EPTA Annual Conference 2022 (Barcelona)

Introduction

When: 27-29 June 2022

Where: Barcelona, Spain

During the last two years, the needs coming from the COVID-19 pandemic put our academies in the centre of many glances by the Prison Services. There was the need for recruiting and training, in a very short period of time, new staff for attending the extra demands provoked by the pandemic, we all changed our routines of working, introducing “online” tools as the main way to provide training, etc.

We all learned a lot from what this crisis meant for our network. The last Annual Conference held in Warsaw on September 2021 was a milestone for sharing these lessons and adopting common conclusions.

After this big effort and after putting in practice many of the lessons learned, we are convinced that the time has arrived for sharing a deep approach into our strategies and practices for assessing the work we do, as training academies, and its impact on the quality of the prison services.

This year EPTA Annual Conference 2022, Barcelona comes up with the title: ‘The need to evaluate training: a work in progress…’

Call for Papers

The role that training plays in the quality of the outcomes of the prison services is pivotal. In case we consider the classical model “70-20-10” from McCall, Lombardo, and Eichinger, our Academies are responsible for ensuring the acquirement and consolidation of the professional competencies of prison services’ staff, in a range that should vary from 10% to 30%, if we include the more innovative ways of facilitating the learning processes among models and colleagues of the same organisation.

Having this in mind, five relevant questions come to us, consequently:

1. How do we assess which are the relevant subjects that we need to include in our training offer? (Detection of needs).
2. How do we assess which is the best option of training for each need? (Reengineering).
3. How do we assess that the training offer reaches the goals we wanted to achieve in each case? (Quality assurance).
4. How do we assess the impact of the training provided in the improvement of the prison services? (Transference).
5. How do we assess that we recruit the right trainers for each need? (The balance among the experience in the field with the pedagogical skills).

At the next annual conference, we want to create the conditions to debate aloud together around these questions using four formats: Plenaries, Workshops, Exhibition, and Demonstrations.

If you would like to participate at the conference and present, please submit an outline of your proposed presentation by 1 March 2022 using this submission form (download the form first before filling it out, in order to have the correct pdf format) and send it to secretariat@epta.info.