We have had an incredibly busy year at Hosking Associates. Our schools support work, the focus of this 2013 Round Up article, continues to grow and in response to this we have developed our newest division, Hosking Education Services. As part of this, and to better serve our schools, we have started speaking to our school clients about our new service bundles. These mean that schools can budget across the year for the support that they require, as well as receive a whole host of built-in support services. See our Bundles article for more information.
2 Day Head Teacher Training
Continuing our 2013 Round Up, the 2 Day Head Teacher training has been extremely successful and we are currently in the final stages of completing the work to IOSH accredit this course. For anyone who attended this training we will be organising a refresher to enable you to achieve the IOSH accreditation if you wish. The course already fulfills legal requirements to undertake Health & Safety training so there is no obligation for anyone to take this step. We will of course keep you informed of future courses and when the refresher will be held.
Safety Ribbon Award 
In addition, we have launched the National Safety Ribbon Award for those schools who achieve an outstanding standard of safety management. We are currently in discussions with ROSPA to potentially offer their standard also. For more information on this see our larger article. We hope that it will become a standard that schools will strive to achieve.
Training
Our 2013 Round Up has seen some great progress within our Training Division. We are continuing to offer individual courses to meet the needs of our clients so that everyone can feel more confident about the decisions they when we are not there. All of our training is geared toward enabling our clients to confidently implement safety and feel much more in control. We understand that trying to arrange training for schools staff is always difficult and Hosking Education Services run a range of courses that can be delivered during school inset days that work around your other training commitments on these days. Some of our training includes Employee H&S Awareness, Governor H&S Training, New HT Induction, and Fire Warden Training. This has been so successful that in April this year we trained over 150 school staff across 3 schools.
Safety Management Systems
2013 Round Up within our other sectors: outside of our schools work, we have been working with some prestigious property clients and facilities management organisations which has enable us to really fine tune how we deliver competent person services for everyone. Other clients are contractors of these organisations and we have had great success in raising standards for these companies also.
Contractor Safety
Our 2013 Round Up has seen some improvement within contractor management. Contractor management arrangements continue to be a challenge for all our clients and we are working closely with Safecontractor to make this easier for everyone. We have negotiated some great savings with them for clients who come under our umbrella and we continue to encourage a dialogue with them as it really can reduce the administrative burden, of at least part of this important legal requirement. This is especially critical for clients with asbestos and it is an area that we will be concentrating on for our schools in 2014.
Hosking Associates Changes Internally
Our 2013 Round Up wouldn’t be complete without the latest staff news.
We will be seeing some changes internally at the start of 2014. After two years, Sherryl Cousins has decided to leave Hosking Associates and wishes all our clients the best for the future. She has worked extremely hard to develop our work with schools in particular and will be greatly missed. The work to develop the service bundles and the Safety Ribbon Award has very much been a team effort over the last three or four months and we are now looking forward to implementing this higher level of service from January 2014. We have visited most of our schools to explain the changes. Louise Hosking has previously spent a number of years with London Borough of Hillingdon working with their community schools and will therefore become the lead for schools competent person support in the New Year.
We have new consultants coming on board. Sharon Notman started working for us this month. She has extensive experience in both the private and public sectors. In particular, she designed and implemented the Schroders Health, Safety and Environmental Management Program which enabled Schroders to win the prestigious Platinum award for the City of London Corporation, Clean City Award Scheme for 4 consecutive years.
Liz Ainslie will be joining us from February 2014. Liz will be a dedicated Environmental Consultant and will be working with existing and new clients to help them identify how they can save money by going green. Liz will also be working toward enabling Hosking Associates to award ISO14001 accreditation and we are looking to implement a similar Green Ribbon Award for clients who are not ready for ISO14001 just yet.
Core to our business, as always, is providing our clients with a high standard of service. As we take on new clients it is important for us to ensure that we continue to give you the level of service you rightly expect. Therefore, Christine McBride is taking a more operational position within the company, as well as becoming the main point of contact for training. If you have any training needs please do contact Christine directly and we can program these in for you. Additionally, Christine is in the process of receiving her NEBOSH National Certificate, as well as holding honours degrees in Business Administration and English.
Christine is ably assisted by Isis Anders who works for us a few hours a month during her gap year. Isis is hoping to study business at Westminster so we are tracking her work experience so that she has a great portfolio of experience under her belt at interview time.
We continue to be supported by our great associate consultants who have specialist knowledge in a variety of fields and are very much part of our team.
Happy Christmas Everyone
As everyone, we are busy meeting deadlines before Christmas. Our office is closed over the Christmas period but we will all be monitoring our email so if you require urgent support please do not hesitate to contact us as you would normally. If you have an urgent request for support please text Louise Hosking on 07876 134 979.
