Rachel Wolf is a partner in Public First. She had co-charge of the 2019 Conservative Manifesto. She was an education and innovation adviser at Number 10 during David Cameron’s premiership and was founding director of the New Schools Network.
Last week, New Schools Network (NSN) – the charity I founded thirteen years ago – announced it will close. It achieved its central mission: to make the Free School programme happen, and successfully. Neither of these, as anyone who has worked in government will know, were guaranteed.
Through NSN, we (my own team, and my successors) delivered an immensely controversial policy, rapidly and against expectations, with successful outcomes: Free Schools are more likely to be rated Outstanding by Ofsted and are more popular with parents. Many of the top schools in the country exist because of its help; countless thousands of pupils are getting a better education because of those schools; and Free Schools like Michaela, or Reach Feltham, have changed the debate about what standard, and what kind, of education is possible.
Why was NSN successful? Because it was an obsessively focused, mission driven, non-governmental organisation. It applied some basic principles that should be used in Whitehall more generally (and, in my experience, almost never are). Others have written generously about NSN’s legacy. I want to focus on what I think policy makers should learn.
1. Speed. Before Free Schools, new schools took years and years to get off the ground. One former Cabinet Minister confidently predicted we’d get, at most, half a dozen open in a parliament. We knew that wasn’t an option: unless we got a decent number of schools open, the policy would be too easy to reverse, and each individual school would be the focus of huge national attacks by unions and other opponents. Critical mass was essential.
For the first year of NSN’s existence (before the 2010 election, and entirely funded by charitable donations) I spent most of my time identifying and cajoling groups who might want to found schools. They were inevitably nervous, and many of the teachers came under immense pressure and opposition. We tried to ensure they were ready to put in an application for a school, with demonstrable support from their community. It meant that by 18 months into the new parliament, over 80 schools were open, and almost 300 within a parliament.
2. Failure. The programme recognised the risk of the status quo rather than just the risk of change. Did all the schools work? No. But the ones that failed were closed much more quickly than is normally the case for schools, and the programme adapted fast.
3. Communication. We talked, endlessly, to the point of screaming boredom, about what was happening and why it was working – over local radio and broadcast. Our parent and teacher groups were featured in the national press. Why? Because we knew that was how you attracted more people to set up schools. New programmes need a sense of momentum.
4. Motivation. There were excellent civil servants who worked on the early Free School programme – as is often the case, the exciting ideas attracted many of the best people. But NSN was staffed by people who wanted Free Schools to happen, not who were dutifully implementing them. For that, you need a non-governmental (or at least not classically governmental) organisation.
5. Implementation. NSN was not a think tank. It was solely interested in the practical design and delivery of the programme. We created the application system for new schools, down to writing the questions on the forms, and asked people who had run similar programmes in other countries to check them. We held training sessions and conferences several times a year for those who wanted to found new schools – which helped them find like minded allies. It meant we were constantly in touch with people on the ground.
I wish I could see replicas of these ideas across the government, but I can’t. NSN was only possible because Free Schools were a priority for the government. The zeal for school reform has unquestionably disappeared. But there is a more general challenge – the energy and implementation capacity for public sector reform has faded since the Blair and early Cameron years. There is no shortage of ambitious targets, but an insufficient ability to make things happen fast or innovate. The vaccine taskforce was a rare blip of brilliance.
The same is true for Labour. A serious government in waiting should have its own social entrepreneurs and detailed ideas. What is the Labour NSN?
Can we do better? Yes. I will give one example. Michael Gove’s latest department is, as usual, a good bet. The Government appears semi-serious about levelling up, and he has entrepreneurial MPs like Danny Kruger and Neil O’Brien around him. Levelling up, like Free Schools, relies on communities acting and having the ability to do so. The Department also faces the most challenging headwind of all: time. Several years were wasted.
There is a perennial delusion in politics that an announcement, a piece of legislation, or even substantial funding, constitutes change. For the first few years, levelling up mostly consisted of random pots of money; it has been impossible to tell what any of it was achieving, and on what time scale. More recently, we have had serious and exciting policy proposals on planning and devolution; R&D; local pride; and skills.
They all rely on local action, and delivering them requires us to implement the lessons I set out above. What exactly is happening to the money? What is appearing, where? Which community groups are doing things, and why aren’t we interviewing them? Where is everyone?
It is easy to imagine an organisation, not exactly like NSN (different problems require different design) but with similar principles. It would probably require several local chapters with decision making power, and it would need to be focused on a small menu of improvements in each of those areas. It is also easy to imagine an NSN-type organisation focused on any number of other government challenges. While Covid, Ukraine, and the cost of living dominate headlines, they are not the focus of every department, every minister, or every official.
Despite the recent negative headlines, this is a government with an 80-seat majority, and an electoral imperative to deliver change. In these conditions, it should be possible to deliver tangible change – especially if everyone involved remembers the lessons we learnt in the early days of school reform and remembers why we all battle so hard to get into government in the first place.
Rachel Wolf is a partner in Public First. She had co-charge of the 2019 Conservative Manifesto. She was an education and innovation adviser at Number 10 during David Cameron’s premiership and was founding director of the New Schools Network.
Last week, New Schools Network (NSN) – the charity I founded thirteen years ago – announced it will close. It achieved its central mission: to make the Free School programme happen, and successfully. Neither of these, as anyone who has worked in government will know, were guaranteed.
Through NSN, we (my own team, and my successors) delivered an immensely controversial policy, rapidly and against expectations, with successful outcomes: Free Schools are more likely to be rated Outstanding by Ofsted and are more popular with parents. Many of the top schools in the country exist because of its help; countless thousands of pupils are getting a better education because of those schools; and Free Schools like Michaela, or Reach Feltham, have changed the debate about what standard, and what kind, of education is possible.
Why was NSN successful? Because it was an obsessively focused, mission driven, non-governmental organisation. It applied some basic principles that should be used in Whitehall more generally (and, in my experience, almost never are). Others have written generously about NSN’s legacy. I want to focus on what I think policy makers should learn.
1. Speed. Before Free Schools, new schools took years and years to get off the ground. One former Cabinet Minister confidently predicted we’d get, at most, half a dozen open in a parliament. We knew that wasn’t an option: unless we got a decent number of schools open, the policy would be too easy to reverse, and each individual school would be the focus of huge national attacks by unions and other opponents. Critical mass was essential.
For the first year of NSN’s existence (before the 2010 election, and entirely funded by charitable donations) I spent most of my time identifying and cajoling groups who might want to found schools. They were inevitably nervous, and many of the teachers came under immense pressure and opposition. We tried to ensure they were ready to put in an application for a school, with demonstrable support from their community. It meant that by 18 months into the new parliament, over 80 schools were open, and almost 300 within a parliament.
2. Failure. The programme recognised the risk of the status quo rather than just the risk of change. Did all the schools work? No. But the ones that failed were closed much more quickly than is normally the case for schools, and the programme adapted fast.
3. Communication. We talked, endlessly, to the point of screaming boredom, about what was happening and why it was working – over local radio and broadcast. Our parent and teacher groups were featured in the national press. Why? Because we knew that was how you attracted more people to set up schools. New programmes need a sense of momentum.
4. Motivation. There were excellent civil servants who worked on the early Free School programme – as is often the case, the exciting ideas attracted many of the best people. But NSN was staffed by people who wanted Free Schools to happen, not who were dutifully implementing them. For that, you need a non-governmental (or at least not classically governmental) organisation.
5. Implementation. NSN was not a think tank. It was solely interested in the practical design and delivery of the programme. We created the application system for new schools, down to writing the questions on the forms, and asked people who had run similar programmes in other countries to check them. We held training sessions and conferences several times a year for those who wanted to found new schools – which helped them find like minded allies. It meant we were constantly in touch with people on the ground.
I wish I could see replicas of these ideas across the government, but I can’t. NSN was only possible because Free Schools were a priority for the government. The zeal for school reform has unquestionably disappeared. But there is a more general challenge – the energy and implementation capacity for public sector reform has faded since the Blair and early Cameron years. There is no shortage of ambitious targets, but an insufficient ability to make things happen fast or innovate. The vaccine taskforce was a rare blip of brilliance.
The same is true for Labour. A serious government in waiting should have its own social entrepreneurs and detailed ideas. What is the Labour NSN?
Can we do better? Yes. I will give one example. Michael Gove’s latest department is, as usual, a good bet. The Government appears semi-serious about levelling up, and he has entrepreneurial MPs like Danny Kruger and Neil O’Brien around him. Levelling up, like Free Schools, relies on communities acting and having the ability to do so. The Department also faces the most challenging headwind of all: time. Several years were wasted.
There is a perennial delusion in politics that an announcement, a piece of legislation, or even substantial funding, constitutes change. For the first few years, levelling up mostly consisted of random pots of money; it has been impossible to tell what any of it was achieving, and on what time scale. More recently, we have had serious and exciting policy proposals on planning and devolution; R&D; local pride; and skills.
They all rely on local action, and delivering them requires us to implement the lessons I set out above. What exactly is happening to the money? What is appearing, where? Which community groups are doing things, and why aren’t we interviewing them? Where is everyone?
It is easy to imagine an organisation, not exactly like NSN (different problems require different design) but with similar principles. It would probably require several local chapters with decision making power, and it would need to be focused on a small menu of improvements in each of those areas. It is also easy to imagine an NSN-type organisation focused on any number of other government challenges. While Covid, Ukraine, and the cost of living dominate headlines, they are not the focus of every department, every minister, or every official.
Despite the recent negative headlines, this is a government with an 80-seat majority, and an electoral imperative to deliver change. In these conditions, it should be possible to deliver tangible change – especially if everyone involved remembers the lessons we learnt in the early days of school reform and remembers why we all battle so hard to get into government in the first place.