The NHS Leadership Academy became part of newly created People Directorate in April 2020. This coincided with the declaration of a level 4 national incident in response to the COVID 9 pandemic.

Academy teams quickly pivoted the way we work, pausing our flagship programmes to enable us and thousands of participants to focus on the pandemic response. Over 150 of our team worked on initiatives including bringing back staff, health and wellbeing and Emergency Preparedness Resilience and Recovery teams.

Our remaining experts led on the development of the People Directorates people.nhs.uk site providing quick and easy access to health & wellbeing offers, networks of support and carefully curated lifelong learning accessible 24/7.

Pausing our work had a mixed response. Some appreciated being able to concentrate on the emergency response, others felt they had lost a lifeline.

Our seven regional academies delivered bite-sized learning focused on supporting staff during the most challenging of times. On average, our regional offers were supporting over 1,000 leaders each month.

We created new channels and ways of leaders connecting enabling them to ‘keep going’, to learn from adversity and to better lead their teams. #ProjectM was a purely virtual network which was accessed by over 35,000 unique users Our Executive Suite has a range of offers accessed by over 1,500 senior leaders.

We re-started our national programmes in a purely virtual environment, creating, ‘virtual residentials’, on-line tutorials and action learning sets.

As social restrictions eased, we reverted to a more ‘business as usual’ model with recognition of the lessons and that many aspects of the NHS will never return to the ‘old normal’. All our learning has meant the NHS Leadership Academy is ready to enable new and current leaders to tackle elective recovery and to transform into the new NHS.

Formation

Throughout 2021/22 Executive and Non-Executive Talent teams helped set the leadership standards for new Integrated Care Systems formation by developing a suite of leadership competency frameworks for board-level leaders. This supports the hiring, development and appraisal of chairs, CEOs, executives and non-executives for the 42 new integrated care boards (ICBs).  

By end of March 2022, we had circa 3,000 applications across all four role types – Chair, CEO, NED and ED and have overseen circa 400 appointments across all 4 roles, being as follows:

Chairs – 40 (plus 2 interims)

CEOs – 37 (plus 5 interims)

NEDs – 114 / 147 (76%)

EDs – 50 / 126 (40%)

Working with partners like the Seacole group for non-executive appointments and with NHS Confederation, significant improvements of the appointments to build diverse board profiles were made. For example, a significant increase in women on boards, with almost half of all ICBs having a female designate chief executive. Non-executive representation of people from Black and ethnic minority communities has also improved, comprising 28% of appointments of designate chairs and non-executives.

The Non-Executive Talent and Appointments team hold delegated responsibility for appointing NHS trust chairs and non-executives. By end of March 2022, the team have completed 46 Chair, 209 non-Executive appointments and 31 non-executive associate appointments. The team received particular commendation on the quality of their work following the recent audit by the Office for the Commissioner of Public Appointments – especially around diversity of appointments.

By the end of the financial year, the two teams will have overseen the appointment of well over 600 board-level staff.

Development

Our regional academies support the development of systems leadership capabilities with ICS/ICBs. This work aims to; support all leaders in health and social care to better understand the notion of systems working and the links to the wider ambitions for health and social care, population health and reducing health inequalities.

The NHS Leadership Academy e-book on Developing Excellence in Systems Leadership provides an overview of the approaches taken to develop systems leadership capabilities with ICS/ICBs which includes a ‘standard’ programme but tailored to each ICS to further their development of system leading, thinking and behaving Leading for System Change – Leadership Academy

To support newly appointed ICB / ICS senior leaders we have carefully curated resources providing a wide range of resources including reports, papers, useful links, podcasts and more.

Each of the 7 regional academies’ work is overseen and steered by regional Leadership and Talent Advisory Boards, made up of executives and directors from across the systems and the Regional Director for Workforce and OD.

We have committed to undertake a Leadership Survey every year, and we have done two for 2020 and 2021. This critically important feedback informs us about the needs of respondents, with 3,500 respondents in 2021.

From a national perspective, our CEO advisory group perform similar task, feeding in their views lending their expertise to ensure the continued relevance of our work.

To maintain patient focus and to ensure the service user is heard in all our work, the Patient Faculty and Co-design team work to ensure the patient and NHS Staff voice is part of our leadership development programmes

Regular dialogue through new channels such as #ProjectM allow us to pick up on emerging themes which the leadership community in the NHS are raising which allow us to respond to emerging mid-level management challenges.

Over the last two years TLLL have been developing standards and tools to better describe the capabilities clinicians and managers need to lead effectively in today’s complex health and care context.

The tools below will help in getting health and care off to a good start in establishing contemporary standards for leadership and management in health and care in anticipation of the Messenger review.

Our Leadership Way sets out the compassionate and inclusive behaviours required by every leader, at whatever level they are working across the NHS, to recognise, reflect and bring to life every day, three core principles: Framed as the Heart, head and Hands of leadership, it describes the value of leading with compassion, curiosity and through collaboration. The National Quality Board endorsed this approach in October 2021 NHS England » Our shared ambition for compassionate, inclusive leadership

The NHS Leadership Competency Framework is a tool designed to help identify, source, appoint, develop, and appraise board members, whether executive or non-executive. It was developed through extensive engagement with internal and external stakeholders, the framework sets out the key competencies associated with the role of an NHS board member.

Scope for Growth is a tool designed to support inclusive career development conversations. The tool works by viewing everyone as ‘talent’, and will be a key part of our new approach to talent management, as the navigator to plan careers around the “what” and the “how” of leadership and personal development, with health and wellbeing being central to its success.

Executive Leader in Health and Care 360 Feedback Tool (ELHAC 360) Whilst the Healthcare Leadership Model (HLM) is a well-loved tool for self-development, over 28,000 people have undertaken a 360 degree feedback session, a new 360-degree tool – the Executive Leadership Health and Care 360 (ELHAC 360) – has been developed for board leaders. In developing this tool, we have ensured to incorporate both the competencies set out in Our Leadership Way and the Leadership Competency Framework.

The Academy has been running the Award Winning NHS Graduate management Training scheme since 2012 with over 1,500 people have completed the scheme. In 2021 over 18,000 applied to join the scheme. In 2021 GMTS achieved third place in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employer of the year and ‘Graduate Employer of Choice’ for general management.

Improvements in assessment centres have resulted in attracting a more diverse group of candidates. In 2021 21% were from a black and minority ethnic background (16% in 2020), 16% identified as LGBTQ+ (9% in 2020) and 11% described themselves as having a disability (8% in 2020).

Clinical Fellows: In September 2021, the new scheme welcomed its first cohort of 29 fellows, with four or more fellows per region and professional groups (medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, midwifery, healthcare scientists and allied health professionals) to experience current systems leadership skills and to aspire to future senior systems-leadership roles. The 2022/23 scheme was successfully launched with the number of fellowships increased to 49.

Our flagship programmes, from an online introduction to leadership and management (Edward Jenner Programme) through to Aspiring Chief Executives programme have had over 166,000 people attend the programmes since 2012. Over 200,000 people have undertaken some form of leadership development in the regions.

The NEW Edward Jenner programme was completely re-designed and re-launched in 2022 with compassionate and inclusive leadership at its heart. Since February, over 8,000 people have commenced this training and development with over 155,000 enrolling on its predecessors.

All of our flagship programmes are over-subscribed with demand far outstripping supply.

As well as acting as talent attraction and development schemes, evaluation demonstrates that individuals develop their ‘inner selves’ (e.g. confidence, knowledge, thinking) change their behaviours (e.g. to be compassionate, collaborative and inclusive) and apply their learning to their organisation’s and the NHS’s strategic imperatives (local strategies, Long Term Plan, People Plan).

Over 40,000 people have undertaken a programme of development which involves writing up an assessed piece of work demonstrating how they have implemented a change project. Many of these evidence a service improvement project providing cost savings benefits, quality improvements and efficiency gains.

The People Directorate has summarised its priorities for 2022/23:

‘more people, working differently in a culture of compassion and inclusion’.

Behind this broad statement sits a wide variety of actions, delivery plans, metrics and clear responsibilities for TLLL which can be summarised as six priorities for this year. Our ambition is to ensure our leaders have what they need to deliver elective recovery and build the new NHS.

The Talent Management and Leadership and lifelong learning 2022/23 priorities are:

1. Build talent pipelines to drive retention and diverse talent supply in each region and the HR profession.

2. Support ICS formation and the effectiveness of new leadership teams working to drive elective recovery and transformation.

3. Deliver and evaluate a common curriculum to support: inclusive culture, talent pipelines, system working: (reaching 30k participants).

4. Run core activities well.

5. Build the Future:  create the capacity to respond to Messenger recommendations.

6. Deliver on our People Promise: embed the People Directorate OD plan and support NHSE&I change.

At the time of writing, we await publication of the Messenger review into leadership and management in health and care, which is likely to have further implications for our work as will the full integration of Health Education England into NHSE/I – hence our 5th priority of ‘Building the Future’. All leaders will need to play a role in responding to these challenges and we will continue to support and develop them to do so. The NHS Leadership Academy is well placed to raise standards in leadership, deepen diverse talent pipelines and to support the development of ICSs to tackle complex health and care issues.