Attachment of Development Team Members

The decision was made, as part of establishing the Partnership, that there were lessons to be learnt from the relative successes and failures of other large scale development activities. If the Partnership was to add momentum through its partners then it needed to:

• not take on too much of a ‘presence’ beyond the activities of the various partners
• not appoint lots of staff to itself, but work through the motivational staff within partners
• leave development capacity within partners and within delivery agencies i.e. not strip out the very infrastructure which change would rely on.

The mechanism used was one of identifying those people who had development/change roles (re literacy, language and numeracy) within each partner and to partially ‘release’ these staff to do their normal job from within a network of similar people, from the other partners. This loose network of people ‘attached’ to the Partnership’s function would collectively act as the Partnership’s development team.

Attaching someone for e.g. 1 day per week meant that any ideas discussed in the development network one day, could be immediately taken out and discussed within their ‘home’ organisation the next. This created a dynamic interplay between the partners and the partnership that would have been missing if we had used separate appointments to the partnership or if we had seconded people out of partner organisations to work for the partnership.

Spending time occasionally in discussions with other attached development workers meant that cross linkages between partners’ planned developments could be spotted early on and created the sense that ‘we’re all in this together; we need to be making rapid progress’, and ensured that this message was consistently taken back to within each partner organisation.

What follows is the briefing note and letter of confirmation sent to partners:

The attachment of development workers from various partners will enable the Core Skills Development Partnership to be advised and supported in relation to particular areas of the Business Plan.

The attachments create a loose networked team that are able to

• bring to the team a degree of expertise to share, related to current developments within their own particular area of work
• act as the key link person between the team and their own external networks related to that area of work
• negotiate development activities which can be worked on to produce improved proposals that have broad support
• undertake initial assessment of ideas being developed and offer support to partner organisations
• draw up Activity Agreements for approval by the Core Skills Development Partnership, and monitor the progress of agreed activities
• identify progress towards outcomes; identify and share any wider insights gained
• promote and explain the nature of the Core Skills Development Partnership
• represent the Core Skills Development Partnership in various ways

Whilst the day-to-day direction of any attached time lies with the Partnership, the development worker remains an employee of the “donating” partner organisation (who remains responsible for all personnel issues).