Corporate Planning for Education in the Department of Education and Science
| Published date | 01 March 1974 |
| Date | 01 March 1974 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1974.tb00162.x |
| Author | WILLIAM PILE |
Corporate Planning
for
Education in the
Department
of
Education and Science
Sir
William
is
Permanent Secretary
in
the Department
of
Eduation and
Science.
This
is
a text
of
a
lecturegiven
on
15
October
1973
in
the
RIPA’S
series
on
‘Corpora&
Planning’.
THE
FRAMEWORK OF
INTERDEPENDENCE
I
don’t know whether my Department does corporate planning.
I
propose
to tell you what we do and you can decide whether it is corporate planning
or
not.
I
shall limit myself to educational planning (almost entirely in
England and Wales) and say nothing about planning in the field of scienti-
fic research
or
the arts.
I
should like to say first that we do not, indeed cannot do, our educational
planning in autonomous isolation. Like nearly everybody else we have
our
upper and nether millstones. The upper is, of course, the Government’s
overall planning system. The lower is the network of institutions, govern-
mental, administrative and academic, which in practice operate the
education system and its services.
To
a
large extent educational policies
are the result of
a
grinding process between these two forces.
A
brief
word about each of them.
Since,
I
suppose, the time of Keynes it has been an overt function of
central government to ‘manage the economy’. This has entailed a concern
for
the amount
of
wealth which the nation creates and the ways
in
which
that wealth
is
spent. In more technical terms, it amounts to a concern
with the total national product and the consumption of that product
as
between, for example, the balancing of
our
overseas transactions
and, at home, private consumption
(or
savings), private investment and
stock building, and public expenditure. Striking balances between these
factors is what government is largely and increasingly about. The decisions
affect educational developments. The date settled for the raising of the
school leaving age to
16,
for instance,
was
postponed in
1968
because of
balance of payment difficulties at that time. Clearly, all the time, the level
of
public expenditure requires adjustment and control as part of the
overall management of the economy and the level of education expenditure
likewise as part of total public expenditure.
13
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