Why did I have to be so Frank?
I need a holiday. I keep making mistakes. I did it again today.
Michael Gove spoke here this morning. In a typically robust and engaging performance he repeated his scepticism about competence based curricula like our own Opening Minds. Gove is highly rated by just about everyone and is very likely to be running our schools this time next year. I need to keep on the right side of him to try to persuade him and his team to be a bit more open minded about Opening Minds. So, this morning I politely asked Michael if he would have an on-line debate with me so we could go into the issues in more depth than was possible in a ten minute Q and A session. He kindly agreed.
So far so good. But then this afternoon I was at a Conservative Home conference organised to brief various public affairs types on the Tory Party as it prepares for power.
In response to a question about whether the Conservatives could have a positive message for the next election I contrasted Conservative health spokesman Andrew Lansley (who was here last night) with Michael Gove.
I recalled the difference between Labour’s education strategy pre-1997 and their health strategy. In the former case, David Blunkett battled with his own Party to make clear he would keep most of the framework created by Kenneth Baker in the 1988 Education Reform Bill but with some changes at the margins, acceleration of elements like the literacy strategy and also using money from abolishing assisted places to reduce primary class sizes. In health, by contrast, Labour said the Tories were totally wrong and pledged to dismantle the Conservative internal market, which they subsequently did, only to later rebuild it under Alan Milburn at huge cost.
Approaching the next election Lansley is in the Blunkett position, broadly endorsing Labour’s approach but emphasising areas he would change, things he would stop and new offers he would make. But Gove sounds more like Labour on health in 1997 suggesting that the whole school system is in a mess and that only the practice he likes from the very best schools is worth emulating. Gove is also arguing for some profound changes in funding and structure. Indeed his agenda was described by Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home as ‘a school revolution’.
The contrast was underlined in the audience reaction to the speeches. Both got warm applause, with many people clearly agreeing. But while no one seemed to want to disagree loudly with Lansley, with Michael Gove I have never known an event where so many people came up to me at the end to express concern about what they had heard, including two head teachers. (Not that this will worry Michael too much as cocking a snook at the educational establishment is, I suspect, part of his strategy)
Not everyone will agree with me so far, but it’s not that which is the problem. You see, the minister in charge of health policy for Labour in 1997 was Frank Dobson and so, in front of lots and lots of Conservatives, I said ‘in his tendency to condemn the schools system wholesale Michael Gove reminds me a bit of Frank Dobson’.
It is a toss up which of these two eminent politicians of different generations would be most appalled by my comparison. But when Michael is told – which he most certainly will be – that could be our bridges burnt.
I suppose it’s too late to say sorry?
Brown’s national plan – six discussion points
Another crazy day in the office . I have torn myself away from Anne Atkins and Jeremy Paxman debating the English language in the Great Room to steal ten minutes to write this post. I wish I had longer because the plan being published by the Government in an hour deserves proper debate . Maybe I’ll come back to it tomorrow. But here are some points to be going on with:
1. Given where GB was two weeks ago it is pretty remarkable that people are interested in what he is saying now. Maybe the public reaction will be a big shrug of indifference, if not it suggests there may yet be life in this Government.
2. The idea of moving from top down accountability delivered through guidance, bureaucracy and inspection to a bottom up accountability delivered by citizens enforcing their rights is attractive. Although we await to hear how exactly the entitlements are to be enforced. No one wants a field day for lawyers
3. I understand that while some rights are individually enforceable others require community mobilisation. For example, the police rights will be delivered through communities being able to force the police to attend meetings to explain themselves. Whether it is useful to lump different types of power for citizens under the single heading of entitlements is open to question.
4. Politically Labour’s hope is that today allows them to remind people of the areas of big progress under Labour (abolishing long waits in the NHS, and the creation of neighbourhood police teams in every area, for example). It is also a challenge to the Conservatives – do they match Labour’s promises which could make them look weak or do they refuse which opens up to the charge of having a secret cuts agenda.
5. It is not clear how local government fits into this new regime. The danger is that local democratic authority is by-passed in a redefinition of the relationship between state and individual. I understand there is some good news for council coming later this week, but we need a clear account of how local government fits into this new framework of rights and freedoms.
6. An interesting plan’s credibility will sadly be undermined by the failure of the plan to tackle the political machine of Whitehall. We have too many ministers looking for work to do. They constantly generate new priorites and guidance which are all too often interpreted at the front line as instructions. Gordon Brown will want to make the case that his new framework frees up the front line and makes government less bureaucratic and complex, but until he slims down and muzzles the ministerial monster this is not believable
Overall, however, an important plan which should be judged on its merits. It will be interesting to see if there is any subtlety to the Conservative response
The end of an education era?
Next month, at the RSA, I am delivering the annual lecture of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The speech is in draft form but it contains the observation that the framework of central prescription, repeated pupil assessment and inspection has run out of steam. So, I welcome the briefing ahead of next week’s schools white paper that the Government is moving away from the centrally prescribed literacy and numeracy strategy.
The strategies are expensive, unpopular with many teachers, and are no longer delivering any significant gains. But, even as we bury a key part of the centralising approach which has been dominant ever since the 1988 Education Reform Act, it would be wrong to conclude that the whole thing was a terrible mistake.
As I have written before, even the best designed public policy tends to end in failure. This is for three related reasons:
• The world changes. To take one example, single parent benefits which were introduced in the sixties to meet the needs of a small and disadvantaged group took on a different meaning and massively greater cost with the growth of one parent families.
• Even as policies succeed, they change incentives and generate unintended consequences. It has been alleged that in successfully meeting its four hour maximum waiting target for casualty departments, the NHS has encouraged staff to attend to the needs of people with minor problems who have been waiting three and a half hours rather than the more severe needs of patients who have only just arrived.
• But the most important reason is that if a policy succeeds, the problem it was designed to address has, by definition, diminished. In 1988, and still in 1997, there was a very long tail of terribly underperforming schools and teachers. In my own borough of Lambeth an OFSTED report in the mid 1990s not only found many pupils in higher years of primary schools unable to read or write but that teachers seemed unaware of, or impervious to, the fact. The number of profoundly failing schools is now much lower and – as a result of the changes over the last decade – we have the systems to identify failing schools and turn them round. At the same time parents have become better informed and more demanding and the quality and preparedness of teachers joining the profession has improved.
As any manager knows, tight systems of regulation are more effective at tackling under performance than they are at fostering high performance. So as the system improves the centralising approach produces diminishing returns.
Some time ago I wrote an essay about public service reform for the think tank IPPR. Drawing on the work of Christopher Hood I offered a cultural theory (yes, back to that again!) perspective arguing that reform strategies could be broadly mapped against cultural theory’s four rationalities: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individuals and the fatalist. I argued that the swings between these different ways of thinking about change can explain as much of the history of public service reform as the ideologies of the Governments in charge.
Next week’s white paper will signal the end to a long wave of hierarchical management in favour of a more egalitarian emphasis on devolved control, professional values and institutional collaboration. It is the right thing to do. But one day, when this new approach has, in turn, run out of steam, there will be another new start.
The RSA – do you get it?
A lot about the RSA in the blog this week (‘about time too’ some people might say). This is partly because I have been writing elsewhere. Also, some time between now and midnight I‘m penning a piece for the Times on home ownership; I’ll be able to draw on a really interesting discussion on this site.
Back to the RSA. Yesterday, we had an all staff session on branding. Over the last year we have been trying increasingly to align the RSA’s activities around a core mission. We have not yet found the pithiest way to express this mission but in essence it is ‘developing citizens for tomorrow’, in other words the RSA is about understanding and advancing human capability so that people can thrive in the future.
This is trying to move forward the old manifesto challenges, which were arguably too generalised, but it isn’t easy to communicate. Things would be simpler if we had a narrower focus or a simple campaigning goal, but our work ranges from the school curriculum to design, from user driven drug services to understanding how the brain makes decisions. And instead of campaigning for others to change, our focus is on empowering citizens through insight and innovation. Most of all we want the ethos and activities of the RSA Fellowship to come to exemplify the idea of citizens for the future.
You might say ‘why does brand matter’? I believe a strong brand can help us communicate our message and align our diverse work strands. The truth is that, despite a lot of good work being undertaken here including our amazing lecture series, very few people – even some who know us well – are clear about the RSA’s purpose. Our name – which, of course, we can’t change – doesn’t help; I still get letters from people asking if they can exhibit their work in our ‘galleries’.
We started out the branding process with a default strap line of ‘citizens for the future’. But as well as feeling a bit clunky and pompous this has the ring of a 1970s sci-fi show. In the discussions we have had recently the idea that took my fancy was ‘RSA: Do you get it?’ This plays with the idea that people don’t know what the RSA stands for but also links it to the core belief that for society to thrive people need to recognise how the future rests on all of us being responsible and creative citizens. It also refers to the power of ideas as in the moment when someone trying to understand something exclaims ‘I get it!’
The branding process is still in the development stage and I very much doubt my idea will end up being chosen. Sadly, we can’t revert to the use of talking animals and a jingle but I’m keen to hear other ideas.
Fellowship – some big questions
Interesting responses to my post yesterday; both as comments and direct e-mails to me. Some eyebrows were raised at me being so explicit about the challenges the RSA faces. Apart from wanting genuinely to engage Fellows, there is a wider reason why I am committed to openness.
One of the problems with accountability and trust in modern society is that every organisation (private, public and third sector) feels the need to say how wonderful it is in every way. This means it is often very hard for taxpayers, customers, shareholders or the public to get a handle on what is really going on. The best recent example of this was the banks. The risks they were taking with various complex financial investments were in their annual reports but the information was expressed blandly and hidden behind all the propaganda about their successes and social responsibility.
In the post credit crunch world leaders to balance the need to project their organisation positively with the duty to give an accurate and frank account of challenges and risks.
On the issue of the Fellowship, the discussion around my post has identified some important issues for our new Fellowship Council to address. These include:
* What level of Fellowship engagement is it realistic and reasonable to expect ?
* Is Fellowship engagement primarily a function of top down initiatives that Fellows choose to engage with or about creating the scope for Fellows to develop their own ideas and initiative and get buy in from the Scoiety?
* Related to this, is the key quality to Fellowship apart from its staus, the connection to, and support of, what we do at JSA (lectures, web, Journal, projects) or is it access to the network of other Fellows?
We are pleased so far with the turnout in the Fellowship Council election, but there is still plenty of time for people to vote. The election is important because the Council will need, from the start, to get to grips with some big questions.
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