Much has been made in recent years of the demise of the civil service generalist. But Susan Acland-Hood, who was named co-head of the policy profession this summer alongside Department for Business and Trade permanent secretary Gareth Davies, admits there is part of her “that’s still a little bit fond of the bit of generalism that’s about having range and being able to make connections”.
The Department for Education’s top civil servant notes that the previous policy profession head, Dame Tamara Finkelstein, “was very anti the word ‘generalist’”.
“I started off trying to defend it... and she basically convinced me that, although she agreed with the concepts that we want people who’ve got the connectivity and the ability to bring ideas together, the word ‘generalist’ wasn’t necessarily the most helpful way of expressing that,” Acland-Hood says.
“I don’t think any of us like the bit of generalism that gets translated into gifted amateurism or not having to be serious about professionalism… or not feeling like you have to properly understand the world you’re operating in.”
Finkelstein – an economist who began her career in the Treasury – made the case that “generalist” skills should be developed within a profession, to allow for formal training, transparent career development and transferable qualifications. She argued that the policy profession should be the home of many of the civil servants who identified with the label, which has been characterised by frequent job-hopping and a lack of structured learning.
Both Acland-Hood and Davies – who says he was “super excited” to take on the role he “happily lobbied the cabinet secretary” for – are longstanding members of the policy profession. Acland-Hood has been its deputy head since 2020, while Davies leads the profession in DBT. That experience “gives you some views about where we’re good as a community and where we can go further”, according to Davies: “We’ve got some real shared views about where we want to go together.” And he says he has been “blown away by the level of energy and enthusiasm [among the profession’s members] and how it feels like everyone I meet has got an idea about what more we can do”.
“So I think the challenge is not going to be galvanising the community; it’s going to be focusing ourselves down, thinking, ‘Okay, well, there’s so much we can do... Where should we really focus to make the biggest difference?’” The perm secs’ approach to leadership has been informed by conversations they have had with members, as well as those years of experience and the three pillars – strategy, democracy and delivery – that underpin the profession and act as an antidote to the pitfalls Finkelstein identified.
Strategy, Acland-Hood says, means asking: “Have you got the right question? What’s your evidence base? How are you putting together the right pieces of the puzzle? Do you have a theory of change that you’re anchored in? Do you understand the domain you’re operating in?”
The second pillar is concerned with the democratic framework in which officials work – “it’s always slightly surprising how many people, when they get down to brass tacks and have to do a piece of secondary legislation, don’t quite know what that is until they get stuck into it,” the DfE perm sec says – as well as citizen engagement and user research.
The final pillar, delivery, is about whether policies actually work. “If you aren’t thinking about delivery from the outset, then there’s a risk that what you end up with is a really lovely piece of paper,” Acland-Hood says. “There’s very little policy you create on a greenfield site,” she adds. “You’re almost always looking at something that’s operating in the world now and thinking about how you might want it to operate a bit differently in the future. So [it’s about] having the delivery understanding, [and] bringing the people who are doing the delivery into your policy conversation early and often to help you shape it.”
These pillars will shape a new, universal policy learning offer: part of a wider effort to develop skills and capabilities as the first strand of the co-heads’ three-part plan to develop the profession. “That’s about trying to make sure we’re both setting really clear expectations and giving people really high-quality, quite demanding and quite serious training and development that helps give them a common language, but also a repertoire of tools that they can use to make brilliant policy,” Acland-Hood says.
This is an area where Davies is keen to bring some of the strengths of the professional services world, where he spent the first decade of his career, to the civil service. “Professional services are really good at giving people a great foundation,” he says, recalling the training on writing, presenting and software skills he received in the early weeks of his private sector jobs. “Whilst that was great individually, because it meant you quickly got up the learning curve, it also meant that as you joined new teams, everyone had a shared language… so it meant you could quickly and very easily collaborate across boundaries. “We know that often, the hardest problems to try and tackle in the policy profession don’t fall neatly into teams or groups – or even departments,” he adds.
There are already several courses on offer including Policy 101, which is aimed at early-career policy professionals and officials from other professions, such as science or economics, who are involved in the policymaking process. At the higher level, there are programmes such as the Executive Masters in Public Policy, developed with the London School of Economics under Sir Chris Wormald – now cabinet secretary – who led the profession from 2012 to 2022.
Acland-Hood and Davies wanted to add a programme that would be a step up from Policy 101, while being as widely accessible as possible. The high-level courses on offer are “brilliant… and they give us very skilled people”, according to Acland-Hood, but are only available to a small cohort at a time. The universal policy learning offer is currently being tested with policy professionals and will “pop out of the sausage machine for more widespread testing” early in 2026, she says. It is being built in segments that follow the policy cycle and will draw on learnings from areas such as the Fast Stream, where Acland-Hood began her civil service career, and will be designed to integrate seamlessly with the wider civil service learning offer. There is also work happening to formalise continuous professional development and to move towards the expectation that policy professionals will undertake core learning and keep their skills up to date.
The second strand of the plan is “policy in practice”, which recognises the importance of working effectively both with other policy professionals and in multidisciplinary teams. Like conducting an orchestra, Davies says, policymaking is “about bringing together different skills and experience to solve, often, really complex issues to make the world a better place”. He wants the profession to think about its work not only in abstract terms, and to look for ways to do things better. For example: “How do we get together to do a white paper or a consultation, and how do we then make sure it’s not just theoretical, but actually then translates into delivery? I want to make sure we’re not trapped in models that I might have [been using] from having been around for 20 years,” he says. Among other things, he wants officials to be thinking about how they can use AI and other technologies to work more effectively and efficiently.
“There’s very little policy you create on a greenfield site. You’re almost always looking at something that’s operating in the world now”
Susan Acland-Hood
CSW wonders how the perm secs use AI in their jobs. Davies says he is “still learning and experimenting” but uses tools like Microsoft Copilot mainly for “synthesis and fresh perspectives”. He might ask for an overview of literature to get up to speed quickly on a topic or to understand what a critic might say in response to a paper. Acland-Hood says she has been looking at whether AI can help in creating accessible versions of documents more quickly, as well as for “word polishing” and writing for different audiences. That’s alongside AI tools being developed in DfE, such as one to help teachers with lesson planning. “We’re still at the stage where we’re encouraging people to use, experiment, test, trial and feed back on what they found,” she says.
The third and final strand of the perm secs’ plan is pride. They want members to have a sense of community and pride in their profession “for the right reasons”, Acland-Hood says: not because of a label, but “proud because you have the professionalism and you understand that great practice”.
“Policy professionals sometimes get seen as the people who think they know it all in their ivory tower,” she says. “But I think sometimes, actually, they’ve felt that they haven’t got as clear a professional identity as some of the other professions we’ve created across the civil service, like finance.”
Davies – who is also the civil service’s social mobility champion – adds that “demystifying” the profession is “one of the biggest jobs we’ve got on our hands”.
The biggest misconception about the profession, he says, “is it’s full of posh people and it’s limited to people who’ve been to Oxbridge and work in SW1. The profession, when it’s at its best, is an incredibly diverse community, and you can do policy right the way across the UK. Actually, we’ve got people working on policy right the way across the world… I think there’s a really interesting overlap between my role with Susan here and on social mobility, demystifying what policy is about. That’s why the skills and qualifications bit is so important.”
CSW is speaking to the two perm secs shortly after Policy Festival 2025, a week-long programme of speakers, workshops and mentoring sessions. “I’ve basically been living my best life this week,” says Acland-Hood, recalling conversations she had with chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty about science and policy; historian and educator Sir Anthony Seldon about the role of history in policymaking; and former politician Ed Balls about policymaking for ministers.
One theme that struck Acland-Hood as she attended the festival was that policymakers are operating in “a world which has got a lot of challenge in it”. She left the event thinking about the ever-present risk of the public losing trust in government and the need to ensure policy improves citizens’ lives. “That’s always been important, but it feels more charged and more important than ever, I think,” she says. Her conversation with Whitty stuck with her in particular. “Sometimes people imagine that if you’re focusing on science and evidence, that’s separate from engaging people,” she says. But Whitty – a former GP and practising NHS consultant – was “arguing very strongly… that to do things effectively, you have to bring together the hard science and the bedside manner: the bit where you understand people, you connect with them, and you really think about what’s going to shape effective shifts in behaviour"
“So, you can get the hard science right and the connection wrong. And, actually, that isn’t you getting a good, evidence-based policy done. It’s the opposite,” she says.
Whitty shared a harrowing and poignant example of this problem from his experience working with communities in west Africa to curb the spread of Ebola when he was chief scientific adviser at the Department for International Development. “I’m sorry, this is slightly grim,” Acland-Hood says. When the Ebola epidemic broke out in 2014, experts knew that the safest way to prevent transmission via corpses – which remain infectious – would be to bury victims as quickly as possible in an unmarked grave. But, Acland-Hood explains, “that cut across everything that the community wanted to do and understood about how you mark somebody’s death” and sometimes led people to “go to enormous lengths to find where their loved one was buried and dig them up and give them the rituals and rites that they wanted to give them”. The experts concluded that it was safer to work with communities to find ways for them to bury their loved ones with dignity “and then wrap a set of scientific safety protocols around that”.
“I thought: that’s quite a powerful example, isn’t it? We have to take science and evidence incredibly seriously, we have to connect with people properly, and the right answer is the one that combines those two things,” the DfE chief says. “There are very few examples of policy that don’t involve thinking about the user themselves. Their own engagement, their own behaviour, is part of what makes your policy work or not work,” she adds.
“The hardest problems to tackle in the policy profession don’t fall neatly into teams or even within departments”
Gareth Davies
For Davies, the highlight of the Policy Festival was attending the profession’s annual awards ceremony, which wrapped up the week of activities. He nods to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ Lindsay Roome, who took home the Leadership in Policy Award for her work leading the development of harmonised carbon reporting and standardised eco-labelling, where previously there had been only fragmented data. Judges praised Roome’s ability to secure ministerial support and drive consensus among government, industry and civil society.
Davies says Roome’s work exemplifies “a much underrated virtue in Whitehall: persistence”. He adds: “There’s lots of really high-profile policy, but there’s [also] lots that sometimes takes years to get right… So it’s great to hear these things about people who are beavering away, having an incredible impact on our country.”
What other qualities do policy professionals need to be successful? “Curiosity is probably one of the big ones,” he says. “Because it’s not just a single discipline. You’ve got to go broad. I think the best policymakers are curious about what’s going on internationally, because the challenges we face here are shared… and historically as well.” He says on a recent visit to Singapore and Japan, he was struck by the realisation that his counterparts are “grappling with exactly the same issues [as us] about how you grow the economy, how you handle technology, how you get skills right”.
A sense of purpose, and keeping citizens in mind, is also crucial, he says: “Sometimes, when we get it wrong, [it’s because we’re too focused on] what goes on in Whitehall – whether you’re briefing for a meeting or aligning different departments or running a good session with stakeholders, you’ve always got to be focused on, ultimately, the person that it serves.”
Acland-Hood returns to the profession’s three pillars and the bridge-building that made her reluctant to abandon the “generalist” label. “I think that the cross-cutting skill that sits underneath that is the skill to convene and put together the right multidisciplinary team around your problem,” she says.
“You have people whose core central skill is as a policymaker, and you also have lots of people who will have another disciplinary background but have a role in the policymaking process… it’s not as simple as bringing everyone into everything, because that leads to endless ‘committeeage’. It’s about saying: ‘Well, this particular problem has these characteristics, and that means if I don’t have an economist working on it, we won’t be solving the problem right.’ Or: ‘I’m doing a piece of work on environmental regulation, I really need somebody who’s got the environmental science that sits underneath that to be part of my team.’”
After all, she says, policymaking is “applied problem solving”. “This is one of the things that really gets me up in the morning,” she adds. “It’s just about trying to get things right for people.”
This article first appeared in CSW's winter 2026 magazine