Project Aim - What were your organisation's overall aims and objectives at the outset? How did you think this programme might benefit you?
Generally through participating in this programme we hoped to benefit from the expert advice in making use of the Inspiring Learning for All framework, resources, materials and methods in the most effective way in order to achieve some or all of the identified objectives. We hoped that the mentor would help us to clarify and focus in order to set the most appropriate and achieveable objectives. They are divided according to the ILFA areas:
People - Learning Outcomes
Use the Inspiring Learning for all framework to audit, the informal learning opportunities offered through Peterborough libraries and Heritage. Making use of the Inspiring Learning for All checklist to identify strengths, areas for improvement and gaps in provision.
Use and make understood across the service the MLA definition of learning from Campaign for Learning, 'Effective learning leads to change, development and the desire to learn more'
Build and develop a cross service 'Learning Team' to lead and co-ordinate learning across the service, share best practice, cascade knowledge and skills.
Focussing on the learning opportunities offered across our services, the 'People' processes, in evaluating whether and how we provide effective learning opportunities, relevant to our particular communities.
To make use of Inspiring Learning for All GLOs in developing and designing informal learning opportunities and setting objectives for learning activity across all parts of the service. Including galleries and exhibitions.
Seek to capture, evaluate and quantify the outcomes of learning opportunities on individuals through use of our GLOs
Use ILfA to ensure that our venues provide activities that have outcomes around enjoyment, inspiration and creativity and activity, behaviour and progression, Attitudes and Values and to capture these changes as they contribute to a lifelong learning culture.
Practically to design a suite of 'evaluation tools' to capture both attitude and motivation at engagement and outcomes following the sessions in line with the GLOs taken from the Inspiring Learning for All framework and in line with best practice from Adult Learning through Learndirect.
People - Staff Developmnt
To use ILfA in establishing a Staff Development Strategy which effectively treats our staff as 'learners' and establishes the service as a Learning Organisation, where staff feel valued and see change flexibility and 'self development as part of work/life'
To embed the ILfA definition of Learning across the organisation in order for staff by making development opportunities accessible and flexible so that they fit around the demands of a front line service.
To make use of the ILfA framework to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of development and training through making use of GLOs
Feed into staff Appraisal, performance and development review processes
Policy, Advocacy and Partnership
To ensure that learning is built into everything we do and is at the core of our services.
Use ILfA as an advocacy tool and framework to evidence, quantity and gain recognition for the contribution of the libraries, museum and archive servcies to the learning agenda and clarify our position as providers of learning in Peterborough as a 'Learning City'.
Make use of the ILfA framework to make understandable to other services/departments, outside organisations and partners the role that Libraries and Heritage fulfil in the learning agenda.
Recognition will enable us to participate and seek out partners in delivering creative learning programmes to target learners. Programmes that could not be delivered by any one partner alone.
These were ambitious and wide ranging objectives but aligned with development of the organisation and current service priorities so were seen by the project lead as attainable and that the ILfA initiative would actually increase the likelihood of attaining these objectives.
Process - Briefly describe your process. (How did you select the team; how often did you meet over what period; how did you involve colleagues not on team; how did you identify priorities?)
Selecting the team:
It is important to note that the whole initiative was driven by a very committed staff member with both a learning background and with Learning as their main job remit (Gillian Barclay, Learning Services Manager). Gillian had originally attended one of the original ILfA workshops sometime before (not sure of date but Hazel and Jenny led it at PCAE in Peterborough) and was already convinced of the power of ILfA and could therefore fill the role of advocate for the service. In addition several members of the core team were strong advocates of ILfA, interestingly both based in the Museum service.
The diagonal slice team were selected from across all the different functional areas of the MLAs by asking for volunteers from the identified teams and obtaining support from their Line Managers to be released.
A main threat to success of the project was the timing of the project whereby the Library service in particular were very short of staff and this resulted in low attendance at workshops and as you will see less participation and progress using ILfA. This was unfortunate but a reality in a pressured front line service. However, museum and archive staff although very much in the same position prioritised this project and fully participated both services showing considerable benefit. The question must be asked as to why the different involvement and prioritisation between services in the same organisation?
The inital workshop took place in November 2005 with the ILfA mentor and the diagonal slice group in 2 sessions due to size of Diagonal Slice across all three service areas. In retrospect it would have been better to involve all the team members in one first session to aid team cohesion and to set the shared agenda.
Cascade sessions carried out fully across the Museum and Archive service with all staff involved but due to staff pressures only some cascade sessions took place across the library service in November and December.
The sessions:
The sessions were devised to the attached agenda with the one of the express aims to idenfity the 3 priority areas for organisational change across all three services. The sessions also introduced ILfA and the 'pyramid' technique to engage people with ILfA, which worked extremely well.
Session 1 - The top priorities for organisaitonal change against the ILfA areas of people, places, partnerships, policies-plans-performance were identified for each of the service areas Museum, Library and Archive and within service staff groups were asked to prioritise them to identify the main priorities for their service area.
Session 2 - The main priorities were looked at as a total to see if each service area had the same or different priorities for change. In fact they were on the whole the same across the organisation. Then the whole diagonal slice team took the priorities from all three services carried out by a pyramid exercise to order by importance and obtain the top three.
The identified of priorities:
(in order of importance)
Setting a clear vision and strategy to deliver
Staff Development - To develop as a learning organisation
Consultation-Evaluation and Feedback - to use ILfA for the complete cycle from planning, implementation, evaluation and feedback and back to planning
Marketing and Accessibility
Advocacy
Partnerships
The core team took the list of priorities to the MLA workshop - 5th December in order to decide the focus for the initative and what the service would work on with their mentor. The core team narrowed the priorities to the top three and took back to the diagonal slice team to decide on which of the three to take forward as the focus for organisational change and to use in the remaining 2 workshops with our mentor.
The diagonal slice team decided to focus on Consultation-Evaluation and Feedback and in particular the more practical outcomes in this priority area such as practical planning and evaluation tools. (ILfA was already being introduced in the areas of staff development, service planning and communication). The team felt it was important to focus on something tangible and that would meet an identified need within the organisation as it was felt that due to staff pressures only something recognised as needed would be likely to get backing and succeed.
The initative culminated in the decision to use ILfA to drive a concrete project, namely planing and delivery of the 'Family Learning Week' across all three service areas - Museum, libraries and archives. The outcome would be a really innovative and vibrant 2 weeks of activities for our customers! The diagonal slice team would lead and hopefully the success of this approach and using ILfA would demonstrate and 'sell' the model of collaborative working using ILfA to colleagues.
Outcomes - Including successes and challenges.
Organisational learning, changes/improvements in policies and programmes
Service Planning: The museum service embraced and adopted principles of ILfA and started to use the tools in both service delivery and planning. All of the priorities for organisational change identified in the cascade sessions have been incorporated into the service plan for the year. The pyramid exercise was instrumental in team work to identify shared views and recognition of the museum as a learning organisation.
Learning organisations - Participation in the programme has helped embed learning in the Heritage and Archives services and align with the learning agenda in recognising that both services are 'learning organisations'. Both services are incorporating ILfA into planning and evaluation fo the service offer. In particular the service has developed a planning template which includes uses ILfA and considers the GLOs and Learning styles in planning all aspects of planning museum activities, exhibitions and events.
Cross service working and collaboration: A major benefit has been in cross service working and communication. People have got to know people in other services! Who does what! In addition the service has promoted positive dialogue and collaborative working between museum and archives services which started with working together on the family learning project.
The family Learning project: The one concrete outcome is the 'Family Learning Project' which has been the focus of for the ILfA inititative and will go forward as a cross service project. In addition the existing group of staff working on learning initiatives will join members of the diagonal slice team to take the project forward.
The aim is that this will provide a model for future collaborative working and be the group to promote ILfA priniciples for learning.
Advocacy - ILfA will be used to provide part of the toolkit for a powerful advocacy tool which services can use in demonstrating their contribution to corporate aims and objectives especially around learning and their value to the wider education and learning agenda.
Evaluation Tools - the Heritage team has begun to develop a suite of 'creative evaluation and feedback tools' including our very successful 'Ideas Tree' a simple yet powerful way to capture targeted and pertinent feedback or ask that one burning question.
Performance Management - A set of planning, action and evaluation forms have been developed to support the use of ILfA and learning as a driver for performance management and continuous improvement. These have been shared with other services participating in the ILfA initative. We also used learning as a powerful and understandable way for staff to see how performance management in a learning organisation should work.
Individual Learning
We did not specifically audit this but on the whole most people remarked on the greater awareness they had gained abotu learning styles, their own learning style and how this affects their behaviour, learning and perceptions.
Diagonal slice and core teams
The diagonal slice team was recognised as a powerful forum for collaborative project working and in particular to get the views and ideas that truly represent the organisation, from the coalface to the upper echelons and thereby enabling true representation of the organisation and to lead in bringing about organisational change and use for ILfA.
The core team: As noted above from this experience we consider that it is critical to success of the project to have a committed core team who believe in ILfA and can 'sell' the benefits of using ILfA to colleaguse and the organisation. The success of the initiative in the museums and archives can certainly be attributed in a major way to the drive of their representatives in the core team and in part explain why less progress was made in libraries where the core team member was seconded to the museum just as the project started. The crucial role of this team should not be underestimated.
In addition an unexpected beneficial outcome is the pyramid tool as a simple, effective and non threatening tool for use in identifying and prioritizing whilst avoiding conflict. In addition it sometimes reveals unspoken values and opinions. This also provided the basis for discussion and change.
Working with other organisations as part of a learning network
Working with other organisaions was really beneficial in several ways
Firstly to appreciate that the major priorities for organisational change were on the whole common issues for all organisations in the group
To see how other organisaitons approached ILfA, their chosen priority areas and how they worked on those areas
The group of organisations provided valuable peer support and were generous in sharing experiences and best practice. It would have been useful if this continued.
Future Plans
How do you plan to continue working to achieve your objectives and address your priorities?
The Family Learning Project: will continue and bring together Digaonal slice and the learning teams across services to work together on one shared project objective. A successful 'learning'; offer for service customers.
In addition it is hoped that this work will provide, not only a successful family learning week but also a successful model for collaborative working and sell the benefits of using ILfA.
We will use ILfA to provide strong evidence as part of an Advocacy vehicle for services. Making use of GLOs, mapping of customer feedback, case studies and quotes along with the recognisable business measures for success such as visitor numbers.
We will continue to build a suite of creative evaluation tools suited to audience and situation (the ideas tree is part of this)
We will continue to cascade the benefits of ILfA across services particularly the library service.
Lobby MLA to develop website to be more user friendly and act as more practical toolkit with resources etc and to give more mentor support and develop champions and organise networking whether F2F or online.
Other:
What advice would you give to another organisation embarking on this without consultancy support?
Selling the concept - ILfA is a bit woollly when presented for the first time as a general concept. People find it hard to answer the question, 'What is ILfA'? So our advice would be to ensure that when ILfA is introduced into the organisaiton enough time is taken to understand the different aspects and we would recommend introducing more tangible aspects first through concrete examples or project.
Learning Styles: This is one of the more understandable aspects of learning and ILfA and had an immediate and recognisable impact on all involved.
Getting Buy in: Support is needed at the highest level and a champion within each service area to drive the agenda forward and sell benefits. Without this it won't happen. (see earlier comments on core team).
Cascading and group working: This is extremely difficult in a widespread and disperate organisation such as Libraries with multiple venues and tightly timetabled frontline staff. This presented a real challenge to the initative and we would advise some time is given to allow for staff to be involved and for cascade sessions to take place across the whole service.
Time: Allow more time for reasons behind stated! This is a major reason that our libraries to some extent got left behind.
How to ensure the best chance of success: Do something concrete, that meets an identified need and has beneficial outcomes if you want to buy in and the best chance of success in a pressured service - not extra if you want buy in!!!
Experience: It would have been good to talk to other organisations who had been through the experience.
To conclude we would like to thank MLA East of England for giving us the opportunity to participate in this initative, the support of Hazel Courtley and our mentor Gaby Porter. It has been a valuable learning experience from which the services has measurably benefitted.
Gillian Barclay
Learning and Heritage Services Manager
Peterborough Libraries, Heritage and Archives
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