When I started my career, a wise old colleague gave me some advice. “Always,” he said, “apply for jobs that become available after someone’s been fired. If you get it then, mere competence will look like brilliance in comparison.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this past week, watching people going into raptures as a new set of ministers manages the basics of the job.
Appointing people who have some expertise in the subject area to advisory roles? Giving encouraging speeches to civil servants? Sending out positive, supportive messages to public sector workforces? These things should be minimum expectations but right now they feel like some kind of miraculous transformation.
It won’t last forever
The new ministers arriving at their desks across Whitehall know full well, though, that this perception won’t last.
None of the challenges faced by the country has disappeared overnight. People might blame the Tories for a while but they’ll expect solutions.
In the Department for Education, we’ve seen the same initial positive moves as elsewhere. Experts like Sir Kevan Collins brought into the department; a sensible bit of restructuring to bring special educational needs under the schools team; encouraging words from Bridget Phillipson, the new secretary of state.
In more private conversations, though, she and her team will already be discussing some of the difficult decisions coming their way.
Big decisions
The first big call will be on teacher pay. The School Teachers’ Review Body made its recommendations before the election, and it is believed to have proposed a bigger pay award than schools have been funded for.
This is on top of an existing hole in the DfE budget caused by the last pay increase. Will the Treasury cough up? Will schools be expected to cover it? What will it mean for manifesto plans to spend more on teacher recruitment?
Broader battles over spending are likely to define the next year. Across all local authorities there is now about £2.3 billion of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) debt and that number is growing every year.
The SEND system will require substantial reform - the current system isn’t sustainable - but it’s impossible to imagine it working without a bailout and a new funding settlement.
There’s a massive maintenance and rebuilding backlog as well - now much more than the £11 billion the DfE admitted to last time it published an assessment.
Will money be found for this when defence, housing, transport and the NHS are also making big demands for new capital spending?
The peril of ‘free’ policies
And it’s not as if Phillipson can focus all her attention on schools. The childcare rollout for one- and two-year-olds also needs to be properly funded, and capacity found for the increased numbers.
Labour have said they want primary schools to lead the way here, but will they be willing and able to provide the necessary incentives for this to happen?
Phillipson is also responsible for further education, which was hit hardest of anything in the DfE budget during austerity, and higher education, which is experiencing its own funding crisis. Choosing what to prioritise is going to be painful.
One danger is, with money so tight, that Labour look to seemingly “free” policies, like curriculum and assessment reform, to keep the momentum going.
But of course, while these policies don’t have significant direct costs, the indirect ones, in terms of teacher time and focus, are high.
The same goes for proposed changes to Ofsted (which I know are popular with many leaders, but I would file under “be careful what you wish for”).
Opportunity costs
Beyond the DfE itself, Phillipson is responsible for one of Labour’s five big “missions” - in this case “opportunity”.
It’s still to be seen what this will mean in practice. Will she have authority over other departments? Will we see a single “opportunity plan” covering issues affecting children that sit outside education, such as the welfare system, mental health and housing?
That’s a hopeful prospect given that so many of the challenges schools, and families, face are rooted in rising poverty and destitution.
But it’s not something Whitehall is set up to do and ministers risk getting bogged down in procedural negotiations.
Silver linings
Let’s end on a positive note: for the first time in a while we have a government with focus and energy that is not beholden to the worst sections of the media and an antediluvian set of backbenchers.
A sector that was utterly fed up with the incompetence of the last lot is willing to re-engage. There are plenty of people out there desperate to contribute to changing things for the better.
The challenges may be vast but, finally, it feels like we’ve got a chance of moving in the right direction.
Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education
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