Sam Freedman considers his years in policy-making and implementation at the Department for Education, and what he would do differently in retrospect.
These days I spend most of my time being critical of politicians and their advisers. It’s easy to find things to criticise, especially when the Tory leadership candidates are dredging up an apparently endless series of terrible ideas.
But at the back of my mind there’s always a voice reminding me how hard government jobs are. I know because I used to do one. From 2010-2013 I was a policy adviser to Michael Gove when he was Secretary of State for Education. This was a civil service role. I wasn’t a political SPAD (special adviser) but I had worked with Michael’s team before the election and he requested my appointment. I shared an office with the SPADs.
I much preferred being a civil servant as I wasn’t then, and am not now, a member of any political party. Indeed I had, until 2007, been a member of the Labour party. Gove gets a lot of criticism but I’ve always thought the fact he was prepared to appoint someone to this role who he knew wasn’t a Conservative reflects well on him. He was a good boss too: open to advice, and often listening to it, letting me range widely, work on what I wanted for the most part, and never raising his voice to me. He’s much more right-wing than me on many issues, but I enjoyed working with him. I wrote separately about my experiences working with Dom Cummings, who was a SPAD for most of the time I was there, but generally got on fine with him too.
Nevertheless I ended up leaving in February 2013. It was partly because I was fed up of politics. I deeply disliked the constant need to make up nonsense for the No 10 media grid; the hyperbolic language used to denigrate people who disagreed (“the blob” etc…); and increasingly found it hard to work with Dominic. I felt we could have achieved all our policy objectives – indeed done them a lot better – had we not constantly turned everything into a shouty fight.
I also left because I didn’t think I was doing the job very well. The longer I did it the more I doubted the policies I was working on and the more I realised the confidence I’d had at the start of our time in Government wasn’t merited. In the decade that has passed since I’ve realised, with increasing horror, just how many traps I fell into. This was largely due to my lack of experience – I was 28 in 2010 and had had a few researcher jobs. What the hell did I know about anything? But it was also because, at the time, I hadn’t thought much about my own decision-making or psychology.
So this is a post of what, in retrospect, I did wrong. I’m writing it as a reminder to myself not to get too smug about other peoples’ policy screw-ups – given how many I made – but also in the hope that people who are now doing similar jobs, or will do so in the future, can learn from my mistakes. Especially as we’re about to get a new Prime Minister who will bring in a whole new team of advisers. The post is split into cognitive errors – misplaced biases or assumptions that led me astray – and practical errors, the ways I went about the job that I’d do differently if I ever did it again.
Cognitive errors:
1. Chesterton’s fence
Governments always look incompetent from the outside. The machinery is clunky and dysfunctional for all the reasons Cummings and others have pointed out. If you’re working for the opposition it’s easy to let this drift into confirmation bias. All these stories about how the Government are messing up must mean that everything they’re doing is wrong and all of our ideas would be better. As a team, in 2010, we had a strong belief that the Department for Education (DfE or DCSF as it was then) had gone way off course and Ed Balls had wrought a bureaucratic mess upon the sensible Blairite reform agenda.
It was easy to feed this confirmation bias – plenty of schools were frustrated with, for instance, the “Building Schools for the Future” programme, under which an extremely complex process had been developed to replace the secondary school estate. And many were also irritated by the “Every Child Matters” agenda under which local authorities were given a load of new powers to drive the integration of children’s services. For lots of headteachers this felt like a departure from their educational purpose and that they were wasting a lot of time in lengthy meetings.
This was all grist to our mill and gave us the confidence to take a wrecking ball to these and other programmes the moment we got through the door. But we forgot to ask G. K. Chesterton’s famous question:
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
We cleared many things away without asking what the use of them was. With Building Schools for the Future, the mistake was immediately apparent. Cancelling the project led to a firestorm of criticism and a poor attempt to replace it. I realised quickly that what we should have done was slow the construction schedule down, so we could make the savings the Treasury required, and simplified things, without scrapping the whole programme.
It took me longer to realise we’d made a similar mistake with Every Child Matters. Again it wasn’t working right, but integration of services does matter. Throwing it all away without thinking about what needed saving has meant that years later a new approach is being developed piecemeal (family hubs, the social care review, etc…) with even less local authority capacity left to enact it.
Key lesson: don’t just focus on what’s going wrong, even if that fits your biases about the incompetence of the people you’re hoping to replace. Ask what the point of the policy was and talk to the people who think it’s a good idea.
2. Optimism bias and cognitive dissonance
I was fascinated to find, when I got hold of the DfE budgets, that there’s a line for “optimism bias” around construction projects. Essentially, the expected completion date for almost every new school building turns out to be wrong, so they adjust for that in budgets (or at least they did when I was there).
It turned out the same applied to a lot of our policies. In politics the cost of admitting you’re wrong or off course is unusually, and unhelpfully, high. Politicians can get away with an occasional u-turn, but build up a collection of them and your chances of advancement are limited. As an adviser you want to make things work for your Ministers, so it’s tempting to dismiss signs that things might not be going to plan, which might be because the idea wasn’t all that good in the first place, or because circumstances have changed.
A good example of this was the expansion of the academies programme. We wanted to move quickly because, at that time, no one thought the coalition would last a full five years. That meant encouraging as many schools as possible to leave their local authority and “academise” as soon as possible, with weaker schools joining trusts run by stronger ones. Fairly early on there were signs that we’d overestimated the ability of highly rated schools to absorb additional schools into their academy trusts, and a lot of them were growing too fast and in unsustainable ways. But we wanted the success story that big numbers seemed to show. Ministers didn’t want to hear about slowing things down - quite the opposite. So I tried to ignore my doubts and pretend to myself it was a few badly run trusts and not a systemic issue. Eventually, it became so obvious that more process and regulation was put in place, but I should have acknowledged the problem earlier.
Key lesson: do not ignore the small voice in the back of your mind however inconvenient – embrace the doubts and use them as a basis to explore the concern and see if the problem is a real one.
3. Capital hoarding and conflict avoidance
When I left I was pretty disillusioned. I no longer believed in some of the policies being pursued and I really disliked the approach being taken in the media. But I don’t think I ever told Michael Gove that or any of the other Ministers or advisers.
I was way too selective in the battles I picked. This is where I should have learnt from Dom Cummings, who never had any compunction about raising his concerns loudly and regularly. Like most people I’m naturally conflict averse and much prefer to work collaboratively, but that meant I passively let arguments go past when I knew I should be having them. I told myself it was to preserve my capital with colleagues for more important battles; that it wasn’t my job to raise concerns about the way we disparaged the sector in the media; and that if I was too difficult I’d get shut out of the decision-making process. But if I’d been honest with myself it was because I didn’t want to have the fight. It made me uncomfortable.
I suspect that unless one is naturally Cummings-like (and very few of us are) that this is something that can only be learnt through experience. I’m still conflict averse, but now I know enough to realise that not having the difficult conversation now means having a worse one later, or being left with regrets. Age also gives some authority which makes it easier to raise concerns.
Key lesson: have the difficult conversation, speak up. If you lose the argument at least you know you tried. If you end up getting punished for raising honest concerns then it’s probably not the right job for you anyway.
Practical Errors
1. Prioritisation
My first piece of advice to any new adviser who asks is “prioritise”. I was terrible at it. I have a poor attention span and am interested in almost everything, so having access to all meetings in Ministers’ diaries and every submission that went into their red boxes was far too much temptation. I tried to read everything; go to every meeting; speak to everyone who wanted to talk to me. I got drawn into firefighting every negative press story that popped up, and the petty battles the SPADs were having with various journalists. As a result, I didn’t give enough time to anything. I often completely lost track of policies I’d worked on in their early stages and then only realised there was a problem with them when it was too late.
For instance, I was very keen on a policy whereby we’d recruit teachers through regional gateways and then place them at schools for training, much like Teach First does but on a national basis. But somewhere along the way, and I still don’t know when, this became “Schools Direct” through which schools had to recruit trainees individually. Forcing schools to do all the recruitment was clearly a bad idea but I didn’t notice the change happening because I was too distracted.
The most effective advisers I’ve seen since I left have all prioritised a few things and largely ignored the chaos around them. I’d like to believe if I did it again I’d do this. but I’m not sure I have the discipline. I’d certainly try.
2. Ignoring the middle
Many of the meetings I had were with (dread word) “stakeholders”. These people, from outside Government, either tended to love what we were doing – or at least pretend to in order to get whatever it was they wanted – or hated what we were doing and wanted to let off steam. Essentially, everyone I spoke to had very strong opinions about our policies. But of course most people working in education, like most people in the country, spend little time thinking about politics and policies, and what they are worried about is often very different to that which occupies the professional wonk world.
I didn’t spend nearly enough time speaking to these people – almost no one in Whitehall does – because they weren’t asking for time in my diary. I joined some ministerial visits to schools, but they are hopeless because everyone is on their best behaviour, and there’s no time to talk to anyone. I had a regular group of Teach First teachers to talk to, but they were atypical too. I should have done more low-key visits to schools and talked to more normal heads and teachers. Had I done so I would have, I think, picked up on things like the growing mental health challenge which has now become a full blown crisis. And I would have realised quicker how compliant most people in education are, and the dangers of setting metrics that you think are nudges but are interpreted as rigid targets.
3. Stopping writing
Being so busy and being bombarded with official submissions, papers and proposals, I spent all my time commenting on other peoples’ work, often in person, because I didn’t want to stop to write it down. But, as I’ve realised too late in life, I think things through by writing them out. One reason I love twitter so much is by writing out points, even in short form, I see the flaws in them. The less I wrote, the less I thought, and the less I forced myself to properly work through arguments. Somewhat remarkably, I tweeted from an unlocked account the entire time I was in the DfE – I think I’m the only adviser before or since to do that – and did have some quite long debates about policy which changed my mind. That should have made me realise I needed to write long form a lot more than I did.
What I did right
As you can tell from the above, I have a lot of regrets about my time in Government. I was naïve, inexperienced, flying blind. I worked on policies that now make me wince. But there are some things I’m proud of – helping set up the Education Endowment Foundation, which has significantly increased the evidence we have about educational interventions; the design of the pupil premium, even if we never had the money to fulfil the policy intentions; the National Reference Test which gives us the first proper year-to-year measure of secondary school standards over time; defending most of the schools budget and getting a better settlement than any department bar Health. There are other things I wish we’d done differently, like academisation, but where I still think the core idea was the right one and will ultimately end up making a positive difference.
I also think I was more open-minded and open to challenge than most advisers, probably because I wasn’t attached to any party. Ultimately, that led to me becoming disillusioned, as my mind was changed on various policies, but along the way I think I stopped some bad things happening that a more tribally-oriented person would have encouraged. I’m also good at absorbing a lot of detail quickly and so was probably better than most at supporting the civil service to explain complex and fiddly issues, like school funding reform, to Ministers and other advisers. I’m glad I had the experience but I really wish I’d done it later in my career. It would be a generally good thing if advisers – including SPADs – were selected more for experience and knowledge and less for loyalty or, as was the case for me, just being in the right place at the right time.
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