Since the election, education secretary Michael Gove has driven his department at breakneck pace. And the DfE is already producing results, permanent secretary David Bell tells Matt Ross – despite the odd stumble on the way.
In the quiet corridors of Whitehall, David Bell (pictured above) would stand out for his fizzing energy even if it weren’t for his lanky frame and musical Scottish accent. Despite years of gradual change, the civil service’s top ranks are still thick with languid, quietly-spoken, Oxbridge-educated smooth operators: products of the private offices, the policy units, and the Fast Stream. But the Department for Education’s permanent secretary is cut from a different mould: a relative newcomer to the civil service, he spent 30-odd years in education and still retains the bounce and enthusiasm that you sometimes see among really inspirational teachers.
Since May 2010, he’s needed all of that energy to help drive education secretary Michael Gove’s hyperactive policy agenda through Parliament and out into England’s schools system. Gove arrived in government with a clear and well-developed set of policies, built around a base of legislation, structures and experience established over the course of a decade by his Labour predecessors. He was determined to put the Tories’ flagship education policies into action fast, and the results are now coming through: last month the first 24 ‘free schools’ opened their doors, and nearly 1000 schools are converting themselves into autonomous academies. But the experience of getting this far has not – to use a classic bit of Whitehall understatement – been entirely painless.
“The secretary of state and I share a great interest in reading about history, and as we’ve said, if you’re first out sometimes you take fire,” says Bell. “The secretary of state’s view is that if you’re not doing things that are going to create some energy out there, then you’re probably not doing anything at all.”
So Gove wanted to move fast; when he arrived at the department, Bell recalls, “he was absolutely committed and convinced about what needed to be done, and we were really anxious to help him do it.” The DfE swung into action, introducing Gove’s new policies while deleting some of Labour’s – and it was here that the department ran into trouble. While scrapping the PFI-funded Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative, officials repeatedly amended the list of local projects that were to be axed, causing confusion and consternation in schools around England. “That was a difficulty for us,” says Bell. “It wasn’t great. It was a bit of a knock to the department as well as, obviously, to the secretary of state.”
Trouble at the top
Some time afterwards, rumours began circulating that Gove was trying to push his permanent secretary out; indeed, the Guardian ran an interview with Labour’s targets guru Sir Michael Barber, in which he suggested that Gove had offered him the job. But Bell belittles such stories: he and Gove “both have a wry smile occasionally about what’s written in the newspapers,” he says. “I was once given advice that you should never believe all the nice things they write about you in the newspapers, because that means you’ll be less disappointed when they write nasty things; that’s good advice and I’ve always lived by it. So I just don’t take that kind of thing seriously.”
Bell has “worked together extremely well” with Gove, he says: “Like any other permanent secretary-secretary of state relationship, there are occasionally moments when you think: ‘Are we in the right place with each other on this particular issue?’ But the general working relationship has been excellent.”
“I’ve been very lucky,” adds Bell. “I’ve had four secretaries of state and they’ve all been completely different, but I’ve got on extremely well with all of them.” That’s your job, I comment. Bell agrees – but political stability is still a relief. “It’s been nice to have had quite a firm commitment from the prime minister that he wasn’t going for frequent reshuffles,” he says. “I think we all say that’s a good thing.”
So, those BSF errors: were they a product of the speed with which civil servants were changing policies? “I wouldn’t want that to be an excuse,” he replies. “It was absolutely not the case that the secretary of state’s desire to move at pace caused some of our difficulties around BSF. There were mistakes made by officials – and we took responsibility for that.”
Why did the department stumble?
Okay, so were officials overly focused on showing the coalition that they weren’t still wedded to Labour policies? Again, Bell rejects the analysis. Knowing that Gove was in a hurry, he says, “we wanted to help and support him, not because we were concerned about being perceived as Labour stooges, but because that’s what you’re supposed to do as a civil servant: you’re there to support the government of the day.”
Then, without quite pinning down what did cause those mistakes, Bell moves on to explain why the department was absolutely right to move with such speed: Sir David may not be your classic Whitehall operator, but he’s as skilled as any other permanent secretary at sliding delicately around awkward questions. “The secretary of state took some flak last summer for the pace at which the Academies Bill went through Parliament,” he recalls: beginning in May, the process was completed by summer recess. “The criticism was that it was far too quick, but I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. Getting that in quickly has enabled lots of other things to happen. Sometimes you have to move at pace to create momentum.”
Bell does drop a hint that the department might occasionally have run a little too fast on a treacherous surface: “There are other times when you move at pace and think: ‘No, perhaps we should just create a bit more time’.” But his main message is clear: by moving at speed, the department has made the most of the impetus attached to any new government, and produced results on the ground in record time.
“From a standing start in May 2010, to have opened schools in autumn 2011 is completely unheard-of,” he comments. “It normally takes a good two to five years to go from project inception to opening a new school. To have opened even one school in that time would have been remarkable; to have got 24 open is an astonishing achievement.” The credit, he adds, should go to people at the sharp end – “but we take some satisfaction from what’s happened, because we think we’ve helped”.
You’ve got the power
There’s another facet to the department’s work that clearly gives Bell just as much satisfaction: the empowerment of local schools, and the granting of autonomy both from local education authorities and from departmental rules and regulations. “As someone who’s been around the education system for a bit, that sense of local empowerment feels absolutely right,” he says. “I almost see it as turning full circle, because when I first became a head teacher in the 1980s we were involved in the local management of schools, which was one of the first steps to local decision-making. And here we are now, really giving that rocket boosters. It’s been a 20-year journey”.
It’s not only free schools and academies that are benefiting from the department’s localist ambitions, says Bell: officials are “trying to rip out unnecessary regulation and guidance, and in some cases that’s been really dramatic.” The existence of great swathes of rules and advice, he says, “was sending a signal that local autonomy and discretion was not as important as making sure that you were on top of the guidance.”
Meanwhile, the Community Budgets pilots are exploring “whether you can break down barriers to local partnership and collaboration,” he adds. “Part of our contribution there is to ensure that anything that we’re doing is not getting in the way of that local collaboration.” Bell doesn’t mention the pooling of departmental budgets, though – and when pressed, he sounds distinctly cool about the idea. “There’s a different perspective from this government about what you should seek to require,” he says, suggesting that the drive for pooling budgets was another symptom of the Labour government thinking it knew how best to make things work at a local level. Like Total Place, Labour’s predecessor scheme, the Community Budget pilots are, he argues, totally led by the needs of local service providers: “That culture of cutting through bureaucracy and bureaucratic overlap is as strong now as it was under the previous administration.”
Critics worry that, with free schools and academies liberated to act independently, it will be harder to coordinate services around the needs of each child; but Bell argues that “the best kind of collaboration comes when you’ve got strong, autonomous institutions choosing to collaborate rather than being forced to.” As schools are granted freedom of manoeuvre, he says, “we’ll see a really interesting system emerge with a far greater sense of local energy, because people have got autonomy but choose to use that autonomy to work together.” Gove, he adds, believes that “intelligent, sensible, well-motivated leaders at the local level will make the right judgements about what to do in the best interests of children and their families”.
Cleaning the windows
In return for all this unaccustomed freedom, schools will have to be much more transparent. “One of the lessons we’ve been learning from successful systems overseas is that you have to combine high autonomy with high accountability,” says Bell. “People are quite happy to hear the former, but not so much the latter.” He’s nonplussed as to “why there has been all this anxiety about making public the performance of schools. I sometimes worry that people think that education should be different from almost every other walk of life, where we all now – as citizens, let alone as consumers – demand information.”
So schools will be asked to publish all their performance data, using calculation methods set by the department to ensure comparability. Many of the DfE’s targets systems will be abandoned, but Bell doesn’t pretend that in future schools will have less data collection work to do. Reforms are about “making visible all the information that is gathered as part of our current reporting mechanisms, rather than adding in a whole new set of burdens,” he says. “We’re trying to create a more autonomous system, but alongside that goes much more information about what you’re doing – not driven by targets set at the centre of government, but set by the expectations of parents and others.”
Schools are, Bell argues, well-placed to start presenting all this data. After all, “we’ve had more data available about the performance of schools than any other public service.” Like the move towards greater school autonomy, this too “has been a 20-year journey.”
Moving with the current
In its pursuit of free schools and academies, the DfE has moved fast and dramatically – but the vast majority of negative press has centred around cock-ups and internal relationships within the department (most recently, a furoré over special advisers’ use of emails) not the policies themselves. “Some of the teaching unions did take a public stance against academies, but that’s not something that’s really taken off,” says Bell. “People are not out there making a huge amount of noise about the academies programme.”
There’s two reasons for this lack of resistance, he says. First, Gove spent a lot of time in opposition “rolling the pitch: in other words, preparing the ground for what he wanted to do.” Asked whether lessons have been learned in government from the retreats on forestry sales and NHS reform, Bell says that nowadays “politicians will think about how they prepare the political ground and the media environment for particular kinds of change”, while civil servants will remember their “duty when advising ministers to ensure that we’re asking them all the time to think about how this is presented, even if it then takes a wee bit longer to get things done.”
Second, the DfE’s policies are “genuinely driven by local demand.” Schools aren’t forced to seek free or academy status: the choice is up to them, and “the vast majority of teachers in those schools are seeing the benefits of their school having more control over what it does. There’s a sense in which this is just going with the grain.” Bell’s implication is that Gove’s policies aren’t encountering stiff resistance because they’re about giving local people extra powers and the freedom to escape top-down systems, rather than – as with NHS reform or forestry sales – wholesale systemic restructuring or a shift in ownership that might reduce local people’s control of public assets.
Hang on to your hats
Bell’s department is, then, moving at breakneck speed on many fronts; and this will raise weary eyebrows among education professionals, whose perennial complaint is that Whitehall just can’t stop meddling. He argues, though, that the DfE has worked hard to give local professionals longer deadlines: “We’ve tried to get away from the days of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when some of the most significant consultations – for example, about the school curriculum – were done in August.” And Bell defends the DfE’s right to change systems: “Sometimes I think people ask for the impossible. We’re spending nearly £50bn on education and other services, and you can’t say: ‘Keep politics out of education!’ or ‘Politicians shouldn’t interfere!’”
What’s more, says Bell, the current reforms will liberate schools from the kind of departmental U-turns, ringfenced funding pots and new initiatives which lead to those irritating, top-down changes. The government’s agenda, he says, has “taken us on a journey to a much more self-governing, self-driven system, so that people out there make those decisions,” he says. “That is how we’re going to run the education system now – but there will be a period of change as we move from where we are to where we need to be.”
And when the education department has got where it needs to be, where will Bell be? Would he like to stay in education, or are there opportunities elsewhere in the civil service? “If you pricked me really hard, you’d find education coursing through my veins,” he replies. “On the other hand, to do a job like this you’re deploying a wide range of leadership and management skills, so who knows what the future holds? But if you look at my career to date, education has been quite prominent.”
For the moment, at least, Bell is clearly still enjoying the rollercoaster ride at the Department for Education, where a fast exit from the traps was followed by a dangerous stumble, a recovery, and a long sprint that has left the coalition’s work on schools perceptibly more advanced than many of its other priorities. Those initial problems “dented our confidence for a bit, but a year on the department feels like a very different place,” says Bell. “I look back, and I wish they hadn’t happened – of course I do – but it feels now that in terms of domestic reform, this is not just a secretary of state or department that’s talking about the reforms to come. This is the department that’s actually making reform happen now.”