Priority three - looking forward

We will continue to develop leaders at all levels for the future, focusing on effective leadership styles, improving promotion processes and enhancing development programmes, all aligned with the NFCC Leadership framework. We will recognise those who uphold our values, ensure leadership accountability, promote a culture of continuous improvement, and implement consistent governance and decision-making processes.

We will continue to use apprenticeships as the first option for development, whether technical or behavioural, to ensure that there is a consistent approach to development. The team will be working with other fire and rescue services to develop ‘Fire Officer’ apprenticeships of differing levels, to further reduce costs and simplify the delivery of development courses throughout all ranks.

We are committed to ensuring equality of access to all our services. Our Prevention team is actively working to increase our network of advocates from diverse communities, this however remains challenging due to issues around right-to-work visas. As with many current public services, the first port of call for the community is our website, this has been developed with accessibility in mind, with a translation tool and controls to be able to adjust the font size and colour contrast.

We will continue to promote the Service as an inclusive organisation for people from different communities to work for and interact with. A positive action event will be held at Middlemoor Fire Station in March 2025 for people from under-represented groups who are interested in becoming on-call firefighters. As part of a recruitment campaign for new wholetime firefighters, our attendance at Pride and Respect festivals in the summer of 2025 will be focused on recruitment opportunities and community safety awareness. We will continue to attend recruitment fairs, and we are using other media platforms such as the national Job and Careers Magazine, to target under represented groups.