By Richard Veryard. Reproduced by permission of the Public Management and Policy Association. The term ‘joining up’ public services severely underestimates the magnitude and complexity of the task. The author outlines some of the important requirements for meeting the challenge of ‘joining up’ services. He looks at the effect of changing relationships between organizations, resisting the temptation to impose solutions, and using technology as a bridge between users and systems. The core of joined up services is about connections between people, both inside and outside government.

The Department for Education and Skills has set up an Innovation Unit, whose job will be to seek out and encourage those schools coming up with innovative ideas.The unit is being set up to reflect the fact that the best ideas aren’t happening centrally, but are being introduced by teachers, sometimes despite central edicts.

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The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has gone live with a recruitment website for civil servants. Details of all job vacancies, schemes and programmes available at the department are now available online.Visitors to the site can search 80 different career paths, and can join a recruitment database to be e-mailed with details of the latest vacancies.

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