The world of Not For Profit organisations is a rich and diverse arena demonstrated when Sam Horsman of The Wellcome Trust; Julian Stanley of the Bounceback Project and Gary Henderson of Millfield School sat down for a chat with Ian Gill and Joanna Spicer-Brown of Agility By Nature.

As we approach the end of Lockdown 3 we are all looking forward to days ahead when the work day is not conducted entirely from a laptop at home, Zoom fatigue fades, and maybe we get ot have a holiday somewhere even if it is just at the end of our street. But will it be as simple as the end of one thing and the start of another?

Millfield School is an International Boarding School and when the doors re-opened on the 8th although many of the students walked into the school, the many non UK based students, currently unable to return to the school, continued to study remotely. Millfield is therefore moving to a Hybrid model of teaching with some children learning face to face and some still via technology with the teachers needing to deliver successfully through both channels.  

This perhaps is just the first of the many aspects of education which will move to a new normal in the coming months and years. As Gary discussed, the education eco system contains a lot of different actors, and change does not come easily, but perhaps the lessons we have learned over the last year give us an opportunity to re-imagine what schools are trying to achieve.

Although there are many children desperate to be back at school, some children have faired much better in an online environment and it will be interesting to see how the gains experienced by such children be capitalised on in future?

But, it is not just school children who will be experiencing this Hybrid model. With recent surveys regularly showing that many, currently remote based, office workers would like to return to a model of some office based work, and some work from anywhere based work, what does this mean to the modern office and company dynamics?  

Sam lamented the days when during the course of an office based day she would speak with people outside her immediate responsibilities about nothing and everything. Without that banter and discourse office relationships become more formal and benefit less from non official means of communication. How, when you don’t see people walking back to their desk after a tough meeting do you know that members of your team could do with a coffee and a de-brief. 

Julian could also see the day when resentment might occur between people whose role require them to be more office based (whose costs of travel in terms of both time and money will be higher) and those based at home (who see the office people networking without them)

Working with offenders and those at risk of offending Julian and the Bounceback Project work to reduce the rate of re-offending. A rate which is heavily influenced by education, skills, employment and a support network. With only 16 prisons in the UK cabled for the use of technology in the cells how do offenders, and society, work towards a successful release with no access to face to face education, training and mentoring and such limited access to the online resources that the rest of us take for granted.  

Something everyone agreed on is that as we move forward, and hopefully lockdown eases, as a society and organisations we will try different ways of making it work and we won’t get it right first time. In the best Agile traditions we will need to fail fast, learn from our mistakes, and make alternate plans.

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