What can make a collaboration work? Collaboration is a word that has been bandied around, sometimes with a great amount of passion, for several years. It is something that has been encouraged by funders and, more recently, almost forced on some organisations by the cuts and the difficult economic climate. But what can make or break a collaboration? Pulling together a group of people with a whole array of skills, backgrounds and passions is not easy, especially if they are all leaders! I believe that practical things such as the mission, structures, incentives, ideas, specialism, technology etc are crucial ingredients…

  BTEG CJS Blog- on Children and Young People in Custody (2010-11)  Half term, and the one day I am in the office will be a busy one. Yesterday, sitting in the hairdressers in Wood Green with the kids, I read the Guardian headline that '40%' of Youth Jail population were black. This was the headline grabber from the Chief Inspectors of Prisons report into the state of our youth offending institutions. I haven't read the report yet, so cannot comment on the detail but it confirms two things that I have felt in my water doing this job over the past…

Organisational Development Creating the right environment to make the right decisions at the right time As individuals we are making decisions all the time so it should be second nature right? If only it was that simple for organisations. Many of us have had to make some really tough decisions over that past year – redundancies, mergers, cuts, etc and I am sure that some of the decisions made under pressure and quite often without all the relevant data or input. Some of these decisions become a bit of a gamble or risk. So what can we do to rationalise…

BTEG BAME Network for the CJS Shadow Justice Secretary puts the case for the opposition but race still doesn’t seem recognised as a key issue Sadiq Khan Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary gave the Howard League’s annual Parmore lecture in Canary Wharf last night. As a working class kid from a South London housing estate, with 12 years experience as a councillor and having had an impressive legal career outside politics before coming into the Commons, Khan isn't one of those new breed of politicians who the accusation of lacking real life experience can be thrown at. He is clearly a…