The Latest Bulletin

The following message has recently been sent to all Social Worker’s Union (SWU) members: A personal message from Neil Thompson I am delighted to be working with SWU to offer membership of my online learning programme at half price. It’s not a course in the conventional sense. Rather, it’s an online learning community, a place where people support each other in their learning. It’s based on principles of self-directed learning (the most effective type of learning) where you decide – with guidance and support – what you need to learn and how to learn. The Programme has a wide range of helpful facilities to promote reflective practice, including an e-portfolio for professional registration purposes. It is a sort of online…

It is, of course, a very common experience to have a great sense of excitement as you look forward to something, only to have a sense of anti-climax once what you have been anticipating actually comes to pass. This is one of the ways in which the idea that the journey is more important than the arrival has a degree of truth. In a similar vein, Buddhist thought includes the idea that it is wise to disengage from worldly pursuits, as the acquisition of one ‘prize ‘ or reward, one achievement of a goal, simply leads to our formulating the next goal and anticipating the next achievement. Perhaps it is not realistic to expect such disengagement on a mass scale,…

A long-standing theme of my work in relation to leadership and management has been the importance of getting the best out of employees (supporting them, developing them, taking workplace well-being seriously), rather than making the mistake of trying to get the most out of them (piling on the pressure, seeking to maximise exploitation, regarding them as expendable). I therefore welcome this important book on employee empowerment. Underpinning employee empowerment is the well-supported idea that giving employees a degree of autonomy and trusting them to make decisions within their sphere of responsibility will produce better results in both quantitative and qualitative ways, and give rise to better consequences for the organisation and the individual alike... Click here to read more

If the National Crime Agency’s latest findings are anything to go by, expect many more headlines like this over the next decade: ‘Lincolnshire slavery gang forced man to dig his own grave in ‘truly shocking’ 26-year hard labour ordeal‘. We are only just starting to hear the stories of Britain’s hidden slaves. Figures released the week before last showed the scale of concern among law enforcement agencies. In May and June alone, 130 potential victims were discovered and 111 arrests were made. Local news outlets from Cambridge to Kirklees have reported an upsurge in slavery-related police activity. Over 300 police operations targeting modern slavery are in action across the UK. “The more that we look for modern slavery”, said Will Kerr, the NCA’s Director of Vulnerabilities,…

For nine months, former-firefighter Roger Moore had the image of a girl he’d seen die, hovering in his peripheral vision. The child had been killed in a car crash several years before and Moore had been one of the first on the scene. It had been harrowing at the time, but he’d got up and gone to work as usual. It was only once the firefighter retired from his 30-year career a few years later, in 2013, that the image of her face returned to torment him. “I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time but it was the first sign that something was wrong,” says the 55 year-old, speaking from his home in the Midlands. Other experiences…

A focal point for information relating to information and support for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies. Click here to read more