Department for Children, Schools and Families
The Department for Education and Skills - Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners

The Department for Education and Skills - Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Departmental Strategy


Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners


Chapter 9: Managing the Transformation

1. This five-year strategy has set out an ambitious agenda for the reform of public services. In this chapter we look at how that agenda will be delivered:

2. We begin, however, by looking at the changing role of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in leading the agenda for reform.

The role of the Department for Education and Skills

3. We believe that the delivery of this strategy will require a major reform of the DfES. Our vision of the DfES of the future is that it will be:

a) More strategic

4. The core role of the Department will be to support Ministers in providing strategic leadership to the system. That means setting the overall strategic direction and the outcomes that are being sought for children, young people and adults; developing powerful and relevant evidence-based policy; and having the capacity to engage with those in the system so that they understand and share the direction of travel. To achieve this the Department is developing a new strategy unit and a more strategic analytical capacity, enabling us to learn from evidence and from international experience.

5. The corollary of this is that the Department itself will do less direct management and direct service delivery. It will increasingly be the 'system designer', setting in place the framework of legislation, incentives, information and funding to make change happen. It will use the guiding principles of this strategy - personalisation and choice, diversity, freedom and autonomy and stronger partnerships - to underpin its work.

6. The Department will continue to serve Ministers, Parliament and the public. In the past year alone it has had over 200,000 contacts with the public, 70,000 pieces of official correspondence and 4,000 Parliamentary questions. There will be a continuing drive to ensure that this work is done with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, using ICT to improve services to the public and benchmarking services against public and private sector comparators.

b) Smaller

7. These changes in role will enable the DfES to reduce its staffing by 1,460 by 2008 - a reduction of 31 percent on current levels. This will be achieved by less direct management of the system and less direct service delivery; by removing overlap between the responsibilities of the DfES and its agents and partners; and by continuing efficiencies. A smaller DfES will also help to reduce burdens at the front line.

c) More professional and expert

8. But we want to do a lot more than just reduce numbers. Our ambition for a smaller, more strategic Department will also require a different mix of grades and skills and a deeper knowledge of both the needs of individuals and employers and of how the systems for children's services, education and skills work at local level.

9. We will continue to bring into the Department at all levels people with practical experience of delivering services at the front line and with professional skills needed by key services. At senior level, for example, 40 percent of the 30 most senior managers in the DfES have been recruited from outside the Civil Service, bringing a richer mix of skills and knowledge to the Department's leadership. At Board level five of the eight executive members have joined from outside Government, including a former Local Authority Chief Executive, a former College Principal and a former university Vice Chancellor.

10. For our existing staff we will give priority to:

d) Strong in its partnerships

11. Fundamental to the vision is, wherever possible, close working with and through partners and the involvement of front line practitioners in the Department's thinking about policy and system change.

12. This means at national level working particularly with other Government Departments to join up policy thinking and to ensure that the DfES agenda is strongly linked to the Government's policies to improve public health, reduce crime, promote culture and sport and develop strong communities.

13. The Department's family of Non-Departmental Public Bodies (including the Learning and Skills Council, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the Higher Education Funding Council for England) plus Ofsted also remain essential partners at national level in driving forward the overall strategy and in bringing expertise and practical knowledge to the process of delivery.

14. At regional level the Department and the Learning and Skills Council will work increasingly closely with the Regional Development Agencies and through regional skills partnerships to ensure that action to improve educational attainment and skill levels is at the heart of regional economic development.

15. At local level, we will continue to forge strong partnerships with Local Authorities, using Compacts to underpin those partnerships. We have set out a reshaped role for them which mirrors what the best are doing already - giving strong strategic leadership for children's services and education; acting as brokers of powerful local partnerships through Children's Trusts; commissioning and developing new services, such as extended schools and 'educare'; and acting as the champion of parents and pupils, rather than focusing only on direct provision and delivery. The Local Authority role in the massive Building Schools for the Future programme is a good example of the practical application of this strategic role - Authorities are designing proposals to transform the schools' estate on an area wide basis, and building in their key priorities for improving and extending schools as they do it. Authorities will also be central to making the 14-19 phase work for parents and pupils, in close partnership with Local Learning and Skills Councils.

16. With new Directors of Children's Services, Local Authorities will be the hub of activity to support and protect children and young people - including safeguarding children at risk, providing for pupils with special educational needs, and leading in supporting parents and families in the round.

17. This key strategic role for local authorities in children's services and in education will be taken forward in partnership with local government, in the context of the development of the ten year strategy for local government.

18. There are many other partners - the voluntary sector, trade unions, foundations and trusts - with whom the DfES has developed effective relations. But a priority for the Department is the development of strong links at all levels with employers. We need employers' help in ensuring that the education system is preparing young people better for work than it has in the past and in building stronger vocational routes to achievement. We described in Chapter 8 the need for more effective partnerships between universities and business in research and development. And we need employers to be active members of bodies like the Sector Skills Councils to tackle the shortages of skill which hold back our productivity.

19. We want finally to engage actively with those at the front line and their representatives. We believe that there are already leading edge examples of what is possible: for example, in the partnership we have forged with representatives of headteachers, teachers, support staff and employers in the school workforce agreement; and in the establishment of the Implementation Review Unit - a group of headteachers working actively with us to reduce bureaucracy in schools.

Simpler systems and less bureaucracy

20. We have committed ourselves in the earlier chapters of this strategy to simpler systems of funding, planning and accountability and less bureaucracy in every sector, releasing the time of front-line practitioners. The process of reform up to now has often been delivered top-down. It has produced significant improvements in services and performance and kick-started change, which would otherwise not have happened.

21. But this approach has sometimes been at a cost. It has often resulted in too many separate initiatives, supported by separate funding streams and separate management processes. At local level, time has been taken up joining up these national initiatives and coping with the demands of separate requests for information and accountability.

22. So our commitment to the front line is:

23. The strategy contains many examples of how these commitments will be fulfilled in the next few years. The most complete example of what is proposed is the "New Relationship with Schools", described in Chapter 4, which will be trialled in some schools and local authorities this autumn. But the same principles will be applied in the reform of children's services and in the further and higher education sectors. In each case we are looking to involve groups of practitioners in the identification of unnecessary burdens and in acting as gatekeepers against further bureaucracy.

24. The process will be driven from the heart of the system. The Department, Ofsted, its Non-Departmental Public Bodies and our partners in local government will work together to reduce overlaps between them, to simplify information systems and, wherever possible, to reduce demands. A particular priority will be to reduce the overlaps between different inspectorates, ensuring that they work to common frameworks and do not duplicate effort. We believe that across the Department, NDPBs and Ofsted together, it should be possible to reduce their administration costs by at least 15% and release significant time and resource for the front line.

25. This thinking has contributed to the wider review of public service efficiency being conducted by Sir Peter Gershon. We have moved on from a world where frontline managers knew that "efficiency" meant cuts in their budgets. Our commitments to increased funding are real and sustained. But we are committed to working with our partners to help them make the best possible use of the significant resources now available to them through greater efficiencies and better productivity. Over the Spending Review period the Department, in partnership with key stakeholders, will work to secure efficiency and productivity gains throughout education and children's services amounting to £4.3 billion, by reducing administration costs, reforming procurement and unlocking productivity gains from technology and workforce improvement.

The People to Deliver

26. The more we look to the front line to lead reform, the greater the need for a highly skilled and motivated workforce. The workforce in children's services, education and training contains 4.4 million people on some estimates. It is vast and diverse: from childminders to university lecturers, teaching assistants to Local Authority employees, social-care workers to teachers and nursery nurses to further education lecturers. It is a workforce dedicated to the people it serves, with a strong motivation for public service and providing countless examples of remarkable achievement, often against the odds, on a daily basis.

27. But it is also a workforce feeling the pressure of growing public expectation and increasing demands for accountability. The emphasis on personalisation and choice in this strategy - coupled with the rapidly changing pressures of society and the economy - will raise the bar of public expectations further. It will put an even greater premium on well-trained, committed staff, recognised and valued for what they do.

28. This strategy contains proposals for investing in the development of the workforce in each key sector. Underlying this is a basic offer to them all:

29. For the children's workforce this means a new common core of skills, knowledge and competence for frontline practitioners and a new climbing-frame of qualifications to boost recruitment levels and support career progression. We will publish later in the year a workforce strategy setting out our plans for developing a children's workforce with the capacity, flexibility, skills and motivation to help children and young people thrive.

30. In the school workforce teacher numbers have grown by over 28,000 since 1997 and, at over 427,000, are at their highest since 1981. The number of support staff stands at over 240,000, including a doubling in the number of teaching assistants since 1997. As a result of the School Workforce Agreement shared by Government, the great majority of the unions and local authorities, the school team is now as diverse and flexible as the best multi-disciplinary teams found in any leading profession, including medicine. Much, however, remains to be done to free teachers to teach and to reduce bureaucracy. Earlier in this strategy we also set out a new commitment to the professional development of teachers including a greater emphasis on better subject teaching.

31. The further education workforce, which totals some 600,000, is also the subject of a workforce development strategy, to which partners in the sector have contributed. The aim is to generate better data on the numbers of staff, their roles, pay and turnover; attract and retain the best people; train and develop the workforce of the future and provide a new infrastructure for a new sector. The sector's pursuit of improvement has already begun with the reform of the initial training of collegeteachers.

32. For the higher education workforce, the Government has provided £330 million between 2001-02 and 2003-04, and will provide an additional £167 million in 2005-06, to help universities develop human resource strategies. These will address their future staffing needs, staff development, equal opportunities issues and more flexible ways to recognise and reward staff for the contribution they make.

33. Our strategy involves important structural changes to lead these workforce reforms. We are establishing a Sector Skills Council for Children and Social Care to provide a focus for the identification and development of key skills in the children's workforce. The Teacher Training Agency will have a new role as a focus for the development of the school workforce. And the Lifelong Learning Sector Skills Council (now known as Lifelong Learning UK) will create a partnership of employers whose main business is to provide learning to the rest of industry and commerce. LLUK will be operational by the end of 2004.

34. The efforts of the professional and paid workforce are vitally augmented by the enormous unpaid contribution supplied by volunteers. We need to make more and better use of volunteers and others from the community and from industry who can help contribute to children's services and learning. Approximately 1.8 million of the total children's and school workforce of 3.5 million, for example, are unpaid volunteers, and they already play a key role in our thinking. We also rely heavily on the army of volunteers who are governors and whose development we will continue to support. But in education and training more generally, we have been less good at recognising the importance of volunteers. We intend now to put this right by including in our future strategies a clear strand that is about using the dedicated people - including young people - who volunteer in education and training more effectively to support our aims.

35. There is also increasing recognition of the benefits of undergraduates working in schools and further education colleges, either as a volunteer, for degree credit or in some circumstances in a paid capacity. They provide excellent role models to encourage more young people to stay on in education and often inspire young people with their passion for their subject. Teachers welcome the enhanced curriculum support and access to extra resources. Many undergraduates then consider teaching as a career. We will work with the higher and further education sectors, with schools, subject associations and professional institutes to ensure that the right structures are in place to provide more opportunities for undergraduates to work in schools and colleges. For similar reasons, there is a strong case, which we will pursue, for undergraduates working in children's services.

An example of more strategic use of undergraduates working in schools - the Student Associates Scheme

Rohan, a science undergraduate, recently completed a placement at an inner city comprehensive in London. He taught a whole class, under supervision, across the range of science subjects, covering topics such as DNA and genetics. Rohan was able to capture the imagination of pupils with practical experiments which included extracting DNA from kiwi fruits. He added to the development of pupils' skills by encouraging and supervising internet based research activities.

The school were very pleased with the placement which they felt benefited both the pupils and the staff. Such was the impact of his work he has already been offered a further placement this academic year.

Rohan feels that he has greatly benefited from his placement, which he found overwhelmingly positive. Despite the challenging surroundings he was able to make a real impression, and he has gained experience which would otherwise have been unavailable to him. He also felt well supported by the head of department and other staff team members at the school.

Leadership

36. An effective workforce needs good leadership. As we put more emphasis on those in the system leading reform, we will increasingly need leaders (and leadership teams) who can combine the ability to manage people and money with the creativity, imagination and inspiration to lead transformation.

37. We have invested heavily in leadership development in the last few years and supported the setting up of centres of leadership excellence for schools, colleges and universities. We have begun to break the common assumption of some years back (widely shared in the public sector) that, if someone was a good teacher, academic or administrator, they were automatically qualified to lead. It is now accepted that good leaders and managers require specific skills and qualities, which need to be grown and developed.

38. Over the next five years we will continue to give priority to developing effective leadership at every point in the system - from the small primary school to the DfES. We shall support and encourage the development of the existing cadre of senior managers and the earlier identification and development of future leaders. We will encourage thinking about how organisations develop effective leadership teams. We shall ensure that successful leaders continue to be rewarded for their success and weak leadership is identified and tackled swiftly.

39. For schools, we will continue to develop the National College for School Leadership as a world class centre of leadership, focussing its work on the areas where it will have the greater strategic impact in transforming the education system. Our aim is that by 2009 all aspiring headteachers will be required to have the National Professional Qualification in Leadership as a mark of their effective leadership.

40. In further education, we will continue to support the work of the new Centre for Excellence in Leadership, which has already provided 1,000 people with a range of leadership and management development. In higher education, Universities UK and HEFCE have established a Leadership Foundation, which will be the engine for raising the status of professional, effective leadership in universities.

41. Leadership development will also be a central element in our programme to improve the quality of children's services and to implement the Green Paper, Every Child Matters. There will be a strong emphasis on cross-sector collaboration in this work: for example, a cross-sector leadership programme is being developed for Directors of Children's Services, the police and the voluntary sector. And there will be joint working with bodies like the National College for School Leadership and NHSU.

Technology to Support Reform

42. As well as having the right people to deliver our strategy, we intend to make ambitious and imaginative use of technology a central element in improving personalisation and choice across the system. Recent years have seen increasing access to online information and services. Over half our homes are now online, many more have digital television, and everyone can get online through work, school or college, a library or a UK Online Centre. But with increasing access come higher expectations. Customers expect 24 hours a day online services. They expect public services to equal the quality of the best commercial services. And they expect those services to add value, to be tailored and to join up with other on and off-line interactions.

43. The Government has invested heavily in ICT in education - and met challenging targets. All colleges and universities now have broadband. Over 99 percent of schools are connected to the internet (60 percent at broadband speeds, with a target of 100 percent by 2006). There is a computer for every eight pupils in primary, and almost every five in secondary.

44. These are major developments. Together they give us the opportunity to personalise the education experience in a number of ways:

Future Priorities

45. Future investment in technology to support our wider strategic objectives will focus on three priorities:

46. These three priorities are likely to overlap - the same system that provides an online service direct to citizens can underpin support for professionals and contribute to reducing administration costs. Wherever possible, we will make use of savings in administration to increase investment in the other benefits.

47. The implementation for our e-strategy will stretch over a number of years, as capability builds. But in the immediate future we can expect to see more examples of:

48. If we are to achieve our ambitions, these examples must become common practice. Key to success will be the deepening of capacity across each sector, and the extension of broadband not just to schools, colleges and universities but to the home and the workplace too.

Putting the Consumer First

49. This is a huge programme of change on a scale which matches anything that happens in the private sector. It will require persistence, determination and a belief that change is possible. It must be driven above all by a single objective - that of improving the outcomes for children, young people and adults.

50. The cause for optimism that it can be done rests on three grounds. First, the workforce has over a decade and more - and particularly since 1997 - shown an ability to adapt and improve at a rate they themselves did not believe possible. Secondly, the reform programme will continue to be supported by investment in the services and the people who provide them.

51. Thirdly, this is a workforce that already draws its motivation from the achievements of those it serves: the sudden breakthrough in a child's understanding; a mother helping her baby to develop; a talented student whose insights shine new light on a research project; an adult able to read a book for the first time. It is not such a big step for this workforce to put the consumer first, to develop a passion for improving public services and to lead reform.

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