Training & Events

This course tackles challenging issues through a worked example to illustrate potential pitfalls; it provides delegates with solid techniques to arrive at well-considered options.

Preparing for a Public Consultation is run over two consecutive morning sessions.

This course tackles consultation issues through a worked example to illustrate potential pitfalls; it provides delegates with solid techniques to select the best dialogue fix and to deliver them to best practice standards.

Conducting a Public Consultation is run over two consecutive morning sessions.

With a turn to online consultation as the default method for collecting views during the pandemic, best practice has been overshadowed by a sense of urgency. This repurposed version of the popular “Best Practice Online Consultation” course contains invaluable lessons - from how to construct an effective online questionnaire to dealing with the tricky subject of engaging the digitally excluded. The course covers recent examples and explores some of the popular technology options and delivery models for integrating a multi-channel approach to consultation & engagement.

This one-day course aims to provide a definition of co-production within the context of consultation and engagement and explore its broad principles. We will also look at practical applications of a range of methods. The course will be conducted in an interactive and supportive learning environment.

Public bodies have never been more vulnerable to legal challenge. This comprehensive, regularly updated course covers all aspects of the Law of Consultation and draws upon 160 plus judicial reviews as Judges have increasingly intervened on behalf of consultees.

Participants have the use of specially prepared case notes to highlight key messages from the cases discussed in the course and the subject matter is entertainingly delivered by focusing on relevant issues and challenges faced by consultation professionals in all sectors. The Course will also cover recent developments and changes in NHS legislation and guidance following the recent restructuring, highlighting key changes and points with which attendees should be familiar.

Many hundreds of Institute Members and supporters have attended our unique Law of Consultation course. We are now able to offer a special variant of this course with the emphasis firmly on the practical implications of the many Court decisions we have scrutinised. This course will be delivered by some of the Institute's most experienced Associates and will provide ample opportunities for detailed discussions about the application of the legal rules to the client's own environment.

Engaging with communities is critical for both public and private organisations if they wish to gain, build and maintain community understanding and support for their activities. This course is essential for those who want to ensure their community engagement activities are meaningful, building trust and reciprocity with the communities being served.

Making Community Engagement Meaningful is run over two consecutive morning sessions.

A workshop based on the feedback of needs from public bodies across the UK. Using examples and exercises based on real scenarios and actual practice, the trainer will run through the latest ‘smart’ techniques for 2020 and beyond.

This workshop considers what constitutes ‘smart’ engagement depending on the profiles of people that need to be engaged with. It starts by considering how well we undertake stakeholder mapping and using this to build an engagement plan, before considering the nature of the interest people have in whatever you are engaging or consulting upon, and how these two factors might determine what ‘smart’ engagement might look like.

It asks questions of delegates, such as, “Do you limit yourself to using the same method of engagement for a group of elderly residents as you do for a group of young activists when they have very different interest, perspectives and position? How do you engage them to get the best from them?”

This one-day training course continues from where the e-Learning module finishes.
It starts by providing participants with an appreciation of what the UK judiciary expects of those undertaking (or failing to undertake) the PSED: the ‘ask’, the extent and the framework for undertaking Equality Analysis, with what the Courts call ‘substance and rigour’. Or what tCI calls ‘good practice’.

It then looks at the three main scenarios where a public body should undertake Equality Analysis, what is required in each case and the degrees to which desktop analysis, data acquisition and engagement with the characteristics are needed. An exercise explores how to meet S149/3C and involve the ‘seldom heard’, including considering the ‘smart’ approaches.
The final part of this course explores how you ensure decision-makers can have ‘due regard’ before allowing participants to discuss scenarios they encounter and what good practice would look like in each case.

The course references case law to reinforce the important messages.

Have you got responsibilities around consultation, pre-consultation engagement and/or option development? If yes, then this one-day course is a must for you. Over the past ten years, the Institute has monitored the mistakes consultors make that result in challenges, judicial reviews, referrals, enquiries, trial by media, political fall-out, bad decisions and worse! A catalogue of costly errors that are alarmingly repeated on a regular basis, even within the same bodies.

This course is a combination of ten mini workshops exploring the ten most common and costly mistakes. The Institute’s highly experienced facilitator introduces them in descending order, explaining the error, why it is a fault, an example of the cost of making a blunder, before involving participants in working out how to work smart. Participants benefit from being able to review their own experiences and forthcoming consultations in the context of each mistake. They are introduced to consultation risk management and the best methods for meeting best practice within time constraints and costs.

The Institute can design and deliver effective tailor-made courses for organisations seeking to enhance their team’s knowledge and skills. Engaging closely with the client, the Institute will develop a unique course to the requirements of your organisation, delivered at the highest level by a tCI Associate. This can involve taking elements from our established courses to be tailored to your needs.

Contact Michelle De Branco via email at michelle@consultationinstitute.org or call 01767 318350 to discuss Bespoke Training options.

Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects are major infrastructure developments in England and Wales that bypass normal local planning requirements. It’s very precise format means that is has many merits that are sometimes lacking in a regular planning application, as this course looks to demonstrate.

Children and young people have a right to take part in and influence how adults plan and run services for them in the areas where they live and learn; but how do you go about involving them, and what might you need to consider?

This course provides participants with an understanding of what we mean by young people and why and how to involve them in decision-making, We’ll consider the legal considerations and offer some practical ideas to get you started.

This course has been written by client and member, Edward Mallam of Mallam Consulting Ltd who has over 20 years of experience in the public and private sectors.

This course focuses on the process of a developer submitting a planning application, acknowledging the important role consultation has in planning.

This four-module course explores the context of consultation today, asking why you should consult and if there is a legal requirement. It shows how you might create a strategy, and offers useful tools for running your consultation. Finally, exploring some of the challenges you may face and how best to overcome them.

In the world of consultation and engagement, social media runs much deeper than stakeholder comms and marketing. It can be used to find influencers, gauge current sentiment on a key issue or help to reach seldom heard audiences due to their massive prevalence. Social Media is particularly beneficial during pre-consultation when it can be used to warm up a debate and, in turn, lead to increased take-up during a proceeding formal consultation.

Today’s society is more connected than ever before. The opportunity to go online is now available at home, at work, on public transport and across cities and towns.

The way we live our lives has been drastically changed by connectivity and the rise of social media. The wide reach and functionality of social media brings new methods to connect, inform and engage. From a consultation perspective, it can add a whole new dimension to your work.

If you were to ask a consultation professional to describe the Law of Consultation, they would probably be able to mention The Gunning Principles. Ask them to describe those in detail and that could present more of a problem. There is, of course, a great deal more to all of this and that is what this online course will help you to appreciate.

Written by Institute Founders, Rhion Jones and Elizabeth Gammell, this eight-module course is a substantial but worthwhile investment in your professional development and involves between four and six hours of serious study and covers 40% more High Court cases than can be included in the public course. A course summary document gives you a handy aide-memoir to supplement your learning, and Module 8 will be updated every year for the next three years to incorporate new significant cases free of charge to all registrants.

Our Creative Dialogue Methods course is broken down into three separate lessons, exploring what we mean by ‘creative dialogue’, the key characteristics, benefits and challenges of using these techniques in consultations, and the methods you can use to encourage creative dialogue.
We also touch on the Gunning Principles, social styles and how, and when, creative dialogue might be useful in relation to them.
There are a multitude of techniques out there, and this course focuses of four of them in particular, looking at the essential characteristics of World Cafes, Appreciative Inquiry, Participatory Geographic Information Systems and Citizens Assemblies.

This course sets out how to construct a coding frame that will help you to organise unstructured (e.g. free text) responses.

In tCI’s online Data Analysis and Report Writing course, the principles of coding are covered, and though it is not essential, tCI recommends that you complete this course first, and study, in particular, the module on qualitative analysis and coding, which will give you some background.

This course takes you further into the detail of coding and explains, through a step-by-step approach with a worked example, how to do it.

In this course, we focus on three particular types of public events: Public Meetings, Drop-in events and Public Consultation Hearings. The course is primarily designed to help those new to consultation but also contains much best practice advice as a refresher for those with some experience in this often challenging aspect of public consultation.

Using a mixture of helpful, practical advice, sprinkled with anecdotes from the wide experience of Institute Associates and Members, we will equip you with a lot of very important insights.

Consultation is not a vote; the data collected is a means of informing decision-makers of what different types of people think, and how strongly they think it, but this does not mean that such data should be any less robust. When a consulting organisation publishes data, then, it should expect it to be challenged, and should ensure that the data itself is robust enough to resist such challenges.

A Focus Group is not a large gathering, nor is it simply an unstructured chat. It has clear parameters, as set out in this course. We look at the basic principles and moderation of focus groups and offer tips and advice to ensure you get the most out of your own group discussions.

Surveys and Questionnaires must be informed by understanding the audience; they must sit in the world of the respondent, not in the world of the person writing them. They cannot and should not be seen as a quick and easy option for gathering data; the questions need to be carefully planned and researched for.

This course covers the basics of survey and questionnaire design.

Data collection is at the heart of consultation – it is a means whereby we find out what people think and what they wish to say.

Before we move to any detail on dealing with data, it is important we understand some basic things about it, and some basic principles about what it is possible and not possible to do with data, information, and sampling.

This course focuses on what is different when it comes to deploying stakeholder mapping in a consultation context, as opposed, to more generic issues.

We’ve created three fictional, but realistic scenarios from the worlds of Health, Planning and Airports, to help you understand how mapping works, and how it enables you to treat each group or individual to the best advantage.

This foundation course in consultation is an eight-module programme based on these key charter principles, demonstrating some of the issues you may come across and what the solutions might be.

This course is free to all members of the Institute