Given media attention paid to Sue Gray’s exit from No 10, you’d be forgiven for missing the arrival, or re-entry, of Sir Michael Barber as the prime minister’s adviser on effective delivery.
Barber’s role is to “support the prime minister in driving forward the delivery of the five national missions – through setting long-term goals on the economy, energy, safer streets, breaking down barriers to opportunity and building an NHS fit for the future”.
One of the finest, most credible and widely experienced proponents of whole-systems change, who worked with the Conservative government as an adviser on skills delivery, Barber’s appointment should be feted by adult, further and higher education sector leaders and training providers.
Here is another piece of the good news jigsaw that is gradually emerging from the Labour administration as it fills out policy intent and manifesto commitments with detailed proposals.
Furthermore, as Baroness Jacqui Smith, minister for skills, further and higher education indicated at the Association of Colleges conference this week, the government wants to develop detailed and effective implementation plans in partnership with sector leaders and practitioners – another welcome foray into the world of co-creation and impact measurement – an approach so clearly taken in the government’s consultation on the industrial strategy.
This reinforces the centrality of skills to all five of the government’s missions, a point AoC CEO, David Hughes among others (including myself) voice consistently. It is further confirmation of a possible brighter future for colleges, universities, training providers and adult and community educators.
However, if we are to shape this future, we must remain laser-focused on the following: delivering high quality courses, developing innovative partnerships, achieving significant productivity gains to help the growth agenda, meeting expectations of local leaders of place across the diversity of devolution arrangements, and satisfying the needs and ambitions of employers, students and communities.
We can take the lead by scrutinising our own activities
Skills and training through adult, further and higher education providers have a pivotal role to play in supporting the personal mission the secretary of state for education, Bridget Phillipson, who recently described her goal “to spread opportunity far and wide, to give every single child the very best life chances”.
In this “new era of child-centred government”, the liminal space occupied for so long particularly by adult and further education institutions seen as the means to redress social justice can, and should, extend, fill out, and move beyond.
Like the nurseries and schools that nurture the young people who move into our colleges, training centres and universities, we should be proud that “our public institutions are civic in their outlook, anchored in their communities”.
The discourse of collaboration and partnership is key to bringing about the systems change at the heart of the government’s missions, which Sir Michael Barber has been brought in to help deliver.
So I suggest we work together to help him. We can take the lead by scrutinising our own activities, ideas and practices to see if we can do better.
We can find ways of working more creatively and innovatively to help government departments work collaboratively. We can model the way forward by showing that we can break down our own siloed thinking and stereotypical habits. We can think and act differently.
I leave this year’s AoC conference feeling energised and positive about the possibilities, and recognising that it’s not going to be easy.
We are used to working in a competitive culture. Walking around the AoC conference, attending workshops and chatting to participants, I was reminded of the plethora of individual and combative interests at stake, conscious that in play are a range of diverse stakeholders who, of necessity, place a clear boundary around their own jurisdiction.
Sharing, ceding territory and finding ‘win-win’ solutions require strategic energy, emotional maturity and generosity.
If we want whole-systems change that will move the five missions forward and maximise the benefits for the many, what is needed now is a not just a collective reaching out to Michael Barber but a concerted reaching out to each others, across all partners in the tertiary sector.
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