Wandsworth Council: Harassment Training

We were commissioned by the Council Tax & Benefits department at Wandsworth Council to undertake Equalities and Diversity needs analysis with the senior management team in the department.

We started by reading and analysing relevant department documents, including an overview of the on-going management development training, the department’s business plan and the recent CPA inspection results. We also looked at Impact Assessments that had been undertaken and the equality policies, structures and systems developed to support the service.

We combined this research with our wide experience of designing and using questionnaires and interview techniques to allow us to assess existing understanding of equalities and diversity as well as identifying training needs. We developed a questionnaire and interview questions to fully understand the training needs of the department. This was extremely important as it is hard to generalise about the department as a whole, as each service area has different strengths and areas of concern in relation to equalities. We also decided that the questionnaire would be useful post-training as part of the evaluation.

Key themes for the training of the Management Team covered professional leadership in equalities and diversity and cover a number of areas, some of which were linked to our conversations, for example:

• Building an understanding of best practice in equalities & diversity;
• Developing and applying a consistent analysis of institutional discrimination;
• Developing an understanding of equality and diversity legislation and its applications to service delivery;
• Effective team-working;
• Changing the culture of the team;
• Equalities and performance appraisal systems;
• Mainstreaming equalities into service delivery and employment practices; and
• Monitoring, assessing and evaluating progress.

Our review and evaluation of the programme was built into the training, through oral and written feedback. We also held a meeting mid-way through the project and at the end of the work so that we could monitor progress and assess how and where change was being made.