Challenges to the voluntary sector in responding to changes to local and national policy

1
Challenges to the voluntary sector in responding
to changes to local and national policy
2
Introduction

• Personal account
• Framework for understanding. Stephen Ball
• Implications for voluntary organisations

3
Context

• Public Sector
• Private sector
• Public sector
• Voluntary organisation
• Voluntary organisation

• Social Services
• Door factory
• School
• Regeneration
• Westway Development Trust - Coordinator of
  Supplementary Schools

4
At first hand

• 1980 very little regulation
• High profile cases
• Last 15 years proliferation of paperwork!
• Education focus but many of the changes have
  affected whole public sector

• League tables
• OFSTED
• Parental choice
• Targets
• Reports, monthly, annual
• Monthly monitoring
• Performance management

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Globalisation- public sector reform

• Dominance of economic arguments
• The Market
• The Knowledge economy- competing on brains, not
  brawn
• Public sector reform to be more business like and
  private sector to have a role
• New public management-increasing accountability
• Performativity

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New Public Management

• Focus on results in terms of efficiency,
  effectiveness and quality of service
• Decentralisation decisions on resources
  allocation and service delivery made closer to
  point of delivery
• Flexibility to explore alternatives to direct
  public provision
• Focus on efficiency in public sector-establishment
  of productivity targets and competitive
  environments
• Shift from government to governance
• Use of contracts, targets and performance
  monitoring to steer from a distance

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But..

• When knowledge is bought and sold it is used as a
  commodity
• Our understanding of the world shifts from social
  values created by people to one where everything
  is viewed in terms of quantities e.g new
  commissioning model based on learning hours
• New technologies can reinforce existing social
  inequalities and exacerbate economic social
  polarisation. There is a wired world and an
  unwired world
• Put across as devolution and deregulation but in
  fact reregulation as set within the constraints
  of performance and profitability

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Effects

• Policy overload
• New values and new relationships
• Being calculable rather than memorable
• Purpose of education becomes economic, not
  liberating
• Effects that the struggle to perform has on us
• Accountability rather than authenticity
• Practice comes to be experienced as inauthentic
• Culture of self-interest
• Our values become distorted/values drift

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Performativity- Stephen Ball

• Re-renders practice into measurable outcomes. The
  work, the processes, of education come to be
  represented and appreciated in terms of products,
  or calculabilities. Individuals and institutions
  are required to account for themselves in ways
  that represent education as a standardised and
  measurable product.
• The dynamic of transformation and the need to
  seize opportunities, to constantly innovate and
  constantly improve performance are everywhere

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Performativity

• Becoming the primary mode for the management of
  the public sector. A regime of accountability.
• Subject to judgments, measures, comparisons and
  targets
• Outputs, outcomes, performance management,
  appraisal
• The performances of individual subjects serve as
  measures of productivity and represent the value
  of an organisation
• Performativity works when it no longer works from
  the outside in but when it is internalised
• Leads to fabrications

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Challenge the rhetoric- empowerment

• Individual self-assertion and upward mobility
• Feeling powerful and self-realised
• Understanding the causes of powerlessness,
  recognising systemic oppressive forces and acting
  individually and collectively to change the
  conditions of life
• Choice and voice when everyone in the public
  sector maximises their personal welfare through
  individual choice it may have unpredictable
  consequences on institutions like schools and
  hospitals. Effect may give people less of what
  they want.

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Challenge the rhetoric- Community Cohesion

• Promoting social cohesion

• Preventing terrorism
• Funding for small groups has drastically been cut
  back, Community Chest, Local Network Fund, small
  grants
• Policy directive not to fund single ethnic groups
• Funders want to fund innovation and change

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Solutions

• Constantly problematise the process
• Increase our awareness of policy drivers
• Negotiate equal partnerships. Supplementary
  schools should be seen as partners not lettings
  opportunities
• Challenge rhetoric e.g. If every parent matters
  why doesnt this one? Advocacy
• Community hubs. Communities federating.
• Build ICT capacities