I received some surprising and happy news yesterday evening: I have been nominated for the Social CEO awards.  Very exciting and really quite lovely, especially when I look at those who have won awards before like Polly and Clare.  The excellent Matthew Hodson won last year. As I took on my post at the helm of the Independent Custody Visiting Association (ICVA), social media changed for me, I waved goodbye to my semi-anonymous and informal accounts of the past; I went live as a Social CEO. As a newbie, and only a borderline millennial, I went looking for any advice […]

It’s 5pm on a sunny Friday in Crawley and I’ve walked into the cell block to be booked in for the next 17 hours. I’m asked to stand in front of the desk and the Sergeant goes through my personal details, questions me about any medical issues, then takes my phone and keys for safe keeping. He gives me a leaflet which I save to read later. Next to me is a male shouting and swearing, with four officers trying to calm him down. He isn’t happy, as he says he was only released yesterday morning and now he’s back. […]

The QAF (or Quaf) sounds a bit like something you might find in Harry Potter – but this tool for schemes and scheme managers will be a magical (!) way of ensuring consistency across the board, learning from other schemes and striving to the be the best scheme possible. First thing to mention this is not a tool to punish or catch out schemes. The Quality Assurance Framework (much less catchy!) this will act as a framework to benchmark against other schemes and celebrate all the amazing work that schemes up and down the country are doing. The next worry […]

You may recall that a while ago I blogged on ICVA’s Quality Assurance Framework, giving you an overview of what it was, what we hoped it would achieve and how it would work. At the point of our last blog, we were just preparing our soft launch to schemes and I wanted to give you all an update on what has been happening since! Firstly, I have been bowled over by the sheer number of schemes who are getting involved in the QAF.  Schemes do not have a statutory duty to take part in the QAF, and we know our […]

Use of force doesn’t look nice. It’s the actions of one or some human being(s) to physically restrain another to a point of compliance. It can look like a fight. It can sound like a fight. It’s often noisy and is moving at a fast pace. Some of the people in the situation that can look and sound like a fight are wearing uniforms. There is no escaping that it the public will have an opinion on use of force and in the days where policing is often videoed by passers-by, footage of use of force is ever more available […]