Public Services – Page 9 – thinking liberal

The anti academy movement is its own worst enemy

Yesterday, as a school governor, I attended a seminar on converting schools to academy status, organised by the London Borough of Lambeth. The paradox of the education profession was clearly evident; however good they may be at teaching the nation’s young to be clear and rational, the profession’s members seem unable to promote a rational debate about the future of education.

Lambeth tried to put forward a balanced debate with four speakers broadly supportive of conversion in the right circumstances, four vehemently opposed and one complete fence-sitter. Of the supportive speakers, one, Bill Watkin of the Specialist Schools & Academies Trust (SSAT) was a model of clarity, addressed his arguments to the audience (headteachers and chairs of governors), and was easily the most impressive speaker of the day. The others included a head and deputy head who had taken their schools into academy status and somebody from the Cooperative School Society promoting a particular model of academy operation; their focus was quite narrow and presentation tended to be a bit plodding with too much PowerPoint. All four managed to be pretty dispassionate, and none was evangelical for the academy model or government policy. Each had different light to shed on the issue.

The “anti” speakers were awful; they seemed to be addressing the public or feeding the paranoia of staff, rather than trying to influence senior school management. Two stood out, though neither stayed for the panel session. One, Phil Beadle, makes regular appearances on TV and writes for the Guardian. His arguments were as chaotic as his hair, and amounted to a rant about the way the academies he had worked in were run, mixed in with tribal anti-Tory paranoia. The other was Alasdair Smith of the Anti Academies Alliance; his grey suit, purple lanyard, grey/white hair, general bonhomie and habit of laughing at other speakers,during their presentations, all put me in mind of an archetypal UKIP candidate. His arguments were no more coherent than UKIP ones either: a general rabble rouse about how damaging academies would be to the overall education system, how all academies were run like grasping businesses, that it was a lonely world out there for academies, and nothing about how senior managers should weigh up the pros and cons. The other two speakers, one a headteacher and one from the Campaign for State Education basically said the same thing, but were a little duller. The arguments were polemical rather a serious review of the evidence, scattering numerous horror stories to support their arguments. What Lambeth thought it was doing by inviting all four to speak is a bit mysterious.

A few important and interesting points did manage to emerge. There isn’t much money in converting to academy status; for that you need an outside sponsor. Since education departments are being cut back drastically (Lambeth is no exception, with the key decisions all being taken before last year’s election, not as a consequence of the Coalition’s cuts) the amount of support they can offer to LA schools is pretty minimal. Most of the things that schools might want to do (including forming relationships with their neighbouring schools and local authorities) can be done under either model, which cuts both ways. The best part of the process, one of the academy heads said, was that it forced the school to think about its vision and strategy, and how to carry it through.

But the standard of debate was pretty awful. Most speakers complained that the government wasn’t offering a clear vision, but they had little or no vision to offer themselves. The antis seem to want the outside world to go away, so that schools can bumble in their own comfortable little worlds as before. There was no horror at the awfulness of so many schools, unless they happen to academies, of course. And then there is the hate and anger. Mr Beadle quoted extensively from former Conservative education secretary Ken Baker to prove that this was all an evil Tory conspiracy to destroy public services. I am not so much horrified that he says this sort of thing, but that so many people seem to be listening. I have seen something similar on local forums about our proposed new “free” school in Wandsworth: a complete inability of the leading anti-campaigners to listen, or to weigh up arguments and evidence – even if they are at least more polite and better tempered than some on the other side of the argument.

But leaders of schools need to do the best for their children and communities schools by working with government policy as they find it. The academies decision is a delicate process of weighing up pros and cons, often with no killer argument on either side. What is coming out of the anti academy movement is no help. It is so tempting to think that if that is the best their opponents can do, academies must be a good idea. The movement is its own worst enemy.

Manufactured outrage won’t help elderly patients

John Humphreys was apoplectic when interviewing Ann Abraham on the Today programme. She has produced a report detailing several cases of appalling treatment of elderly patients in the NHS. How on earth can these wonderful dedicated NHS staff we keep hearing about allow such abuse? Ms Abraham did not try to give us any insight into how such things happened, merely echoing Mr Humphreys’s anger.

Not long after the interview there was a rather interesting counterpoint in the sports report. Garry Richardson was interviewing the trainer of one of the horses killed at Newbury over the weekend, asking him about how he and his staff felt about the whole thing. This was clearly designed to bring on the normal outpourings of emotion that are now the expected face of public grief. Such a a beautiful horse; a real character; we’re all devastated; we need answers….and so on. Instead all he got was, more or less, just a bad day at the office and life goes on.

That would be a more helpful attitude in the NHS case. Whatever Mr Humphreys and Ms Abraham are suggesting, it really isn’t hard to reconcile the dedication of NHS staff to systematic abuse of patients. It’s what Richard Adams in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called the “SEP field”, which guarantees a cloak of invisibility. SEP stands for Somebody Else’s Problem. Anybody who has worked in a large organisation is familar with the idea of bad things happening while everybody involved is convinced they are doing a highly professional job.

The SEP field arises from the way we organise work, splitting it up into separate bits for which individuals can take responsibility. We only look at our bit. Bad things happen between the bits. The first reaction is to blame management, who are supposed to be making sure the whole thing adds up. And the quickest and easiest response for management is to make the process yet more complicated by adding in more bits, with checks and controls. That’s how they tend to behave when people get outraged. But it doesn’t really help, because the main problem is complexity; nobody wants to take wider responsibility because they don’t understand what’s going on.

This is an old problem, and solutions should be familiar. You simplify processes, empower staff to act outside their normal remits, and engender team-working attitudes. Simple but hard. It means telling people comfortable with their narrow jobs, who think they are doing wonderfully well, that actually they are part of the problem.

But for NHS managers that should be another day at the office. We, the public, should be encouraging them to be braver. Instead we stoke up the outrage, and even start suggesting the NHS doesn’t need managers at all.

The NHS needs better leadership at ground level. We should be demanding it. Perhaps we should even ask ourselves, as Jeremy Laurance does in the Independent, whether our beloved NHS is capable of ever managing itself properly ever.

Public services are different

As he left office as Prime Minister, and age ago in June 2007, Tony Blair wrote the following in The Economist:

Public services need to go through the same revolution – professionally, culturally and in organisation – that the private sector has gone through.

It is easy to understand how politicians become frustrated with the leaden ways of so much of the public sector. And the private sector has indeed been revolutionised in the last two decades. Recently I’ve experienced this private sector revolution full on.

Somebody has been setting up mobile phone contracts in my name.

The first I heard of this was when a welcome arrived through the mail. My daily post hasn’t been this exciting for years (well since the last time somebody did this). Then comes the difficult bit: I have to phone the company to stop the contract. Since I don’t actually have the phone and the free service line that goes with it, this usually means phoning a premium number and then wading through the various options. Funnily enough none of the options says “If you want to report a fraudulent transaction press 3” – it’s always “other” at the end of the list; one company only lets you in if you have a PIN – not easy if you didn’t actually set the contract up. Eventually you speak to somebody with a script, sometimes in India; actually this bit usually works OK: these people are polite and know what to do; only once was I just passed round the office. And there it seems to end; somebody gets a free handset and a few days worth of free calls. Just another business expense.

It is a huge, horrible impersonal nightmare of systems, procedures, filters and scripts, with the minimum human contact. The fraudster doesn’t know who I am. The company allows the fraud because it is worth the expense. I have to wade through the system to protect myself. This is the dark side of the private sector revolution of which Tony Blair writes. The personal element is sucked out and crime lurks in the fringes. Perhaps Prime Ministers are cocooned from this.

The process is relentless. I should know, since I used to manage a financial services operation that underwent just such a transformation. The starting point was a clumsy labour-intensive operation, not easy to manage; the service may have had lots of human interfaces, but you didn’t really know what the staff were doing: not until too late and you had an irate customer. Then along comes a salesman with a system that helps you control all this and keep proper records. He or she would be gushing: you would save money, improve the quality and customer satisfaction all at once. So you implemented these wonderful workflow and customer relationship systems, and indeed you could improve controls and improve quality of service. But if you wanted to reduce costs as well, then you had to keep the customers away from the workforce and build barriers. And then came a process called “de-skilling”: using less skilled staff, usually in a location were wages are much lower, and giving them simpler procedures to follow. And the pressure to reduce costs is absolutely relentless, not least because mostly the public chose lower costs over better service.

Clearly there is a big upside. The public can consume more and (usually) gets more choice. No doubt this is what Mr Blair was thinking of. If everybody is going to get richer, or even just have more leisure, then we must produce more per person. This is just another way of saying that the personal content in the goods and services we deliver has to be less. Sweden is often cited as an example of a society that is well off without rampant, exploitative capitalism: but try finding a member of staff at IKEA. And, we shouldn’t view the past with rose-tinted spectacles: services may have been more personal, but they were often shoddy and high-handed. Overall we are better off.

But public services are different.

Personal contact, and understanding the user’s individual needs is often of the essence for public services – think of schools, doctors, social workers. And simply deciding that somebody is too difficult to deal with is not an option. If people fall off the edge they create even bigger problems. In fact so many of societies problems are the result of lack of human contact and understanding – think of antisocial behaviour or mental illness. Public services should be more human not less. If they were, we’d need them less.

What we need is a complete rethink of public services, not copying blindly from the private sector.