New ideas and hard questions
An apology to my regular reader that my blog activity has been less frequent of late. Tonight I have my annual RSA lecture and I have been somewhat preoccupied. However, I thought you might be interested in a column in The Times this morning which covers some of the issues I hope to discuss in the speech.
And I can’t resist linking to this excellent piece by my former colleague, Philip Collins. It came the day after Professor David Blanchflower, an external member of the MPC, was asking some very hard questions about Conservative economic policies. I am trying to avoid being too ‘political’ in this blog, but I can’t help thinking that, while the problem of Mr Brown for Labour is his apparent unelectability, the problem for the country is that the party likely to form the next government is not being subject to the scrutiny from which both it and we would benefit.
‘Policy based evidence making’
Between the recurring bouts of existential crisis brought on by a combination of the demands of RSA change management, the deteriorating form of West Bromwich Albion and night time flatulence (for which, apparently, the only cure is to give up every single type of food I enjoy eating), I have been thinking about the relationship between evidence and belief.
One prompt was an LRB review of Wilkinson and Pickett’s ‘The Spirit Level’ by David Runciman. David argues that Wilkinson and Pickett overstate the statistical evidence of the damaging effects of inequality on all levels of society. They do this, he argues, because they hope the statistics will relieve them of having to make what is ultimately an ideological claim; namely that inequality is a bad thing. If we are inclined to think this, says Runciman, there is enough evidence out there for us to make our case (and Wilkinson and Pickett assemble the best of it), but trying to prove it with facts alone is not only self defeating but misunderstands how political change works.
The question was also raised by a wonderful little paper recommended to me by my old IPPR colleague Joe Hallgarten. ‘On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research’, is by Dr Eleonora Belfiore from the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, at the University of Warwick. Dr Belfiore mines Government documents and ministerial speeches on the impact of arts investment on social objectives such as educational attainment and social inclusion. Not only does she find arts ministers making claims which have no basis in evidence but she also reveals how the same ministers occasionally drop their guard and admit the pretence is required of them in order to convince the Treasury or Number Ten to maintain cultural funding. She concludes:
“At the heart of the notion of ‘performance paradox’, thus, is the baffling observation that measures such as the imposition of targets, performancemanagement, evidence-based policy-making, pressures to evaluate the extent to which arts project have the socio-economic impact that policy makers presume they do – or in other words a whole range of measures introduced with the aim to improve transparency and accountability in the public sector – might have resulted, in reality, in more bullshit being produced and injected in public discourses around policies for the cultural sector, and in opaque political messages amounting to little more than doublespeak”.
The point I take from these two essays is that trying to prove arguments in social policy can not only be self defeating, but may involve us in hiding our beliefs behind ‘facts’. I am taking this to heart as I desperately try to finish my annual lecture before I am due to deliver it on Thursday evening.
The speech explores the relationship between new thinking about human nature (derived from behavioural research and neuroscience) and the attempt to close what I have called the ‘social aspiration gap’, enabling people to living more engaged, self reliant and altruistic lives.
The temptation in all this is to overstate the evidence. This is a criticism fairly directed at my piece on brains and ideology in Prospect magazine. Indeed this month’s edition contains a forthright letter from one of the magazine’s own editorial team making this point (is this a first I wonder: an essay so unfortunate that it made the commissioning magazine’s editors turn on each other!).
A theme running through my annual lecture is that we overstate how much control we exercise over our own behaviour and prospects as individuals, and understate not only the importance of, but the capacity we have to influence, our social environment. But I will be sure to make clear that, while there is research to reinforce this belief, there will never be enough to prove it.
Learning to love consultants
Among the Fellows who hang out at the Society’s HQ there was one group whose social value I used to question. Now I am beginning to understand their worth.
Learning lessons in middle age is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it is a bit humiliating to have to accept that one has been so wrong for so long. On the other, it’s kind of exhilarating not only still to be able to learn, but to see things in a different light.
The executive team at the RSA is trying to accomplish a step change to the clarity of the Society’s mission, the impact of its work and the culture of the organisation, including, crucially, the Fellowship. We have made good progress in many areas and the feedback we get from Fellows, partners and observers is very encouraging, but, as I suspect always happens in genuine change processes, there is no escaping the really knotty problems. This involves everyone in the top team having to accept their own strengths and weaknesses and explore the ways we need to challenge ourselves if the team really is to provide transformative leadership.
I am confident we will achieve our ambitions for the RSA (which I summarise as becoming ‘the kind of organisation the 21st century needs’) but it isn’t an easy process. Having spent twenty five working years working in organisations (fifteen in quite senior positions) only now do I feel I am getting fully to grips with the essence of change management, strategic leadership and cultural change. But, if and when we succeed, I suspect I won’t have the energy or inclination to take on such a process again. So what do I do with what I have learnt?
I have always been a bit suspicious of people who set themselves up as consultants claiming to be able to help organisations through change processes. I guess I couldn’t help thinking ‘if you’re so good how come you aren’t playing a strategic role in a major organisation rather than persuading other people to hire your services?’ I am sure there are a lot of consultants out there for whom that is a fair and difficult question but I now see another aspect.
Going through a major organisational change process is a bit like going through a life stage; you come out of it wiser and – hopefully – better, but that certainly doesn’t mean you’d want to go through it again. But you might want to use your expertise to help others about to embark on the same stage. Of course, motivation is only half the story. Consultants have to be effective thinkers and communicators and their knowledge and insights need to be broad based. (As it happens, the people we are working with at the RSA are great.) But I suspect that whether or not the Society achieves the scale of change I hope for, I will emerge from the process as a kind of managerial Ancient Mariner wanting to stop everyone I meet to share my lonely adventure in leadership.
The best consultants – I now see – are driven not just by the desire to earn an honest crust, and have some control over their working life, but have a visceral appetite to share the deep learning that can only come from being in the middle of profound change.
David, meet Michael
I spent some time yesterday evening with David Willetts, Shadow Secretary of State for Universities and Skills. I am a fan of David’s, finding him thoughtful, open minded and progressive. Indeed he was the respondent I chose for my second annual lecture. But having heard David speak about his views of higher education I wonder whether I should introduce him to another impressive Tory politician, Michael Gove. It is far from clear to me that they share the same world view.
Last night, at the dinner we were both attending, several people criticised the Government’s target of 50% of your people going into higher education. But David was eloquent in his support for the expansion of HE, even while recognising that levels of participation had gone up faster than levels of attainment. As well as saying that university has many advantages for young people in addition to gaining qualifications, he pointed out that the expansion had largely been in vocational areas and that about two out of three people at university are studying for a degree necessary for them to enter their career of choice. He also explicitly rejected the notion that the new degrees being taught in new universities were in ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects.
This was music to my ears. At almost exactly the same time David was making his point at the dinner, I was using a very similar argument on this week’s Radio 4 Moral Maze.
But how are we to square David’s view with the thrust of Michael Gove’s lecture here last June. In referring to universities in his speech, the Conservative education spokesman spoke exclusively about the view of the elite Russell Group. He argued strongly against what he clearly saw as Mickey Mouse subjects and qualifications (although to be fair he didn’t use this phrase). Moreover, I interpreted the thrust of Gove’s speech that he was determined to raise the bar of academic attainment, something which would surely lead in the short term to lower levels of participation in higher education.
So, while David Willetts espouses a laissez faire, expansionary view of post compulsory education, his shadow cabinet colleague urges a return to a more rigidly defined set of subjects and content with progression capped by rising attainment requirements.
Perhaps there is a way of explaining this apparent tension but I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to understand it. I blame my school, or should it be my university?
The two worlds of education discourse
Why is there such a gulf in understanding between popular discourse and the way educationalists see the world?
On Monday, a packed RSA Great Room listened to Professor Robin Alexander and a panel of experts, including Barry Sheerman MP, Chair of the Education and Skills Select Committee, discuss the findings of the Cambridge Primary Review. The report, three years in gestation and three years in researching and writing, is the most comprehensive and far reaching review of primary education since the 1967 Plowden Report. So extensive was the consultation exercise undertaken by the research team and advisory panel it is hard to imagine anyone interested in primary education didn’t have the chance to get their voice heard.
But when the report was published last week it was subject to a concerted critique by ministers, shadow ministers and most parts of the press. Not only that, but its key recommendations were systematically misrepresented. So, for example, the suggestion that English schools come into line with nearly all continental practice and not start formal teaching of a knowledge based curriculum until children are six was widely reported as being a recommendation that children don’t start school until that age. The recommendation that SATS in year six be dropped in favour of a less disruptive and narrow form of assessment was portrayed as a proposal to abandon any form of assessment, and the questioning of the utility of school league tables was seen by many as implying that schools have no external accountability, an interpretation the Review’s authors flatly deny.
So, given the largely negative coverage of the report, after Robin Alexander had spoken I asked the audience of over 200 how many of them largely agreed with what he had said. Nearly everyone put up their hand, and literally no one (apart from one person who later revealed they were just being contrarian for the sake of it) said they disagreed with the main thrust of the report.
I’m not suggesting our audience was a random sample; many were education professionals and, in line with the traditions of the RSA, there would no doubt have been a broadly progressive leaning. Nevertheless, the gulf between the view from inside and from outside the world of education is a real problem. It means, for example, that politicians can say whatever they like about schools (much of it negative) and few people outside education will believe those inside who try to give a more balanced picture.
I have written before that I am dreading the quality of debate about schools that we will have to endure in the run-up to the General Election. In an attempt to get over some of the false dichotomies, I tried unsuccessfully to engage Tory spokesman Michael Gove in a debate about the core ideas underlying his eloquent and profound critique of most modern teaching practice.
The RSA will continue to try to shed light on the complex and challenging issues facing our education system and the varied and often exciting ways schools are responding. Sadly, I fear ours will be a quiet voice drowned out in the crude and destructive slanging match we can expect to be played out on our airwaves between now and the election.
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