Learning outcome 3
Understand how to make minutes of meetings
Minutes of meetings allow people who attended the meeting and anyone else who the information needs to be shared with to look back on the meetings key information and also to clarify and actions taken or actions that have said will be taken.
Minutes are legal documents that are used as a proof for referring back to in the future. The Freedom of Information Act states it is compulsory for minutes to be taken at meetings from public authorities in the United Kingdom. People can request information from the public authorities by writing to them. The authorities then have 20 working days to respond. This is why minutes of meeting need to be accurate, if they are inaccurate it could cause a lot of problems in the future.

There are different types of minutes that can be used and this depends on the type of meeting they are being taken from. From very brief but accurate minutes that detail action points discussed, to word by word minutes for more detailed minutes that are usually recorded then written up via playback. If you are taking notes during the meeting to produce the minutes after the meeting finished then you need to make sure you quickly note the key points down as they are talked about, you may find it best to sort of use your own shorter words or abbreviations to make things easier and less of a rush to get the words down on paper. You must also remember to make the real copy of minutes up as soon as you can after the meeting has ended whilst it is still fresh in your mind. The minutes shouldn’t include any irrelevant comments and all minutes should have the title of the meeting, time it started and finished plus any breaks taken and resumed, the place it was held and names of attendees.