Local councils and workforce development

The SLCC, who are the membership body for local council clerks in England and Wales have issued a report, apparently co-authored with some academic institutions, making recommendations about various workforce and organisational issues for the sector. You can read it here https://www.slcc.co.uk/site/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/SLCC-Future-Report-2022.pdf

It’s an interesting read, but it’s also troubling, not least because of what it doesn’t explore, as well as what it does. Let me give an example. The issue of the structure of the workforce is touched upon, but in a way that cannot be described as best practice. Age and gender are explored, and recommendation six of the report’s conclusion says “Mentoring schemes and leadership development programmes should target equality across the profession, particularly the equal advancement of women into the posts of clerks in larger councils.“

The fact that the proportion of clerks from BAME backgrounds is less than 1% is not touched on or explored in the recommendations, and no data is offered on the number of GSRD / LGBTQIA clerks or those who are, under the Equalities Act, regarded as disabled. There’s no excuse for this lack of intersectionality in the approach to the research, and it reduces the recommendation on mentoring and leadership development to something akin to a trade union demand on behalf of the existing workforce rather than an academic reflection on the state of the profession.

The first half of recommendation six is almost as bad. It demands a diverse graduate entry to the profession, but fails to point out that schemes like CILCA, which the clerks of ambitious councils are required to have in order for their council to acquire additional powers, do not recognise prior qualifications. Imagine the stereotypical young would be lawyer or accountant who decides a job at their local parish council is for them when they tire of the experience of working in large organisations. Irrespective of prior qualification, or experience, they’ll need to acquire CILCA, which requires a portfolio of practical work to a level 4 academic standard, to be of any use to a council or to get past the increasingly common requirement to have CiLCA pre-recruitment.

The lack of insight from the SLCC, that their training scheme is a roadblock to the recruitment of ambitious, diverse clerks is almost breathtaking in its naivete. A simple system of acknowledging prior qualifications, even if allied with a straightforward competence exam (the BACP, for all its faults, has a good example in its certificate of proficiency) would make more sense than the current mess.

Similarly, the recognition within the training structure of only a very limited range of qualifications as being relevant to a Town Clerk’s work is a brake upon development of both the sector, and the professional standing of practitioners. I’d argue strongly that, in terms of my role in relationship to the town where I work, that membership of the Institute of Place Management is more relevant, and of greater value, than membership of the SLCC. It’s not my job to advise the SLCC, but I think it should be exploring a wider range of qualifications, and a wider academic field, than the narrow range of community development based qualifications it currently endorses. This needn’t be difficult to do, nor should it be impossible to deliver in a way that provides the SLCC with a continuing role specifying and administering training and qualifications.

These are explicit workforce issues, but they seem a hangover, still, from the issue of the SLCC struggling to decide whether it represents its members, or enables and trains them, even if that means there is an over-supply of qualified clerks. It almost feels, at times, as if the SLCC is as much a gatekeeper ass it is a recruiter for the profession, and that’s never a good look if you want to embrace diversity.

I have to confess, I’m not inspired by some of the recommendations. Recommendation five, for instance, recites the age old concern that young people are not engaged and should be via youth forums or youth councils, and then tacks on at the end a reference to councils reviewing their use of social media in the process. Whisper it quietly, but the idea that social media is most relevant in relation to young people is worryingly shallow; different platforms attract different age groups, and Facebook’s audience demographics are much older than, say TikTok’s. If councils need to be told to review this, as part of a major report, the issue of how local councils communicate is much deeper than just their social media.

However, that aside, there’s a more simple question; where’s the template for doing a social media review? Where’s the toolkit? Like many councils, when we needed to check if our approach to social media was working, we brought in an outside contractor (who was, to be fair, utterly brilliant). Many councils can’t do that, or can’t afford to do that, and there needs to be an approach to upskilling councils from within that empowers councils. Too often, the skills base being delivered in training is too narrow, and too governance focusses (and I say that as an unashamed governance geek.)

I don’t want to sound negative, but messages urging councils to collaborate more, or to work better with other local authorities in the same place are too remote, and too hard to believe, for me to get excited about them. Similarly the prospect of another strategic review of local government isn’t likely to stir me into activity; like many who work in counties that have been through the local government reorganisation process in recent years, I can’t help feeling that doing a strategic review after so much change has been forced upon the local government sector is pretty much closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.