The University of Westminster was crowned the winner of the first ever Staff Development Impact Award at the annual Leadership Foundation for Higher Education Staff Development Conference in Cardiff recently. This unique award, organised by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education with the Staff Development Forum, and sponsored by, GoodPractice, was conceived to recognise, celebrate and reward outstanding staff development projects and initiatives within Higher Education. The judges felt that it was important the entries showed how they had a made a significant and positive difference to the teams or individuals that they were aiming to support.
The University of Westminster’s entry, led by Jean Harrison, interim director, human resources and Nick Kapoutzis, leadership and management development manager, described a Corporate Services Programme that took 180 professional service managers through a development course that would help them achieve the most challenging aspects of the universities corporate strategy. The programme’s aims were to develop management capability, improve performance and enable cultural change that would allow better employee engagement. The six month programme is delivered through a mix of induction, taught modules, action-learning, research options and 360-degree review and feedback. The programme is also supported with online learning resources and mentoring.
Ewart Wooldridge, chief executive of the Leadership Foundation, remarked “we were really surprised and pleased by the number and high quality of entries, but the reason that Westminster’s stood out was that they had adopted a really comprehensive approach, involving a very large proportion of the corporate service leaders and managers, deploying a wide range of high quality development processes, and maintaining the active involvement of the top management team.”
The judges also awarded ‘highly commended’ to Dr Odette Dewhurst from the University of Leeds for an innovative programme designed to support researchers new to grant writing and ultimately to increase the University’s research income.
Commenting on the award, Catherine McCallum, Client Services Director, GoodPractice, states: ‘The high quality of the award applications truly reflected the Staff Development Conference’s over-arching theme of ‘HE Futures: Making a positive difference’. The response to the award, in its first year, was phenomenal and GoodPractice were thrilled to both sponsor and judge the award and work collaboratively with the Leadership Foundation to reward outstanding staff development projects and initiatives within Higher Education.’
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