GOV.UK blogs

Defence in the Media: Saturday 16 February 2019

Coverage of defence issues in the media today includes a report on the mental health of former service personnel and news of Prince Harry's visit to Norway as Captain General Royal Marines.

Meet your Cambridge neighbours

If you are a civil servant based in or around Cambridge come along to this event, a mix of stalls and workshops, a great networking opportunity to build your knowledge and capability

Fact sheet: Returnees from the conflict zone in Syria

There have been widespread reports about the potential for individuals who have taken part in the conflict in Syria to return to the UK in recent days. This fact sheet explains our approach to managing this issue.

Help offenders take their next step forward

Could you use your skills to help offenders prepare to return to society? Join our Going Forward project and make a difference.

GSE opportunities: Cross-Governement vacancies in BEIS and DEFRA

This blog post is a collection of vacancies, events and learning and development opportunities for people working in Government Science and Engineering.

The Greatest Resources For Developers

The software development landscape is constantly changing, focusing on just one technology, or even stack, can often leave a developer blindsided by a new approach, and there’s always someone claiming the latest shiny thing is better than an existing one. …

Driving Ethics Forward: The Importance of Considering the Ethics of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)

Hello, my name is Dr Rachel Adams and I’m an Early Career Researcher with the Information Law and Policy Centre, Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. I’m also a member of the Surveillance Camera Commissioner’s Automatic Number Plate Recognition Independent …

Health screener diploma is positive experience for learners and assessors

More than 100 people have now successfully gained their Level 3 Diploma for Health Screeners. Here, an assessor and a learner share their experience of the diploma.

Psychological safety for researchers

Tristan Ostrowski, user researcher at the Police Digital Service, explains how to plan for psychological risks on a project.

How Can Mentoring Benefit You?

In his blog John talks about why the Civil Service is a great place to work and the enormous benefits of mentoring or being a mentee. John Lawrence is the Operations Head Veterinarian at the Food Standards Agency…. and a first time “blogger”!

Defence in the media: Friday 15 February 2019

Today’s defence-related news includes coverage of the extension of personnel eligible for medallic recognition in the fight against Daesh. Counter-Daesh medallic recognition  The Times picks up on the Defence Secretary’s announcement that drone operators will be eligible for a medal …

Fostering: what do the latest statistics tell us?

Matthew Brazier, Ofsted's specialist advisor for looked after children, discusses our latest fostering statistics and what they tell us about the sector.

UK Waste Statistics published

UK Waste Statistics published There is coverage in The Daily Telegraph (p9), The Sun (p24), and the Daily Mail online of the latest Official Statistics on UK household and packaging waste recycling for 2017. The recycling rate for households has …

What we’ve learnt from our test automation revolution

Test engineer, Matthew, talks about working on a project to build a Java Selenium Test Automation Framework to work with a customised Siebel Application and run a fully-automated Regression Pack.

Education in the Media: Friday 15 February 2019

Today’s Education in the Media blog looks at the Education Secretary’s response to pupils striking for climate change.

Home Office in the media blog: Friday 15 February

Today’s Home Office stories include the case of Shamima Begum and the immigration case of a 90-year-old man.

London fashion week: a catwalk of British IP

As designers showcase their work at London Fashion Week, we look at the UK's contribution to the fashion and design industry.

Duncan Selbie's Friday message - 15 February 2019

Dear everyone Each week I am in different parts of England to hear first-hand how Councils and their NHS partners are going about their duty to improve the public’s health. This week I met the excellent leadership team for Enfield …

CS Local Northern Ireland three months on

Lynn and Neil reflect on their hectic journey over the last few months and look forward to continuing that journey over the coming months.

Volunteering opportunities in Somerset schools

There are a number of upcoming volunteering opportunities to work in schools across Somerset.

Inspiring the Next Generation in Northumberland

Northumberland Education Business Partnership (EBP) are offering a number of great opportunities during the Spring and Summer term.

National Air Quality Summit

Today (14 February) the Environment Secretary attended a national clean air summit hosted by local government leaders’ network, UK100 and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

Introducing a map of Healthy Start uptake

Isaac Smith, Technology Advisor, shares how and why the Healthy Start team created a map of Healthy Start voucher uptake.

Evaluating new GCSEs in French, German and Spanish

Last year we committed to do further work to evaluate the new GCSEs in French, German and Spanish, and to consider whether there was a case for making an adjustment to the grading. There are several strands to this work …

Education in the Media: Thursday 14 February 2019

Today’s Education in the Media blog focuses on the termination warning notices  which have gone out to two Steiner schools, and new research from Neon on the disadvantage gap in higher education admissions.

Army Basing Programme – A look back and a look ahead 

A look back at the achievements of the Army Basing Programme so far and a look ahead to what is planned in 2019.

Care with confidence

Last month, our Minister for Care Caroline Dinenage attended the launch of Carer Confident in Westminster, a new employer benchmarking scheme designed to help businesses of all shapes and sizes create more carer-supportive workplaces for their staff. Funded by the …

EU vessels prevented from electric shock fishing post-Brexit and fungi sites to be protected for future generations

EU vessels prevented from electric shock fishing post Brexit and fungi sites to be protected for future generations

Continuous Improvement Network

Leading the way in continuous improvement across all government departments and becoming the go-to place for knowledge, experience and support.

This is the new vision of the North East and the Yorkshire and Humber Continuous Improvement Networks.

Symbols and characters in a company name

This Valentine’s Day, the heart symbol will be used for many types of decoration. But one thing it cannot be used for is a company name. Find out which characters, signs and symbols you can register.

Home Office in the media blog: Thursday 14 February

Today’s Home Office stories include returning Daesh fighters, Zimbabwe removals and a trafficking caseworker job advert.

How the GOV.UK Design System can work alongside other government design resources

We carried out research to look at how the GOV.UK Design System can work with other design resources across government. Here's what we found out.

I'm a deviant. The positive kind.

I set-up the Open Innovation Team. I pitched the idea to Jeremy Heywood, refined it with colleagues, persuaded some top universities to fund us and quit my job at Treasury to run the pilot. I recently discovered that this kind …

AI is transforming industrial inspection

At the forefront of the latest and most exciting advancements in this technology is AI for industrial inspection (AI4II), which is set to transform the way manufacturers carry out the process of visual examination of high value components. Artificial intelligence …

Health Matters: Preventing cardiovascular disease

The latest edition of Health Matters, PHE’s professional resource, focuses on the new ambitions developed by the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention System Leadership Forum (CVDPSLF) that sets to improve the detection and management of atrial fibrillation (AF), high blood pressure and …

Latest screening KPI data and other updates

We have published the latest key performance indicator (KPI) data that measures how the NHS screening programmes are performing.

What we learnt from Digital Voices six months on

Deb, Jane and Jane talk about our Digital Voices programme and how it helped them develop their digital skills and confidence.

Why is a careers service Digital First?

For this blog we are handing over to our colleague Joe Billington, director of the National Careers Service (NCS) on how, just like the apprenticeship service, the NCS has adopted a digital first approach. The mission statement for the National …

Changes to newborn blood spot failsafe reports

The weekly failsafe report for newborn blood spot screening is changing. Find out more about this important change.

World of Wellbeing - CS Local Scotland

The newly established Well-Being Network group would like you to join them in increasing your knowledge and understanding of the importance of Wellbeing and the positive impact it has on us and in the work place.