The north London teacher was emphatic. Her job was tolerable only because of her school’s 20% truancy rate. Thank God the little monsters did not turn up. The school was occasionally threatened with a “penalty” for its truancy but the teachers did not care. Their fragile league table position and therefore their fate depended on excluding the duds. In the government canon, GCSE targets outranked truancy ones. Truants were great. Tough luck on the community.
Last week truancy in English schools was said to be at an all-time high. I am not surprised. For eight years Whitehall has had a truancy policy. Fast-track laws have fined parents £50 and even sent them to prison for not sending their children to school. A billion pounds has been blown on reducing truancy, or at least on hiring inspectors and monitors and gathering figures. Some 30,000 children are still skipping school.
This government tries to keep control of every school. Since coming to office its education department has issued 500 regulations, 350 policy targets, 175 efficiency targets, 700 notes of guidance, 17 plans and 26 separate incentive grant streams. In 2001 Hansard reported an annual average of 3,840 pages of instructions being sent to schools in England (which the government does not even run). The target-obsessed David Miliband even issued a 30% bureaucracy reduction demand. Yet one target rules them all: examination results. Spending on exams has risen under Labour from £10m to £600m. If I were running a school under such a regime I would want all truants out of school, out of sight and off my league table statistic.
That would, of course, be unprofessional. But the government is convinced of Shaw’s dictum that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity” — and against ministers. Regulation replaces professional leadership with central ordinance. The nervous breakdown to which Patricia Hewitt is reducing National Health Service hospitals is caused not by management models foisted on her by a stage army of consultants. It is caused by her obsession with imposing perpetual revolution, such that no institution has any sense of personal or continuous leadership. All eyes must be on her.
Visit a hospital these days and its managers simply do not know if they are serving Hewitt’s career, their governors, the free market under “payment by results”, the NHS executive, a local primary care trust or the local community. Targets conflict with market performance. Local pricing conflicts with central tariffs. Both conflict with long-term planning. Not a month passes without an announcement that hospitals are to lose this or that specialism.
Gordon Brown’s reported, and nostalgic, revival of Margaret Thatcher’s short-lived 1981 “NHS board” would carry conviction only if he renounced his own disastrous oversight of NHS pay deals and his opposition to hospital autonomy. The same complaint can be repeated for a head teacher, a chief constable, a social services director or a librarian. Each will have aspired to lead their institution as the apex of a professional career. It may be in the private or public sector, but in the latter case a particular ethos customarily attaches to it: pride in serving the community. The community expresses its thanks not through pecuniary reward but in the form of status and respect.
Civic life, anywhere in the world, is built on leaders of institutions. Yet in Britain a recent survey showed one in four head teachers considering quitting because of the volume of red tape. Barbara Jones, head of Combe primary school in Witney, Oxfordshire, attributed her own league table success to disregarding the state numeracy and literacy diktats.
For all the virtues of Thatcherism, it assailed the concept of public service. In place of “ethos” it brought plans and targets geared to bonuses, performance depending not on consumer satisfaction or local accountability but on obeying instructions. Chancellors such as Nigel Lawson, Kenneth Clarke and Gordon Brown sought to replace the ethos of public duty with one of contract. The idea that a dentist or a social worker or a civil servant might be motivated by duty was to them unimaginable. Yet in 1999 an overwhelming majority of public servants told the Public Management Foundation that their chief motivation was “to improve services to the community” and that “recognition” was more important than financial reward.
An edifice of internal prices, legal contracts and top-down targets now spreads into every corner of the public sector. It would be wrong to pretend that some of those corners were not galvanised. But targetry now wholly dictates the relationship between government and all public service institutions.
The target culture so overwhelms professionalism in government that even Brown claims the need to curb it. Yet his last budget re-emphasised the private funding of public investment and put head teachers and hospital managers in the position of business executives maximising targeted revenue.
A measure of the penetration of this thinking into Labour’s soul was a lecture last week by Alan Milburn, the Blairite former minister. He offered the customary bromides about empowering individuals as consumers and increasing choice. He even acknowledged that the same liberation had not gone to citizens in allowing them to choose (and pay for) their services through their communities. To such neo-Thatcherites, choice in public services is a market phenomenon, not a political one.
After two decades of opposing Thatcher’s dalliance with “money follows patient/pupil/consumer”, Labour politicians are moving beyond mere privatisation towards the voucher principle. Individuals must roam the yellow pages in search of private providers. These providers may be private or not-for-profit, but they will be price led and market driven.
Much in the privatisation of public service is an idea whose time has come. But there are two reservations. Most public institutions cannot efficiently adjust to a market economy. When Stoke-on-Trent was told by Broiwn’s PFI team to subcontract 125 school buildings to a developer, the latter had to be allowed to close up to 30 of them should they become “unprofitable”. Such disruption would be unthinkable in any other country. The same applies to privately financed hospitals. As the Treasury is finding, choice-based services tend to oversupply. Let one school or hospital expand and the community will be littered with empty classrooms and unemployed nurses. Civic institutions are not convenience stores.
A more serious objection is that the ethos of running a public institution does not automatically transfer into the private sector — witness the London Underground or privatised “academy” schools. According to the Audit Office an astonishing 40% of private finance initiative contracts have changed hands since being let, often upheaving institutional leadership and requiring costly refinancing.
There is a reason why the otherwise privatised United States still regards its schools as quintessentially civic institutions, not as Whitehall’s teaching machines. There should be a symbiotic relationship between schools and neighbourhoods, embracing such unfashionable concepts as shared pride, collective discipline and fairness to all local children. A school head is a person of substance, not the exchangeable agent of a distant apparat. He or she embodies the community. The collapse of school sport in Britain under league table pressure is a sign of how far that status has eroded.
The autonomy of professions and institutions seems to threaten modern politicians. It can be a reactionary force and radicals are right always to question it. But the erosion of such independent leadership within the welfare state cannot be what the public wants.
The education department casually revealed last week that it expects “500 failing schools will be shut down or taken over” nationwide. Such machismo may look good on the front page, but it did nothing for the morale of the institutions which know they are in the firing line, often through no fault of their own. Naming and shaming has become the blood sport of Blairite government.
Simon Jenkins’s Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts will be published by Penguin next week
