This day is designed to help people make sense of the world of policy work, often experienced as a mysterious environment with its own confusing jargon. It will help people with little or no experience to understand and feel more confident as a participant in a policy job as well as reinforce the skills of proven policy professionals.
The course will be useful for civil servants who are new to policy work as well as providing valuable background knowledge for those from the public sector generally. People from the private, charitable and voluntary sectors who may be involved in implementing and influencing government policy will also find this course of enormous benefit.
Attendees to this course will:
- Gain a better understanding of what policy is and how policy formulation and implementation works
- Better appreciate who the most influential and important policy actors are
- Gain knowledge of proven techniques, good frameworks and intelligent insights to improve their policy work
- Examine policy making examples in the wider public sector
- Improve their ability to plan, assess and implement policy
Speaker:
Geoff Langsdon - Head of Training at Government Knowledge
After school Geoff worked for an insurance company in London and then joined the Army at 20. He served in Northern Ireland during "the troubles", in Cyprus and Germany.On leaving the Army Geoff became a civil servant for many years working first in operations and then policy. During the Margaret Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, he was a private secretary to a number of Ministers in the Commons and the Lords. Policy areas he worked on include Care in the Community, Mental Health, ex-Service personnel, Child Support and vaccination and immunisation. After the civil service he set up a training company and has worked predominately in the public sector, and is now Head of Training at Government Knowledge. He has an honours degree in government and politics from the Open University. As a lecturer with the OU, he then taught those subjects, and is currently an associate lecturer with University of Chester. With Chester and Government Knowledge, Geoff developed the work based Public Services Management qualification at graduate and postgraduate levels. Geoff also worked for two years in the NHS, and has served as a local councillor and Mayor. In his spare time he is a mentor to pupils in the run up to GCSEs.