Helping public sector managers get value for money from their budgets
A blog about public financial management: the fine art of managing public money to deliver vital services to the public. It involves budgeting, accounting, controlling, auditing, reporting, policy-making and decision-taking.
More than 25 years ago the Committee on Standards in Public Life held an inquiry into Parliamentary scandals and created seven principles that everyone in public life should adhere to.
In my forthcoming course, The Principles of Managing Public Money, there will be a section on making decisions about public money. Making such decisions requires the decision-maker to have integrity and I will be referring to the SELF test for decisions.
Read MoreI’m working on an online course about the principles of managing public money. The course is aimed at everyone in the public sector, whether employees, politicians, volunteers, etc. I want it to be a great course that is valuable to the people who register for it. I’ve got over thirty years’ experience of managing public money and there is a temptation to cram all my knowledge into a single course, but that would not be a good idea.
There’s not a technology reason why I could not have a course comprised of hundreds of lessons that would take the learner many weeks to complete. There is, I think, a practical limit on what a person is willing to take on, especially if it is additional to their work commitments. This means that one of my challenges is to find the balance between including enough material for the course to be valuable without going into too much detail and becoming onerous — or worse, boring. I’ve spent quite a bit of time, therefore, deciding what to include and what to exclude and I’ve had to delete some sections and ideas that I would like to teach in order to keep things focused.
The platform I am using for my courses allows lessons to be grouped into modules. I think five modules, each taking one to two hours to complete is about right. This is something someone could complete in a day if they really wanted to, but more likely they could complete it over 1 to 4 weeks to fit with their schedule.
The five modules I have now decided on are set out below.
These are my thoughts on grouping the course into modules. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and observations in the comments section.
If you’re interested in this course you can sign up for my mailing list and be the first to know when the course opens for registration by clicking here.
I am the treasurer of a charity in the UK, the Friends of Ibba Girls School, which exists to build and operate a school for girls in the southwest corner of South Sudan. As well as being the world's newest countries, South Sudan is one of the poorest and most fragile. We all know that education improves the life chances of children and, in practice, their families, too. That's why it is important that Ibba Girls School, and the other schools in the country, exist.
If you have two minutes to spare, here's a video about the school featuring some of the girls whose future we want to enhance.
Read MoreThe HMRC says ‘Tax avoidance doesn’t pay. Most arrangements simply don’t work and people can end up paying more than they were trying to avoid. Users may have a long-term requirement to deal with the cost, commercial and tax fallout from these transactions with no support from the promoter of the original arrangement.’
Read MoreLast year I authored a MOOC (massive open online course) about managing public money for the Open University. It was an interesting and enjoyable project to work on, and I learned an awful lot the production of online courses. Here are five of the lessons I learned.
Read More© Gary Bandy 2024
