Waiting at the school gates

The history of civil service training has been one of regular organisational reform, always marred by an uncomfortable feeling that the latest iteration of Whitehall’s learning and development arrangements still didn’t quite fit the bill. “The pattern since the Civil Service College was set up in the ‘60s is one of regular change,” says Institute for Government director Peter Thomas: the Major government turned the college into an executive agency, then Tony Blair made it part of the Centre for Management and Policy Studies, before it re-emerged as the National School of Government (NSG). At the end of this month the NSG will itself be formally abolished, and civil service training will adopt yet another shape: under the Next Generation HR banner, a team named Civil Service Learning (CSL) has taken control of the training agenda and awarded a delivery contract to the vast services company Capita.

Asked what the latest reform means for senior civil servants, CSL director Jerry Arnott says it’ll guarantee “access to a greater amount of learning and development (L&D), both in terms of courses – we’ll be running more senior leadership, senior civil service-targeted interventions than have been offered before – but also in terms of a multitude of online options, including e-learning and other resources.” And how exactly is that going to happen? Well, in short...

“Anything online is free at the point of access,” Arnott explains. “Departments pay a contribution on a per capita basis: that funds the shared service providing CSL – including the online learning – plus civil service resourcing and civil service employee policy.” CSL will also produce a small proportion of civil service training, using an in-house team to organise those courses that must be directly managed and presented by civil servants. Originally entitled the Civil Service Way, this branch of training has now been renamed Working in the Civil Service (WCS); it covers programmes such as senior civil service induction course Basecamp and graduate scheme the Fast Stream.

In future, though, the vast majority of civil service training will be sourced and supplied by Capita, which will be responsible for providing a ‘Core Curriculum’ set out by CSL. Delivered by both Capita staff and a set of subcontractors, this curriculum covers all the generic training required across the civil service on topics such as health and safety, leadership and data protection. Departments and agencies seeking training in any topics covered by the curriculum must henceforth buy it through Capita; and while exceptions will be made for both the ‘business-specific’ training required in particular parts of government, and for specialist training serving the civil service professions, these groups will normally have to get CSL’s clearance before looking elsewhere for suitable training.

The learning behind the learning
Last April, when Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude was asked by the Public Administration Select Committee to explain the changes, he argued that the previous system – under which each department and agency has organised its own training, with the NSG touting for business across government – has fostered duplication of effort, poorly-informed spending decisions, a shortage of pan-Whitehall management information, and a failure to exploit the government’s collective buying power.

The new system, he said, will address all of those problems; and Dr John McGurk, an adviser on learning and talent development at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, suggests that the structure is broadly sensible. “You have to be aware of the transaction costs of having every manager doing their own procurement,” he says. “You need a gateway to manage access, and as long as there’s an opportunity for smaller providers to get a share of that cake, I think there’s nothing wrong with having more centralised procurement.”

Some think Maude has further motives, with one well-informed observer telling CSW that the government is keen to outsource civil service work as a means of stimulating economic growth. But there is little argument as to the over-arching objective: saving money. “The Core Curriculum will ensure we can deliver an efficient and high-quality management and leadership programme, whilst taking out duplication across the civil service,” says Giles Ruddle, Capita’s service director. “Departments will no longer be able to go outside directly and procure training requirements outside CSL. Exceptions have already been identified – but ultimately, CSL has been created to control and manage civil service learning requirements to deliver the savings that have been expected.” The expectation is that CSL will cut training costs by £90m against the baseline, 2008-9 figure of £280m; certainly, Capita thinks that its contract – admittedly excluding WCS, business-specific and professions training – is worth a relatively small £50m a year.

The cost of driving down cost
This focus on costs worries Robin Ryde, a leadership development consultant and former NSG chief executive. “Three or four years ago, L&D was seen as essential; now, with the recession and job cuts and pressures on public services, it’s seen as a little bit indulgent,” he says. “The overwhelming message from CSL and Capita is about cost reduction, but more than ever now we need top class learning to deal with a new public service environment. What’s going on seems transactional and workmanlike; about getting by with low-cost development in the most unambitious way possible.” In an era of public service reform, international instability and huge economic challenges, he argues, a failure to invest in civil servants’ skills heightens the risks that “we don’t come out of the recession strongly but take another five or 10 years to emerge; that we don’t respond as well as we might to the new forms of public services. Those risks are significant.”

Arnott, however, argues that the Core Curriculum has been carefully designed to meet the civil service’s strategic L&D needs. While departments and agencies did have some input into the courses run by the NSG, he says, CSL has made much greater efforts to ensure that its work meets the civil service’s needs: the curriculum has been defined and overseen by a leadership group comprising representatives from across government. Thomas agrees that CSL has worked hard to get departments and agencies on board: “There’s been more collaboration across the civil service about what’s provided,” he says – and McGurk adds that “senior civil servants have been very involved in developing the new curriculum.” CSL has, it seems, consulted carefully on the contents of its new curriculum; though that is, of course, no guarantee that its plans really will equip civil servants with the skills and capabilities they require.

Sourcing suppliers
At the heart of the new curriculum lie the WCS courses – and Arnott is clear that the civil service will retain ownership of them. “In this space we’ll be encouraging greater opportunities for senior civil servants to teach others; leaders teaching leaders,” he says. “CSL with Capita will be helping to organise and arrange these events, but we’ll be calling upon civil servants to help deliver and facilitate them.”

However, the vast majority of generic training will in future be sourced through Capita, which will – its contract specifies – deliver no more than 49 per cent of the training by value, going out to market to source the rest. Ruddle explains that Capita has run a training organisation, Capita Learning and Development, for 10 years – but he accepts that the company is still developing the capability to deliver its share of the training, saying: “Given that we’re still evolving bespoke requirements and the core curriculum, we need to identify additional resources.” Speaking for CSL, Arnott explains that the 49/51 split will ensure that a range of providers are drawn in. “We’re seeking to work with the best people to provide all aspects of the common curriculum, so we’ll be expecting to work with business schools, L&D training providers, coaches, specialist suppliers,” he says. “We’re looking to access through Capita the people who are best equipped to meet our needs.”

Although Capita will manage the relationships with all of these subcontractors, Arnott adds that CSL retains the ability to reject Capita’s proposals. “We’ll be wanting to see evidence that they’ve gone through an open tender process to attract suppliers for that 51 per cent, and the ultimate decision over who’s chosen is up to us,” he says. “If Capita come to us and say: ‘This is who we conclude is best suited to serve your needs,’ we can reject that and say: ‘No, we’d like you to go out to the market again.’”

A shift in style
Alongside this change in the supply arrangements for training, CSL is ushering in an equally dramatic shift in the delivery methods. For a start, more classroom-based training courses will be available out in the English regions; and civil servants are in future much more likely to find themselves sharing a desk with trainees from other departments or the private and voluntary sectors. “A lot of our classroom provision will be open to civil servants from a range of departments,” says Arnott, “but we’ll also be plugging into open programmes, so departments could send people on courses run by Capita within the open market. At the senior leadership level we’re very keen to open up opportunities for our high-potential leaders to learn from others in the private sector, and that exchange and sharing will be built into the training.”

The bigger shift, though, will be away from classroom-based training and towards learning online and on the job: as Maude told PASC, “Classroom training will be largely reserved for areas where training is intended to change behaviours or develop skills.” CSL has commissioned a set of e-learning courses, and Ruddle explains that Capita has been asked to integrate these with other forms of training: “As part of our contract, the face-to-face learning will link in with those e-learning modules, and we’ll look to blend our delivery of learning so it’ll be a mixture of classroom learning and online materials,” he says.
This mixing of different forms of learning is crucial, says McGurk: too often, he believes, the adoption of e-learning is “focused around efficiency of delivery in economic terms rather than effectiveness of learning”. E-learning is a useful tool, he says, but best used “for compliance issues around health and safety, food hygiene, customer services, financial management. It shouldn’t be used just because it’s the low-cost option: people have to be accessing e-learning that helps them become more effective, rather than just completing an outcome that enables someone to tick a box.”

Can managers manage?
Meanwhile, managers will be expected to play a much bigger role in their employees’ L&D, as Arnott explains. “Part of the fundamental shift that we’re promoting is far greater emphasis on maximising the opportunities for learning in the workplace,” he says. “The vast majority of us build our skills and learn through experience in the workplace, and the role of line managers in this is crucial. We’ll be rolling out blended management development programmes for all levels of management over the next few months, and a key theme will be the manager as a developer of others. This really is the most important challenge in terms of making CSL a real value-adding entity: we need our line managers to understand it, to feel comfortable and confident that they can support the personnel development agenda.”

The use of blended learning here is probably sound – Robin Ryde comments that “the principle I’ve seen is that 70 per cent of learning should be on the job, 20 per cent through mentoring or coaching, and 10 percent classroom-based training” – but there are obvious hurdles. Ryde argues that a focus on driving down costs can push providers towards e-learning and on-the-job training, even when classroom teaching is required: “When the civil service is facing new challenges, as it is now, it needs to adopt a new mindset,” he says. “If you focus too much on on-the-job training, the risk is that you perpetuate the existing habits and approaches. If you want a different approach, that won’t come from people who’ve been doing the same job for the last 25 years; it’ll come from external people who can think about new ways of doing things.”

One specialist provider of training to the civil service raises another objection, commenting that “on-the-job training requires quite a lot of management time, and is very dependent on the quality of the manager and their training skills – and those are variable.” John McGurk agrees: “It takes a certain skill set to help people learn, and it doesn’t come naturally to every manager,” he says. “There has to be a big investment in the capability of managers to manage learning.”

Unions have an important role to play here, says McGurk – but Sue Ferns, head of research at the Prospect union, is wary. “In the current very pressurised environment,” she asks, “with job losses and managers focusing on hitting targets, how much time realistically will there be for managers to help their staff with learning? We very much support the emphasis on learning in the workplace, but negotiations have to take place to create opportunities for people to learn.”

Asked how Capita will be helping managers fulfil their expanding role, Ruddle says that “we’ll provide, as part of our core service, online content that will help managers work with their staff; there’s a coaching element, so we’ll be looking to support line managers with that.” However, he adds that the “change of direction was previously agreed, prior to us being involved just over four weeks ago. We understand it’s part of our journey and we’ll support managers with it, but ultimately the decision was outside our control.”

Asked whether CSL’s system will be able to bring in the kind of top-quality management and leadership training required to draw in the most aspirational and high-flying civil servants, Arnott says he expects “to attract the business school sector as the pool from which we’d be sourcing our supply of top-level leadership development”. Here, Ruddle comments that Capita has “already established a number of relationships with business schools with very good reputations” – though he says he can’t name them until their precise role has been agreed. However, former NSG chief Ryde is sceptical: the NSG, he says, had “excellent relationships with many of the business schools. It takes a long time to build those relationships and to cooperate in a way which is in the best interests of senior civil servants. Capita don’t have anything like the relationships that NSG had; they’ll have a lot of work to do”.

Guardians of the gateway
Under CSL’s system, business-specific and professions training may be bought outside the framework; but Ruddle explains that Capita is working with the heads of profession and hopes to deliver many of their training needs, too. “The professions have been engaged. We’ll source the appropriate individuals or organisations or SMEs to deliver [their training], whether as part of our direct delivery or on the open market,” he says. “If there’s a requirement we can’t deliver or source then an exception can be made. We understood that all the professions will be part of the overall engagement, though the level of delivery we’ll offer is currently unclear because we don’t know their requirements.”

The truth here is that most of the professions are also unclear about their training requirements, largely because their L&D – unlike, say, online learning – has no centralised budget. “We’re concerned that members should be able to update their professional skills,” says Ferns, whose union represents many civil service specialists. “People will have to make a case for their professional development – and given how tight budgets are, we worry that it will fall off the edge.”

Even where departments or professions do want to buy specialist training, they’ll have to get CSL’s approval before buying outside the Capita framework. “All external training procurement must come through the ‘gateway’ – and I say all, that’s not just generic training,” explains Arnott; though he adds that “there’s a threshold for business-specific training: if it’s over £10,000 then it must come through the gateway; if it’s less, the business can procure through its own routes.” A Cabinet Office spokesman adds that CSL is producing definitions of business-specific and professions-specific training, and departments won’t be required to use the Capita contract to fulfil training needs that fit these definitions – but “they would need to demonstrate that their alternative provision would offer better value for money, as the contract prices which Capita have quoted for generic training can also be applied across this wider business.”

There is, of course, a risk that departments will attempt to skirt this gateway – perhaps by hiding training in other budgets, or breaking contracts down so that each is smaller than the £10,000 threshold. The anonymous specialist training provider believes that “departments will start out fairly compliant, but as time goes by they’ll start to want to flex their muscles and make their own decisions.”  And Capita’s Ruddle acknowledges the danger: “There’s no guaranteed volumes or expenditure under the framework contract,” he says. “The success of CSL will depend on the overall change in process compared to what happened before. We don’t have access to [departmental spending data], so it will need to be monitored and managed internally across the civil service.”

The IfG’s Peter Thomas is optimistic, pointing out that “because controls on spending are stronger now and there’s increasing transparency, it’ll be more evident if departments have gone around the back; and current civil servants are more corporate [in mindset] than their predecessors a few years ago.” Ultimately, though, Arnott acknowledges that the success of CSL will rest on departments’ willingness to accept the new system: “For the civil service to get value out of CSL, the business needs to comply with the requirement that all L&D procurement goes through the gateway,” he says. “However, the monitoring of that is dependent on the procurement and finance functions in those businesses supporting that line and ensuring that line managers follow that route. I and my team can’t do that, and nor would we want to; we’re not in the role of policing but of enabling, so the monitoring and policing of this is entirely dependent on the finance and procurement communities supporting what is a Cabinet Office directive.”
From mandation to persuasion

Given the ways that recalcitrant civil servants might find to sneak around the gateway, Arnott knows how important it is that CSL’s training provision leaves both HR departments and trainees satisfied. His staff will be gathering and collating trainees’ opinions on individual courses, he explains, and he’ll get further feedback through the departmental L&D leads who act as pointmen with CSL. “If you’ve been through a course and you’re not happy, go to that lead and tell him. He’ll pick up the phone to my team and we’ll tackle that issue,” he says. “If we’re not meeting the requirements of the business because of a quality issue or the delivery partner isn’t doing their job, then we’ll immediately stop or change the provision.”
Capita, of course, has an interest in driving down the prices charged by its subcontractors – but while Ruddle points out that “the drive behind CSL is
reducing costs,” he adds that “measurement of quality and evaluation is part of the process. Regardless of price, we have to ensure we deliver good-quality training interventions.”

Winners and losers
All this talk of quality standards is scant comfort to the 1600 or so training managers who’ve lost their jobs in the CSL reforms, or to the couple of hundred staff of the National School of Government – scheduled to close at the end of this month. “Quite a few of our members transferred to [CSL],” says Ro Marsh, who represents the FDA union at the school. “But that still leaves a substantial core that’s being lost to the civil service, along with all their expertise.” And former NSG chief Robin Ryde argues that expertise isn’t the only thing that will be lost with the school’s demise. “The NSG was a beacon of quality across the world; CSL is invisible,” he says. “I work abroad, and CSL is a nonentity; it doesn’t make us look good as a public service.”

Despite the Cabinet Office’s attempts to get CSL’s new main contractor to take on the NSG’s Sunningdale HQ, none of the bidders were keen to retain the luxury Berkshire property – leaving the government with an £18m liability for the PFI contract under which it was refurbished. The NSG redundancy costs tot up to a further £7.25m; and while the Cabinet Office claims it will make administrative savings of more than £15m from closing the school, the big financial prize will only be won if the CSL contract succeeds in realising those planned £90m savings.

Full steam ahead
CSL has – unusually among government efficiency reforms – pretty much stuck to its original timetable in terms of signing a contract and abolishing the NSG, but civil servants will have to wait a little while before the full range of Common Curriculum courses become available. The first training schedule was published earlier this month, and the booking system is open – though as Ruddle acknowledges, “it’s a work in progress”. The tender specified that 60 per cent of the common curriculum should be available by 1 April, but “over the last four weeks things have changed on a daily basis,” he says. “That’s our target, but I couldn’t give you a percentage right now.”

As Capita – the ink barely dry on its 22 February contract – brings together a set of training providers to meet CSL’s needs, civil servants across government are sizing up the new training arrangements with a degree of trepidation. During this period of deep budget cuts, training has more or less come to a halt in many departments and agencies; and when L&D spending starts to rise again, officials will find that the content and nature of training has changed significantly.

The systems by which civil service training is bought and organised will also look quite different, with provision handled by a private company rather than the previous network of individual buyers. Yet behind the procurement system, says Jerry Arnott, stand a group of civil servants determined to serve their colleagues, to maintain civil service ownership of the learning and development agenda, and to ensure that the needs of the civil service – rather than those of the private suppliers – determine the training available across Whitehall. “We’re not an arm’s length organisation; we’re part of this business,” he says. “We’re the customer, we own the agenda, and we own who we want to work with.”