Newcastle City Council: Embedding the National Occupational Standards for Resilience and Emergencies

Context

Newcastle City Council delivers a wide-ranging resilience and emergency planning function within a local authority context, supporting preparedness, response and recovery across the organisation. Unlike blue light services, it does not operate within a nationally prescribed training and exercising framework and instead focuses on ensuring that officers involved in response are appropriately trained, experienced and confident in carrying out their roles.

Historically, the Council has maintained an established training and exercising programme, supported by an annual training needs analysis (TNA). This identifies capability gaps and informs the design of training for the following year. However, similar to many local authorities, emergency planning has historically developed alongside other functions and has not always been consistently recognised as a core professional discipline.

The introduction of the National Occupational Standards (NOS) for Resilience and Emergencies provided an opportunity to strengthen this position – offering a recognised standard to formalise training, demonstrate capability, and reinforce the professionalism of the function.

Approach

Rather than redesigning their training model around the revised standards, the Council adopted a pragmatic approach, embedding the standards into existing processes. The starting point was their established training programme, which was systematically mapped against the NOS.

Each training session was reviewed and aligned to relevant standards, with this information captured in a central spreadsheet. This included details such as the course content, intended audience (strategic, tactical, or operational), duration, and the specific NOS it supported.

The team had previously worked with Civil Contingencies standards and undertook a transition exercise to align these with the newer NOS. This helped maintain continuity while updating their approach. The revised standards were also found to be clearer and more accessible in structure, which supported the mapping process and made it easier to apply them consistently across training and exercising activity.

To date, the Council has primarily taken a forward mapping approach – aligning existing training to the NOS. However, there is a recognised need to evolve towards a more strategic model, where the standards are used to identify gaps and directly inform future training design. This is expected to be incorporated into their upcoming training needs analysis cycle.

Impact

A key benefit of the NOS is the ability to provide assurance in the event of an incident or emergency. By mapping all training and exercising activity to nationally recognised standards, the Council can demonstrate that officers involved in response are suitably trained and experienced to carry out their roles. This is particularly important in a non–blue light context, where there is no prescribed national training framework. The NOS therefore provide a credible benchmark against which capability can be evidenced, both organisationally and at an individual level.

This has contributed to a shift in how resilience work is perceived within the organisation. By aligning training to recognised standards, the function is increasingly understood as a professional discipline rather than an additional responsibility. This has been supported by a highly engaged team, many of whom are already familiar with professional standards in their primary roles.

At an individual level, the use of NOS provides greater clarity on expectations and supports ongoing professional development by ensuring that training is clearly linked to the competencies required for emergency response.

Next steps

While significant progress has been made, there are clear opportunities to build on this approach. There is scope to extend the use of NOS beyond training into wider workforce processes, such as job descriptions and person specifications. Embedding the standards in these areas would strengthen alignment between organisational expectations and individual performance.

At a wider system level, the Council is part of a Local Resilience Forum (LRF) where the NOS have been discussed and are being taken forward by individual partner organisations. This creates a clear opportunity to build greater alignment at LRF level over time, particularly through the use of NOS within any collective training and exercising activity delivered across the partnership.

Overall, Newcastle City Council’s experience demonstrates that embedding the NOS can be achieved incrementally. By integrating the standards into existing processes and building towards more strategic use over time, organisations can enhance professionalism, improve confidence, and strengthen their ability to demonstrate resilience capability.