By John AdairHow to Grow Leaders is a ground-breaking new book from acknowledged expert John Adair, which aims to set the record straight on leadership development. First he gives an invitation to join him on a journey of discovery about the nature of leadership and how it can be taught. Then he identifies the seven key principles of leadership development and answers vital questions on how to select, train and educate leaders at team, operational and strategic levels. He argues that leadership is not a soft skill, but a key factor in achieving success. How to Grow Leaders will help to develop these skills in others and provide a guide for the reader’s own personal journey towards excellence as a leader.

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Councillors in Leicester will be asked next week to endorse a series of recommendations about the future of the city’s night time economy, which have been drawn up following a review including a number of public sessions.The process began in December and the review team took written evidence from a wide range of groups, including residents, licensees, businesses and the police. The results of the review, the first of its kind to be led by councillors, will be presented to the City Council’s cabinet by Councillor Andy Vincent, who chairs the strategic planning and regeneration scrutiny committee, which sponsored the study.

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Local authorities in Wales are getting almost a million pounds from the Welsh Assembly Government to help them prevent homelessness and for their work to reduce the number of homeless people housed in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation.The money has been made available under the new Homelessness Grant Programme, which is primarily designed to help councils provide appropriate temporary housing for homeless people and families. A total of 959,000 is going to 26 schemes run by 19 councils across Wales.

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By Sandy Johnstone Long-term care provision in the United Kingdom has been the subject of much debate and analysis over the past decade, yet the issue of how to fund the cost of that care for future generations remains unresolved. Much of the debate has revolved around how the State should address the problem. As a consequence, the general public are unsure as to where their responsibilities and liabilities lie. The author reviews the current options.

Workers in Britain have collectively taken off around 78 million working days in the last 12 months, with some 13.9 million people having taken at least one day off due to sickness. These findings emerge from research by The Benenden Healthcare Society. The research also revealed that two million people or about 8% of the working population admitted to taking more than three weeks off sick in the last 12 months, totalling a loss of more than 30 million working days for their employer. Women were more likely to take time off than men, with 54% of women having taken at least one day off, compared to 46% of men.These figures from Benenden Healthcare are in line with a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development which revealed a rise in sick absence. It showed that public sector employers are hit harder than the private services sector. The gap between the number of sick days taken in the two sectors has widened by more than half a day since last year’s survey. Average absence levels in the public sector stand at 10.3 days per employee per year compared to 6.8 days in private services sector. The cost of absence in the public sector is 645 pounds per employee each year, rising to 1060 pounds within the health sector.

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The number of places available in care homes for the elderly and for people with disabilities fell by 8,700 in the year to April, according to a report out today. The “Care of Elderly People Market Report 2005”, published by Laing & Buisson, shows the number had reached 476,200 places across the private, voluntary and public sectors, putting capacity across all sectors at some 100,000 places lower than the peak in 1996.At the same time levels of demand also fell by 6,700 residents as local councils continued to rein back on placements, the report says. That meant occupancy rates in independent care homes reached almost 92 per cent. But the report says care home demand may be set to rise, contrary to Government opinion.

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This Guide from the Improvement and Development Agency looks at the fundamentals of customer service. It explores the options for customers to contact a council from enquiries being dealt with by someone responsible for a service, to the use of a single point of access to all services, through to joint enquiry centres dealing with calls about district and county council issues. It also deals with the various methods of measuring customer satisfaction. There is a warning that sample surveys and questionnaires can be unrepresentative because they will include some people who do not use services.The Guide concludes with a look local government culture. It stresses that thinking of the people councils serve as residents or council tax payers is not helpful in raising standards of service. Council officers working on the front-line need to think of the people they deal with as customers. Although people who use council services cannot walk away and take their business elsewhere, they need to be treated as if they can do so.

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England’s Regional Development Agencies are not getting through well to local business and when they do get through they are failing to impress. This is the result of a poll by NOP of 500 members of the Institute of Directors. Launched in 1999 Regional Development Agencies were created in the English regions. Their mission is to transform the regions through sustainable economic development. Their role as strategic leaders is to influence and mobilise the efforts of regional partners across the public, private, community and voluntary sectors.The level of understanding of RDAs’ functions amongst the directors participating in the survey was generally low. Less than one third of members said that they understood the role and activities of the RDA in their region ‘quite well’ or ‘very well’. Only 17% of the directors surveyed had contacted their RDA over the course of the previous year for information or advice on business issues. The members surveyed were unimpressed with the Agencies’ awareness of the needs of businesses. Only 8% of those who had heard of their RDA agreed that it understood the needs of their organisation. A substantial body of directors feel that the Agencies lack both a prominent profile in their regions and
empathy with the needs of business.

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Projects from six local authorities will share 130 million pounds of funding which will go towards the cost of library and sport facilities under the Private Finance Initiative. Bristol, Worcestershire, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Wigan councils now have to drawn up outline business cases to qualify for their share of the money.The six were chosen from projects submitted by 32 local authorities in England that were assessed by experts from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Sport England and the 4Ps – Public, Private Partnerships Programme – to establish their value and sustainability.

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This report from the Department for Education and Skills and the National College for School Leadership sets out a challenge to policy makers and practitioners to contribute to the goal of offering every student personalised learning. It argues that the frontline of learning is not the classroom, but the bedroom and the living room, because the education system’s biggest untapped resource is the children themselves. The biggest gains in terms of learning productivity will come from mobilising as yet under-utilised resources available to the education system: children, parents, families and communities. The ultimate goal of personalised learning is to encourage children to see themselves as co-investors with the state in their own education. The report sets out how this transformation can be achieved.The report is available at: http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/STC%5B1%5D.pdf

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