This toolkit draws on the authors’ recognition of the multi-agency nature of many community programmes, including urban regeneration and community safety. It emerged as a response to the increasing interest in partnerships reviewing their activities and developing more effective ways of working. It provides practical activities for partnerships to review, assess, check, evaluate and plan their activities across both partnerships and networks. It offers a variety of training materials in the form of tables, checklists, exercises, comments, and mapping and planning tools to address issues of power, membership and the nature of networking.The toolkit sets out approaches towards understanding the complexities in thinking about partnerships and networks through attitudes, accountability, leadership, and tensions between them. It also offers a practical approach for practitioners working in partnerships and networks to review and challenge their coexistence and develop appropriate monitoring activities.
Policies to persuade parents to find work as a means to tackle family poverty have a downside and are sending the wrong signal. Five years of research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with 19 separate projects has revealed a lot of tired parents, a large amount of dissatisfaction, and a desire to cut down working hours, or even give up paid work altogether. The report, ‘Work and family life in the 21st century’, warns policy makers that the accompanying implication that paid childcare is somehow ‘better’ than parental care runs contrary to the instincts of many parents.The report argues that parents of both sexes support action to help them put their families first, and that stereotyped images of child-centred mothers and work-focused fathers are increasingly out-of-date. More than half all fathers work more than a 40-hour week, including 30 per cent who routinely exceed the 48 hours a week limit set by the EU Working Time Directive. Employed parents are more likely to work outside the normal ‘nine to five’ than other workers. Some 53 per cent of mothers, 54 per cent of lone mothers and 79 per cent of fathers frequently work at atypical times of day. More than half all fathers, and over a third of mothers work at least one Saturday a month, while a quarter of mothers and nearly a third of fathers work on Sundays.
A programme for developing teachers to take on headships in Scottish schools is having a positive impact and the learning from it will be transferred to a new continuing professional development framework.Researchers from Paisley University found that the programme was successful for both candidates and their headteachers. The impact for candidates is strongest in the development of management and leadership skills, while the strongest impact on schools is often perceived to be on the learning and teaching culture of the institution. The work-based ‘action learning model’ which underpins the programme empowers candidates professionally, inspiring confidence and leading them to become interested in fundamental educational issues