How does the ECM agenda fit into Public Service reform

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How does the ECM agenda fit into Public Service
reform

• Gerry Stoker
• University of Southampton

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ECM Agenda

• Focus on children and ambitious goals
• Carers and families
• Integrated public agencies
• Inter-linked professionalism
• Locally designed and focused
• Individually-focused
• Best practice-led inspection and oversight
• Support for training and staff development

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New Labours old style reform approach targets
and terror

• Detailed top-down targets
• Intensive inspection, league tables
• Managerially focused in context of single agency
  
• Emphasis on top leadership
• ECM agenda has led a change in thinking more
  broadly

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Contrasts and developments

• Single to multiple agency focus
• League tables to mutual support
• Top-down to more locally driven
• Top leadership to dispersed leadership

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But a complex period shifting terrain

• Mix of old and new styles of management
• Gap between rhetoric and practice

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An emerging strategy across the public sector

• Echoing and going beyond ECM agenda?
• Browns perspective equity and personalisation
• Excellence with fairness. Enshrining universal
  entitlements to basic standards
• Services that are shaped by people thru
  individual and collective empowerment
• But under challenge from the Conservatives

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Personalisation

• New idea or old idea revived?
• Reflecting social and economic changes
• Making a real difference to service delivery
• Bi-partisan push?

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Collective empowerment New Labour and beyond

• New forms of consultation
• New forms of direct control
• An explosion of non-state schools?
• Checks and balances can partnership survive
  empowerment?

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The gap between a partnership of strategy and
practice

• Partnership now established at the level of
  strategy and plan
• Here to stay
• Much harder to establish at the level of practice
  
• Accountability systems, pressures of time,
  complexity of information flows

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Come back professionalism all is forgiven

• Fostering a new professionalism across the whole
  public service workforce in which professional
  take the lead, New Labours new terminology
• Tories offering a very pro-professional
  perspective
• Linked to support for training and development

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A hands- off Strategy?

• Providing strong strategic leadership from
  central government needs to give overall
  direction, say New Labour
• Tories even stronger on this point on the need
  for less central intervention
• Do they mean it?

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A longer-term debate

• The launch of a public services commission in
  Autumn of 2008 run out of the RSA
• http//2020publicservicestrust.org/page.asp?p3125
  
• Welfare state, system, society?

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But suddenly a new climate

• Financial crisis
• Big debate about the respective merits of the
  public and private sectors
• Economic downturn and squeeze on public finances

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Managing in a cold financial climate

• Squeeze on public spending already planned
• Will likely be more severe
• Few options left in terms of local finance
  raising and no prospect of reform on the horizon
• Efficiency savings swamping wider ambitious
  targets?