Working Together Grade 6 Example Statement (500 Words)

SMy agency co-chairs a regional resilience forum with five organisations: the local authority, the fire and rescue service, the health trust, the environment regulator and ourselves. Each organisation had its own flood response plan, but the plans assumed different warning times, used different contact trees and had never been tested together. A real flood two years earlier had exposed those seams, and the forum's chair had twice asked for someone to take this on.

TAs the Grade 6 leading our emergency planning, I volunteered the agency to organise the forum's first joint live exercise, align the five plans beforehand and leave the forum with a repeatable way of testing itself.

AI began by visiting each organisation's planning lead separately, because the forum's meetings were polite but superficial and I wanted the real obstacles. I found genuine worries: the health trust feared exposing staffing gaps, the fire service doubted the council's contact lists were current, and nobody was sure who could commit resources. I brought my own director onside early, securing staff time and a modest budget, so I could make credible commitments in the room. I proposed a table-top exercise first as a low-risk way to build trust, and I created a small design group with one planner per organisation, meeting weekly, so the exercise belonged to the forum rather than to my agency. We co-designed the scenario over two workshops so every organisation recognised its own reality in it. When the scenario revealed that our warning triggers differed by six hours, I facilitated a working session where the five leads agreed a single shared trigger, and I wrote it into a one-page protocol each chief officer signed. When the health trust nearly withdrew after a difficult internal review, I met their emergency planning lead, scaled their role back to something manageable and kept them in. I then persuaded the forum to commit to a live exercise, addressing resource concerns by sharing costs and using each organisation's staff in their normal roles, and I brought in an experienced facilitator from outside the region as a neutral umpire so no agency would mark its own homework. I organised a joint briefing for participants, paired each organisation's control room with a buddy from another, and built three injects into the day that forced cross-agency decisions rather than letting everyone stay in their own lane. Afterwards I ran the debrief so each organisation assessed its own performance first, and I compiled a joint learning log with an owner and deadline for every action. I published the protocol and contact tree in a shared online space that all five organisations could access and update.

RThe exercise involved 120 staff across five organisations and identified 23 plan gaps, all now closed or scheduled. All five chief officers signed off the final report, the forum adopted the shared warning trigger permanently, and two neighbouring regions have reused our scenario and protocol. Feedback rated the joint control room the most valuable part.