The Unnoticed Battle for the Future of Labour’s Public Sector Reform Agenda

A fascinating experiment in public service reform is unfolding in front of our eyes and yet almost no-one seems to have noticed. I’m not even sure No 10 has clocked what’s going on.

Two of the great delivery departments of this new Labour government – health and education – are simultaneously undertaking reform agendas that are underpinned by radically different theories of change.

On one side we have the Department of Education, led by Bridget Phillipson, which is slowly but surely reforming schools and colleges in ways designed to lessen the impact of competition in the system, soften the harder edges of accountability and increase collaboration. The department is implicitly rejecting the ideas of Michael Barber’s New Public Management theory that for more than two decades has driven the focus on data, league tables and Ofsted. Only last week Phillipson set out these ideas in a major speech at the Confederation of School Trusts.

Improvement in schools will come, she suggested, if we can get heads and school leaders to work together and share best practice without the threat of a punitive system looming large, driving pressure. These ideas are squarely located in emergent ideas of “social value”, which is very much a counterpunch to NPM. Unions are happy, headteachers even more so.

Contrast this with Wes Streeting’s outing on Wednesday. It was pure, unadulterated Barber-ism. The cabinet’s only bona fide Blairite was in his element as he toured broadcast studios before heading to the NHS Confederation to make a speech outlining an NHS reform agenda that felt straight out of 1999. League tables between hospital trusts are to be introduced, he explained. Hospital managers that underperformed would be eased out; those that were delivering would have “earned autonomy”. It’s safe to say nobody in the medical professions was whooping or cheering.

It is not without irony, that no doubt Streeting would – probably privately – use perceived improvements in the school system in the last 25 years to justify what he wants to do to the health system. And one could construct an argument that Phillipson’s plans are only possible because of the self-same advances.

But one thing is clear: Phillipson and Streeting are taking their departments in very different directions. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just that they’re different.

So which approach will work better?

Some will suggest I am setting out a false dichotomy. Others will reasonably argue that comparing NHS and school performance is a fool’s errand. Apples and pears etc. Context is everything etc. But, nonetheless, assuming these approaches to reform remain intact in the next few years, the public will undoubtedly have a sense of whether hospitals are better (not hard) or if schools are improved. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that the future of public sector reform in this country rides on whether Bridget or Wes are judged more successful.

Another interesting question is what Downing Street makes of all this? In some ways the answer to this question gets to the heart of the debate about what Starmerism actually is. Is it Blairism 2.0 or is it something more akin to German social democracy-meets-Harold Wilson?

I’m possibly being ungenerous. You can see strands of philosophical consistency through health, education and indeed criminal justice in what some have called the “prevention agenda”: investing upstream to prevent problems manifesting when it’s too late. But that doesn’t amount to a clear philosophy of public service improvement.

Time will tell who will be successful, and Labour needs it to be them both.

 

To read more about the Cabinet’s reform agenda, click here to read Dan Tomlinson MP’s piece on Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.