The centre cannot hold
I know, I know, everyone tells me to write shorter blogs…maybe next time
Looking forward to Jack Straw’s speech here tomorrow. The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (as is his title) will be officially launching our Prison Learning Network. I understand that Jack plans to say some very interesting things about how to embed the criminal justice system more concretely in local communities.
I’m sure there will be a couple of new announcements in Jack’s speech. These will add to the seemingly unstoppable tide of policy ideas, proposals and commitments emerging every day from Government. Although I find myself agreeing with a lot of what I hear, I can’t help wondering about the sheer scale of the Government’s objectives.
The scope of central Government is subject to continuous and sometimes substantial change. In the 1980s the privatisation of utilities meant Government went from running industries to providing a framework of regulation. More recently, Labour’s alleged ‘control freak’ tendencies have been somewhat belied by two massive transfers of power away from Whitehall: the independence of the Bank of England and devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
But the extra items coming onto the Cabinet agenda dwarf even these shifts away from the centre. As well as all the responsibilities Labour inherited in 1997 has been added the whole slew of law and order, security and identity management issues, responding to climate change, and a growing set of complex ‘behaviour change’ challenges like obesity, poor parenting and binge drinking. Gordon Brown is also seen to be prioritising international development and national values and identity. Yesterday it was briefed that the Government plans major reforms on Party funding, the House of Lords, a Bill of Rights and the voting system.
I am all for constitutional modernisation and – recalling how difficult it was to get senior Cabinet ministers to sign up to this kind of thing when I worked for Tony Blair – I envy the political authority Number Ten has to drive radical change. The question is whether any corporate centre, even one as full of clever people as Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, can manage this scale of external challenge and internally generated initiatives.
There are libraries of research and recommendation about modernising public services and the civil service but in a brief internet search ahead of writing this piece I couldn’t find anything that spoke directly to the sheer scale of central Government’s task. Among some of the more thoughtful newspaper columnists there is a growing critique of Labour’s competence in governing, but while some ministers may be overactive, terrorism, climate change and binge drinking weren’t problems made up by Whitehall.
The obvious strategy to deal with central overload is devolution, and as I have said before, the Government really does seem to be trying to hand more power to local authorities. But is this enough, especially when central Government will still be held accountable for overall public service performance and if things go badly wrong? I have spoken about the need to move from a ‘government centric’ to a ’citizen centric’ way of thinking about social change but can Government itself facilitate this?
This is a very broad brush attempt to open a debate. Another way of kick starting it is a proposal of my own. How about Government transferring responsibility for major areas of constitutional and democratic reform (like voting system, Lords and party funding) to Parliament? Parties would still have their own policies to which they would be accountable at election time, but the task of policy development, consensus building, as well as the detailed drafting of legislation would move from Downing Street, the Cabinet and Whitehall to MPs backed by a beefed up Parliamentary secretariat. This would arguably be in line with Gordon Brown’s commitment to enhance the status and powers of Parliament. It would certainly take some tricky items off the Cabinet table.
Double vision
Another good week of speakers here at RSA. Clay Shirky spoke about organising without organisations to a packed Great Room yesterday. It was a brilliant talk – available now as a downloadable audio file, and in a few weeks as an edited video!
Clay’s view about on-line and off line networks were better thought through and more balanced than the utopianism heard from some quarters. But there was plenty here to encourage us in our vision for the RSA.
Equally encouraging, from another perspective, was reading Sir Ronald Cohen’s The Second Bounce of the Ball, which he spoke to here last night. In the book Cohen tells the reader how his idea of venture capital was a decade ahead of its time in Europe. Indeed he launched his first fund in the unpropitious economic times of the 1970s. But eventually perseverance – which ranks pretty high up Cohen list of key requirements for an entrepreneur – won through.
We are learning a lot as we develop the ideas behind RSA Networks. Scaling up the numbers who can access the platform, dedicating more resources to moderation and developing a more user friendly and engaging platform are all parts of this learning process. We are also getting more interest from regional and local RSA chapters that want to use the platform as the basis for developing area based activities. We will need many virtues as we seek to enable the Fellowship to become a network for civic innovation – including perseverance.
We are saying ‘goodbye’ today to Liz Winder, head of our lectures team. Anyone working in an organisation, especially as old as RSA, knows they are part of a story that begins before them and carries on afterwards. Yesterday, we started filming lectures for our new website. An innovation like this is possible because we can build on the strong foundations built by Liz and her team in her nearly two decades at the RSA.
My first visit to JAS was for an event with Al Gore which was one of the many great events overseen by Liz. We will all miss her but, hopefully, as well as coming in to see us at John Adam Street she can visit our website and see some of the fruits of her years of brilliant service for the RSA.
Academies – the big debate
Tune in to Teacher’s TV tomorrow at 19:00 to see the Jonathan Dimbleby Big Debate on Academies - featuring Our Matthew in the red corner. It’s a subject close to our heart…
Social care and FE – innovation powerhouses
Fantastic night at Lewisham College on Wednesday. The Principal, Ruth Silver (FRSA) had invited me to be the pre-dinner speaker for the College’s annual fund raising banquet. I managed just to deliver on my promise to cover the birth of human rights, brain science, and the need for a new collectivism, to tell some jokes and to land my speech back at Lewisham College all in ten minutes. The fantastic food was cooked and served by College students, for whom it was part of their course assessment.
Sitting next to Ruth – without doubt one of the UK’s great public service pioneers – it occurred to me how two of the less ‘sexy’ of the public services – social care and further education have both become power houses of innovation. In social care the driver was client and carer dissatisfaction with the services on offer which, combined with a rights based approach, led to the work of In Control and then on to the rolling out of direct payments.
Further education will be a crucial partner in the new Diplomas, which look increasingly certain to become the framework for all 14-19 education (including ‘A’ levels). I suspect colleges will find it much easier than most schools to work collaboratively with other education providers and with employers.
FE is also at the forefront of two key Government priorities – tackling worklessness and improving skills. We are used to debates about the private sector selling its services to the public sector but in adult FE the direction is reversed. Lewisham’s team have become expert at selling to employers the business case for publicly funded and provided training to employers. As they were telling me on Wednesday their opening line to employers isn’t ‘why aren’t you training your staff’ but rather ‘would you like to improve customer satisfaction by a third?’
Social care because its services were failing, and FE because it has had to constantly renew its mission, have become sites of major innovation. Chatting this morning to Fran Sainsbury, who is heading our project on offender learning and skills, we wondered whether prisons could themselves one day been seen as testing ground for new ideas and practices.
There is lots of interesting work on education going on in our prisons and continuing into the community. Yet for various reasons little of this innovation gets noticed or debated outside the prison and probation fields.. This is something our own project will aim to change.
Why are children so unhappy?
‘Why are children so unhappy’ trumpets the Independent front page today. The question and the accompanying article creates the impression of a younger generation more disturbed, dysfunctional and depressed than ever before.
The concerns are real enough and the main point in this post is about what we should do. But a word of caution first. When making sweeping and alarming statements it is important to be clear what is being claimed. In particular we need to separate the existence of issues that are worrying from the implication that they are getting worse. To take one example it is, of course, true that we have a big problem with childhood obesity. However, to recognise this is not the same as saying that children are becoming less healthy. Indeed as the RSA Report on Risk and Childhood pointed out last year, on most indicators today’s children are healthier and safer than ever.
The reason we encourage the media to turn specific and important set of problems into a more pervasive message of social pessimism may be twofold.
Firstly, it is disturbing to realise that unhappiness co-exists with plenty. Although the poorest children are the least healthy (in mind and body) it is clear that even those laden with consumer gadgets and treats can be one or more of sad, unhealthy, anxious, aggressive.
Second, and related, we no longer see childhood problems as the unfinished business of progress (as it felt when people were abolishing child chimney sweeps, eradicating polio, providing free school meals etc). We see today’s childhood discontents and traumas as the flip side of progress.
But, anyway, on to solutions. There are many and as I said we need to get behind the hype to develop specific solutions to specific problems. However, for the RSA a high priority is enabling schools to be intelligent communities. The great work of schools like Wellington College (headed by Anthony Seldon) or schools using the Opening Minds curriculum demonstrate the benefit of working directly with these issues. Still, overall, too many feel like exam factories, in which hearing the pupils’ voices or addressing issues like individual and collective well-being are seen as low priorities. Schools are a public institution unlike any other. Young people have a long term relationship with a single institution from which they will emerge with many of their life choices and life chances clearer and more circumscribed (a key paradox of schooling is that it is both about opening up and narrowing down possibilities for students).
Making schools the kind of places where youngsters can individually and collectively overcome the kinds of problems modern life throws at them is vital. It is something I talk about in speeches – such as the one I gave last week to the Association of School and College Lecturers – and I’m sure it will be an important theme in the work of our emerging RSA Future Schools Network.
Thanks for the comments on the last blog. I agree with Bob and Susie. There are still challenges to be addressed to have more user public services. I think, Bob, the Government remains signed up to user empowerment and contestability in service provision. That is certainly the direction of travel, for example, in employment, and there was an interesting reference to a more radical user driven approach in the recent drugs strategy. And thanks Matt for a very interesting article.
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