You still have time to get the joining details for tomorrow afternoon’s webinar: The Autistic Brain. Hear about the neuroscience, lived experiences, and societal perspectives surrounding autism.
NEW: A roadmap of stronger security for your help desk and systems.
Read through the blog post and login to download the guidance.
President’s Conference 2026 dates confirmed: add Tuesday 9 and Wednesday 10 June to your calendar today.
In your membership: content and people
- NEW: Payroll cyber incident: a roadmap of stronger security for your help desk and systems
A recent incident, involving compromised email accounts and payroll fraud, highlights just how attackers exploit weak links. And illustrates what steps we must take to keep our systems and people safe. - Meet members and collaborate on solutions together at your next local meeting.
- NEW DATE of Wednesday 3 December – Maximising social value in your procurement: A workshop for your buyers
Browse your members-only resource hub.
You will need a user account on socitm.net to access member-only resources. Let us know if need any support.
What’s in your membership?
- Accessibility testing with Silktide
- Benchmarking
- Conferences, meetings and webinars
- Courses
- Innovation session/lab with Civiteq
- IT policy audit [Essential+/Enhanced/Executive] from PPS
- Resources
Extra member-only offers
- New for 2025-26 WeChange.AI Socitm-only pricing.https://socitm.net/membership/wechange-ai-socitm/
- Place Insight: your own social progress index [England-only]
- Socitm pricing on courses with the IT Management and Leadership Institute, Leadership Through Data, and QA
We calculated the £value of your Socitm membership so you don’t have to.
Keep getting all you can from membership: log into your account.
In your membership: Courses
Leadership
| Course | Location | Dates | Training points |
|---|---|---|---|
| FULL Empowering Women | London | Monday 15 to Tuesday 16 September and Tuesday 25 November | 3 |
| Empowering Women | Huntingdon | Thursday 18 to Friday 19 September and Thursday 20 October | 3 |
| Place-based Leadership | Birmingham | Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 October | 4 |
Core skills (on Teams)
| Course | Dates | Time | Training points |
|---|---|---|---|
| FULL Introduction to emotional intelligence | Monday 22 September | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
| Managing and motivating hybrid teams | Tuesdays 30 September and 21 October | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
| Equality, diversity and inclusion | Tuesday 7 October | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
| Introduction to emotional intelligence | Tuesday 4 November | 09:30 to 12:30 | 1 |
Digital skills (on Teams)
| Course | Dates | Time | Training points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Change Agent | Thursday 9 and Friday 10 October | 09:00 to 16:30 | 0 |
Registering for training
Read your guide to using training points. Log in for the current number of available points. Don’t have enough or you’ve run out? Let us know.
Things happen. If you can’t make the date of your training course let us know ASAP and we’ll get you onto the next suitable one available. And your training points will transfer with you.Please note: non-attendance without letting us know will mean training points getting deducted from your organisation’s annual total.
In your 2025 membership: benchmarking
Complimentary use of 1 module
Choose from: cost, delivery, performance or user skills.
With all the financial challenges facing the sector, use the cost module this year to baseline your transformation work.
Find out what you can do and how in the Benchmarking Services Help Centre, then claim your module.
In your membership: events
Lunchtime webinars from 13:00 to 14:00
Friday 12 September: The Autistic brain
Tomorrow’s session will challenge assumptions, highlight strengths, and explore how neurodiversity can reshape leadership, innovation, and inclusion in the workplace. Whatever your role, this webinar offers fresh insights and practical takeaways to support more inclusive thinking. Bring your lunch, your curiosity, and your questions!
- Wednesday 17 September | Maximising optimisation in an XaaS world
- Friday 19 September | Securing artificial intelligence
- Wednesday 24 September | How technology drives smarter outcomes
- Friday 26 September | Key strategies for modernising threat detection
- Friday 3 October | Your slides are not the presentation. How to stop excluding people every time you share your screen
- Wednesday 22 October | Beyond the £45 Billion: How AI can actually deliver the productivity everyone’s talking about
Meetings
- Tuesday 30 September | 10:00 to 11:00 | LGR insights for districts and boroughs
- Tuesday 7 October | 10:00 to 11:00 | LGR insights for districts and boroughs
- Thursday 23 October | 09:30 to 11:00 | Maximising social value in your procurement
Conference
Sessions and speakers include:
- An opening keynote address from Cardiff Council’s chief exec Paul Orders
- The future of apps and data integration in local government and the NHS withDylan Roberts, CDIO of Betsi Cadwaladr University Health.
- Embracing serverless to enhance service: Nickki Johns, Head of Digital at the Vale of Glamorgan Council
- Sarah Day from ADSS Cymru will talk about why digital matters for the future sustainability of social care services.
- Neath Port Talbot’s CDO Chris Owen will be chairing a discussion with CDPS, NLAWARP and the WLGA.
- Councillor Dimitri Batrouni from Newport City Council asks, ‘Is Wales doing enough in the data and AI space?’.
Partners’ events and updates
- Fri-12-Sep | 09:30 to 16:00 | Northern WARP Annual Conference [Manchester]
- Wed-17 to Fri-19-Sep | 11:00 to 12:30 | Resilience and Cyber4Good 2025
- Tue-23-Sep | 11:00 to 12:30 | C-TAG Virtual Workshop: Securing your email domain
- Wed-24-Sep | 17:00 to 19:00 | Dolenni Digidol: One year on – celebrating the impact of ‘Leading modern public services’ [Carmarthen]
- Wed-24 to Thu-25-Sep | 09:30 to 16:30 | DigiGov: Citizen Experience [London]
- Thu-25-Sep | 09:30 to 13:00 | Course: Microsoft 365 Purview eDiscovery
- Thu-25-Sep | 10:00 to 11:00 | Inside cyber attacks: the real impact of ransomware in 2025
- Tue-7 to Wed-8-Oct | 10:00 to 15:15 | HETT 2025 [London]
- Tue-14-Oct | 14:00 to 16:00 | Public sector buyers showcase: AI for eDisclosure and eDiscovery
- Thu-3 to Fri-14-Nov | The Future of Localism [St Andrews]
- Fri-7-Nov | 10:00 to 15:00 | AI workshop for councillors: Explore AI and Innovation [Towcester]
Institute Director Sam Smith is one of the speakers/panellists - Tue-18 to Wed-19-Nov | LGPN South [London]
Full of your Socitm community! CEO Nadira Hussain, Emeritus President Mark Lumley (Hounslow), VP Yogita Popat (Barnet), LSE Chair Rehana Ramesh (Hackney) and VP Kevin Taylor (Suffolk)
Insider cyber attacks: the real impact of ransomware in 2025
Thursday 25 September | 10:00 to 11:00 | Teams
Ransomware attacks are evolving along with their consequences and when an attack hits, it doesn’t just expose your data, it compromises your whole organisation. In Sophos’ 2025 Ransomware Report, for the third year running, cyber attack victims identified exploited vulnerability as the most common technical root cause of attack.
Join Phoenix and Sophos for an insightful and eye-opening session as they partner with cyber security expert, Jon Hope to unpack the key findings from Sophos’ brand-new 2025 State of Ransomware Report. This session dives into the real accounts behind the statistics, based on a vendor-neutral survey of 3.3K organisations.
Thank you for reading (or scrolling) this far! Just one more thing…
A few things I’ve been doing and looking at this week:
- Browsing the schedule for this year’s AI Week running from Monday 14 to Friday 4 October. There is a category filter for Public Sector.
- Heard a great presentation from Norfolk during last week’s SNRF meeting about accessibility in Power BI. We’re hoping to bring you more details in a dedicated session. Early stages of planning for that one. In the meantime browse through their Intro to Accessible Power BI reporting.
- Trying to get used to preparing this newsletter to send on a Thursday instead of a Friday. Still finding it tricky. You have 1 final day to vote in my LinkedIn poll about the best day to read a newsletter 😀
- This morning I’ve been reading through Computer Weekly’s longlist for The Most Influential Women in UK Tech. As I type this I’m still checking but do have to highlight the inclusion of our CEO Nadira Hussain and Institute Director Sam Smith. Most excellent to see!
Take care. I hope you can have a great weekend when it arrives.
Best wishes,
Alex.
