Ambassadors - North West
Four down and four to go...
It's looking as if we are heading for a record number of those attending the NW information sessions with a total of 64 coming to either update their current knowledge of NTA or to find out for the first time what it's all about. I realise that many of you have put a lot of effort into publicising and persuading those that you meet that this is an important first step towards a winning entry: so a big 'thank you' to you.
Apart from the number attending, what's particularly pleasing is that almost everyone who said they would attend did so or else someone substituted for them. Looking down the lists of those who attended there is a broad spread of those from different size organisations and from the public, private & third sector: very much reflecting the unique appeal of the National Training Awards.
There have also been a significant number occasions, where more than one person has come along: either from the same organisation - always a help in building up for a team effort to put the entry together - or from different organisations working in partnership. It would be good to see this reflected in the quality of the final entries and in a rise in the number of partnership/collaborative entries. I'm a great believer in using an external task - putting an entry together - for an internal organisational purpose.
NTA
UK Award Winner, Large Employer; Cumbria Constabulary
Investigations
into Training Deliver Results
Criminals in Cumbria had better beware. For the past two years, award-winning Cumbria Constabulary has been 'growing their own detectives' meaning more crime than ever before is being solved.
Cumbria Constabulary is one of the UK's smallest constabularies and as such the organisation was previously not in a position to train its own police officers into detectives. Historically the organisation sent their officers away to be trained by larger constabularies at a high cost. But these costs meant that the constabulary was moving at a snail's pace, only able to afford to train approximately seven police officers in a year. And because many of the officers working in the child abuse unit were women, they were reluctant to travel away for a six week course, because of their family commitments.
Yet with more extreme child abuse cases and threats of terrorism coming to the fore, new directives from the Government and independent inquiries were demanding more detectives within the service. For Cumbria Constabulary, there was only one viable solution - to train their own detectives. Not only was in-house training the most cost effective approach, but developing a programme that could be studied within Cumbria meant more female officers were willing to enroll onto the course.
