What can 80 years of Roffey Park tell practitioners about helping people work well when the demands on them keep changing? Read the paper by Dr James Owens, published for our 80th anniversary, and watch him talk about what he found.
Intro
On 21 June 1946, the Minister of Works formally opened the Roffey Park Rehabilitation Centre near Horsham. It had already been running for two years and had treated around 1,700 people. Its patients included managers, secretaries, accountants and factory workers, all struggling with the strain of wartime work. Employers had paid for it.
The doctors who ran the Centre came to a firm conclusion. Helping someone recover gave only temporary relief if the job they went back to stayed the same. They judged their success by whether people were well and back in work a year later.
Eighty years on, the pressures look different. Artificial intelligence, hybrid working and economic strain are reshaping organisations again. The founders’ idea has lost none of its relevance.
About the paper
To mark our 80th year, Roffey Park researcher Dr James Owens has gone back through the Institute’s archive and published histories. He has also interviewed people who have worked at or with Roffey Park over the past four decades, including Board Chair Roger Leek, former Chief Executive Val Hammond, Linda Holbeche, Nick Jeffery, Sonia Greenfield and a long-standing learning partner.
The paper follows one question through Roffey Park’s learning programmes, its research and its work with client organisations: how do you help people meet the demands of work when those demands never stop changing? Each section closes with practical lessons for practitioners today. It opens with a foreword from our Chief Executive, Al Bird.
Watch: James Owens on Roffey Park at 80
Alex Norbury, Head of Sales at Roffey Park, talks to James about what he found in the archive, the people he spoke to, and why an idea from 1946 matters again as AI and hybrid working change the way we work.
Inside the paper
- How the first courses in 1947 taught “mental first aid” to doctors, managers and trade union officials
- A 1995 programme that took senior managers to sea on a 70-foot ketch from Poole to learn about managing constant change
- The story of The Management Agenda, the annual survey that tracked the working world from 1998 to 2018
- How in-company work more than doubled between 1984 and 1991 as organisations brought development in-house
- What moving every programme online during Covid showed about when place matters for learning, and when it doesn’t
- Why our 2025 research on AI in HR reached much the same conclusion as a paper published in 1950
Why download this report?
- See how a single founding idea has held up through 80 years of economic, social and technological change
- Get practical guidance on designing learning that starts with what people are actually experiencing at work
- Understand why development works best when the conditions people return to are part of the plan
- Find a simple test you can use to judge the impact of a programme, research project or client relationship
- Hear first-hand accounts from the people who shaped Roffey Park, and from the organisations that worked with it
