Wanted: professionals not public robots

All political parties recognise the need to improve public services and, because of the economic problems, this is now coupled with the need to make them more efficient. The current government’s efforts in the last 12 years have not just been disappointing but positively harmful. Despite billions of pounds of extra money, we are slipping down international tables on educational achievement; the health service shows modest improvements for the huge investment; social inequality is still as bad as when they took office. The chance of one’s birth is still a major influence on one’s life course.

Besides these disheartening outcome data, the government has also produced a workforce that is demoralised by the rigid control of their work through the audit and inspection system. Many are working in defensive, blame cultures where learning is discouraged and compliance is king. Rules and regulations restrict creative responsiveness to service users. Demonstrating compliance means that paperwork or — more commonly nowadays — data entry has become the highest priority, pushing out time for the very practice that is supposed to be improved by all this regulation.

The heart of the government’s problem is their false image of the world. They believe top-down control of front-line work is both possible and desirable, but this is based on an obsolete Newtonian view of the world, a world of simple linear causality where it is thought to be possible to predict and control the future as if we were living in a large machine. Because of this assumption the government interprets any failure of control as evidence of a need for more controlling mechanisms. For front-line workers, their range of activity becomes increasingly constricted by rules and regulations, by trying to comply with ever more detailed audit and inspection systems.

But the government’s world view is wrong. The government hasn’t grasped that unpredictability is a feature of the world and outside their control. No amount of tinkering with performance indicators or tweaking the rules will create a world that runs like a machine. We live in a complex world, where non-linear causality limits our ability to predict and control. In this world, we need to be adaptive and creative in dealing with the dynamic flow, not rule-following robots.

Consider the nature of much public sector work: it is about providing a service through a relationship with users; teachers relate to their pupils and social workers engage with families. As Jake Chapman so neatly expressed in his 2004 Demos pamphlet System failure: ‘One can “deliver” a parcel or a pizza, but not health or education. All public services require the “customer” to be an active agent in the “production” of the required outcomes.’

For any of us who have had the good fortune to have inspirational teachers, we don’t remember them because they covered the national curriculum so meticulously but because of the thoughts and emotions they generated in us: curiosity and excitement about the subject. My maths teacher didn’t inspire me to study hard for my GCE exam but to study hard to find out more about this fascinating subject; the good exam result was a by-product.

Yet the whole impact of the target system is to direct attention upwards. to pleasing senior managers. not downwards onto the service user. Time and again, inquiries into children’s deaths from abuse report with amazement that no-one spoke to the child; but this poor practice is a consequence of an audit system that looks at data not actions.

Freeing public services from such rigid control requires a fundamental mind shift. It means abandoning the false security of the Newtonian image of a safe, predictable world and recognising the need to be constantly attentive and adaptive to new circumstances. It requires having some trust in the workforce; of assuming that, on the whole, teachers, social workers, and doctors would like to do a good job. It does not mean freeing them up to do whatever they like.

Some form of accountability is essential, not just because we need to know if public money is being spent well, but also because the process of accounting for your actions is a valuable learning process. Service users themselves should have more voice in deciding what the goals of the service should be and what ‘good’ practice is.

David Cameron speaks of wanting to empower families to take control and exercise responsibility — for example, in his Hugo Young lecture on 10 November 2009 — but how is this possible in the current audit system where the government has told children’s services to work to its set of ‘desired outcomes’, with associated performance indicators for each stage of a child’s development?

An example of radical reform is the Hackney policy on social work with children and families. Improvement is being sought not through tightening control of the front-line workers, but by making sure they have the necessary skills and then stepping back and giving them more space to focus on the children’s needs. Administrators take on many of the bureaucratic tasks so that social workers can prioritise time with families. Everyone in the organisation shares the goal of improving children’s safety and well-being. Managers do not see their role as monitoring their juniors for compliance with performance indicators but as listening to their problems and needs and helping them find the required resources and skills to help children.

The difference in approach is also seen in supervision: unlike the disheartening model in so many social care departments, where supervision is used primarily for checking compliance with the audit system, in Hackney it is seen as the forum for learning and for minimising the risk of the errors that so repeatedly show up in child abuse inquiries.

It prioritises critical thinking about how they are working with the family: are they losing focus on the children because of the needs of the parents? Are they being misled about what is happening? Are they overlooking some possibilities for helping the family?

Changing the current management of public services is a huge task and one that will take time. Hackney was able to reform because it was able to seek out the experienced staff it needed but, on a national level, there is a shortage of such people.

Child protection social work in particular has seen an exodus of experienced staff, driven away by the demands of paperwork that prevent them doing what they consider to be in the best interests of the children. There is a lot of work to be done in building up morale and getting people to stay and work in conditions where they are able to become more and more expert in helping families (not just in complying with rules).

A vicious spiral has developed that, as demoralised experienced workers are replaced by novices, managers trust them even less and so increase control, accelerating the rate at which people decide to get out and find more satisfactory work conditions. Many child protection teams, doing the most challenging tasks in social work, are staffed with newly-qualified workers.

One of the most damaging aspects of the over focus on the paperwork has been that it has undervalued the really important parts of the work. Skills in relating to service users and expertise in forming well-reasoned judgments and decisions are where we need to see improvement and it is by creating work conditions where these can flourish that we will retain a motivated workforce.

To encourage responsive, creative public services an incoming government has to jettison the top-down control model and work with the staff and users, listening to feedback about what is or is not going well in the eyes of front-line staff and users, not just of inspectors.

Eileen Munro is Professor of Social Policy at the London School

of Economics.