The government’s response to the Covid crisis in schools was undermined by a “huge disconnect between conversations in Whitehall and the reality on the ground”, a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education has said.
Jonathan Slater, who was permanent secretary from May 2016 to August 2020, said the inability of government - including his own former department - to “put ourselves in the public’s shoes” is likely to loom large in the forthcoming public inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
He added that he has no doubt that the inquiry “will show how the inadequacy of the Whitehall machine contributed to the huge death toll”.
Mr Slater, who was sacked from his role at the DfE in 2020 amid the fallout from the exam grades crisis, has written a new report entitled Fixing Whitehall’s Broken Policy Machine.
In it, he claims that Whitehall shows “surprisingly little interest” in what those who use or deliver public services think, and says that policy far too often amounts to little more than preparing statements of intent for ministers, rather than actually turning these statements into reality.
Call for more transparency at the DfE
He highlights the DfE’s attempt to ensure that pupils attended lessons during the first months of the pandemic in 2020 as an example of this.
In his report, he says: “It is all very well for ministers and senior civil servants to announce, say, that pupils with special educational needs should continue going to school, or that primary schools should reopen to all pupils while the rest of us are socially distancing, but will it really happen?”
In June of 2020, Gavin Williamson, who was education secretary at the time, had to announce that the government was not going to be able to achieve its plan of getting all primary school pupils back to school before the end of term.
In his paper published today by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, where Mr Slater is a visiting professor, he argues that while public engagement is a core part of working in local government, it is not seen as important by Whitehall and that more transparency and accountability is needed.
He says that leaders in the civil service must challenge the culture of “emotional detachment”, while employees must be rewarded for the real changes they make on the ground.
Mr Slater’s report also talks about the importance of civil servants being able to speak truth to power.
He says that when he arrived at the DfE he was struck by “a lack of confidence” among senior civil servants.
“Somebody responded by pointing out that I would have understood why if I’d been there in previous years,” Mr Slater adds. “Since I hadn’t been, I don’t know the truth of it, but the fact is that many senior people certainly lacked confidence back in 2016, and this inevitably had an impact across the department.”
Mr Slater’s report says there are almost no incentives to speak truth to power in the civil service.
It adds: “The only systemic one - the requirement placed on permanent secretaries to seek a public ‘direction’ from ministers if there is ‘significant doubt’ as to the feasibility of what they want to do - is rarely applied in practice.”
Mr Slater sought a ministerial direction from Damian Hinds, when the latter was education secretary, over the government’s timetable for introducing T levels.
His report makes a series of recommendations for improving policy-making in Whitehall.
This includes managing people’s careers so that policymakers “genuinely learn the reality of frontline delivery early on their careers, and cannot get promoted without it”.
He also calls for civil servants to be made accountable to parliamentary select committees for the options appraisals they prepare for their ministers.
Mr Slater adds: “It would no doubt have been a pretty challenging occasion were I to have been called to a meeting of the Education Select Committee to explain the options appraisal we were doing into, say, how one might operate an assessment regime rather than traditional exams while schools were closed because of Covid-19.
“Or to a meeting of the House of Lords Public Services Committee to answer questions on the analysis we were doing into how to mitigate the impact of closed schools on the most vulnerable children. But I am sure that the discipline of having to do so would have led to better appraisal of the potential options, just as they used to when I worked for Islington [Council].”
A government spokesperson said: “We regularly engage with the public, businesses and civil society so that policies and public services work for citizens.
“Through our reform plans we are moving 22,000 roles out of London to ensure we better reflect the communities we serve.”
