Hello and welcome to this month’s newsletter. I hope you are safe and well, wherever you are in the world.

What have I been doing since the last newsletter?

January was a busy month. I began a consulting assignment helping a police force with an outsourcing programme and I’ve been writing the content for a finance for non-financial managers course for the Open University.

I have started to mark the 60 essays I mentioned last month. What surprised me so far is how many students tackled the question about the adoption of accrual accounting. I thought it was a difficult topic and would be the least answered but, it seems, students find it interesting. What do I know?

Online courses

I have adapted my public sector financial management course from the University of Nottingham into an online course which I hope will be published later this month.

I still have online courses available, some of them for free, here. Check them out!

Public financial management in the news

Here are some of the articles I have spotted in the last few weeks.

I’m trying not to fill this section with COVID-19 items but here’s one that is interesting. It is about the OECD suggesting the public will not accept that there should be more austerity measures as part of the post-pandemic government plans.

In my book I wrote about the change in measuring public sector output from being equal to its inputs to something more useful. The UK has begun to do this but other countries have not. This is one reason why the UK’s GDP has fallen so far over the last year, as explained in this episode of the BBC Radio 4 show, More or Less.

Lastly, if you happen to create papers or reports that include graphs you might want to read this blog post about how to remover the clutter from them. Removing clutter makes it easier for your readers to get the message from your graph that you want them to get. Like this before and after image from the blog post: