Nelson Croom's Blog

What does the Coalition mean for the Voluntary Sector?

by David Croom

With so many of our clients now coming from the voluntary sector, I wanted to find out what the new Coalition government would mean for them. Last week I went to an Action for Planning Conference to hear Francis Maude, the cabinet minister responsible for the voluntary sector. Not much detail on policy but he sees plenty of scope to deliver social service more locally and more cheaply. He reckons there are 150,000 dysfunctional families in the UK, each costing, on average, £100,000 a year. There are apparently 3 families in Birmingham which have together cost £36m over three generations. His instinct is to push the delivery of service down to the super local in the style of Turning Point.

Despite worries about Coalition budget cuts, life may be easier than under Labour. A Glasgow MP was quoted as saying so many of his Labour colleagues were from the voluntary sector that they tended to micro-manage everything; at least you could trust the Tories to delegate.

To explore Coalition, or at least Conservative thinking, on the voluntary sector, I turned to Red Tory, the new polemic from Philip Blond, the guru of centre right social policy with his own think tank, ResPublica. Already a strong influence on David Cameron’s rhetoric, Blond may have a role in shaping the “Big Society”. He is certainly an enthusiast for the localism voiced by Cameron and Francis Maude.

Blond is big on Broken Britain: it’s all the fault of middle class liberal values, giving “social primacy to the individual and their right to choose”. Mingling Baptist brimstone with wafts of Anglo-Catholic piety, he denounces liberal individualism and the welfare state in equal measure. They have combined to destroy the British culture of virtue and “the long standing social values held by the working class and thereby…the mutualism these values enshrined”.

After 1945 the state “nationalised a previously mutual society and reformed it according to an individualised culture of universal entitlement”. After 1968, the mass bohemians, liberated by sex, drugs and rock n’roll, shrugged off custom , tradition, family and community and left the state to pick up the pieces of the fragmented society that followed. “In unleashing the freedom of the 1960s, it is those at the bottom who have suffered most acutely” Furthermore they provide continuous employment for the managerial class of the welfare state “whose interests… are intimately tied up with the eternal perpetuation of the problem they purport to address”.

Blond believes David Cameron’s new civic conservatism can turn back this self perpetuating state Leviathan. “Cameron has called for a recovery of the society and the refashioning of the state to facilitate human relationships and the building of new communities and a new capitalism that works for society rather than against it”.

The instruments of reform at least in the public services are the energy and motivation of front-line staff. Reorganised into social enterprises or civil associations and delivering services locally, they can achieve savings of 20-40% in some situations. Employee ownership, in the John Lewis mould, is the driver: “Ownership is the crucial means by which true leadership by front-line workers and real engagement by users of services can be achieved”.

Is there more to Cameron’s thinking on reform of the welfare state than traditional Tory pragmatism? Is there really a vital role for social enterprise and the voluntary sector? Philip Blond believes there is. Let’s see if the Coalition delivers.

10 years on: CPD

by Alan Nelson

The emergence of Continuing Professional Development as a serious part of professionals’ lives has been one of the key developments that have shaped the company over the last ten years.

Of course, nothing is completely new. It’s not as though professionals didn’t engage in their own development. Some of the ideas were around back in 2000, but the language was different. I remember a lot of talk of “cradle to grave lifelong learning”. If we were to prosper as a society, we were told, competing in a global market, we would all have to become knowledge workers , using our superior skills to stay ahead of competitors in lower wage developing economies.

So when did CPD start and how? The honest answer is that I don’t know. So I did what every lazy researcher does and turned to Wikipedia. I was amused to note that if you type CPD into the online encyclopedia, it comes up with a host of other expansions of the initials, nineteen of which apparently rank higher than Continuing Professional Development. So however important it may seem to me and to the people I talk to in professional bodies, we should all remember that it ranks nine lower than the Oregon based rock band, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Puts it in perspective doesn’t it? I should also say that the entry is far from comprehensive and includes this comment from the moderators:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

Now there’s a project a group of us should turn our minds to.

Good professionals have always strived to stay current and this has been explicitly stated by many. The British Psychological Society, for example, had the following principle in their Code of Conduct long before they established their formal CPD regime:

“Psychologists shall endeavour to maintain and develop their professional competence, to recognise and work within its limits, and to identify and ameliorate factors which restrict it.”

Often through a network of local branches, professional bodies have encouraged their members to engage in training and development. Many of our early projects focused on this sort of activity and were designed simply to extend the reach of the professional development services on offer to members.

Over the years CPD has become more clearly defined. The Professional Associations Research Network suggests the following:

“[CPD is defined as] 'any process or activity that provides added value to the capability of the professional through the increase in knowledge, skills and personal qualities necessary for the appropriate execution of professional and technical duties, often termed competence.”

For what it’s worth, I think I prefer there to be more of an emphasis on currency. This definition from The Health Professions Council works for me:

“A range of learning activities through which health professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practise safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice.”

Alongside this clearer definition of what is needed, there has been a move towards greater compulsion.

The move towards more tightly controlled and monitored CPD has been driven partly by the professional bodies. In health they are responding to adverse public reaction to high profile medical malpractice cases, and elsewhere the response is to other governance related cases such as Enron, which has been the catalyst for action in the accounting profession. This is reinforced by pressure from government for the professional bodies the get their house in order if they want to retain their regulatory role.

This move to the right of the scale created a demand for CPD resources of all kinds. What was exciting for me personally was that this world looked remarkably similar to others that I knew all about. I cut my teeth as a publisher producing textbooks for students. Students would buy good books in greater numbers than bad books. They found out whether a book was good either through peer recommendation or through a suggestion from their lecturer. But one thing was clear – they were mostly going to buy a book because they knew they needed it to get through their course.

The parallels with CPD were clear. I could see that if we could produce something good it would sell better than something bad. Good would have to be defined. It might mean any or all of: engaging, relevant, authoritative or fun, for example, but it was the existence of a CPD regime requiring professionals to complete and record their CPD that would ensure that they would buy something. It created a market.

It was to meet the demands of this market that we developed our publishing programme. We now offer our courses to a wide variety of professionals and are learning all the time about what they like and what they want. We also understand more about who is most likely to opt for online CPD:

• Judging by our sales, CPD activity is highest in regulated professions where CPD in mandatory and monitored. We have also been pleased to see that alongside the move to more regulated CPD, individuals are starting to migrate rapidly towards online offerings.

• In the UK and Ireland, two thirds of the courses are bought by women, who make up only one third of our audience. More women work part time and find it difficult to fit attendance at face to face events around other commitments.

• There is a bias in take up towards younger, newly qualified accountants, although this is not nearly as pronounced as expected.

• More courses are bought by those in practice, where a future course booking may conflict with a paid client work, whereas completion of CPD online can be fitted around other priorities.

• Finally, take-up is highest where CPD is monitored on an inputs basis – by hours or points – rather than on an outputs basis.

One of the things I like about publishing online is that you can see how people are using the courses. I never knew how someone used a book but I know exactly how they use our online courses. This means we can continually evolve our approach to meet their needs. So although more than 95% of users consistently rate our courses as good or excellent, and 98% say that the course has met their professional development needs, we continue to develop the offering to meet the needs of a CPD world that may well change over the next ten years as much as it has over the last.

10 years on: How learning design has changed

by Angela Smith

I don’t know where we’re going, but I sure know where we’ve been…

Nelson Croom’s 10th Birthday celebrations have brought up a few feelings for me. For starters, it made me think about the fact that I’ve been at the company for six of those ten years. This thought makes me a) very proud and b) much older than I like to think I am. What’s that? Your thirties aren’t part of your twenties? Rubbish.

It also set me thinking about how we have changed our approach to learning design since I’ve been here. When I started, we had a very set way of approaching learning design. It revolved around the theory that there are four basic learning styles and we had three activity types which we mapped to these learning styles. In fact, we were pretty dogmatic about this approach and if anyone suggested that their programme should follow a different structure or – god forbid – be linear, we’d quite happily say “I’m afraid we don’t do that” and show them the door.

Over the past six years, I’ve seen our thinking on learning styles develop. We are still concerned with the concept of learning styles and, where appropriate, providing learners with the ability to choose their own route through their learning materials, but we are more open to the fact that we can offer the benefits of different activity types without explicitly labelling them and attaching them to a style of learner.

So why the big change? Well, firstly, we have learned a lot from our clients and the learning experts they work with, being exposed to new learning theory along the way. We’ve also learned from the collective wisdom of the industry as it moves forward and examines itself via conferences and industry communities. And of course, we’ve received feedback from the multitudes of learners who have been through our courses over the years.

Our response to all these influences has been to become more flexible in our approach to learning design. We can now bring ourselves to admit that sometimes a linear approach is the best one, whereas sometimes our classic Nelson Croom activity streams are most appropriate – and there are all sorts of exciting possibilities in between and perhaps beyond. In addition to this, our focus on learner community has grown with our technology and what we are hearing now is that getting to see what their peers have to say is of growing importance to our learners.

Our approach has also become more flexible as we work with more and more clients who have different learner groups with different needs. Working in the area of compliance, for example, prompted us to develop Imago to allow a more robust linear approach, but a linear approach which provided the scope for interactive branching case studies where the learner chose their own path – flexibility arising from seeming inflexibility.

If I can be permitted to go a bit Grand Designs on you, while the foundations of everything we build at Nelson Croom are still firmly rooted in our origins, the buildings that rise up from these foundations are appearing in ever more exciting shapes and configurations. Above all, I think this opening out of approach points to the fact that we are more confident in our scoping and development process and our expertise in learning than ever. It will be fascinating to see where the next ten years lead us.

Formal vs informal learning: a thought from Training Zone Live

by Jacqui Nelson

I had a great day on Tuesday at Training Zone Live. I learnt a lot, particularly about social media which was my main reason for attending. I’ll write more about that later but I wanted to share (that’s what social media is all about!) a couple of stories. Here’s the first;
The last session of the day was an ‘Ask the panel’ event. The panel included Peter Honey, Jim Kirkpatrick and Charles Jennings (who has appeared often in this blog). It was good to hear the majority (if not all) of the panel talking about how we need to move from thinking about ‘training’ people to thinking about enabling people to ‘learn’.

‘Facilitating learning NOT teaching’ is a concept central to what we do at Nelson Croom, and has been for 10 years. I think, it’s particularly important with online learning because the internet should be about freedom not constraint. It is in no small part due to the popularity of the internet that people now expect to be able to learn what they want to learn in a style that suits them. People want to discover not to be told. People want to learn, not be taught.

We embrace this in our courses; but for some of the panel this is not enough. They would like to take it further. Perhaps there should be no formal learning at all, just the learning that is part of our everyday life. The information we absorb, learning on the job etc.
I can see the point, and there is no doubt that more and more ‘learning’ is outside of a formal ‘classroom’ setting but I still think there is a place for a ‘course’. Here’s why.

I’ve been learning lots about social media recently. My learning has been purely self-directed and much of it has been ‘informal’ learning. (The best advice I got was to ‘follow a teenager around for a week – that’ll teach you about social media!’) But a good part of my learning has been formal too. I’ve watched videos on you tube, attended a webinar (ok, only lasted 8minutes then did my emails and got back on google)………… and I went to Training Zone Live, didn’t !?

I’m happy with my informal learning but there is a point where I want to interact with an ‘expert’ and that’s where I will look to ‘formal’ learning.