On 8 February, our very proud Director of People and Learning, Liz Page, travelled to Milton Keynes to collect our Best Companies 2 Star Companies Award.  This is the third time in a row that we’ve received a star rating from Best Companies, and the second year in a row that we’ve scooped the two star rating.

And it’s a rather interesting award for us to get … The Best Company awards, linked to The Sunday Times Best 100 Companies list, are not simply a case of management writing a carefully crafted submission or even a nomination from a third party.  The Best Company rating comes from our staff themselves, and with over three quarters of our 365 staff responding honestly and anonymously, it says a lot about us as an organisation and where we’re heading

Because of this, we’re genuinely incredibly proud to get this award – this tells us that our staff love working here and are involved and engaged with the work that we do.  Particularly interesting was a breakdown of some of the scores: in a time of austerity, it’s fabulous to hear that confidence in our management has increased (+3%) and that there’s been a  …

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Last week, YOU marked Poverty and Homelessness Action Week in Basingstoke in a slightly unusual way!  Raising awareness of issues around homelessness, tackling prejudice, challenging discrimination and looking at innovative and forward-thinking solutions to tackling poverty is what YOU is all about. 

Part of that challenge is letting the people we work with know exactly what it is that we do … we have some staff and services who work with particular groups and people but they may only know that person, the team or the service.  Often, they may not be aware of the other services that we offer even if we work in a ‘joined up way’ amongst ourselves.

In Basingstoke, we have a range of fabulous services that really make a difference,  Basingstoke First Point is our floating support service for people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness, May Place House is a direct access hostel, Penn House is part of our young person’s services and then we have SAiL (homelessness support service), our county-wide Supported Employment Service for people with a learning disability and the award-winning Smart Living assistive technology service.

To raise awareness during Poverty & Homelessness Action Week our staff thought it would …

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It’s been all go in our Dorset Young People’s Services.  You’ve probably already read about the exciting work we’re doing with the Art Project in Weymouth (thanks, Co-Op!) but there have been a number of other things happening as well …

In a very exciting team-up with the National Open College Network (NOCN), we’ve been working to sign up our residents when they move in.  This means they can go through a series of modules and gain nationally recognised accreditation.  Not only will this make them more employable and better placed to get accommodation but it will also show that they know how to budget, do basic DIY and understand tenancies.  Of course, this also fits in with YOU’s values, the QAF, the 5 outcomes of every child matters and the new government initiative for keeping 16/17 year olds in education. 

Our aim is to make sure that all our client leave us with, at the very least, credits towards a national qualification. We’re still fine tuning the detail of how it will work but we plan to use West Rivers as a pilot then roll it out to the other services and possibly wider.  We are working in partnership with West Dorset District …

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