As a civil servant, Michael Sanders says he came across two types of academic.
“The bigger of these groups would say: ‘We've done some research and we really would like you to be interested in it,’” says Sanders, who became the director of King’s College London’s School for Government in November. “And, if I'm honest, a lot the research they'd done was not very interesting, either because it wasn't relevant to what we were doing or because there was no route to application.”
Those academics often “gave the strong impression that they hadn't thought about how it might be useful to government until they were sat in the room with us and trying to convince us to be interested in it”, he adds.
“And that was quite a big disconnect,” Sanders says. “We were meeting with them to talk about their research because we'd been told it might be interesting, and they hadn't thought about us as an audience.”
The second group – much smaller – came with a “very clear message” for government from their research, such as “we found that this thing works to reduce crime or to increase recycling”, with a “very clear route through to impact”.
“There was a third group who we didn't interact with, which is the academics who didn't bother to interact with government,” Sanders adds. “And I should give more credit to the first group who were at least giving it a go. If you're a professor of public policy or a lecturer of public policy, and you're never talking to government, I'm not really sure what you think you're for. That's probably an unfair generalisation, but if you're doing research on government, I think it's helpful to talk to the civil service sometimes.”
Sanders joined the civil service in 2014, initially on a three-month placement at the Behavioural Insights Team in the Cabinet Office during his PhD in economics. He ended up staying for eight years, five of them at BIT and three at the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, before moving back into academia as a professor at KCL.
In February this year, three months into his tenure leading KCL’s School of Government, Sanders published a short article in the academic journal Public Money and Management titled: What can academia contribute to public administration? In it, he argued that academics need to spend more time speaking to civil servants, should practice greater humility, and that better interaction between academia and the civil service can bring huge benefits.
CSW met Sanders to ask why there isn’t more collaboration between civil servants and academia.
You say in your article that academics should spend at least as much time talking to civil servants as they do talking to other academics. What do you think the current ratio is? And what do you think are the key benefits of interaction between the civil service and academia?
Probably 10 to one in the wrong direction.
The civil service can benefit from academic research because of the fact that we have had the time to go into something in detail in a way that is not easy to do if you're a civil servant and you've got the demands of policy delivery to worry about. Academics can benefit enormously from the civil service, from understanding what the big challenges are, what the priorities for government are, and in an ideal world, tailoring the research that we're trying to do, to answer those kinds of questions.
How have you applied your experiences as a civil servant to how you interact with the civil service as an academic?
At the beginning of any project, one of the things that we very clearly ask ourselves is: “Who's this for? Who's going to be able to use this research?” If you can't work out who it's for, don't do it. Another thing I’ve learned is, if you do your research and then you try and engage with civil servants, you're starting way too late. We should be regularly engaging with civil servants and making sure that what we're doing is relevant to them, that they're across it, because they are a much more receptive audience at the end of the project if they've had some sight of the work during it – and they can help you to tweak it. Some of that is about investing shoe leather in going and talking to people. Some of it is keeping an eye on the areas of research interests that government publishes.
The article urges academics to “Be humble!” in their interactions with civil servants. How big of an issue is this?
Your typical academic is pretty clever, and we get to dedicate our whole lives to honing our cleverness, and that's not a career move that incentivises a great deal of humility. In addition, we get all these super-cool titles. And that again discourages humility, I think. I'm a children’s social care policy specialist. I will know more about children’s social care than most policy makers working in children’s social care, because I've spent a large chunk of my life dedicated just to that. And they haven't. And when you have a knowledge advantage like that – and particularly a technical knowledge advantage – it’s very easy to be arrogant. However, what you don't understand is that there are other skills like managing a budget, working with other people, making compromises, being flexible, being practical, dealing with ambiguity, living with uncertainty – which are complex and advanced skills that academics are not really encouraged or incentivised to have. Civil servants are, which puts them at a massive advantage over us.
If you look at someone like Tim Leunig, who was both a very good academic and a very good public servant;, he saved three and a half million jobs [through the creation of the furlough scheme]. Jonathan Slater, when he was at the Ministry of Justice, funded the Peterborough Recidivism Project, which is a social impact fund where we were able to significantly and substantially reduce the number of people who are reoffending within six months.
Those impacts, you can only have inside government. I can, from the outside, try to help make government a little bit better through my teaching and through my research, but the amount of impact that I'm able to have is tiny and inconsequential compared to the vast majority of civil servants. And so looking at it that way, humility is the only reasonable response. Ben Goldacre's least successful but I think best-titled book is called I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That. And I think the main thing I learned in the civil service is that actually it is a lot more complicated than I thought it was.
You also champion the benefits of more porous borders between academia and government. What's holding this back?
One of the big challenges is the academic promotion process, which doesn't really reward nipping off into government for a few years. My PhD supervisor told me when I went into government, “Oh, you shouldn't do that because there's no way you can make it as an academic if you've spent a couple of years in government”. And obviously I have dedicated my career to proving her wrong, but that's probably best between me and my therapist. You do get amazing academics who go into government, but that tends to be very senior people, or people who are already professors. We don't really encourage it for lecturers or senior lecturers at the beginning of their career. And I think that's a real shame.
On the civil service side, lots of fellowships bringing people from academia into government don't work well because they're badly designed. People don't think about what they’re going to use the academics for, and how they’re going to get the best out of them. The three-month secondment that brought me into government was long enough for me to be able to contribute to something. And the team that I was placed in, working for David Halpern, had a very clear idea of what we were going to do and a very concrete sense of what academics are good at. In my case, statistical analysis. Of the six of us who came in on that first round, three of us remained in the civil service – the same for the subsequent round. So people who had been on the academic career trajectory were like, "Actually, no, I'm going to go and be a civil servant”. And those of us who have ended up back in academia are better academics as a consequence of it.
And do you think you will return to the civil service at some point?
Yes. I've just been made the director of the School for Government, so I feel like I'm going to be doing this for the next few years. But I think I would be very sad if I got to the end of my career and I'd never gone back into the civil service.
Sanders' Public Money & Management article can be read here: Debate: What can academia contribute to public administration?