Details of grants to councils that agree to freeze or reduce council tax have been published. Councils that freeze or reduce their council tax next year will get a one off grant equivalent to raising ...

Parents who ensure their children don’t play truant will be able to get discounts and free places on holidays under an initiative designed to tackle unauthorised absence from schools. The scheme, ...

Some councils do not want to achieve all round excellence in Comprehensive Performance Assessments and are content to be just good enough in some areas, according to comments made by some councillors ...

The Near Neighbours programme has been launched to help people within communities to get to know each other better and to help them to improve their local neighbourhoods. The three-year Near ...

Reproduced by permission of the Public Management and Policy Association. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI Act) creates a new legislative framework for access to all public sector information.

Business intelligence is about making better use of information that is already stored away. Some 95 per cent of councils have made it a strategic priority, but few have quality data to support ...

Some trust their instinct when it comes to influencing people and this is one way to do it, but sometimes it does not work. For instance, to get a class full of children to take more exercise it ...

The Government is being urged to make better use of the money it spends on adult training. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education says the focus should be on individual needs rather than ...

New systems for processing ballot papers, such as those used in the election of London’s mayor, may be heading for redundancy. The next development is Internet voting using a personal computer, ...

Early in 2008 the US Academy of Sciences will publish ‘Reducing the Impact of Poverty on Health and Human Development’. This special Annals volume is part of a coordinated effort by 235 scientific ...

Councils in Scotland say lack of funding means roads that should be resurfaced every ten to twenty years are waiting an average of eighty-one years to be dealt with. The figure was given by the ...

The Government has called on private and institutional investors to engage with the developing social investment market and benefit from more balanced portfolios and new approaches to corporate social ...