Every government has to ask itself whether it has the skills to do what the public wants – to manage large projects, run complex welfare systems, tackle entrenched disadvantage or handle emergencies like pandemics.
There’s often a gap between needs and capabilities, and this manifests in lots of ways: policy failures, botched projects, but also a slower drip of underperformance.
I’ve taught in many of the civil service colleges and universities around the world, from China and India to the US, Europe and Australia, and have become convinced that most are failing to keep their curriculum up-to-date, with the UK now a particularly serious example of how things can go wrong.
At a global level, the traditional civil service curriculum focused on administration, law and economics. But governments are increasingly having to master very different skills. They need to understand science in a period when so many issues, from climate change to AI and mental health, have a scientific dimension. They need to understand psychology at a time when the public is ever more distrustful. And they need to understand data and systems, rather than seeing each policy as something separate.
In many countries too, they need to cultivate a different mindset: more empathic to the public, which requires getting out of the office and listening to citizens to get a better feel of how the world looks to them, and also more open to innovation and experiment, constantly looking for potentially better answers.
These points are particularly relevant to the UK, where the systems for training civil servants and politicians have fallen apart since the end of the National School of Government in the early 2010s.
The new government aspires to be more active in solving problems, from productivity in the economy to infrastructure, inequality to ill-health. But, although the public services are full of talented and committed people, it’s hard not to notice the gaps in capability at every level.
The British civil service has been here before. The Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in the mid-19th century aimed to put in place a much more professional, meritocratic and independent civil service (partly inspired by China). A century later, in the 1960s, the government commissioned a major review into the civil service as part of its broader programme to modernise Britain which criticised the civil service for lacking professional skills, including management skills; for being too amateur and generalist; for too narrow a social base; and for not giving specialists enough power.
The Civil Service College was set up in 1970 in response, and provided training for civil servants, and many leaders in business and the voluntary sector (it was renamed the National School of Government in its later years).
But it was closed in 2012 by the coalition government. They opted for a market-based approach, which simply encourages departments and units to buy courses on the open market. Much of the provision was contracted to management consultancies, notably KPMG. Skills in running government were seen as no different from skills in accountancy or foreign languages. An open competitive market was believed to be the best way to guarantee quality and keep costs down.
Unfortunately, by giving up on any strategy for skills, and any attention to ethos and mindsets, the system slowly drifted into mediocrity, not helped by years of political instability.
The hope now is that the new government will grasp this problem and recreate a national college or academy that can focus on the most important priorities of government, including implementation of complex missions and collaboration across tiers on pressing tasks such as net zero. The new approach needs to be networked – linking the four national governments, i.e London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, as well as the combined metropolitan authorities and local government, rather than focusing solely on Whitehall. ANZSOG is one good model of how this can be done.
It needs to combine offline and online, and rapid just-in-time training with formal courses and peer learning. And there needs to be a bias to action and learning by doing. All governments risk believing that reports and representations matter more than reality. But effective organisations have a strong bias to action, trying things out and learning fast, and valuing implementation as much as neat policy prose.
It’s not just civil servants who need training. Politicians do too, and some countries take this seriously, while others just assume that they will be improvising amateurs. This makes ever less sense as they have to handle complex issues like climate change. There will also need to be rapid adjustments of the curriculum. For example, generative AI is quickly transforming the options for gathering evidence and knowledge around policy, but few civil servants are adept at using them. Most governments evangelise about the value of education for their young people – but surprisingly few apply the same energy to themselves.
Sir Geoff Mulgan is a professor at UCL, and a former head of Strategy in the UK government. He is author of The Art of Public Strategy (OUP) and his recent survey of global government skills can be found here