Engagement is at the core of the Oxfordshire Skills for Health programme and provides its three guiding principles.

Workplace learning is a collective activity – everyone needs to be involved

To make a real impact on service delivery it is never enough to work with individuals. The whole team has to be involved and the team always includes managers and supervisors as well as operatives. ‘Involvement’ may consist of no more than an update briefing on the learning others are doing, but it is vital.

This principle of collective involvement is also true by default – every time one member of a team is released for learning, the others are obliged to cover. When the individual returns with new ideas and new ways of doing things, the others are obliged to adjust.

Learning comes out of doing – start with what people are doing in their jobs

The whole point of workplace learning is to develop people’s ability to engage critically with their work. The more learning is situated in participants’ daily experience, the more likely it is to support critical engagement.

There are additional benefits – by focusing on workplace experiences and issues, Oxfordshire Skills for Health has been able to flag up issues relevant to organisational development in areas such as health and safety and operational systems. This reinforces managers’ perceptions of the programme’s value and sustains their support for and receptiveness to the programme and its lifelong learning agenda.

Most learning is informal – go beyond the classroom

The role of informal learning in creating workplace practice has already been mentioned.

Classroom input is a relatively small part of anyone’s learning cycle, particularly at work and particularly at the lower end of the pay scale where staff release is always limited. Linking input as directly as possible to participants’ workplace experiences and then following up outside the classroom helps translate input into practice.

For this reason informal contact with participants and non-participants alike is valued, as is a range of other activities that reinforce work with individuals. These activities include consultancy around operational systems and procedures, mediation, mentoring and management development.

An example of the last is its use of tools developed by the management theorist Meredith Belbin to sensitise task-oriented managers to the impact on performance of a range of ‘soft’ skills not previously taken into account.