Public spending and service innovation
My working week started early with an interview last night on The Westminster Hour. The discussion topic was the impact on public services of the sharp deceleration in spending planned to start in 2010.
As I argued a couple of weeks ago in this blog, it is important for public services managers to use the coming months to prepare for the long period of tightening budgets ahead. The reductions in spending – against a backdrop of increasing demands particularly in key areas such as social care – will not be achieved through painless ‘efficiency savings’.
As an example of a more radical approach to improving public service productivity, I suggested that year 10 and 11 pupils in secondary schools might only be expected to attend lessons for four days a week. The students would spend the other day at home or in the school library using on-line materials to structure their learning. This could free up teachers’ time and mean that class sizes could be maintained even with a rising pupil teacher ratio.
So I was fascinated to read this morning in The Independent about the Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden. Among their many innovations is a system in which older students work much more independently under the supervision of personal tutors.
My prediction is that by 2020 whole class teaching will have been largely abandoned for the upper years of secondary school (KS4 and 5). So this is a good example of how a public service can be innovative, improve its service and improve productivity. But this kind of change needs to be explored now not in 18 months, by which time every change will be portrayed as driven simply by the need for ‘cuts’.
Civil society – its unexplored potential
Notwithstanding my Kerry Katona like mood swings, I find myself increasingly convinced that the economic downturn is going to be very, very bad; so much so that our lives and our country will never be the same again. Even if we have seen the beginning of the end of the problems in the financial sector (and there is still a huge amount of leveraging to unwind), and even if the economy starts to pick up slowly towards the end of next year, we then face severe cuts in public investment. On the one hand, this could kill off any recovery (as we now know, much of the job creation of the last decade has been in the publicly funded sector) while on the other, we will all suffer diminished public provision and many will face real hardship.
As the Conservatives inadvertently underline every day, there is no alternative; things are going to be grim. What we must do – the ‘we’ in this case being society in general and organisations like the RSA – is make better use of the under-used capacity which exists in society.
Innovation is very often precisely about this mobilisation of capacity. So, as I was saying to Leonard Cheshire Disability this morning, individual budgets for social care work in part because they tap into the previously unseen and unused capacity to manage their own lives and services which exists among social care clients and carers. Another example, which I heard in Leicester from a Fellow called Nigel Lothrop, is a successful scheme in which young people who have been in trouble or have dropped out of school clear and maintain the gardens of people unable, for one reason or another, to do it themselves. Using a time bank mechanism the young people then trade the hours donated to the gardens for time getting one-to-one tuition in the basic skills they often failed to pick up in formal education. Apparently, the scheme is proving too successful in that the barrier to it now is not the need for or supply of volunteers but the capacity of the local authority and third sector to manage the scheme.
If we are to improve the quality of our lives, protect the most vulnerable and strengthen communities we need these kinds of experiments to be taking place everywhere. However much capacity we are going to lose in the private and public sector, it is dwarfed by the unexploited potential of civil society. Mobilising this capacity should be a priority for policy makers and a new raison d’etre for the RSA Fellowship.
The path to civic innovation
I have been spending time recently with some amazing social innovators. Last week it was Oli Barrett, creator of the Catalyst Awards among many other things. In just a half hour conversation Oli came up with some great ideas for Fellowship engagement.
On Monday it was Bobby Fishkin, another of the new breed of the hideously talented, young, ambitious American social technology pioneers.
What I got from Bobby, apart that is from an inferiority complex and a sneak preview of his exciting new web widget, was this:
- The US is about five years ahead of the UK in the scale and scope of social innovation
- The problem with social capacity is not an aggregate lack of commitment, time or effort but that the available capacity is massively under-utilised. We don’t use people’s skills effectively, we don’t collaborate as well as we should and we don’t learn from what works (and what doesn’t).There are some amazing organisations trying to address some of this (for example Ashoka) but too much blood sweat and tears are still flowing down the drain.
- In countries, cities and neighbourhoods we aren’t combining social interventions effectively. Too much is marginal, short-term and disconnected. From sustainability to tackling social exclusion new ways of joining up interventions and innovations are vital if we are to get to a critical mass point.
- The RSA’s history is both a help and a hindrance. On the downside we are trying to change a very established organisation. It’s a bit like IBM going from selling computers to being a high level consultancy (a process which nearly killed the corporation).Where we used to offer Fellows status and membership of a club we are now offering membership of a network of thought leaders and civic entrepreneurs. Getting buy-in from Fellows to this new offer is the key challenge facing our new Director of Fellowship Belinda Lester.
On the upside the RSA’s brand, the willingness we meet when we ask people to work with us and our reasonably robust financial model mean we can stay the course.
In innovation failure is as essential to learning as success, but for new initiatives mistakes in planning or application can be fatal. The web is full of abandoned experiments in social innovation. Our new networks platform will have learnt important lessons from the too clunky nature of version one.
Talking to Oli and Bobby confirmed to me we are going in the right direction. It also underlined how far we have to go before we the RSA is genuinely a hotbed of innovation. But most of all I was encouraged by their willingness to offer us advice and support as we try to fulfil the new mission agreed by our Trustees and Council.
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
RSA Comment- RSA Projects Blogs
- Twitter @RSAMatthew
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.