Hello PPMA members and friends

Last week our joint Apprentice of the Year Winner 2019, Kirsten Moore shared with us her experience of taking part in the competition and this week we hear from her inspirational fellow winner, Daniel John. Daniel is from South Gloucestershire Council and here is his story:

“I decided to enter the PPMA Apprentice of the Year as the idea of testing my abilities against other apprentices in a competitive environment greatly appealed to me as well as development opportunities to develop my career. I was thrilled to be shortlisted along with 15 other great apprentices from across the country and was looking forward to the challenge.

The morning of the first day was focused around training and development. The emphasis was on developing the core being of who we are as individuals and how to increase our confidence to help us get our message across. We learned different techniques for public speaking such as how to breathe and how to hold people’s attention using silence. I found the morning challenging as it took me out of my comfort zone, although when the competition started I felt confident in applying what I had learned in the morning.

During the afternoon of day one we had to perform a team activity that focused on time forecasting, individually answer questions from the judges, and deliver a short pitch on our legacy presentation that we had to deliver the next day.

The second day consisted of an individual task in which we had to show how well we could cope under pressure and the legacy presentations. For my presentation, I talked about how my passion for improving conditions for people with Autism has been shaped by my life story. My apprenticeship finishes in July and I would like to gain a permanent job which would enable me to make a difference for people with Autism.

Overall, I found the experience wonderfully enjoyable and precious. I found everyone involved to be so friendly and inspiring and I will cherish the memories for the rest of my life.”

Daniel John, PPMA Joint Apprentice of the Year 2019

We hope that Daniel has an amazing year and we look forward to celebrating with him and all of our other talent programme winners at this year’s PPMA Conference, which will be held at The Hilton Metropole Birmingham, on 14^th to 16^th May. If you’d like to join us, then book your place here.

Hello PPMA members and friends

The 2019 PPMA Apprentice of the Year competition was a fantastic event and showcased the amazing up and coming talent we are lucky enough to have in the public sector. We had an unprecedented number of applicants and the 16 brilliant finalists were invited to a 2 day event at Warwick Business School. The judging panel were unable to differentiate between 2 outstanding candidates, so the decision was made to select both as our winners…and we’d like to congratulate Daniel John representing South Gloucestershire Council and Kirsten Moore representing Central Bedfordshire Council.

Below, Kirsten Moore shares with us her experiences from the event and legacy she aims to leave behind:

“I went into the competition not knowing what to expect. I had already felt challenged by the application questions but was excited to see what the activities and assessments would bring. The two days took us back to basics, focusing on self-confidence and presentation skills, as well as working under pressure and group coordination. The judges, coaches and other apprentices created such a safe environment, allowing all of us to try new things and push ourselves. There was so much support from everyone that we forgot that it was a competition! The other apprentices had such interesting, and often moving, stories and great passion for the sector they are working in.

After an intense first day, I stopped just focusing on the competition and instead set personal goals for the experience, ensuring I took all I could from my time with PPMA – and I am so pleased I did, as I feel this is what might have helped me to become joint winner.

Presenting my personal legacy allowed me to reflect on how beneficial undertaking an apprenticeship has been for all areas of my life. Professionally, I am completing a transferable qualification, where I can help to direct my personal development and training opportunities, whilst working. Personally, the security and my enjoyment of the role now allows me to focus time on my legacy: fundraising for Parkinson’s UK, which is a cause very close to me.

It has been great to challenge myself and I have learnt so much about myself, personally and professionally. The biggest thing I am taking away from the competition is self-confidence and the courage to push myself forward more in my development. ”

Kirsten Moore, PPMA Joint Apprentice of the Year 2019

We hope that Kirsten has an amazing year and we look forward to celebrating with her and all of our other talent programme winners at this year’s PPMA Conference, which will be held at The Hilton Metropole Birmingham, on 14^th to 16^th May. If you’d like to join us, then book your place here.

Hello PPMA members and friends

As part of our ‘Let’s Talk’ themes, our President Caroline Nugent gives us an update on how apprenticeships and the levy have developed over the past year.

“Well what a year it has been. From the ‘excitement’ of the new levy to the reality of the new levy! You are all very well versed on my views on apprentices and how passionate I am about bringing on tomorrow’s talent so they do not have huge debts. We have had an olive branch of some change through the chancellors recent speech, so hopefully those in power have realised that we all want this to work but it will not be successful in its current state.

We need to increase apprentice numbers again as to see a 50% reduction in numbers of apprentices is just the worst thing, which could have happened! I suppose I have to get my frustrations out of the way before I reflect on the positives. Why has it given providers the opportunity to raise fees for providing the same things! How can a course last year have gone up so much? And hasn’t this happened for our own HR professional courses too? We are heading the same way as universities where we have a race to the top to see who is going to charge the most and who is going to challenge why fees have gone up so much!

And why on earth weren’t the qualifications ready for some of those courses we desperately wanted to put people into as part of succession planning? What I find so depressing is during talking to so many people that I am hearing ‘oh we just put x onto a management course to make sure we use up the money!’ Where is the strategic planning approach we really need? And who is keeping track on the equalities on who is getting the training and who isn’t. I can just see now the FOIs etc asking which protected characteristic had opportunities and who didn’t…….. we don’t want another BBC.

So onto the positives as I always do. We have our highly successful national programme on Apprentice of the Year, which is due to run again this month and will test and challenge our young people and put them outside of their comfort zones. If I had had the opportunity to go on a programme like this, which is FREE and will set me up for life, I would have been so motivated and grateful to my employer. Let’s increase numbers even further next year to give more people the chance.

We have wonderful people like Matthew from Central Bedfordshire who won our Apprentice of the Year 2017 and has been working with Leatham on considering disabilities in apprenticeships and how we can make this work so that we can actively support and increase numbers of people with disabilities in the workforce. There is a real opportunity here.

Finally all in all I see a positive potential to apprenticeships, but this is conditional upon being able to use some of the money for salaries and challenging providers about why costs are increasing. From one ex apprentice to the next lets make it work and lets work together to give young people the chance to work cross sector or across different public bodies during the apprenticeship so they get a fantastic experience and no university debt!”

Hello PPMA colleagues and friends

In this week’s blog post, our amazing Apprentice of the Year, Matthew Wallis gives us an update on the work he has been doing on accessible apprenticeships for disabled people. Matthew speaks from very personal experience as he is hearing-impaired. For those of us that know Matthew well, we know that this ‘impairment’ does not make Matthew ‘less-than’ in any way. Caroline Nugent told us that Matthew’s commitment to raising opportunities for disabled apprentices is clear to see and his experience means that his thoughts have real insight and impact.

So over, to Matthew …….

“I would like to give an update on the progress being made by the PPMA to make sure that public sector organisations have the tools they require so that their apprenticeships are as accessible as possible for disabled people. For those of you who haven’t read my previous articles in the PPMA’s focus supplement, I feel very passionate about promoting the benefits of employing more disabled apprentices.

As a former hearing-impaired apprentice, I can say from personal experience that apprenticeships offer disabled people the chance to achieve great things – as long as the support is available to help them reach their potential. For employers, the benefits include the opportunity to shape their workforce to reflect the community served, the introduction of new skills and an increase in the number of high quality apprenticeship candidates.

Of the 7 million disabled people in the UK, 3.4 million are currently out of work. As a result of this, public sector organisations are missing out on the chance to employ talented members of staff. With increasing pressures in the public sector to ensure they recruit and retain the best talent, could providing accessible apprenticeships for people with disabilities, offer the much-needed key for a prosperous future workforce?

I think it can. The government has set an ambitious target of 3 million new apprenticeships by 2020. As part of this target, there has been an increased focus on the need to encourage and enable many more highly quality disabled candidates to start apprenticeships. There have already been a number of initiatives which aims to tackles this.  This includes:

–       The Apprenticeship Levy, where learning providers can receive additional funding for recruiting disabled apprentices;

–       And the Paul Maynard taskforce recommendations, which was a taskforce commissioned to explore access to apprenticeships for people with learning disabilities.

Despite these efforts, there is still a lot more work that needs to be done, to achieve the governments ambitious goals.

In the past few months, I have been undertaking research and building a case to determine what we can do to help bridge the apprenticeship gap for disabled people. As a result of this research, I provided the PPMA Policy Board an update earlier this month. I made 4 simple, but effective, recommendations which aims to tackle the gap.

• To produce a number of case studies of disabled apprentices in the public sector
• To gather statistics regarding disabled apprentices in the public sector
• To create a standard for an ‘Accessible Apprenticeship’
• To understand what barriers there may be in recruiting disabled apprentices

These recommendations will help PPMA and our employer organisations identify whether their apprenticeship programmes are as accessible as they could be. In the coming months, I will be working with our networks to try and make sure these recommendations become a reality.

If you know of any disabled apprentice in the public sector who would like to contribute to this project, either as a case study or to give feedback, please encourage them to contact me at matthew.wallis@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk.  Alternatively, if you have any thoughts, comments or suggestions please feel free to contact me or drop me an email.”

Matthew Wallis , PPMA Apprentice of the Year 2017

Hello PPMA members and friends

Caroline was recently interviewed for HR Magazine and we thought we’d share the fabulous interview with you here on our blog. It’s a great insight into Caroline’s passion and energy for her energy for HR. We hope you enjoy reading it!

‘With her irrepressible enthusiasm for all things HR it’s no wonder Caroline Nugent is the PPMA’s new president

It quickly becomes apparent in HR magazine’s photoshoot with director of HR and OD at oneSource, London Boroughs of Havering and Newham, and PPMA president Caroline Nugent, the best way to make her smile. Just say something along the lines of ‘think strong women, taking over the world’ (as HR magazine’s photographer did) and Nugent instantly lights up.

Talking about her 18-year-old daughter – who has just started an HR apprenticeship with the Treasury – elicits the same response. As does the topic of apprenticeships in general, HR discovers when chatting with Nugent afterwards in her office. And so do the many other people- and public sector-related topics Nugent passionately powers through.

“I’m a glass half-full person, completely,” she enthuses in reference to her passion for just getting out there and rising to whatever challenges life throws your way, and regarding how she first got into HR at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, straight from doing her A-Levels.

“Because it was a very big local authority you could work in central policy unit… down the depot… so they were almost like little companies – each had its own HR department and own issues,” she says. “That was a good grounding because it made me see so many different things. Then I decided to do my degree during the evenings. At that stage I had two young children and was the chair of governors and had quite a challenging job at a senior level. You do look back and think: how on earth did I do it?!

“But it’s about wanting to do it. That’s always been my thing in life. So whatever comes along you deal with it, because actually it’s happened for a reason. Life is like that and you just have to get on with it.”

This was exactly Nugent’s reaction when one week into her new job as head of strategic HR and OD at the London Borough of Havering, back in 2012, her chief executive came to her and explained, come 2014, she was going to be overseeing HR not just for this locality but for Newham as well.

“The week I started my chief exec said ‘by the way…’,” says Nugent. “But to me again the glass is half-full, this is life, and this is a great opportunity – so why not?!”

This was the beginning of a gradual three-year process to integrate many service functions across the two councils, with Havering and Newham’s partnership epitomising the growing public sector trend to cut costs through shared services.

Nugent’s counterpart in Newham became her deputy and the HR teams, while learning about each other and sharing best practice, remained distinct. As of October last year the teams have been fully merged, with their central base established at Havering council’s Romford offices.

“I used to have separate teams when we first set up; there were 13 different service areas so we couldn’t just say ‘tomorrow we’re going to merge everything together’. So we had a rolling programme,” reports Nugent.

Satellite offices at Newham mean that Nugent and her team can split their time between the two authorities, basing themselves at one or the other for whole days to save on travel and depending on where they’re needed. Romford was chosen as the central hub simply because this is where most, even former Newham, staff lived anyway, explains Nugent.

“We got the postcodes of everyone and put them on a map, and you could see the pocket,” says Nugent, advising that other organisations across the board sector-wise could definitely learn from this employee-led, evidence-based approach when it comes to office location.

Nonetheless this has been a difficult change to manage, says Nugent: “[HR staff] have had to go through a change programme themselves. That was a challenge because some people may have worked in one place for 20 years… We lost a number of staff through redundancies; that was a challenge for a team to see colleagues go. But they’ve come through it and it’s a good team.

“For me bringing the team together culturally was important,” she adds regarding creating a main hub in Romford. “You can’t change culture if you don’t put people together. It gives you the opportunity to say ‘this is how things work in this authority’. Then it’s not about saying anyone is the better authority.”

Which brings us to the benefits of councils sharing HR services. While cost-cutting has been the chief driver, there are many knowledge-sharing benefits beyond this for Nugent, despite the very different demographics and dynamics of the two boroughs.

Nugent cites dealing with IR35 changes as one topical example. “With IR35 we had one person co-ordinating across the two authorities. That made a real difference because it is very complex and the toolkit you have to use has changed even over the last couple of weeks,” she explains.

She adds that IR35 has also brought some positive gains. “Project management is difficult because people can just go to the private sector and get a better deal,” she says. “But with social care workers we said ‘if you’ve worked here you can apply for a job without going through the full process’, because we’d almost already tested them. So our permanent social workers have gone up significantly, which means we’re able to better control that recruitment market.”

Another example of the power of a partnership approach is apprenticeships. “Newham is the most ethnically diverse borough in the country and has a young, quite transient population. Havering is more elderly and rural,” says Nugent. “Because Newham has a very young population it has a ‘Yes Apprenticeship’ programme that has been going for more than 25 years. So we were able to take some of that model across to Havering.”

“We do things like speed dating,” adds Nugent, describing apprenticeship recruitment. “Because they’re coming into a big formal building and it’s quite intimidating. When I was interviewed in Waltham Forest it was a huge committee room with 10 behind a desk. So we have 10 managers and the apprentices will go round for three minutes; you see the real person more, it’s snappy and it relaxes people.”

Ensuring that as many people from as many different backgrounds as possible access apprenticeships clearly means a lot to Nugent. “I was an Essex girl from a working class family, one of three girls… In those days unless you were very bright you didn’t go to university,” she says.

“We [in public sector HR] used to have this drive where we said ‘everyone must be a grad and every job description has to have a degree’,” she adds. “It was discriminatory, because we know certain protected characteristics didn’t have the opportunity to go to uni. If the job requires it fine. But in HR you don’t need a degree so I’m pleased there’s been this whole tide turn.”

But while she appreciates a shift in attitudes and renewed government focus on apprenticeships, most notably in the form of the levy, Nugent is frustrated with some of the finer details.

“The levy is a great thing and I’m pleased it’s come in. But I have some reservations,” she says. “Some we’ve heard are using their training budget so they won’t have a training budget as a result of the levy. Some are saying ‘we can’t do it because the administrative side of it [takes too long]’. Others, like us, even though the company may be on the register to say they can provide the qualifications, because of procurement we have to go through a procurement process. So what should be a good thing now has a number of repercussions. Hopefully there’ll be some tweaks to it.”

This is just one area Nugent would like to see more government consultation on. Public sector HR particularly often gets overlooked in the consultation process, she feels. Which brings us on to Nugent’s 2017/18 PPMA presidency and what she’d like to achieve.

“There are policy decisions that get made that affect the public sector where it would have been more helpful to be asked at the earlier stages but no-one thought of us,” says Nugent. “The CIPD will give the professional viewpoint but what it won’t know is some of the nuances we have in the public sector. So that lobbying is important.”

Nugent cites the exit cap as a prime example. She explains that while logical in principle, the cap fails to take into account that where someone is made redundant in a local authority it’s obliged to release that person’s pension and compensate the pension scheme for releasing early.

“If that cost is £100,000 because you have to pay the pension scheme for the lost revenue of someone finishing early, that is actually taken into account in local government in that £96,000 cap, so in effect that means you as an individual don’t get anything,” explains Nugent. “It’s only local authorities that have to release the pension by law when you’re made redundant; the others don’t, you can defer it. But that wasn’t recognised.”

Another key ambition for Nugent’s stint as PPMA president is to continue the body’s work getting public sector HR more recognition. Nugent is tired of professionals in the sector still being seen as the poor relations to their private sector equivalents.

The reality, says Nugent, is that over the last seven years of austerity in particular, public sector HR has become highly commercial. “Historically people might have seen the public sector as: everyone’s useless, drinking cups of tea all day. I still think that’s how we’re perceived,” she says, laughing that actually “yesterday I had a cup of tea at 7.30 when I got into the office and I was made one at five o’clock!”

Nugent points out that this commerciality is evidenced by many local authorities, hers included, now selling to other councils. “My investigations and mediation services are now sold to other councils. So they have to be business-like, they have to work professionally, they have to behave as if they were private going in to sell something at an organisation. So it does frustrate me there is still this perception.”

This partnership approach is very much the future for public sector HR and indeed public sector support functions more widely, feels Nugent. “Because we’ve had such big cuts you’re not going to do it by yourself,” she says. “It’s sharing services like we do through oneSource, or it’s ‘can someone else do it for me?’ So not necessarily everyone selling… but outsourcing to other local authorities; we’ve got to be able to say ‘yes I want to work with that authority,’ and the money then stays in the public sector.”

With her PPMA hat on Nugent is also highly passionate about helping to counteract the long-bemoaned phenomenon that “men will go for a job where they can only do 20%, whereas women will say ‘but I can only do 99%’”, and not apply for it.

“We have to give young women the confidence to try it or do some more shadowing so when the opportunity comes up they’ve been exposed to it a bit more,” she says. “That’s something I want to do more of at the PPMA. You get where you are by having someone to talk to and we don’t do enough mentoring and coaching.”

Which brings us to the end of our interview and back to where we started in our photoshoot, imagining ‘strong women taking over the world’ superhero-style (Nugent’s hair is after all “cyber purple”). Indeed HR magazine gets the sense after our inspiration-filled hour with Nugent, that she is a strong woman capable of doing exactly that.’

Our post this week is a ‘Workforce News’ video podcast from our colleagues at the LGA and it features an interview with our President Sue Evans, who talks about the Apprenticeship Levy and it’s likely implications for councils. Phil Bundy, Senior Employment Law Advisor also talks about the legal aspects and impacts of the Levy.

To kick things off, Sarah Messenger who is the outgoing Head of Workforce at the LGA, reflects on her time in the role and the work that she has been involved with.  It’s a must watch!