Ian and Liz have been running an “Action Inquiry” group to look at the provision for children and young people in East Lothian who are identified as having additional support needs.

This work has brought together parents, headteachers, educational psychologists, and third-sector agencies to look at the whole experience from all sides. It has also included input from young people themselves.

Small ‘tests of change’ are currently being tried out in schools, which aim to improve the experience of young people with additional support needs.

Jo and Joette have just finished a six-month programme of development with the SMT of an international NGO, whose mission is to change the system of global humanitarian aid and crisis response by developing a global network of ‘member hubs’ – where local people can play a primary role in disaster response by letting their local knowledge dictate how aid is distributed and used.

We worked with a team based in the UK, Europe, Bangladesh and the Philippines, offering a combination of residential and online events, and 1:1 coaching.

Joette has been working with FC since 2020, having started an action inquiry into ‘how might having a coaching culture support the work of Fife Council’.

This resulted in further work in developing confidence to use ‘a coach approach’ across the council. She has now worked with more than 200 staff from every directorate – the usual suspects in health and social care, but also roads, facilities management, finance, housing, and many more.

This year the focus is on building capacity and confidence for some of those staff to take on the training and development work that she has been doing, and to embed this approach as far as possible.

Jo, Ian, Mairi and Lisa are delivering a 9-month programme to support Team Leaders at Falkirk HSCP to develop collaborative leadership skills.

Participants have, to date, attended workshops to get to know one another and to learn more about how they can work together to improve outcomes for patients alongside exploring their own leadership skills through an individual coaching session. We have also hosted workshops with team leaders and senior leaders together to promote vertical collaboration.

Jo is beginning a heritage lottery-funded project with Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. The project hopes to promote recovery from Covid-19 and improve the wellbeing of local residents, by making the most of local heritage.

The work has four key themes: Explore and Connect; Learn and Create, Volunteer and Inspire, and has also chosen to report against the NHS 5 Ways to Wellbeing. Jo is co-designing the learning and evaluation strategy with the project team and this strategy will then be used to draw up a learning framework which includes indicators for success and outlines a timetable for gathering evidence.

Ian is supporting the Church of Scotland to conduct an action inquiry aimed at enabling the institution to become a more welcoming, inclusive and racially just place, by better understanding and acting on the experience of its members from black and ethnic minority communities.

The work additionally involves exploring attitudes towards racial justice amongst majority white leaders and members to inform actions required to tackle prejudice and challenge bias. He has trained and is supporting a diverse group of volunteers to carry out the inquiry.

Joette has been writing training materials to enable Cornerstone to train their managers to become coaches at ILM Level 3 and Level 5.

This is quite a ‘technical task’ for Animate, but we have amassed so many useful resources relating to coaching (see Fife work) that it has been great to pull lots of them together into a single place.

It has been useful to have to search for new information too, and some new sources of information – coaching has literally exploded in recent years!