E NRIQUE G ARCÍA

This section discusses the areas that were identified by participants as requiring further professional development. All participants felt that there were areas that were specific to their particular roles and responsibilities. However, few believed that their recent professional development had focused sufficiently on identifying and addressing some of the issues and challenges they had identified in local collaborative working arrangements. One participant expressed that she thought it strange that; given how central working together was, that there were not more opportunities to improve the skills required to “collaborate more effectively and enter into the true spirit of partnership” (Social enterprise, trainer).

Participants were asked how they felt their experiences could be used in order to help other practitioners and to contribute towards policy decision-making. Fifteen of the respondents

felt strongly that it was important to be able to manage expectations from their partners. One participant, from a small VCO, felt that the issue for her was in the term ‘managing’ and questioned who did the managing of expectations and what constituted an ‘expectation’. She further suggested that what needed to happen was: “all partners need to not only identify what it is that needs ‘managing’ and agree it but exactly what processes are to be used and agree those too” (VCO, manager).

Participants often felt that there was far too much use of “un-qualified loaded terms with assumptions that we are all singing from the same sheet” (Charity manager). Seventeen participants felt that it was essential that the expectations that policy-makers had for what collaborative activities between organisations could achieve, was informed by the experiences of a range of partnerships. It was felt that the support and training that was being offered to support collaborative working, needed to reflect the reality of the professional needs of organisations.

One participant, believed that measures to improve practice and to offer professional development opportunities to the diverse group of providers in her area, had at best been ‘patchy’ and at worst had been ‘ineffective’. The sense of frustration embedded in this individual’s emailed comments, captures the overall tone of much of the practical frustrations that were shared by third sector providers during the interviews:

“We need to make a big leap beyond selfish preoccupations, petty squabbling,

overwhelming self-interest and preoccupation with our own survival and ignore

others. We have a bl dy good opportunity here we are in danger o f scr ing up. Policy makers have never really taken their head out of their a—ses, so how would they possibly know how bad it has become for third sector and smaller voluntary

orgs. They take their evidence sanitised and easy to digest and handed to them by those who are dependent on what they say to them for their own survival. Anything wrong with this picture? Wake up! Some of us are drowning here; anybody noticed? (VCO, manager).

This participant’s ‘plea’ came at the end of a very animated and candid interview and at the end of a particularly difficult week for the organisation concerned. They wondered if they would be able to continue to open their doors to local people within their community. There were many anecdotes from participants around this time (2008-2011) of how financing had ‘dried up’, ‘fallen o f a cliff edge’, ‘required us to offer other things’ or to ‘contract our service provision’. The experiences of this study’s participants are varied. There were considerable differences in the financial resources of small VCOs with annual incomes of less than fifty thousand pounds per year and housing associations in the millions of pounds per year.

“There is little real appreciation, or understanding, by government agencies o f how much non-funded work goes into facilitating a partnership approach to delivering training opportunities collaboratively in this area. We cannot go for full cost recovery so we have to absorb what we can. We don’t really witness our local authority partners sacrificing much extra to see that the work gets done. I think we are to be thankful that the projects receive funding at all” (VCO, funding officer).

Throughout these responses there are references to the fact that participants felt that the act of discussing their experiences enabled the opportunity to initiate, what one respondent expressed as, “the luxurious, self-indulgence of reflection - necessary but sometimes hard to justify when your face is pressed against the glass” (VCO, volunteer). This participant

shared several recent experiences of trying to get a programme going. They had the premises, funding and learners but they had experienced problems with their public sector partners being absent from crucial meetings. They suggested that integration and collaboration was becoming more o f a problem with the majority of outcomes being driven by organisations that had “size and weight” but were not “pulling their weight...this needs addressing through training for all not just a few” (VCO, volunteer).

Several participants felt frustrated at what they knew needed to be addressed locally and what they struggled to change; despite numerous discussions to improve local relationships. Three VCO participants felt that in their ten years o f working with local groups and national organisations in their own regions, they did not feel that enough attention had been given to investigating what had not been working well enough and why. One o f their areas of concern was how the delivery of their learning and skills provision was being compromised. Although the findings indicate similar and contrasting perspectives of working in partnership, there was broad agreement of pivotal issues and challenges which were felt by all participants to either underpin or undermine their professional practice. The potential for these inconsistencies to compromise learning and skills provision, was highlighted as another area for concern and one that had been identified as being exacerbated by the very dramatic changes to public funding and other sources of income; including reductions in charitable donations.

The relentless extrinsic and intrinsic ‘motivations’ to ‘make things happen’; despite these highlighted concerns and difficulties, was identified as being a commitment to ‘making it work’ for learners and other service users. However, these findings also suggested that the constant pressure to ‘make it work’ was having an impact on individuals in terms of stress and general health. O f the twenty-five respondents, during the period of this study, more

than half indicated that they had had time off work which they directly attributed to the additional pressures they had experienced. Extra workloads and the financial uncertainty related to their jobs were the most frequently cited reasons. These were primarily from the third sector.