Top marks for improvement: Civil servant engagement in DfE, 2009-2014

The Department for Education’s engagement score has risen for the first time since the People Survey began in 2009.

Between 2009 and 2013, the engagement score for DfE fell every year, the only department for which this was the case. The score – a weighted average of how proud civil servants feel about their organisation, whether they would recommend it to others, and how attached, inspired and motivated to achieve its objectives they are – fell by twelve points between 2009 and 2013. This included a drop of five points between 2012 and 2013. It dropped below the benchmark score for the whole Civil Service in 2012 and still further in 2013. (All this despite DfE leading the way in satisfaction with pay and benefits.) Between 2013 and 2014, however, the engagement score rose by seven points, the second largest improvement of any department. Inevitably, the change of political leadership – Nicky Morgan replacing Michael Gove as Secretary of State in July 2014, and Gove’s special advisers also departing – has been highlighted as one reason for this improvement. In reality, there may be other factors at work. At the 2010 Spending Review, nearly all Whitehall departments were charged with making extensive headcount reductions:

• The Civil Service Reform Plan (June 2012) estimated there would be 380,000 civil servants in 2015, 23% less than in March 2010
• As of September 2014, there were 406,690 civil servants – more than suggested by the estimate in the reform plan but still a reduction of more than 70,000 since Spending Review 2010
• Most departments have reduced staff numbers by between 15% and 30%.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Institute’s Transforming Whitehall: One Year On report found that the way departments conducted their redundancy process could impact engagement, not only during the process but afterwards with remaining staff ‘left alienated and exhausted’. As we saw in Whitehall Monitor 2014, DfE underwent two rounds of cuts: one in mid-2011, and another in mid-2013. The latter followed the department’s own review in November 2012 which expected it could lose around 1,000 staff before 2015. The Institute’s 2013 report Leading Change in the Department for Education found the fall in engagement scores was partially driven by how the reduction was managed, with staff thinking it ‘was unfair and had negatively impacted on morale’. The rise in score this year may, therefore, reflect DfE’s progress in terms of organisational change. But it also reflects an improvement in how DfE civil servants feel about other subjects within their department. DfE civil servants rate the department more highly across every theme in 2014 compared to 2013, with many scores approaching the highs of 2009. The People Survey asks civil servants questions under a number of different themes, from how they feel about their work, manager and team, to what they think of pay and benefits, clarity of their organisation’s purpose and objectives and how change is managed in the department. With the exception of the engagement score (which is a weighted average), the scores reflect the percentage of ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ responses to the questions asked within each theme.

As the graph above shows, scores were lower for every theme in 2013 (the blue line) than in 2009 (the grey line). Most (though not all) themes declined constantly over that time. Double-digit falls were recorded in leadership and managing change (down 17 points, from 49% to 32%), pay and benefits (down 12, 53% to 41%) and learning and development (down from 56% in 2009 to 46% in 2013, having recovered from a low of 42% in 2012).

But the 2014 results (the pink line) show improvement in every single theme, the most noticeable rises occurring in leadership and managing change (up ten points to 42%) and learning and development (up eight points to 54%). Within the ‘leadership and managing change’ theme, how change is managed and whether changes are for the better scored the lowest…

The two highest scores (and the only two where a majority of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statements put to them) are for whether civil servants are kept informed by DfE about changes that will affect them (61%) and whether senior managers in DfE are sufficiently visible (52%). … but all scores within ‘leadership and managing change’ have improved at DfE in the last year and are approaching the highs of 2009.

Nonetheless, scores across all questions within the ‘leadership and managing change’ category have improved between 2013 and 2014. The scores for whether change was managed well and whether changes were for the better have risen by 10 points, while positive responses to ‘I feel that DfE as a whole is managed well’ rose by 13 points. Other scores, around being able to challenge the way things were done and the visibility, consistency of, and confidence in senior managers, also rose by double-digit figures.

Although the 2014 scores are heading back towards those from 2009, some significant differences remain: whether the board has a clear vision for the future (14 points lower than 2009), whether DfE is managed well (13 points lower) and whether change is managed well (11 points lower). How civil servants rate the clarity of the DfE’s purpose and objectives has varied considerably since 2009.

The score for whether DfE civil servants have a clear understanding of their department’s purpose and objectives and how their work fits in with them dropped by 14 points between the 2009 and 2010 surveys. Fourteen departments saw their score drop but only one had a larger drop than DfE (DfT, 15%). DfE’s drop in engagement coincided with a change in priorities (a shift in focus to expanding academies and introducing free schools) and uncertainty about the future shape of the department following the 2010 General Election – during October 2010, as the survey was conducted, it was announced that a number of its arm’s-length bodies would close, merge or remain under review. Now, with policies well established and reorganisations completed, the score is only 3% short of its 2009 high, with another election imminent. DfE has undergone a great deal of change since the 2010 General Election, with staff reductions and changes to the department’s focus and structure. This appears to have driven the decline in its engagement score. But in 2014, civil servants in the department are feeling more positive about how the department is led and how the changes have been managed.