The Crown Prosecution Service saw its staff survey scores on learning and development rise 11 percentage points in a year, thanks to chief exec Peter Lewis
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), unlike many departments, doesn’t allocate grants or oversee large spending programmes. So when, in 2010, chief exec Peter Lewis was told to slash 25% from his budget by 2015, he knew he had a major challenge on his hands. The CPS would have to lose staff, and “the only way we would deliver on the ‘more for less’ agenda was to invest in the skills of our people,” he recalls.
A programme of training and an online portal was introduced, but two years later staff satisfaction with learning and development remained stubbornly low. “We had been looking very closely at the staff survey results,” Lewis says, but “a lot of what we regarded as high-quality training was not hitting the spot.” What’s more, staff seemed less happy with their line managers than was typical across the civil service.
Lewis decided that the training had to get more rigorous, and focused on improving the management skills of junior and mid-ranking team leaders. The 2012-13 CPS business plan introduced a new management development programme, delivered to all managers below the senior civil service – 619 staff out of a workforce of 6,000.
Run in conjunction with Civil Service Learning, the programme saw the management cadre spend six months undertaking training sessions. The key to success was following up afterwards to embed knowledge: “Everything is about validating and making the experience real,” Lewis comments. Managers’ own line managers got involved by, for example, meeting with trainees to discuss their learning, and sitting in on meetings to see how staff were putting their training in running effective meetings into practice. And after people had been trained in liaison skills, the agency sought feedback from their contacts in other departments. Everyone completed a file of evidence relating to their progress, which was externally assessed and accredited.
The decision to embark on the programme has been validated by the results, Lewis says – but he’s wary of taking too much credit. After all, he says, “at the time, there was nothing else we could do.”