Medway Council: Carousel Training Days

Our work with Medway has had several strands and has been continuing since 1998. The Equalities and Diversity project has had three phases. With the aim of mainstreaming equalities into all Council activities and to ensure that managers and staff integrate equalities into their key functions, Equality works were commissioned to carry out ‘Carousel training days.’

A ‘Carousel day’ is a conference where every participant has the opportunity to attend three topic-based workshops. The training is called ‘Carousal day’ because of their format of rotating workshops.

We designed and led training of ten large groups with approximately 500 trainees. The training was open to all of the staff at the Council. This style of training event is designed to:

• Raise awareness of an issue
• Stimulate thoughts
• Pass on information
• Give delegates the opportunity to maximize their knowledge in a short space of time.

The Carousel Training Days were successful as they gave trainees as well as the Council the opportunity to:

• Reflect on an analysis of institutional discrimination and Medway’s policies
• Enhance the range and depth of their understanding of equal opportunities
• Explore three equality and diversity topics
• An opportunity to apply their knowledge of equalities to line-management meetings

Having completed the Equalities Carousel Training days we followed up with specific training events for managers and teams. These events were skills-based and covered staffing issues and service delivery in more detail. Thus, the phase 2 training consisted of:

• A three-day Equalities training programme for all directorate teams, concentrating on strategy;
• A three-day Equalities programme for all service managers, concentrating on planning and service delivery;
• A two-day Equalities programme for all team leaders; and
• Specialist training for the HR team; Adult and Community Education Management Team; Youth Service Management Team; Educational Psychologists Team.

Part of our responsibility in the final phase was to ensure that the various strands of equality training and initiatives were connected so the organisation could derive maximum benefit from the project. This also involved designing a positive action programme to assist with future implementation of messages delivered at the training.