Continuing the leadership theme

Earlier this week I attended a development day on Ethical Leadership in Public Services, run by The Staff College. There were very good inputs from all three speakers - Kathryn Perera (NHS Horizons), Sherry Malik (NSPCC) and Martin Kalungu-Banda - I was left thinking about Martin's emphasis on what he sees as the three most critical challenges of our time - the ecological divide, the social divide and the spiritual divide.

Whilst each are important in their own right, the one that we DCSs probably pay most direct attention to is the ‘spiritual divide' (mental ill health), both the perennial problem of securing sufficient CAMHS provision for our most vulnerable children and young people, and our request to colleagues in adult mental health services to "think family" when it comes to their practice and to "see the child" whenever they are working to support an adult with mental health issues who is a parent too. The impacts of poverty and inequality (the social divide) are well evidenced in research and felt throughout our work as well. And even though we may usually leave worries about climate change (the ecological divide) to other council departments, if we act on Martin's exhortation to "listen to those not yet born", it follows that as children's outcomes matter to us, then our children's children's outcomes should matter too, and so on. If this is the context, what kind of leaders do we need? Leaders who can prioritise how many fingers we need in each of the many pies - and how deeply we need to poke at them!