A skilful civil service?

Andrew McDonald is chief executive of Government Skills, the sector skills council for central government, which is seeking to drive up the overall standards of civil servants and all those in the wider public sector. Jon Davis, specialist on the civil service, met with him to discuss his future strategy.

In February, Government Skills published Building Professional Skills for Government — a strategy for delivery which set out the ideas and plans for the coming years. ‘This is the first occasion,’ said Mr McDonald, ‘where government has looked right across the sector — central government, non-departmental public bodies and the armed forces — to ask, “What are the skills that are needed? What are our common skills needs? Where can we best work together and where separately? How can we improve delivery of up-skilling?” We must strike a balance here between working with departments where necessary and recognising that individual departments are often best placed to ascertain their own needs: one department may require financial capabilities, another project management. It is our responsibility to establish the areas where we’ve got common priorities — not to meddle.’

This national skills strategy builds upon Lord Leitch’s Review of Skills, Prosperity for all in the global economy — world class skills, published in December 2006. The review included the pledge that more than 90 per cent of the workforce must be qualified to Level 2 (five good GCSEs or equivalent) by 2020. In many ways the public sector is already highly skilled. However like the rest of the UK plc, it faces major skills challenges.

‘Skills gaps are already harming delivery. More than half the individual recommendations in the departmental capability reviews relate in one way or another to skills issues. A major civil service-specific initiative over the past decade has been to “de-privilege” the dominance of the policy advice role of the senior civil service. This trend is implicit within the skills strategy which seeks a parity of esteem between the various parts of the service. We need to have in senior positions people who are very good at operational delivery, policy delivery and corporate services. We must prevent one strand from dominating another.’

McDonald also highlighted the tightening of demand for intermediate and higher level skills in the economy. ‘We must have a really good offer, part of which will be built around skills.’ He expects to see a greater movement of people in and out of the sector.

He also stressed that jobs at the bottom of the skills pyramid are disappearing. Something like 54,000 jobs with lower skills requirements in the ten years to 2014 will disappear across the economy as a whole, of which a fair number will be within this sector. One of the questions we must address is the extent to which we can retrain them.

Considerable money is spent each year on training but Mr McDonald was critical of how it was spent. ‘We know that we’re not getting the best value from our learning and development spend. The civil service spends between £500m - £1bn on learning and development. That’s laudable, but we need to improve the way we make that money work for us, especially in the tight CSR period we’re entering.’

The higher and further education sector is also a target for reform. ‘We want people to have the skills that make them more job-ready on day one. For example, the IT sector has helped to develop an IT and management vocational degree. We want to reach back down the talent pipeline and build in relevant skills along the way.’

Apprenticeship programmes should be an important part of training people in the public sector. The Financial Times recently reported that Government Skills found fewer than 300 apprentices out of a civil and public service of around 600,000 with none at all in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, Revenue and Customs nor, somewhat embarrassingly, Government Skills’ new home: the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.’ The civil service accounts for less than 0.02 per cent of the 180,000 people apprenticed annually. ‘The government plans to expand the number of apprenticeships within government starting with a pathfinder project for 500 new apprenticeships. We’ll evaluate that with a view to scaling it up significantly.’

The Ministry of Defence seems to be leading on the skills agenda. Last year, Mr McDonald went to see the basic skills training the army does and he saw in it a model of what the public services should be doing: the recruits took seriously the educational opportunities that the army was giving them and outstanding results were being delivered. He believes that ‘there is a serious commitment to taking forward the skills agenda because, at its simplest, we get better public services as a result, and because as good employers we should be investing in our people, improving their life chances.’

Mr McDonald is upbeat about the prospects for the strategy for building skills for government. ‘This is the moment for skills. We have not had for a hundred years such a high priority on skills across the UK. Not since the fear of falling behind Germany and the resultant clamour for national efficiency right at the beginning of the twentieth century has there been such a focus on skills so that we’re able to compete.’ As the prime minister is apt and right to remind us, the real aim of all this effort is to prepare the UK for what is shaping up to be a highly competitive global marketplace.