A new body has been set up to tackle bureaucracy in the Learning and Skills Sector. The Bureaucracy Review Group has been created by the Department for Education and Skills and the Learning and Skills Council and will be chaired by Sir Andrew Foster.The establishment of the group is a direct response to the Sweeney report on bureaucracy in the Further Education college sector. Sir Andrew, who will initially spend around four days a month in this role, has been appointed by the Education Secretary Charles Clarke and will report directly to him and to Bryan Sanderson, Chairman of the Learning and Skills Council.

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Councils and their staff are to benefit from a new range of activities designed to improve skills and expertise in local government. The capacity building programme has been set out in a joint prospectus from the Local Government Association and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Councils will have to contribute towards the cost of improvement but the programme aims to make capacity building activities affordable and accessible.The two bodies have allocated 27 million pounds to develop the national framework set out in the prospectus, which outlines the first group of available programmes. Additional activities will be added under a number of themes as part of a three-year programme. The ODPM and the LGA will send regular updates to councils about these.

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James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. PosnerBuilding on the knowledge base of their previous books, the third edition of The Leadership Challenge is grounded in extensive research and based on interviews with all kinds of leaders at all levels in public and private organizations from around the world. In this edition, the authors emphasize that the fundamentals of leadership are the same today as they were in the 1980s, and as they’ve probably been for centuries. In that sense, nothing’s new. Leadership is not a fad. While the content of leadership has not changed, the context has-and in some cases, changed dramatically.

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