Recent moves by teaching unions to obstruct next year’s Sats provide a dramatic example of the tension that exists between government and professionals, especially in the public sector. Even before Labour came to power, government attempts to reform public services were altering the nature of professional life. But since 1997, when the pace of change shifted up a gear, the role of the professional – and their representative bodies – has been transformed, and not wholly by design. A determination to improve outcomes has led to increasingly direct government control of professionals’ work through a mixture of targets, tables and directives. Policing, healthcare and education have all been reorientated by these business-inspired techniques, with both good and ill effects.
On the credit side of the balance sheet, public services are now better than a decade ago. Reform gave ministers levers by which to tighten control of public institutions such as schools and hospitals, levers that rightly shifted their attention onto improving results for the citizens they serve.
But the disadvantages of this approach are also now well recognised. Working to targets tends to narrow a service to measurable parameters alone, leaving unquantifiable yet crucial outcomes overlooked. Moreover, most public sector workers would agree that micro-management from Whitehall serves to demotivate a workforce and suppress innovation. So on the debit side, public sector reform has helped to undermine many features that should characterise professional work – breadth, depth, innovation and responsibility.
Those disadvantages increasingly restrain the public sector’s potential to improve. It is time to recognise that further advances can only be achieved through enhancing, not eroding, professionalism. In renewing its vision, a key question Labour must now ask is how to promote a richer concept of professionalism, which helps raise all to the standard of the best.
Whether in social work, nursing, teaching or a host of other public sector jobs, at the heart of a new approach must be the idea of the ‘good professional’. Irrespective of sector or discipline, the good professional must strive for excellent and ethical practice by keeping up to date and reflecting on their work. Each professional must take full responsibility for their work, even where that work is shared with colleagues. (Countless child protection inquiries have found that decisive steps that could have saved lives were repeatedly left to other staff involved in a case). Finally, if they are to be serious about creating a high-quality professional community, good professionals must be willing to report poor standards. That commitment means not only whistleblowing on hidden problems but, more controversially, also supporting disciplinary action against poor performers among their colleagues.
In attaining these standards, professionals require the support of high-quality professional organisations. They should – and often already do – share best practice among professionals. But such bodies also need to ensure they deal with quality symmetrically, being as willing to help root out poor practice as they are to publicise the good.
This vision of professional life shows how responsibility for improving services can be handed down to staff on the frontline. By collaborating with colleagues, they can take more control for setting their own local and national targets. The balance would shift from external regulation and inspection to a more empowering framework of peer assessment and appraisal. In this way, the well-motivated people who enter public service would take ownership of reform rather than react against it.
For public sector workers to make progress towards this ideal requires less tentative devolution of power to professionals alongside a responsibility to deliver, within a clear political framework. A package of less control and more support for professionals to improve standards needs to be a defining feature of Labour’s agenda. We will only engage workers in this next stage of reform by genuinely trusting them with the power to deliver it.