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In 2013 the Government published its Capabilities Plan, described by the Cabinet Office as a key part of the Government's overall Reform Plan. The stated purpose of this plan was to transform the Civil Service into a high-skilled, high-performance organisation that's less bureaucratic and more focused on delivering results.
The state of skills and capabilities in the Civil Service has been a long-running concern for this Committee. A number of our previous reports have highlighted this issue as critical to achieving government policy and ensuring good governance. This Report:
· explores how skills and capabilities needs and gaps are identified within the civil service;
· examines the strength of the Government's approach to training and development of civil servants;
· scrutinises the abolition of National School of Government and the performance of its replacement, Civil Service Learning;
· considers best practice in business and what can be learned from other organisations in terms of how they identify and develop skills and capabilities in their workforce.
We recommend that the Cabinet Office should have a standardised framework for auditing departmental skills levels and that the National Audit Office should be invited to carry out a Civil Service wide skills audit on a regular basis.
We fully support the proposed Civil Service Leadership Academy to address the unique challenges faced by public sector service leaders which conventional business training cannot address. We are not calling for the National School of Government to be re-established but we do, however, see a crucial and influential role for a new institution to serve as a nucleus for civil service reform.
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