The rules of the chamber
Codes of conduct, standing orders and community assets.
Around four hours on the rules of the chamber: codes of conduct and the regulators, conflicts of interest, chairing the whole room, standing orders and quorum, and working with communities from their strengths.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Serving the public
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Councillors and the democratic services and governance officers who support them
Overview
Public trust in councillors rests on visible fairness. This course is one strand of Your first days in office and opens with codes of conduct and who oversees them, comparing the Welsh route through the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales with the English system. It covers actual, potential and perceived conflicts of interest, the Porter v Magill test and the Greensill Capital lobbying case. It then reads the undercurrent of a meeting through Bion, Janis and Edmondson, before setting out standing orders, quorum, declarations and open business. The last section covers McKnight and Kretzmann's asset-based community development, four models of community leadership and the Preston Model of community wealth building.
Aims
It sets out to give councillors the confidence to declare and manage interests properly, take part in or chair meetings that are fair and defensible, and work with a community rather than on it, so that procedure protects members, officers and residents alike.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Compare how a code of conduct complaint is handled in Wales and in England, and apply fair process to the people involved.
- Plan how declarations of interest, quasi-judicial items and private sessions are handled, and recognise groupthink so that silence is not mistaken for agreement.
- Assess your own community practice against the behaviours of an asset-based leader and the conditions that lay behind the Preston Model.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Distinguish a code of conduct, which sets minimum standards, from a behavioural framework, which describes what good looks like.
- Distinguish actual, potential and perceived conflicts of interest and apply the fair-minded and informed observer test.
- Identify Bion's dependency, fight-flight and pairing patterns in a meeting and describe how a chair can act as a container.
- Identify where the rules for your meeting come from and check that it is quorate, including when members leave part way through.
- Apply McKnight and Kretzmann's five building blocks to map the assets already present in a place, and distinguish this from stakeholder mapping.
- Distinguish a wish list from a delivered community strategy using the four requirements of shared vision, narrow priorities, a named delivery mechanism and a review cycle.
- Describe the route of a code of conduct complaint in Wales and compare it with the current and proposed position in England.
- Apply the five steps of spotting, declaring, recording, stepping back and reviewing to an interest in your own work.
Built from 3 parts.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Clear lines on interestsCodes of conduct, gifts and hospitalityBitesize · Ethics, Integrity and Standards2 modules
- 02Holding the whole roomStanding orders, quorum and interestsBitesize · Chairing Meetings, Boards and Committees2 modules
- 03Building on what is strongAsset-based community development (ABCD)Bitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships2 modules