Category: Government and Public Sector

Building schools for whose future?

I loved the idea of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) long before I had school-age children who might  benefit from it, and not just because someone needed to (literally) fix the school roof.

The public sector’s realm used to be ugly, grimy, cheap and second-rate.  Asked to think about the public sector in the 1980s and chances are you pictured  schools with leaky roofs, outside loos and children taught in pre-fab  huts which were inhumanly hot in summer and deathly cold in winter.  NHS hospitals were painted  grey and sludge-green and the lino on the floor was cracked.  There were plastic chairs chained to sticky grey carpet tiles and staff behind protective  barriers in council offices and job centres.  Those mental images, I’m sure, helped undermine confidence in the whole value of the public sector.  Public was for losers who couldn’t  haul themselves into the promised land of Private.

The notion of BSF was a welcome vote of confidence in Public.  It was a philosophical Trojan horse  which didn’t just make a practical point – that children couldn’t learn and teachers couldn’t teach in those conditions; but  introduced the idea that people who used the public sector should be treated well and deserved excellence.  That Public could be as good as Private.

For all its problems of slowness and bureaucracy, you’ll have guessed that I’m not overly chuffed  at the news that Michael Gove is halting investment in BSF; especially as rumours persist that part of the savings from this and other cuts to the education budget are to be used to fund free schools and the dash to academies which are not exactly uncontroversial.

Still, as the man said don’t mourn, organise.  I’m not sure what can be done to save school building, but here’s a campaign to try to secure parental consultation before schools can opt for academy status; here’s info about another campaign in support of local schools, and here’s the Department for Education case for and the anti-academies alliance argument against – for those who want to see both sides …

What’s a government for?

Intrigued by reports of Tony Blair’s “lessons I have learned from being in g0vernment speech to the Institute of Government the other day.

It’s a strikingly managerial account of  government – as you’d  expect from a philosophy-lite PM who believed that “what matters is what works” .  The ten lessons are:

  1. Governance is a debate about efficiency rather than transparency
  2. We are operating in a post-ideological politics
  3. People want an empowering, not controlling state
  4. The centre needs to drive, but not deliver, systemic change
  5. Departments should be smaller, strategic and oriented around delivery
  6. Systemic change is essential in today’s world – as the private sector demonstrates
  7. The best change and delivery begins with the right conceptual analysis
  8. The best analysis is based on facts and interaction with the front line
  9. The people you appoint matter dramatically – private sector skillsets are needed
  10. Countries can learn from each other

“good politics boils down to good policy – to ‘a serious intellectual business’ of conceptual and technical analysis of the problem, and competent and efficient delivery of the solution.”

And so it does.  The mantra of evidence-based policy will be  familiar to anyone who worked in Whitehall over the past few years and it’s evidently right.  It’s sad that the evidence was so often bent to fit a political timetable, with initiatives piled upon each other to catch a headline and maintain an impression of dynamism, rather than because the evidence dictated them.  If only he’d stuck to his guns (on reflection possibly not the best choice of words…)

Social change  takes a long time.  Even gathering the evidence of where the problems are, to start indicating what to do about them, takes longer than political parties are willing to wait.  It takes even longer to see results.  So Labour didn’t wait, and while they had lots of good instincts and some of the right answers, it was a lack of patience, a shortage of managerial skill and a fatal habit of over-promising and under-delivering that did for them in the end.

I wouldn’t disagree with anything on Blair’s list between numbers 3 and 10.  But Lord what a depressing picture is conjured up by 1 and 2.    Governance is a debate about efficiency rather than transparency.  Really?  I’m  not even sure I know what that means – it’s more important to be efficient than honest?  It’s more important to be efficient than fair?  Whatever happened to the idea of politics as a moral crusade?   What I’d really like to hear from the Labour leadership hopefuls  is an intellectually coherent, passionate argument for what they believe in.   What do they want to do with power when/if they get it back?  Otherwise we might just as well hand the country over to McKinsey (not that we can afford them).

Singing the public sector blues

It’s unlikely that 38Degrees will be organising flashmobs to protest about the cutting of marketing and consultancy budgets in the public sector.  There won’t be a harrowing Boys From the Blackstuff sequel showing the  impact of unemployment on the PR consultant communities of north London.   Newsnight’s package last night about the potential impact of cuts to services in Sheffield has already been called “lefty bollocks” by one esteemed Tory blogger, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for an outraged  backlash from the commentariat either.  But, other than the Guardian (inevitably), no-one much seems to have noticed that cutting the government comms budget is going to have a hefty impact on the private sector too.  Lots of small consultancies  mixed public sector with private sector work.  It helped them to stay in business so that they could employ their own staff and sub-contract printers, designers, writers  and event management companies.  It paid for ad space in print and on TV, direct mail, web development , exhibition stands and a multitude of other things.  The money got spread around and (whisper it) a lot of the campaigns it paid for did a lot of good.

It’s not that I didn’t expect cuts to comms – an obvious target if ever there was one, and much more sobering cuts were also made yesterday.   I’m just concerned about what happens when you take £270m worth of business out of an industry containing a large number of  SMEs that’s just coming out of a recession.

Look on my works ye mighty and despair

Strange feeling reading the papers since the election result, as though the whole of my working life for the past few years has been written up on a giant etch-a-sketch  and is now being slowly erased.  I have, over the past few years, worked in different capacities on or alongside Every Child Matters, Building Schools for the Future  and the QCA amongst other things for the DfES;  on support for victims of sexual violence (Home Office ) and on equalities legislation ( GEO )  All of it now seems potentially to be threatened,  gone or going.  I am the Typhoid Mary of government communications.

I suppose this is the inevitable result of working with the civil service – as someone once explained it to me we’re the chauffeurs, Ministers chose the destination, we just get them there the best way we can.  The destination on my stuff has evidently changed, so mirror, signal, manoeuvre and off we go again – even if  lots of good stuff seems to be being jettisoned along the way.  How much weirder it must be to have been one of the Ministers and now watch the whole thing being dismantled as you are plunged into irrelevance and obscurity.

A Department by any other name?

Intrigued by Michael Gove’s instant decision to change the name of the Dept for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to the Dept for Education before he’d opened his first red box.

I was at DfES when it took responsibility for children’s issues, and led some of the early work on communicating the Every Child Matters programme.  It took a LONG time for the Department to get out of its  “education, education, education” mindset and start to think about children’s services as  an equal part of what it was about.  I remember an excruciating planning meeting looking at the  strategy for the whole Department, which focused so exclusively on schools’ standards that those of us working on children’s policy complained of feeling like the mad relatives locked in the attic that no-one wanted to talk about.  Eventually things changed –  some might argue it went too far the other way (though not, I’d guess,  thousands of children in care who still have much worse chances in life than their more fortunate peers).

So, does this symbolic name change mean that children’s services are being shoved back in the Departmental attic?  A quick google to find things Gove has said about children’s services reveals much complaining about Baby Peter but not many policy clues, and a rather worrying willingness to dismantle what’s been put in place.

There’s another blog post (or possibly a rather dull book) to be written about what worked and what didn’t on Every Child Matters, and I agree that there are levels of bureaucracy now in place that might well stand in the way of positive action.  I’d be happier if I could see some more definite thinking about what the Tories want to do in this area – and some recognition that children’s policy isn’t just about supporting families through the tax system.

24 hour news, a modern curse

So, having stayed up all Thursday night to watch the results, and having been glued to TV, radio, newspapers, blogs and (especially) Twitter ever since, I now find myself watching a live stream of nothing happening in front of a teal blue door as the future of the government is not announced – yet. Is there a medical name for an unhealthy obsession with events you have no power to influence?

Look, will you please just vote?

everyvotecounts

I’m not sure I completely buy the “there’s no need to be afraid of a hung parliament” schtick that’s been going around since Cleggmania first hit.  I don’t believe our politicians are grown-up enough to act in the nation’s interest and come together in the kind of coalition people seem to have in mind when they talk about it (interesting how “hung-parliament” elides neatly into “coalition government” in so many articles about the subject).  I’m  pessimistic enough to fear squabbling, back room deals and horse-trading on an epic scale and a re-run of the ’70s when sick MPs were carried through the lobbies on stretchers to keep the government of the day in business.  But even that is better than what we have now.   I’ve  never seen a better argument for political reform than this –  tactical voting guidance for how to vote if you’re in a Lib/Con or Con/Lab marginal,  a Lab or Lib seat with a very small majority, a new constituency created by boundary changes or one of the oddities where minority parties have a shout.  I’m lucky that my personal preference and the tactical necessity in this constituency point the same way so I can vote for what I want with a clear conscience.   But if a hung parliament is the way to get political reform so that we never have to do this again, then bring it on.  And, please vote.

Voting for a hung parliament

I find myself  praying nightly for a hung parliament. Partly because I  want to see some long overdue political reform, but mainly, I have to confess, out of  morbid curiosity to see what happens when the old system finally implodes.

On a purely personal level it will probably mean another election soon (the Tories are already tapping up their donors, apparently).  As purdah has stopped much of the work I’ve been doing in its tracks and put a serious dent in my cash flow, that won’t be good for business. (Although I suppose no one within touching distance of the public sector will be able to afford to do anything at all soon, so I’ll be forced to diversify either way!)

For once I wish I was back inside a Department just to see this unfolding from the inside.  The one general election campaign fought  when I was working in Whitehall felt like a foregone conclusion.  Lip service was paid to the possibility that things might change, but no-one really believed that it would.   I remember writing lots of pointless briefing on the state of policy for new Ministers who I knew wouldn’t be walking through the door, and doing lots of compare-and-contrast of party manifestos to prepare colleagues for change that we knew wasn’t going to happen.  It must feel very different in there now.  For fellow obsessives, here’s the BBC’s take on what happens in a hung parliament and what Gus O’Donnell has said about  the roles civil servants might play.

This is the Morden World

To R’s school a couple of nights ago for parents’ evening (how weird it is to be doing as a grown-up the things you remember your parents doing when you were the child).

Apparently she is topp at Hist and Geog, German, Maths, Tech, Science and RE (where she is trying to convert  the other kids in her class to atheism).  She can almost play Fairy Bells on the piano and may not be able to recite The Brook, but has put together an anthology of her own peotry (all right, all right,  I’ll stop with the St Custard’s stuff now)

There are, of course drawbacks.  As her (otherwise fantastic) English teacher pointed out in her report:  “Her spelling is her Achilles heal” (the title is one of hers, but with teachers like that…); but she knows she needs to work at it, she’s getting better, and she is  filled with enthusiasm for EVERYTHING the school has to teach her. She’ll do just fine.

Obviously I can’t speak for all schools in Tower Hamlets, but the ones I know about are pretty impressive.  Don’t let Michael Gove spook you.  Education isn’t in crisis because children can’t recite the dates of the Kings and Queens of England.  They’re  learning different things these days, that’s all.  And they learn them in different ways because the world is changing.  I hate the New Labour managerial-speak of enrichment activities and learning outcomes just as much as any other literate person,  but I do understand that different doesn’t necessarily mean worse.

Bigotry and outrage

Turned the Today programme off, violently, at ten past eight this morning, but not before shouting things at James Naughtie that, had they been picked up on Sky, I would certainly have had to apologise for.

I lost it when Naughtie said that, by agreeing to the leaders’ debates, Gordon Brown made the election camapaign into a personality contest so must accept it when his personality becomes the story of the day.  The idea that the media have been diligently following policy issues for years until being forced to talk about personalities by the sight of politicians debating in public is as hilarious as it’s infuriating.  The papers have been desperate for something like this to happen to liven things up. They’ve finally got the gaffe they’ve been waiting for.  Watch them make the most of it.