Work & progress

The Member Development programme aims to help Members further improve their effectiveness as local community leaders, and specifically in their roles:  

• Acting as the advocate for local people, understanding their needs and aspirations
• Acting as the champion for their area with a high profile
• Challenging and scrutinising services
• Promoting customer first principles, through setting priorities and making tough choices to shape services around customers

A series of workshops were developed with the Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA) and ran between June and December 2007 for elected members from the County and District Councils in Wiltshire.  Additional workshops focusing on Community Cohesion were also arranged to strengthen member awareness of equality and diversity issues.

Workbooks on key skills for elected members have been designed and promoted to members, to provide a choice of training options. The Autumn workshops commenced in September 2007 and ran until December 2007. Click here to view the programme.

A BTEC qualification has been developed, linked to the workshop progamme, that enables members to formalise their work into a nationally recognised qualification.Further details on this can be found here.

The member survey was being repeated in September 2007 and again at the end of the programme in December 2007, to track progress against the initial baseline.

Proposals for written briefing materials on aspects of equality and diversity were put forward for consideration by the WIP Board in September. Now approved, these will form an additional resource to increase member awareness of community cohesion matters within Wiltshire.