontline public sector staff). Senior decision-makers and strategic partnerships in the District have recently been asked to respond to the priorities participants identified in the context of service/ action plans for 2004. Eighteen local groups have been funded to develop Neighbourhood Action Plans and a further twenty are active but not yet funded.

Skills and knowledge as a priority

In common with the National Strategy on Neighbourhood Renewal, the partners have recognised that developing the skills and knowledge of all involved in neighbourhood renewal is a strategic issue, not least in seeking improvements to public services. Key issues to address include:

• how can partners create the conditions for frontline workers to use their knowledge and experience to shape services in more effective ways
  
• how can middle and senior managers unblock processes that prevent effective delivery on the ground and develop their ability to make positive change happen
  
• how can partners best bring together thinking, knowledge and skills at strategic level to bear on major challenges facing the District; and ensure that this learning is embedded in service delivery?

Bradford Vision has developed an Organisational Learning and Development work plan to address these needs. In this, it addresses one of the Government's requirements for Local Strategic Partnership Accreditation, whereby LSPs are expected to build on their own experience, spread best practice and learn from others at all levels (local, sub-regional, regional and national); ensure that LSP partners have the skills to do the job (through implementation of 'local learning action plans'); and encourage the development of leadership skills for those involved in neighbourhood renewal in a representative role including councillors and excluded groups. Research for ODPM ("Accreditation of Local Strategic Partnerships (2001/02): An Analysis and Review of Experience") found such learning plans to be an area of weakness for many LSPs, and recommended the need for further information, support and good practice examples to guide LSPs.

How was the need tackled?

The Organisational Learning and Development work plan has been developed by a partnership task team. Members are drawn from the Council, Jobcentre Plus, West Yorkshire Police, health trusts, Bradford Trident (New Deal for Communities), Bradford Learning Partnership and the voluntary and community sector.

The task team felt that it was important that the agenda and plan should be developed with a much wider group of people. They organised an Open Space Event in June 2002 at Bradford City Football Ground. More than eighty people attended, largely from the public services but with key voluntary and community sector workers.

The Open Space methodology proved particularly suited to identifying key issues, allowing participants to prompt and lead discussions on any aspect of improving public services that they felt passionate about. Twenty two topics were volunteered over two sessions. The event clearly identified both the dissatisfactions and the vision for how things should be.

To get people thinking, use was made of the following formula:

C = D x V x F > R
where C = Change and D = Dissatisfaction, V = Vision, F= First steps and R = Resistance

ie, change happens when the level of dissatisfaction is high, when there is a vision for how things could be and when there are clearly identifiable first steps to take - then resistance to change can be overcome.

Work plan

In September 2002, the task team formulated the 'first steps' and drew up a work programme. In this, they observed important principles, that the programme should:

• add value to what individual public services are doing already to improve services
  
• always be cross-sector and involve a 'cross-slice' of invitees, from frontline to senior decision-makers

The work plan comprises six strands:

1. Cross-sector problem-solving: a programme of events to support public sector partners meet the floor targets. The first focuses on raising educational achievement.
2. Learning from what works - local, national, international: a series of bi-monthly seminars to draw on learning to influence practice. The first drew out the learning from Bradford's Health Action Zone: from its evaluation, from project case study workshops, and from working with communities. Time was also provided for a 'marketplace', the chance to drop in to 'Information Points' for 15 minute sessions to discuss key themes, eg, neighbourhood action planning, community cohesion, project management, and evaluation.
3. Strengthening staff capacity for cross-sector working: mentoring, work shadowing and secondments to enable a cohort of public sector staff to work across service boundaries.
4. Assessing impact of policies on community cohesion: developing and applying a tool to assess the impact of future policies on social cohesion within the District.
5. Improving customer/client experience: (a) improving public access to information about services by developing a 'Bradford District' Plain English style for public documents; and (b) organising workshops which focus on service improvement by tracking the processes clients have to go through to receive a service (drawing on NHS work on 'patient pathways').
6. Promoting the creative capacity of frontline staff and middle managers: through (a) setting up a cross-sector, action learning network for public service middle managers; and (b) a small innovations fund ('Make It Better') for frontline staff and middle managers focused on service delivery redesign.

The work plan is funded under the Neighbourhood Action Planning budget heading within the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund allocation for Bradford (total of £22m over three years). There is a budget of £30,000 for the Make It Better fund.

Bradford Vision are using consultants to work with their own Organisational Development team, to support delivery of parts of the work programme. They intend to use this outside resource where it will make most of a difference (eg, in drawing in experience elsewhere), with local inputs to the design and delivery of the various learning activities.

What were the outcomes?

These are very early days in implementing the work plan. The Open Space event demonstrated its value in engaging many key individuals and raising awareness of what needs to be done.

The programme will be evaluated for its success in:

• improving the capacity of the public services to work together and with local communities
  
• fostering new and innovative ways of working, focusing on change tasks on the ground
  
• changing the culture of service delivery and its relationship with users, citizens and communities
  
• making the rhetoric of change a reality in practice and action
  
• establishing new levels of trust across the whole system

What was learnt?

Key lessons include:

• importance of having strong leadership from the Bradford Vision partners, especially members of the Bradford Vision Executive, with senior officers of key public agencies championing and participating the programme
  
• value of having access to existing OD, action learning and community development skills
  
• ensuring sufficient priority and resources to developing and implementing an organisational learning and development plan

Contact

Elaine Applebee
Neighbourhood Renewal Director
Bradford Vision
The Conference Centre
Leeds Road Hospital
Maudsley Street
Bradford
BD3 9LH

Tel: 07866 557514
e-mail: elaine.appelbee@bradfordvision.com
www.bradfordvision.com

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