Sunday thoughts: How does anything get done in education in Whitehall, and what does that mean for an incoming government?

Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, who was revealed during the Covid inquiry to have described the UK government as a “terrible, tragic joke”

This week, Whatsapp messages emerged in the Covid inquiry showing the way in which the Cabinet Secretary – the most senior of civil servants – dismissed the work of the politicians he was meant to be serving.

An excerpt from Rory Stewart’s book went viral, discussing the difficulty he had making a decision as DFID Minister to get civil servants to stop UK funds flowing towards a jihadi controlled area in Syria.

And Labour won two huge by election victories in previously safe Tory seats.

What these three things have in common is they show the strengths, and the difficulties, that the almost-certain new Labour government will face when they come into the office. And that is about governance, and managing Whitehall, in modern Britain.

This isn’t a Jacob Rees-Mogg style rant about officials working at home, or being too busy in Taxpayer Funded Woke Bakery Classes to do any proper work. Indeed, one of Labour’s biggest advantages will be a sense of relief from officials that this type of counterproductive briefing from Ministers will likely cease, alongside a desire to serve a new government with an agenda, which ought to lead in the short term to a surge in action from Whitehall.

This also isn’t me saying that Labour’s advantage is that all civil servants vote Labour, and so of course they’ll serve that government better. To the extent that one could speculate, given that close to 60% of the civil service is aged under 50 (and 50% under 40), and only 12% of that age bracket are currently intending to vote Conservative, compared to 59% voting Labour, they probably do lean left. But that is, dare I say it, a symptom of a wider Conservative problem, rather than a civil service problem.

Instead, I think it’s a symptom of two issues – one relatively recent, and one more longstanding.

The recent one is a consequence of the political chaos that has immersed Westminster in the past few years. When Cabinet Ministers and junior Ministers churn at such a high pace, it’s understandable if no one thinks the current lot will be around for long and have the ability to see anything through. When No10 is in chaos, it is not a surprise if people suspect Cabinet Ministers don’t have room for maneuver. When a governing party is consistently 20 points behind in the polls (under three successive Prime Ministers), and seemingly already fighting the post election leadership battle, it is a reasoned view to conclude that the interest and ability to exercise thoughtful powers in a department is probably low down the priority list of Ministers.

This is not just civil servants. This affects anyone who engages with government. When DfE Ministers hold one hundred and thirty three introductory meetings in six months with external stakeholders (and some groups did five separate ones, with five new groups of politicians, in those six months), you’d be forgiven if you were one of those stakeholders from breathing a weary sigh when the next invite comes in, and you start all over again (“well, Minister, a school trust is…..”)

In these instances, human nature means that subconsciously, work slows down, and so does engagement within the civil service. Lots of research into workplaces across the world shows that higher employee engagement scores lead to more productive workplaces. And absence of that engagement leads to a vicious circle, where morale shrinks, work gets done less effectively, people leave, and engagement shrinks again. We can see the effects of this – we know that civil service morale is low.

Got it. All Ministers’ fault, can’t blame the civil service.

Well, no. Because the longer term trend which makes life infuriating for even the most engaged and determined Ministers, is the way in which power and accountability is now distributed so widely across the complex system, that Ministers’ abilities to make something happen can feel almost naught. I’ve described it in the past as “rubber levers” – you sit in an office, make a decision, pull a metaphorical lever to make something happen and…..nothing.

This is, I think, a function of two things having happened – both sensible in their own way, but now causing issues. The first is a desire, in a complex system, to devolve power to make changes to the “front line”. And the second is - due both to the theory that government departments should outsource operational issues to arms length bodies, and the convenience where that sometimes allows headcounts and budgets to be smuggled around fixed targets - that successive governments have created a miasma of semi official and semi autonomous bodies who now exercise huge power in the system.

Let’s take a couple of DfE examples. Why couldn’t the system, collectively, get laptops to children who didn’t have them during covid? Because different parts of the system were focused on different elements of the problem. The state could have given schools and trusts the money to just go and get them. But then arguably that wouldn’t have been best use of taxpayer money because the state can buy at higher volume and lower price. So one part of the state bought them, at high volume and a lower price, and stored them in a warehouse. But another part of the state didn’t actually know how many children and schools needed laptops, because that data isn’t held anywhere, and decisions on the level of need were held locally. But you just can’t send laptops out on a formula basis because some would get too many and some too few. So you need to design a mechanism for schools to say how many they need. And then which bit of the DfE decides this? Is it the ESFA, who looks after the Academies? But that doesn’t look after local authority schools – at which point, you need to bring councils in. Meanwhile, a whole other part of DfE is focusing on questions like whether these laptops can have internet access, and whether the data for educational sites can be zero rated, which of course doesn’t sit with the department for education or indeed any department at all, so now it’s a discussion with another part of the private sector to see if a deal can be done there.

[edit: as a very helpful comment below points out, there was also a political element around the quantum of laptops ordered]

Or RAAC. Unlike others, I have a lot more sympathy for the Department closing some schools and buildings at very short notice just before term starts – if that’s the terribly unfortunate time when the decision is made that the buildings which you thought were safe, now aren’t, then you need to act. But the process since then, as I understand it, has been hellish. The portal set up by the department for schools to send in their returns isn’t reliable. Schools are unclear whether they should be commissioning their own surveyors, or the department will be doing that. Local officials from the Regions Group in DfE have been angrily calling schools, demanding data returns, only to be told angrily back that the system is down, or that the returns have been submitted already. Civil servants have occasionally just given their own email addresses to head teachers as the most reliable way of sharing data. Meanwhile, in Sanctuary Buildings, who is responsible for designing a plan for fixing it? Is it ESFA, again, that manages the spending? Is it Regions Group, who oversee finance issues and governance and school place planning for Academies (which includes buildings). Is it LocatED, who started off as the quango acquiring new free school sites, but now have a broader estate management function? Is it DfE central capital? Is it the strategic finance team, who need to go get extra money from HMT?

Both of these examples are what you might call operational / delivery challenges. And, in fairness to the DfE, they’re also both crisis situations, in which you might not reasonably expect a flawless response.  But the same can apply to policy issues too. I have personally seen, in the past three to four years, at least four policy areas (which I won’t name) in which I saw a succession of official level proposals and actions fundamentally fail to meet what Ministers and advisers wanted from that area. I don’t think it’s because the officials were bad people. I don’t think it’s because they didn’t care. As far as I can see, it’s because in some instances officials didn’t really want to do what Ministers and advisers wanted (and that is fundamentally an issue). And in some instances – more commonly - they simply didn’t have market insight, the intelligence (as in data, not brainpower), the funding, or the legal powers to do what would have been needed – because the accountability and decision making is distributed throughout the system, or because making a change in this one policy space, that could have solved this issue, would have a huge unintended knock on effect in other areas.

Governance, it turns out, is really hard.

Sometimes, when it works, it’s brilliant. A really small, but powerful example I keep on using is around HGV drivers and bootcamps. Readers may recall that in 2021, there was briefly a significant media story around a shortage of lorry drivers. It was a perfect media story, because it combined a chance for people to relitigate related issues (Brexit), with a real world impact (no fruit and veg on supermarket shelves), a pointless intergenerational ding dong (I don’t know why people want to do online shopping anyway, it’s just lazy, plus if we ate more British food it wouldn’t matter) and a burning platform (risk of no pigs in blankets for Xmas). The Government announced a swathe of things to try and tackle it, including funding for 12 week bootcamps to get more people trained quickly.  The immediate crunch in supply eased, the story faded from the headlines, but the bootcamps continued. And 18 months later, it…..worked?

There is, to be clear, still a skills shortage in HGV – a pan European one, not just a British one. But this is a small but real example of where DfE officials came to Ministers with a proposal, costed it, were able to use that money quickly and effectively in a decentralised system (given DfE doesn’t run the bootcamps), managed the contract, and delivered a result.

And it’s also true that not just this example but day in, day out, 7000 odd civil servants in DfE and ESFA are managing tens of billions of pounds and overseeing a complex education childcare and skills system that is, broadly, doing what it should be.

But the shadow education team’s challenge is that coming up with policy is relatively easy. Getting funding for it from Rachel Reeves is pretty hard. But harder than both of those is walking into Sanctuary Buildings and understanding how to actually implement the things which they’ve committed to.

The question which should be keeping them up at night is not “what should we do about the teacher shortage”, but “we’ve committed to 6,500 new teachers, but we have absolutely no policy levers through which to deliver on this”.

It shouldn’t be “is another quango for skills policy really what is needed”, and more “what specific powers will Skills England have, how will it be staffed, what funding pots will it have control over, and how do we situate it within the ecosystem amongst all the other arms lengths bodies that exist?”

Not “is changing the thresholds for new, lower earning graduates to pay back their student loans a sensible thing to do” and more “what changes need to be made to the Student Loans Company architecture, including the IT system, to do this, can we cope with rapidly changing wage levels especially if inflation remains high, and how do we deal with the large numbers of edge cases which will no doubt occur?”

I hope that, as is the risk with all oppositions, they’re not over indexing on getting the policy right and day to day political attack, and under indexing the tasks for the first 100 days, or the first year. This risk is always greater because most of the lobbying they will be receiving (within the party, but also outside it) is also on the former.

And the answer can’t be “during transition talks, the DfE officials will talk us through what we need to do”. Governance is complex, and it needs the clearest of steers from an incoming team, as well as expert official advice.

If I were in the shadow team now, I’d want to have 4 pagers on all the key commitments I’d made, with a best case theory of delivery and implementation for all of them. I’d want to seek out experts – privately – to test these, and not just from within the party or aligned think tanks and the like. I’d want my junior Ministers all over these, as the people who will have to shuttle these through Parliament, and the Department, on a daily basis in office. I’d want to use any spare money I had within the Shadow Education office to commission legal and accountancy and public finance advice. And I’d want to sit down, every month, and review these, until I was really confident in what I wanted to do – ready to take advice from officials and prepared to change my mind - but from a position of strength and informed expertise.

Otherwise, they could be another Rory Stewart – metaphorically and literally flying round the world to stop a bad thing happening.