Class dilemmas
I had a great start to the day. As part of a Teach First initiative I was invited to give a lesson to a group of year 11 students at Cator Park School in Beckenham.
I frequently give lectures, chair events and meet and greet the famous and powerful (today, for example, I welcomed Gordon Brown to the RSA where he was giving a speech to the think tank IPPR about constitutional reform). None of this stopped me being incredibly nervous today. As I told the class, my own teenage sons find it hard to listen to me for more than about two minutes, so how would I hold their attention for an hour?
To break the ice I told them about a former academic colleague of mine who spent the whole summer preparing for his first ever lecture. To avoid any mistakes he wrote out every word in advance. On the day he strode as confidently as he could across the stage, plonked his notes on the lectern and started to speak.
He was just beginning to get over the worst of his nerves when he began to hear some students giggling. Without looking up or stopping his flow he tried to work out what might be the cause – were his flies undone, did he have odd socks on? It was only then he realised: since his opening words he had gradually been lifting the lectern from the floor and it was now almost head height.
Anyway, not only did I calm my nerves, but I had a great hour. The content picked up on a recurrent theme of mine: politics is difficult because we the people have complex and often contradictory desires. Having shown the students that they agreed with both the following statements, I got half the class to develop the best argument for the proposition:
As long as we aren’t breaking the law or hurting anyone else the Government should not interfere with how we run out lives
And the other half to defend
Government has an important role to play in encouraging us to look after our health, protect the environment and other things we care about as a society
I found it fascinating that within fifteen minutes the groups had identified the three classical philosophical arguments for both the libertarian and paternalistic state.
After the lesson I met a group of students who had been involved in the school’s impressive international work. Some had been on exchange trips to Russia, others to help out with a social project in Uganda set up by the teacher whose class I was leading.
Talking to the school’s passionate Headteacher, I was reminded of one of the many dilemmas of decision making. The school is by far the most socially diverse in the largely affluent and white borough of Bromley. It does benefit from some central Government funding but the local authority does not give it any additional support despite its crumbling building, its challenging intake and its steadily improving results.
There is little question that greater devolution to councils in affluent areas will tend to lead to lower levels of redistribution within services; these councils generally don’t need the votes of poorer citizens to get re-elected. The goals of social justice and local democratic freedom pull in opposite directions.
It’s not an easy problem to crack, but if we want some sound advice we could do worse than ask some of the year 11 students at Cator Park.
Are taxes better than debts?
A very enjoyable morning at an event convened by the Bishop of Salisbury. It’s not often one gets to speak in a Medieval Hall. In a conversation around the themes of my annual lecture and the impact of the recession, the issue of debt emerged. Someone said:
‘one of the worst things Labour has done is persuade young people that it is normal to have loads of debt’.
The reference was to student fees and loans. I was a supporter of top up fees (indeed my old think tank, IPPR, helped design the top up policy), and I will support the removal of the top up cap when it inevitably occurs after the election. Higher education, which continues to be a major national strength for the UK, needs more investment but the tax payer should not be expected to put extra subsidy into provision which still goes primarily to the middle class and from which the individual student enjoys a direct financial benefit in terms of future earnings potential.
But this morning I realised that, could we go back to the debate about top-ups, I would argue more strongly for a graduate tax. In a way this is a semantic point as student loans operate like a graduate tax; the graduate only has to pay back when his or her earnings reach a certain threshold. But the words are important.
In 2003, when top ups were being debated the idea of a ‘loan’ seemed quite benign; after all, just about everyone in society was being encouraged to take out more and more loans. On the other hand, politicians were still allergic to the idea of explicit tax rises. Could a graduate tax be portrayed as Labour reneging on its manifesto tax pledge, we wondered.
Now, things are different. Tax rises may still be unpopular but they are no longer taboo. Meanwhile, we have come to associate loans with irresponsibility, debt and danger. Surely it would be better for graduates, and for their general attitude to debt, that they see the price of getting a degree as committing to a higher rate of income tax for a defined period rather than being saddled with debt?
There are other problems with a graduate tax. It means that those who earn a lot after university pay more even if their earnings have little to do with the degree. But if top ups are to rise again, it may be worth overcoming these problems in order to avoid normalising even greater personal indebtedness at the beginning of an adult’s life.
Two futures for the North East?
In my posts I like only to be complimentary about other people’s writing and research. ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’, my Grandma used to opine. (Although she didn’t always stick to her own injunction – blaming attacks on her lime trees on butterflies released in Hyde Park as a tribute to Brian Jones by the remaining Rolling Stones she never stopped referring to Sir Mick as ‘that hideous Jagger creature’.)
On my way to Newcastle I am reading the IPPR Commission on Public Services in the North East report.
I’m off to speak about public services to an IPPR / RSA audience in Newcastle. My core message will be that the region faces a risk spiral and an opportunity spiral.
The first is that the region comes out of recession on a low growth, low entrepreneurship, low employment trajectory. This then combines with public spending cuts which hit a large dependent population very hard, adding to poor social outcomes and social division. In addition the public spending squeeze takes money out of quality of life areas like arts and public space, leading to the area being less attractive to talented people and investors and thus exacerbating the problems of economic dynamism.
The opportunity cycle starts with a total commitment to public service innovation. Given how much of the regional economy is in the public sector any significant improvement can reap major gains in service outputs. In addition – given the inexorable increase in global investment in education, health and social care, community safety etc – the region can use an emerging reputation for service innovation to improve its image, attract investment and talent. In this context other advantages of the region – particularly the scope for a high quality of life – can come into play as the region explores not just the method of public services but the goals in the context of a growing desire for new more sustainable and humanistic models of growth.
So, two futures in prospect.
There is already public sector innovation in the North East (Newcastle Council’s in-house modernisation and South Tyneside’s work on well-being are examples). There is also a dynamic HE sector which helps provide the R&D backing for a regional innovation strategy (maybe NESTA might want to help out too).
The possibilities are great if the leadership is there. And, on this, I hope to find out more in the next few hours.
Why do I do it to myself?
As my regular reader knows, my self-esteem isn’t high at the moment.
A couple of years ago, at the 20th anniversary dinner for IPPR, Patricia Hewitt paid handsome tribute to the Institute’s former and current directors, before adding as an afterthought ‘and, of course, we all remember Matthew Taylor and his excellent jokes’.
I was reminded of this last night when I spoke at the official launch of Counterpoint, the think-tank of the British Council. My speech offered three compelling accounts of how the world had changed and what now needs to be done. At the end, there was a polite ripple of applause as the relieved audience looked round for a fresh glass of wine. As I inched towards the exit, someone came over to me and grabbed me by the hand. ‘Thank you so much for your speech’ he said, ‘it was so fast!’
Now today, as I write, I am at Jesus College, Cambridge, attending the Rustat Conference on the Future of Democracy. This small-ish roundtable (actually rectangular, but you know what I mean) event features presentations by some of the country’s leading political theorists and … me! I have, of course, done no preparation; indeed, all I have to cling to – like a piece of driftwood in choppy seas – is an idea. It is this: modern representative democracy, as it is practised in England, is based on a false metaphor – that of consumerism. We think the task of democracy is to give us what we want, the customer is always right. In contrast, I want to argue that representative democracy is actually much more about trying to agree what we can’t have and coming to accept the reasons why. This, after all, is the question posed by the public spending deficit and by the even bigger challenge of reducing our national carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. But deciding how to make sacrifices is much harder than promising everyone goodies. The way we think about and undertake representative democracy is incapable of supporting this kind of discussion.
So, I think I will argue, an important question is how do we make democracy better able to foster an informed and engaging conversation about trade-offs and sacrifices. Here, in headline, are four ways we might do it:
- Radically devolve power because it is simply easier to understand and manage trade-offs locally (partly because citizens can better see how changes in their own behaviour can improve the terms of the trade-off).
- Use proper citizens’ juries to advise on two or three major policies every year.
- Have a significant part of the upper chamber chosen by a ballot of members of the general public. This is so citizens get to see how difficult decision making can be for people like them (and not just for the despised class of professional politicians).
- Finally, require the publication in full of policy advice to ministers so that we get used to understanding that every policy option has a downside and involves a real political choice (and try desperately to persuade responsible broadcasters and newspapers to treat this new openness fairly).
Goodness know how it will go down in this august setting, but I’ll be sure to make some jokes and talk quickly!
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.
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