The centralised drive of policy

Comments in earlier chapters have been concerned with the effects of centrally driven policy on the withering of local initiative and governance infrastructures, especially Education. The accompanying emptiness of policy making and lack of national understanding that long ago lost the immediacy required to lead effectively have had their own effects. I begin to examine these effects in this and subsequent chapters. I shift to examine national policy making, rather than its content: how policy is made and how it is intended to be implemented. This has consequences for those expected to connect with students in Education, but the focus now goes wider. The Davis quote mentioned earlier is relevant to the considerations of both this chapter and Chapter 7.

Tales of limited power, interest, skills and policy paralysis at the top

In an interview in 2018, I asked an ex-senior official from Her Majesty's Treasury, who had been deeply involved in the development and implementation of the Education reforms from 2010 onwards, to give his assessment of ‘where they were now with it all’ as he put it. At that time, the relationship between Her Majesty's Treasury and central government service departments, like the DfE, was based on accountability: how had the service department implemented and spent the detailed funding agreed centrally by the Treasury? This was what ‘driving change’ actually meant at his level – Treasury officials would have progress meetings with their counterparts. But this way of doing business declined gradually and, arguably, there has been no further strategic policy making in Education since Michael Gove left the DfE in 2014: just the playing out of its own organisation logic and tweaks in the bureaucracy until the current unstable assemblage crept up unnoticed.

This official's assessment was similar to some of the descriptions given in earlier chapters – the schooling system was a ‘mixed market’, and a ‘half way house’ measured against the stated ambition (DfE, 2016) of 100 per cent academisation of schools by 2022.