The Civil Service Fast Stream regained its spot as the best graduate scheme in the country this year. It also received record numbers of applications for the 2025 cohort.
But concerns remain: an Institute for Government report published this summer warned that the civil service’s flagship talent development programme needed to rediscover its sense of purpose.
The report said that the civil service was asking the Fast Stream to do too much and that pay issues were creating incentives for fast streamers to exit early for better-paid jobs, often within the civil service.
This week, the Institute for Government gathered together experts – including a former head of the Fast Stream – for a roundtable discussion on how the scheme can deliver more for the civil service. Here are CSW's highlights from the event.
Ex-Fast Stream boss: Ongoing reforms 'need time to embed'
Sonia Pawson, who was head of the Fast Stream from 2020-2024, said the Fast Stream leadership is “working on a lot of the issues” the IfG found through reforms she led in 2024 which included aligning all schemes to a profession.
Pawson said the Fast Stream leadership identified the need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the scheme in 2020 in “recognition of a rapidly changing civil service and workforce”.
“In a nutshell, we identified that the purpose had become ambiguous, both in terms of the strategic intent of the scheme and the size,” she said.
She said they also found a “more rigorous, prescribed” learning and development offer was needed, and that the delivery model had become “unwieldly”, as well as issues with pay, attrition and location.
Pawson said the Fast Stream leadership thought “a lot” about the purpose of the programme.
“Historically it was very much badged as a pipeline to the senior civil service,” she said. "But in reality, our research told us that lots of applicants had never even heard of the senior civil service [and] weren’t thinking about long-term career aspirations.”
She said they therefore decided to market the scheme as “a leadership and management development programme serving all of the functions and professions across government with the aim of developing individuals to take on an individual role at grade 7, but with a more implicit acknowledgement that this could be a pipeline to much more senior leadership roles”.
Pawson said there “has to be time given” for the changes “to be embedded”.
Less attrition ‘key test for success’
Asked what the tests for success are for the 2024 reforms, Pawson said fast streamer feedback from the annual survey is key.
“I would be expecting satisfaction with the scheme to go up, satisfaction with the quality of both the training, learning and development offer… [and] increased satisfaction in terms of the total reward package and pay and benefits," Pawson said.
But she added that “ultimately one measure of success would be reduced attrition from the scheme”.
“It is true that most in the main stayed in the civil service at large, but we would look for a measure of success from a greater proportion of fast streamers reaching that end point assessment and graduation,” she said.
A survey by the IfG of 237 former fast streamers found 41% had left the scheme before it finished, with most of those leaving for a role in the civil service outside of the talent and development programme.
And a survey by the FDA union of 800 current fast streamers found that 64% of respondents would consider leaving the scheme early. Of those, 84.5% cited pay as a key factor. Fifty-seven percent said that, if they left the scheme early, they would be most likely to leave the civil service altogether or take up an HEO or SEO role.
How pay parity can address retention issues
The FDA has negotiated pay agreements for fast streamers in recent years which it says have begun to address pay parity issues. But Robert Eagleton, the FDA union’s national officer for the Fast Stream, said pay remains the biggest concern among its Fast Stream members.
He explained that fast streamers apply, often as university students, see a starting salary of £31,000, or £35,000 if they're based in London, and “think that's a decent salary”, only to find out they're working with HOs and SEOs who receive more money for equivalent work – “and that's when the dissatisfaction sets in.”
“And then fast streamers are put in this position where they have to calculate: Am I better off staying on the scheme with a lower salary but more certainty of getting to that grade 7 position? Or should I leave the Fast Stream, trade off that certainty for an immediate pay rise and basically try and make my own way to grade 7 within a similar time frame?
Eagleton said this is “a very real calculation that people face, especially early on in their career, especially if they live in London, they’re from a working class background, don't have family wealth that they can rely on, and over half their salary is going on rent, tax and student loan repayments”.
He said this is bad for the Fast Stream because gifted and talented participants are leaving the scheme early, and for fast streamers, who miss out on the learning and development offered through the Fast Stream and the ability to more easily gain a broad range of experiences.
More leadership training is coming
Eagleton said another of the big concerns from members is the lack of line management experience on offer during the scheme, which means that when they complete it and go on to a grade 7 role they have to manage a team without having developed those skills.
But Eagleton said the central Fast Stream and Emerging Talent team which runs the scheme has responded to these concerns and “are now introducing modules on management and they’re looking at piloting management experience”.
Rachel Hopcroft, a former director in the Cabinet Office and now chief corporate affairs officer at NatWest Group, noted that in the private sector the civil service scheme is viewed as producing “brilliant leaders”.
She said there is “probably a lag there” as civil servants generally go into the private sector after spending a long time in the civil service.
Fast Stream viewed as ‘elite’ in private sector
Hopcroft, who is a former fast streamer, was asked to pick out some areas where the civil service could learn from the private sector.
First she noted: “There’s always a tendency for the civil service to look at the private sector and think it's done so much better elsewhere. One of my early experiences when I first joined KPMG was how prized the Civil Service Fast Stream was as a graduate scheme in and of itself, and some of the people that we would be looking to take into KPMG, if they had done the Civil Service Fast Stream were seen as having gone through an elite graduate scheme. And therefore there was currency for having done that in and of itself.”
On what the private sector does well, Hopcroft said KPMG and NatWest have both “been really good at identifying what skills the future workforce may need, as well as what are the kind of evergreen skills of today that we want our grads to have”.
She also highlighted the speed of the recruitment process in the private sector.
“I'm sure that the civil service has got much better at that than it did when I was experiencing it, but at KPMG, once you've done the graduate assessment, you would know within 48 hours,” she said.
Hopcroft said there are “all sorts of benefits to that, not the least for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, where you want certainty of where you're going, what you're going to be paid, have you got a job or not. And sitting around waiting for offers, even if your preference is the civil service, if you've got to wait six months to get that offer, that's not great.”
She also pointed to the pace at which people are trained up. “At NatWest, the average graduate scheme is two years, and at KPMG, it differed, but almost everyone was working towards some form of qualification or accreditation. I think that’s a real advantage.”