Ideas and Issues in University Education for Public Services Leaders

Article
Teaching Public Administration
Ideas and Issues in
30(1) 42–53
ª The Author(s) 2012
University Education
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DOI: 10.1177/0144739412440434
for Public Services
tpa.sagepub.com
Leaders
Paul Joyce and Francis Coxhead
Introduction
Do public services leaders need university courses which help develop professional
skills? David Walker gave evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee in which
he suggested that members of the higher levels of the UK Civil Service should take a
compulsory postgraduate qualification in public administration; he also maintained that
the necessary intellectual apparatus to develop these did exist, in part, in academe and that
it could be mobilised (House of Commons, Public Administration Select Committee,
2007: 15).
The leadership of the UK civil service has in recent years made it clear that it would,
in principle, like to make more use of universities as a source of new recruits to the civil
service. It has also on occasions described both further education colleges and uni-
versities as key partners in the development of the civil service workforce. The success
of any attempt by the civil service to engage with educational institutions will be affected
by the relevance of the capabilities of universities to the business needs of the civil
service and the acceptability to the universities of the financial arrangements.
If universities do want to be part of helping the civil service to become more pro-
fessional, they will have to increase their understanding of the needs of government
services and will have to be prepared to challenge existing assumptions about the design
and delivery of education and development. One sign that there is some willingness in
universities to develop this understanding and rethink existing approaches was a recent
initiative to develop guidance for designing Masters of Public Administration (MPA)
programmes. This initiative involved a number of organisations: the guidance was
prepared over the course of a year (from late 2008) and was approved by the Public
Administration Committee (of the Joint University Council), the Public Management
and Policy Association, and the Public Administration Specialist Group of the UK’s
Political Studies Association. The preparation work also benefited substantially as a
Corresponding author:
Paul Joyce, LJMU 98 Mount Pleasant Liverpool, L3 5UZ United Kingdom.
e-mail: P.C.Joyce@ljmu.ac.uk

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Joyce and Coxhead
43
result of the involvement of staff of the National School of Government and of
Government Skills (both of which have disappeared as discrete organisations as a result
of changes involving the Cabinet Office; see Appendix for extracts from the guidance).
In working in this area it is apparent that, while government often turns to individual
academics for advice, academia generally has not had the same sort of access to the workings
of central government as it has had in the business sector. Further progress in developing
understanding of the government sector requires the universities to think differently about
how best to meet the needs of this particular sector, including challenging existing design and
delivery assumptions. This progress can be made through collaborative design and delivery
of specific programmes. This article contains a case study of a specific collaboration in which
both authors participated, and we will be drawing out the issues and lessons from this
experience. Before we do that, we consider the environment for universities engaging with
education and development in the government sector.
The Environment
As is often the case in government, political priorities which are urgent – for example, deficit
reduction being the current number one priority for the UK Government – make it difficult
for those directing government services (local as well as national) to have regard for longer
term matters of developing the professionalism of those working in public services,
including public services leaders and managers. Even if government ministers would like to
focus on organisational capabilities and improving public services, managing deficit
reductions and all the intended and unintended consequences of deficit reductions will leave
little scope for departmental managers to pay attention to the challenges of enabling
universities to be effective partners in the development of the civil service.
This is the situation just at the time when government policy on the relationship
between government and society has crystallised into the concept of the ‘Big Society’,
which the government has identified as requiring very different ways of working by civil
servants. David Cameron outlined his ideas for the Big Society, in a 2010 speech:
This idea, the big society, is both incredibly ambitious, but also refreshingly modest. Ambi-
tious because its aims are sweeping . . . But modest too – because it’s not about some magic
new plan dreamed up in Whitehall and imposed from on high. It’s about enabling and
encouraging people to come together to solve their problems and make life better.
Let me be very clear: the big society does not mean no government . . . It means a new kind
of government. (Guardian, 2010)
It is clear that this agenda for the Big Society calls for a new type of government and new
types of civil servants who will enable and encourage rather than use command and
control. This would require a new definition of professionalism among civil servants.
Leaders and managers of government organisations will need to be skilled in working
with civil society, in commissioning, managing public sector competition, and in
commissioning services that offer choice to service users.
While we know that internally the government is concerned with working to develop
the skills and professionalism of public servants (see for example the recent White Paper

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44
Teaching Public Administration 30(1)
Open Public Services), there is little direct engagement with universities in developing
the Professional Skills for Government framework and other initiatives in a way that
influences the content or design of HE offerings.
Where could universities go with their educational offer?
Ideas for changing university provision can easily run ahead of the development of the
capabilities and culture needed to deliver them – both in universities and in employer
organisations. This means that there is a need to face the challenge of planning the migration
from where university courses are now (generally speaking) to where university courses of
the future might be.
We can imagine for example the evolution of more practical courses for public services
leaders in terms of their central concern, their core processes, the values they affirm, together
with new roles for those who...