We help organisations that want to make a greater social impact, respond to change and meet the needs of their communities.

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OPM works extensively with further and higher education institutions and with schools. We work with strategic leaders, managers, academic staff and governors on organisational development, leadership, governance, research and evaluation, and service review projects.

Recent projects in the higher and further education sector involved: helping further education colleges to respond strategically to the new economic mission; helping universities develop effective human resources strategies; and conducting evaluations into the impact of leadership and management development approaches in higher education institutions. Our work with schools has included: promoting innovative practice; engaging with extended provision; working collaboratively in networks of schools and in partnerships more generally and working directly with parents and families.

Governance

The governance of schools, further and higher education establishments and universities is both difficult and important. Governing bodies need to be successful in business, finance and educational policy and welfare. Their membership needs to reflect the right balance of skills and experience as well as the need to involve stakeholders and take into account the diversity of the student body and local communities. We have worked successfully with a number of universities to improve leadership and governance and to develop strategy and plans. We've worked with boards, directors, senior management teams and with individual leaders, using a range of approaches, from coaching to stakeholder workshops.

Change management and involving communities

Managing change has become increasingly critical in schools over the past decade. But institutions don't adapt to change: people do. We focus on involving partnerships, local communities and stakeholders in decisions that affect them. We have developed a number of events and behavioural simulations to engage their staff and communities:

• Exploration events can help involve a large number of community members and capture a wide range of concerns and interests.
• Behavioural simulations involve participants in detailed scenarios based on their own environment – to draw use their own judgement to help schools understand and plan for the future.
• Open negotiation events - open, transparent and inclusive - recognize that in the real world change occurs not by management edict but by a process of negotiation and bargaining, leading more naturally to successful implementation.

Many change programmes fail because employees don't understand the organisation's goals and the change process, or feel left out of that process. HR can have a powerful strategic importance in managing organisational change, especially within further and higher education institutions. So we focus on involving managers and staff in decision making. We have substantial experience in designing and implementing ways of developing personal skills that support change and strengthen organisational capacity.

Evaluating leadership in higher education

During recent years we have worked on a number of management and leadership programme evaluations and related projects linked to the strategic development of learning programmes.

In developing a sound approach to evaluation, we tap in to existing assessments to avoid duplication and use the statistical data on current and past development activities offered to staff. An important aspect of our approach involves engagement with participants, their managers and other senior staff to ensure that findings and learning generated from the evaluation are clear and useful to support further training and development activities. 

An example of our recent experience is work with Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). OPM was commissioned to evaluate its Senior Management Development Programme (SMDP). The evaluation set out to produce a summative evaluation of the programme, to measure its impact against the original objectives, as well as formative guidance to make recommendations as to the future structure of senior management development at MMU.

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