1Introduction
1.The Civil Service, alongside the Diplomatic Service, constitutes one of the great institutions of state. It underpins political and constitutional stability. It is a permanent and impartial official administrative service which also must adapt to changing times and changing governments. It has no separate legal personality from the government of the day, and is accountable to ministers and to Parliament, yet it must also provide for its own sustainability and governance. The governance, leadership and capability of the Civil Service is a topic to which this Committee and its predecessors have returned in several inquiries.1 The Civil Service has undergone significant change in recent years in order to address concerns about its capability. This inquiry and this report address how the Civil Service can best provide itself with the leadership and capability which governments need: how it should provide for its own governance and leadership while remaining accountable to the government of the day.
2.The National School for Government (NSG) was abolished in 2012 as part of the Public Bodies Reform Programme by the then-Minister for the Cabinet Office, Lord Maude. It was only partly replaced by Civil Service Learning (CSL), a new body established under the Civil Service Reform Plan.2 Since then, a number of academies have been established to fill gaps left in the absence of NSG. NSG had also provided a forum for people, aside from line management, who had the time to think about the Civil Service as an institution, and about its future leadership and governance.
3.As well as learning and development in specialist areas where the Civil Service wanted to strengthen its capability, the Civil Service Leadership Academy (CSLA) was established to develop leadership capability in the Senior Civil Service (SCS). It is now approaching its second birthday and the National Leadership Centre (NLC) has also been established as a separate initiative to address senior leadership capability across the wider public service. We address the relationship between these two initiatives in this report.
4.The 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan laid emphasis on the specialist, cross-departmental Professions and Functions, and this development is proving to be a significant and lasting reform. The Professions established frameworks of skills required by those in their area throughout the Civil Service. Functions have been established to better coordinate the corporate functions that departments have in common, in areas such as HR, digital, or contracting.3 Both the Functions and Professions are working across Government in areas that have traditionally been dealt with by individual departments. Meanwhile, less thought was given to concerns about Civil Service governance and leadership and capability which have been tested by the preparations for leaving the European Union.
5.Some consistent themes have emerged across our previous reports. The most immediate of these is the continuing concern about issues relating to Civil Service capability. The Civil Service needs the skills to do the demanding job it faces and these need to be actively nurtured. But a coordinated and coherent strategy to deliver this has been lacking.4 In addition, the leadership and organisational culture to ensure that these skills can be properly deployed is just as significant.5 In particular, officials need to be equipped to give Ministers honest advice; to “speak truth to power”. We addressed this is our recent our recent report, The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness.6
6.We have been concerned with the over-reliance on “experiential” or “on the job” learning at the expense of conceptual and reflective forms of learning (see Box 1 below). The closure of the NSG was significant because it deprived the Civil Service of a safe space in which this experiential learning could be supplemented with conceptual and, in particular, reflective learning.7
Box 1. Types of Learning
The Public Administration Select Committee’s (PASC) report on Civil Service Skills drew on the distinction between four types of learning that formed part of Professor Colin Talbot’s (University of Manchester) evidence to that inquiry. We reproduce part of that evidence here.8
Experiential learning is simply ‘learning on the job’—gaining knowledge and skills by doing the job, and possibly by observing those around you doing similar jobs. Historically this has been the principal way of developing civil service leaders. This includes the convention of moving aspirant leaders around between different (mainly policy) jobs which they do for relatively short periods (typically 2–3 years at most).
Reflective learning is an approach that involves individuals engaging in roles and then reflecting on what did and did not work. Most often this involves some sort of mentor who helps with the reflection and is akin, in some ways, to an apprenticeship. The approach has a well-developed theoretical and research base and is widely used in professional development: teaching, medicine, nursing, architecture, etc.
Conceptual learning is the more traditional training and educational, classroom-based, style of development in which participants acquire knowledge, concepts, and theories from more knowledgeable teachers or trainers. This was described as “the forte of the Civil Service College, and its successor organizations”, which provided this sort of development to tens of thousands of civil servants. Of course, there has always been a lot of non-Civil Service College provision of such training and development: in-house courses run by departments and agencies; external courses from a range of providers; and higher education courses linked to qualifications.
Experimental learning originated in the ideas of a British educational innovator, Reg Revans, in the post-War National Coal Board. Revans pioneered ‘action learning’, an approach which involved managers engaging in ‘active experimentation’ in their jobs and then discussing the results with a group of peers (‘action learning sets’ in the jargon). There have been many variants on this idea and the practice has waxed and waned several times over the past half-century, but it still has many adherents.
7.In the course of this inquiry, it has become apparent that the landscape continues to evolve. The CSLA has been active since its establishment but still has no permanent location. There are plans to develop one, but this is dependent on money being made available. There remain outstanding issues to resolve with the NLC before it becomes operational. Furthermore, we have found no evidence that thought has been given to the way in which these two bodies complement the Professional academies The Government’s written evidence said that “Our model is built on a system of dedicated professional Academies”,9 but we could not find anyone who is accountable for this “model” or who has designed or has a settled concept for such a “system”. Nonetheless, the leadership of the Civil Service are making efforts to address long-standing problems, such as the over-reliance on experiential learning and the lack of skills and capability in key specialist areas. The overall purpose of our inquiry and of this report is to make recommendations on how to strengthen the coherence of learning and development of civil servants, and in particular, to identify how a more strategic leadership and better governance can underpin a stronger, more self-sustaining Civil Service
8.Over the course of this inquiry, we have held four oral evidence sessions. We received ten written submissions. A list of those contributing evidence is included at the end of this report. We thank all those who contributed to the inquiry, including our specialist adviser, Dr Gillian Stamp.
1 See, for example: PASC Truth to Power: How Civil Service Reform can Succeed 8th Report of Session 2013–14 HC74; PASC Civil Service Skills: A Unified Approach, 4th Report of Session 2014–15, HC112; PACAC The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness 5th Report of Session 2017–19 5th Report of Session 2017–19 HC497
2 HM Government Civil Service Reform Plan June 2012, p. 23
3 We discuss the roles of Functions and Professions in our report, The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness 5th Report of Session 2017–19 5th Report of Session 2017–19 HC497, chapter 4.
4 PACAC The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness 5th Report of Session 2017–19 5th Report of Session 2017–19 HC497, chapter six; PASC Civil Service Skills: A Unified Approach, 4th Report of Session 2014–15, HC112
5 PACAC The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness 5th Report of Session 2017–19 5th Report of Session 2017–19 HC497, chapter one; PASC Truth to Power: How Civil Service Reform can Succeed 8th Report of Session 2013–14 HC74
6 PACAC The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness 5th Report of Session 2017–19 5th Report of Session 2017–19 HC497
7 PACAC The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness 5th Report of Session 2017–19 5th Report of Session 2017–19 HC497, chapter six
8 PASC Civil Service Skills: A Unified Approach, 4th Report of Session 2014–15, HC112, para.38
Published: 22 July 2019