Public Services Sector

One of the key areas of work for the South West Lifelong Learning Network was the professional and vocational curriculum development for the public services sector.

Public Services is one of the largest employers in the country. The Public Services sector is defined as part of economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government, whether national, regional or local.

The sector represents a broad cross section that is responsible for delivering services. This includes Police, Fire, Health, Social Care, Environment, Roads, Transport, Planning, Education and local leadership. To support these functions the third sector is working in partnership with the public sector to provide a variety of programme and services.

Rapid changes in the global infrastructure facilitated by processes of globalisation are fundamentally altering the makeup of today’s public sector organisations. Recent government reports such as the Office of the Deputy Prime Ministers paper ‘The Public Services 2015, The Stern report (2006) Lyons enquiry 2007, The Leitch report 2006, Peter Gershon 2006 report and The white paper Strong and Prosperous Communities 2006 have translated these rapidly altering global processes into tangible political imperatives.

With this in mind the role of competencies within organisational structures was identified as an important component of an organisation’s capacity to effectively respond to these concerns. Competences are the ability of an individual to perform activities within an organisation to a prescribed standard. However, they also represent the cultural and reflexive nature of the organisational structure as a whole.

In order to assess the nature of competency structure and enhance curriculum development and delivery an extensive programme of employer engagement has taken place. Over 150 interviews were conducted across the public sector. These interviews included the Police, Fire, I.D.E.A .County Council’s District Councils, Parish Councils, Health, P.C.Ts Unitary Authorities, Volunteer providers, Local Government Legal Officers, Political members and Education and Childcare Officers. To debate the outcomes of these interviews three high level focus groups were convened. These groups proved the researchers with some interesting comments and challenging ideas

The research team consisted of Prof. John Dixon, Ian Sherriff M.A. and Dr Gregory Borne who identified a series of core competencies which were integrated directly into curriculum development and enhanced the relevance of educational material.