Getting civil service policy professionals “away from their desks” and onto the front line of service delivery has been a recurring theme in government announcements in recent months.
The “Community Mission Challenge”, launched in June by then-Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould, is just one example. The challenge involves three government campuses – Darlington, Leeds and Sheffield – each being allocated one of prime minister Keir Starmer’s “missions” to work on, in conjunction with nearby local authorities and academics.
Darlington will be focused on the growth mission, Leeds on health and Sheffield on “breaking down barriers to opportunity”. Each of the topics matches the thematic strengths of the respective campus. The plan is for civil servants based in each area to work with frontline local authority staff and academics to “solve some of the key issues facing their local areas”. According to the Cabinet Office, which is responsible for coordinating cross-government work on the missions agenda, the locally developed solutions will be assessed for potential expansion or adaptation – possibly across the whole nation.
Gould said the new approach represents the start of a process to “rewire the state from the ground up” through a civil service that is “connected to the British people, backing their ideas and working alongside communities”. To chime with the focus on the opportunity mission in this issue, CSW decided to look at work on the Community Mission Challenge in South Yorkshire.
At the time of writing – some two months after the Community Mission Challenge announcement – scoping work is still under way for the precise challenges that the project will explore. However, a concerted effort to get to grips with the forces at play in one specific area with high levels of NEETs – young people not in education, employment or training – is part of the plan.
Whatever the specifics turn out to be, improving outcomes for young people will be fundamental. The government’s own milestones for delivery of the opportunity mission list a significant hike in the proportion of five-year-olds who reach a “good level of development” in their Early Years Foundation Stage assessment as a measure of progress.
The target is for 75% of five-year-olds to get to the “good” level – based on development across areas like language; literacy; maths; and personal, social and emotional development – by 2028. According to 10 Downing Street, the current proportion is 67.7%, and hitting the target could see an extra 45,000 children a year meet the development goals.
Longer-term ambitions include reducing school absence rates, improving attainment at the end of secondary education, and making sure there is a route to meaningful work for all young people. The Sheffield Policy Campus, which was launched two years ago, has more than 1,000 policy professionals spread across three sites in the city – and a strong Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions presence, making it well placed for the opportunity mission. Sheffield and the wider South Yorkshire sub-region’s selection as a “testbed” – another recent Cabinet Office buzzword – for the opportunity mission received an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the four local authorities in the area. They will work in partnership with South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority on the Community Mission Challenge.
Sheffield City Council chief executive Kate Josephs is a former Cabinet Office director general, who was responsible for the Covid Taskforce before her move to local government at the beginning of 2021. She views making the sub-region the “home” of the opportunity mission as a “very strength-based and natural decision”.
“The policy campus has been in place for a couple of years now and – perhaps a little different to things like the Darlington Economic Campus – some of what it is doing is bringing together an existing very strong civil service presence in the city,” she says. “Not just 5,000 or 6,000 civil servants but a very large concentration of policy civil servants. Certainly the largest outside of Whitehall.
“In terms of the team leaders and policy teams, it’s lots and lots of colleagues in DWP and DfE working on skills and early years and SEND, and on employment programmes. We’ve got the MoJ, we’ve got the Home Office. There’s sort of a natural alignment of the kind of people and the work they’re doing for the opportunity mission.”
Josephs says that while the “reflex action” has traditionally been for policy to be made in Whitehall, the current environment feels like a new era of “co-production” in which local areas have agency in policymaking.
“In all the years I’ve worked in central government, the biggest problem the policy profession has had – as a former member of the policy profession – is total disconnection of delivery and implementation,” she says. “It’s not a personal criticism of civil servants. I’ve spent years in the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. It’s really hard from Whitehall to connect policy intent to the messy reality of how delivery and implementation happens on the ground.”
She adds: “The potential for me from the policy campus work and the mission is that policymakers and civil servants gather a way of really understanding how policy can be implemented in a place they understand and know because they live there. It also means that we are the front line of a lot of the consequences of, and the delivery of, lots of policy... we are able to feed in and have some agency and influence in policy, not in a lobbying way but as part of a – and this is my dream, I guess – part of a system that works together.”
There is some precedent for the Community Mission Challenge in other projects undertaken in the sub-region and further afield. One is Sheffield’s work so far on the government’s £100m Test, Learn and Grow Programme, which is focused on improving uptake at Best Start family hubs. The hubs are a “one-stop shop” for families with children aged up to 19, or up to 25 in the case of young people and adults with special educational needs and disabilities. The centres build on the legacy of the Sure Start programme introduced in the late 1990s, funding for which was slashed by the 2010 coalition government. Labour has set a target of creating up to 1,000 Best Start family hubs across the country by 2028 (see our feature on Best Start, p.36).
“It’s really hard from Whitehall to connect policy intent to the messy reality of how delivery happens on the ground”
Kate Josephs, Sheffield City Council
The second wave of Test, Learn and Grow pilots will see neighbouring Barnsley Council work with civil servants to explore the wider application of artificial intelligence in service delivery. Barnsley’s previous Pathways to Work Commission, which looked into ways to reduce economic inactivity and get more people into work, now forms the basis of the South Yorkshire-wide Pathways to Work “trailblazer”, which is sponsored by DWP.
Barnsley Council’s chief executive is Sarah Norman, a former director of children’s and adult social services at Wolverhampton City Council. Before that, she was a regional director at the Commission for Social Care Inspection, which was a non-departmental public body of the Department of Health.
She says that while there have been previous examples of central and local government collaborating on policy, based on good practice in frontline services, “they were more the exception than the rule”. She cites Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards – introduced under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 – as an example of rushed policy introduced without proper discussion, testing and exploration with local government. On the other side of the coin, Norman says New Labour’s rollout of Sure Start children’s centres for the families of under-fives in disadvantaged areas is one of the rarer positive examples.
“The way that Sure Start was developed did involve real engagement with councils on the ground,” she says. “There was real involvement in working out what worked in practice and testing things and it was a very effective scheme.”
For its Test, Learn and Grow Programme pilot, Barnsley is keen to explore how AI capability can be developed to provide more predictive tools for safeguarding and prevention, and wants to work with the Sheffield Policy Campus, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the AI Incubator on the project. “Central government are trying to ask the same questions in relation to AI,” she says. “We all need to understand what the real capability of AI might be for us, beyond routine business-admin tasks.”
Norman says one of the benefits of the Test, Learn and Grow pilots and the Community Mission Challenge work will be allowing councils to draw in professional expertise from central government that it would otherwise be difficult to obtain. “In terms of AI, it’s having a more rapid, deeper understanding of the potential that AI has got in a practical sense than I think we’d be able to do on our own,” she says. “And identifying where local government needs central government to help us to realise its full potential.” She points to the use of big-data sources that could help to identify children in the local authority area who are most at risk, or ways that those with the lowest healthy life expectancy can be targeted for life-changing intervention work.
“Part of that involves data sharing; big data that the local authority doesn’t hold,” she says. “That’s part of what we’re trying to do. That obviously then has big ramifications for the opportunity mission in terms of how we solve some of the bigger problems that we’ve got in South Yorkshire.”
Norman says efforts to overcome at least some of the barriers to data sharing across the public sector will be important. She points to Pathways to Work as a “great example” of areas where fundamental data-sharing issues need to be resolved. “DWP knows who’s economically inactive. We’re trying to reach them with a service,” she says. “Can we have that information? So far, no. If we can identify how we solve some of those data-sharing problems, it could have wider ramifications for all sorts of uses.”
She says her hope is for a better understanding between local and central government on the requirements for success in overcoming mutually agreed challenges.
Josephs says the biggest impact for Sheffield’s Test, Learn and Grow work on family hubs was having access to central government behavioural scientists, data analysts and policy designers. They became part of a multidisciplinary team that worked hand-in-glove with frontline staff to test and learn together. “The benefit to the policy colleagues of being alongside the people actually delivering services to real people was enormous, because they start to see live how this is impacting,” she says.
“For our teams, it’s very challenging work. But they were totally energised by having people coming in and saying: ‘How about doing this?’ and showing them how in a matter of weeks, they could actually see and demonstrate and measure impact in a way that sometimes, when you’re working in really complex communities, it’s not always easy to see.”
One of the goals of Sheffield’s Test, Learn and Grow pilot for family hubs was to test routes to connect more families into services. Josephs says the team was able to show a “pretty impactful” increase in parents attending drop-in play workshops who signed up for the more intensive Making it REAL programme, aimed at supporting children’s literacy and development. The pilot used play-session demonstrations and testimonials delivered by WhatsApp voice notes in a range of languages to increase understanding of Making it REAL.
Josephs says the multidisciplinary team for that project was around a dozen people. But she is clear that the staffing requirements and timescales will vary depending on the particular challenge. “This is about what’s the right thing for the problem at hand,” she says. “That might be, in some cases, a sort of short, sharp six-week project working together. In other cases, it might be an ongoing commitment to partnership on a long-term problem. I think the point is that there is the permission and the energy now to explore new ways of working between central, regional and local government.”
“There seems to be very little about missions coming from central Whitehall departments”
Heloise Dunlop, IfG
The NEETs project being scoped is expected to focus on a defined area that has a particular challenge with young people not in education, employment or training. “It’s about bringing together all of the partners in the place – colleagues at colleges, businesses, schools – to try to really understand what is driving this, what can we do differently, and to create the case for policy change,” Josephs says.
The Institute for Government is highly supportive of the spirit behind the Test, Learn and Grow and Community Mission Challenge initiatives, although it is sceptical about aspects of the government’s commitment to delivery of the five missions. One of the think tank’s queries following the Community Mission Challenge announcement was whether there would be extra resources for the policy campuses taking part.
The Cabinet Office told CSW that the work will be paid for out of the £100m allocated for the Test, Learn and Grow Programme, although the two projects are theoretically separate.
Heloise Dunlop, a researcher at the IfG, says a range of pilots to test principles as part of the policymaking process is a “really positive” move that is key to identifying the need for specific local flexibilities. She agrees with Barnsley Council’s Norman that New Labour’s Sure Start programme is an example of great practice. “Central government only had the instruction that you have this budget and you have these five core services that you’ve got to provide,” she says of Sure Start. “Local authorities took the lead and engaged with parents and put them on boards to work out how it could work effectively. It did scale up really successfully.”
However, Dunlop says there is a “kind of disconnect” between the language of ministers in relation to missions and the reality of day-to-day government. “As we saw in the Spending Review, there seems to be very little about missions coming from central Whitehall departments,” she says. “And missions appear to be being treated more like targets rather than this ‘new way of working’.” Dunlop says there is at least the potential for initiatives from the Community Mission Challenge and Test, Learn and Grow Programme to end up being one-stop experiments – rather than the basis for developing new principles on which better policy is made.
Josephs is adamant that the point of the initiatives is to create ways of working that are different, and says there is already a strong culture of sharing good practice between South Yorkshire’s councils and beyond. That said, she acknowledges that the relationship between central, regional and local government has a tendency to be “transactional”, with all players lobbying for their own agendas – as might be expected of competing political organisations. She views the current opportunities as a way to break out of that pattern of behaviour.
“When you think about the most complex challenges that we’re seeking to address in our society, my honest view is that we will only get to the right answers if we are working more like a team in public service than separate entities that transact with one another,” she says. “My hope is that through the policy campus you create that sense of a team. We’re working to get ahead on specific challenges and we’re rooting that in our place and we’re ensuring that places and local government have a voice, but we’re doing it in a way that’s also curious and respectful about how we can help central government make policy better.”
This article first appeared in CSW's autumn magazine