Education

A council’s education expert explains to Philip Bevan the impact of recent reforms to the schools system.

Chris Wormald

Permanent Secretary, Department for Education

A primary school teacher laments the loss of centralised standards.

The Department for Education (DfE) should not make the National Pupil Database (NPD) available to the public, according to the Open Data Institute – a publicly-funded organisation dedicated to helping departments publish information and the private sector benefit from public data.

Pruned hard, the civil service will be lost without new skills.

Failure to properly communicate the increase in university tuition fees to £9,000 a year has already caused a large drop in student numbers and may also affect applications this year, Professor Les Ebdon, director of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) has told Civil Service World.

To encourage poorer and ethnic minority youngsters to consider a career in the civil service, the government has introduced new internships. Tim Fish reports on efforts to ensure Whitehall’s high-flyers are less uniformly white.

A special educational needs teacher considers realistic ambitions, unfair criticisms, and how the EBacc might affect non-academic children.

A leaked review of the Department for Education (DfE) sets out plans to cut about 1000 jobs, introduce a project team-based structure, focus work on “ministerial priorities” and radically reduce office space.

Never mind the NAO; ministers too hate a risk gone wrong

The MOD must store institutional knowledge in its armoury

As the Parliament’s halfway point looms, Tim Fish and Ben Willis examine the Cabinet Office’s progress against the tasks it was set in May 2010 as part of the Coalition’s Programme for Government.

A plea for sensible policy-making – and more cash

Legal Services Commission chief Matthew Coats has a reputation for carrying problematic services through political storms. Matt Ross asks him about organisational reform, service quality – and the looming cuts to legal aid

CBI director-general John Cridland writes (CSW p4, 12 April 2012) that the government has made little progress with its public service reforms over the past nine months. Those working in health and education witnessing major changes being pushed through might beg to differ, as might the civil servants trying to make sense of proposals from ministers for the ‘right to challenge’, ‘right to provide’ and now the ‘right to choose’.

Funding has been cut for efforts to broaden student intakes. What now?

The Cabinet Office is to run a central academy to train civil servants and local government employees in commissioning and procurement, the department has told CSW.

An inner-city school struggles to juggle the demands of disadvantaged pupils and national attainment targets

The head of Civil Service Learning (CSL), Jerry Arnott, has told CSW that he’s relying on departments’ procurement and finance professionals to ensure that all training purchases pass through CSL’s ‘Gateway’ – a key element of the reforms to civil service training set to come into force on 1 April.

When I joined the CSW team in June 2010, the Efficiency and Reform Group had just been created, the civil service had 43,000 more employees, and IT contract renegotiations were but a glint in Francis Maude’s eye. Since then the civil service has – while developing a brand new set of policies – experienced wholesale reforms in fields such as pensions, redundancy pay, training and HR, and the ERG has delivered £8.75bn of savings. Even if you don’t agree with everything that’s being done, the pace of change is impressive.

Vince Cable has ignored the advice of the Commons’ Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and appointed Professor Les Ebdon as director of fair access to higher education.

After nearly 22 months, the Commons select committees’ first elected chairs have had plenty of time to size up their Whitehall counterparts. Joshua Chambers asked them how the departments they watch have been performing