Monthly Reports from the Senior Management Team - July 2016

Monthly reports from the Senior Management Team - July 2016

Every month the Senior Management Team (SMT) hold a meeting to discuss and agree key aspects of RAPt work and strategy. Each member of the SMT submits an update on their directorate ahead of the meeting. These are edited to remove any commercially sensitive or confidential information and published here on the intranet. For that reason not all departments have a report included.

Please note that these reports are not intended to be a comprehensive list of all the work of each department.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE

Mike Trace, August 2016

Policy/Commissioning

Community Substance Misuse – While budgets are shrinking, and tendering is very competitive, there are still dozens of opportunities forRAPt to bid for community substance misuse contracts in the coming year. At this stage, we are focusing on developing partnerships for joint bids.

Prison Substance Misuse – There are likely to be another round of tenders for prison services in the coming months, with contracts commencing either April or October 2017. RAPt will obviously be bidding for as many new contracts as possible, and defending our contracts in Wandsworth/Brixton, Kent and Norfolk. NHS England are conducting a consultation on the specification for these services, which gives RAPt (and others) an opportunity to express our views of what should be commissioned. We hope that they will move the focus back to effective service models in this next round of retendering.

Employment Services – There are encouraging signs that our proposed model of employment services to offenders could be very popular, but in the early days we will be ’testing the water’ with small contracts. We expect that 2017 will be the big year, when prison education/employment services, and the Work and Health programme (both of them large government funded schemes) are put out for tender.

Business Strategy

We are continuing our internal discussions on the 2016-2019 Business Strategy at the staff conferences, and in the next couple of months will be communicating widely across the sector that we are broadening our services into the offender employment sector, and doing more work on mental health. We want this business strategy to help us delegate more decision making to managers and teams, by leaving them to be responsible for budgets and delivery against objectives. Progress in all areas is being reviewed at quarterly strategy days, the first of which is scheduled for October 20th.

Recovery Enterprises

Part of our recovery support strategy is to support as many clients in recovery as possible to find real jobs, or set up and expand their own businesses. We do this mainly through Blue Sky jobs, and the RAPt Apprenticeship scheme, but are always seeking to find new opportunities for our clients. One avenue are the recovery enterprises – now we have taken on the Trew Era Café from Russell Brand, we are supporting three enterprises that employ people in recovery, with another couple in the pipeline. We are also looking at the feasibility of setting up an investment fund specifically to back businesses run by people in recovery – if we can get this off the ground, many more enterprises and individuals can benefit.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Gail Jones, September2016

Research and Development

We have now submitted our applications to CSAP for the re-accreditation of the ADTP and The Bridge programmes. This was a significant amount of work and required a review and update of all programme manuals. We haven’t been given a date to meet with the panel but it should happen in the next couple of months.

We are waiting to hear if we have been successful with the four prison reform bids submitted. Expecting a decision soon.

The ITT for Wandsworth, Brixton and Pentonville still hasn’t been published. We’re very conscious that Kent community and the London prisons will now come out about the same time.

Theory of Change work continues with a consultant booked to facilitate a further planning meeting on the 29th Sept. I have distributed the brief for Theory of Change and database for review at the SMT meeting.

We are planning to attend a bidders event for East Kent Community substance misuse service on the 19th September. We have already done a lot of preparatory work looking at local needs/providers etc.

Business Development Executive interviews are to be held on the 21st September.

Have had positive meetings with two potential strategic partners for both community and prison contracts.

Governance and Quality

The team have visited The Bridges to audit and prepare them for their forthcoming CQC inspection in late October.

The team continue to support the three Norfolk prisons due for HMIP inspections. HMP Norwich commences on 19 September.

RAPt are currently subject to a high level of external scrutiny and audit, mainly from HMIP, CQC and PHE.

Governance and Quality have been inputting into the Lewes implementation, with all actions on-track, including hosting a successful visit from the Home Office Controlled Drug Inspector on 8 September.

HUMAN RESOURCES
Caroline Gilmartin, September 2016

Key Performance Indicators

We will update on KPIs at the end of QTR2.

Leadership Development

We have commenced the second cohort of management training and have completed investigation training for some managers. We will also be providing training for managing disciplinaries and grievances for managers in November.

Part of our Empowering Managers project is to issue a number of Managers Guides with a view to encouraging managers to manage more people issues directly. We will be issuing the first Manager’s Guide on 1st October. One week after each guide is issued a member of the HR team will make contact with the manager to discuss any initial questions. Any significant issues will be discussed at the Service Managers meeting. The HR Business Partners will provide coaching to support managers to take ownership of each process. Any relevant screens on Cascade will be opened up to managers with each issue and managers will be provided with a Cascade user guide with each upgrade.

We have set up a Managers Hub on the intranet and have been liaising with IT to make this a secure area for managers to access and share information. We would also like to introduce a manager’s forum within the hub in the future. All Manager’s Guides and associated documentation will be uploaded into the Manager’s Hub as they are released.

Learning and Development Strategy and Training Plan

Dawn Wilkinson and Norman Beecher have drafted a 2016-2019 L&D strategy which they will present at the October quarterly review together with the training plan.

Administrator’s Training

Norman is developing a training plan for Administrators. This was a request from the last financial year which we weren’t able to deliver due to other commitments.

BLUE SKY
Kate Markey, September 2016

Key points to note

We are due to begin our half-year reforecast in the next 2 weeks.

Employee consultation on terms and conditions to move over to RAPt’s T&Cs will start in the next week or two.
We have an interim COO for the next 3 months (Steven Garner). One week in so early days. Aside from COO duties he is focusing on Referrals and Resourcing. Permanent COO interviews will be during late Sept.

Referrals (recruitment) continue as a priority. Structurally, TR is causing significant challenges for employment preparation and outcomes, with serving prisoners falling between different case workers from different providers. Importantly October is when the employment targets for the TR Primes begin (financial penalties rather than bonus or PbR). We are promoting Blue Sky heavily to the TR primes in anticipation of this but conversations to date remain the same (they have no budget for employment outcomes).

NOMS CFO is finally underway. This combined with our existing training provision (funded under Learning and Skills Development Fund) means we are delivering / due to start delivering training in the following prisons: Belmarsh, Scrubs, Pentonville, Isis, Feltham, Downview and Onley. We expect to hear about our joint bid to Reform Prisons grant this week. If we aren’t successful, we will explore approaching funders and TR providers with the model.

Our work in HMP Onley will take us into construction, a new sector for Blue Sky and one we have struggled to engage in historically.

We are also talking to HMP Send and Belmarsh about training space for a recycling workshop (with Blue Sky providing the training).

To support this work, we are planning a comms drive to key stakeholders (commercial clients, funders, primes etc.) on Blue Sky’s Theory of Change.

Developments under the Employment Division
Head of Employability interviews should be concluded this week.
Our core Employment Advisory Group met again to work on a service model for the W&HP), initially. A positive meeting I hope that demonstrated the shared / combined intelligence RAPt and Blue Sky can bring to the agenda of employability. Next steps is the write the service model / products and then cost them (particularly around PbR expectations of the PQQ).

We are meeting with primes across Welfare to Work, OLASS and TR. Most of the large players are looking across these contracts. To date the high level ambitions of the Employment Division have been received well, primes recognising the expertise and scale on offer (though this doesn’t necessarily guarantee contracts). The PQQ and Green Paper for the W&H Programme are due out in early October.

Holding pages on both RAPt and Blue Sky’s websites about our Employment Offer go live this week and will support any due diligence conducted by the primes, particularly for the W&H Programme.

EXTERNAL AFFAIRS

Hannah Fox, September 2016

Current staffing – the full External Affairs team are now in post.

• Hannah Fox – Director of External Affairs, Grace Appleyard – External Affairs Assistant
• Alison Buchanan – Fundraising Manager, Anika Patel - Senior Fundraising Officer
• Chris Wingrove - Communications Manager, Amy Williams – Senior Communications Officer

Fundraising

Summary of income this financial year:

Target:£1,045,167

Received (as at 13th September):£708,874

Received since August SMT:£6,989 (Bridges Trust income, smaller value unrestricted individual donations and additional donations towards The Bridges raised by Venetia Wrigley’s fundraising challenge)

Remaining:£336,293

Fundraising Strategy April 2016 - 2017

• Following a presentation by Alison, the new Fundraising Manager, SMT agreed a fundraising approach prioritising larger multi-year applications to major funders (e.g. Big Lottery, Comic Relief, Henry Smith). This would secure longer term support, offer job security for staff and inspire confidence amongst commissioners.
• Work is progressing to re-engage RAPt Ambassadors and focus resources on developing the major donor income stream.
• The new Senior Fundraising Officer, Anika will focus on events and fundraising challenges including the London Marathon. Arrangements are underway for the RAPt London Quiz to be held this year in January.
• A ‘Case for Support’ will be developed with the Communications team to outline the rationale for supporting RAPt based on the organisations background, service offer and the solutions we provide. This will include a number of packages of different values of either projects or individuals to be financially supported.

Trusts and Foundations April 2016-March 2017

Submitted and waiting response

• We are waiting to hear about a project visit as part of our bid to City Bridge (submitted on 10th June) for Recovery Support with a total ask of £123,382 over 3 years
• Bids for Recovery Support funding have been submitted to CHK Charities (£13,421) and for the John Murray Family Trust (£9,000)

Bridges

Target:£100,000

Received (as at 13th Sept):£ 68,942

• Rory Wardroper will be chairing his first Fundraising Advisory Group in Hull in mid-September to develop both the trusts and major donor income streams in North Yorkshire.

Communications

Business Plan

• The external version of the business strategy is being finalised this month, to then be sent to external stakeholders and content shared on our communications channels

Marketing our services

• Natasha Roe has now met with a number of internal stakeholders and gathered input to the marketing activity, Natasha has done a messaging analysis on our competitors and is looking into our services.
• SMT attended a messaging workshop with Natasha on Tuesday 23rd August
• An initial four phase model document has been designed for the HMP Lewes service, a wider external facing version of the four phase model for prison substance misuse service is being developed.

Recovery Support

• We are continuing to work with Recovery Support to open a Facebook account specifically for graduates
• A proposed plan for the launch of the Hub is being developed for approval

Documentaries

• Curve Media have been in touch with Amy to discuss initial thoughts on a show they are pitching about rehabilitation for offenders
• We are exploring options around documentaries for the HMP Send Café.
• Hannah and Cristina are continuing to work with Shine Media on the documentary on recovery enterprises.

Project specific activity

• HMP Send: Hannah has shortlistedfour design agencies/freelancers who she is progressing talks with for the project. One has already proactively expressed interested in doing the design element pro bono. Another has said they would love to give us business strategy advice - from food concept to business model - pro bono. are still waiting for feedback from the prison and the MoJ press office with regard to our publicity ambitions around this project. This was chased at the recent meeting at the prison and they head of re-offending who attended the meeting committed to following up on this soonest.
• HMP Lewes: The new service name ‘Brighter Futures’ is now in place and materials will be ready in time for the launch Mike, David and Louise are visiting the service in the first week of opening

Colleague Conference

• Preparations for the colleague conference are well underway with 94% of staff having confirmed attendance.
• There was good interest in the marketplace with seven different teams holding stalls.

RAPt In Focus Meetings (previously called Town Hall meetings)

• The first meeting has been scheduled for 26 October. Communications will arrange for this to be filmed, and for the pre-publicity for the event

Media enquiries

• Jason Moore was quoted in the Independent about RAPt’s use of Prison Radio and TV.
• Hannah and Chris have been assisting BBC Panorama on a documentary they are making, this has initially been background research and we are continuing to assess the appropriateness of RAPt’s on screen involvement.