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Kicking the habit

The Children in Care and Adoption league tables serves a reminder of how hard it is for departments to relinquish their oversight over local services.

The Children in Care and Adoption league tables serve as a reminder of how hard it is for departments to relinquish their line of oversight over local services.

The Department for Education announced earlier this week that it will ‘name and shame’ poorly performing adoption services by ranking local authorities on the basis of 15 performance indicators. The Children in Care and Adoption league tables combine process indicators - such as the speed in which adoptions take place – with outcome indicators - such as the caution and conviction rate of adopted children and children in care. Poorly performing authorities may have their adoption services contracted out or privatised. Given the political salience of adoption and the poor performance of some local authorities it is perhaps unsurprising that the department has stepped in to monitor performance. But the intervention appears to contradict the coalition’s promise to end the culture of targets and top down performance management and to release data so independent adjudicators or ‘armchair auditors’ could create their own league tables. Is this an isolated incident, and, if not, why has the government found it hard release control and rely on local democracy to punish poor performance?

As I have argued before, despite their localism rhetoric governments find it hard to trust local accountability mechanisms to monitor and punish poor performance in the face of pressure from the electorate. Whether it’s bin collection or adoption services, Ministers don’t believe the buck will stop locally and so prepare to intervene in cases of failure. This ‘centralisation cycle’ is of a course an age-old characteristic of government. The theory was that legions of armchair auditors would hold individual service providers to account. But at the moment, Ministers may perceive an accountability gap - The Audit Commission - which historically had primary responsibility for local authority inspection and intervention in cases of poor performance – is going and credible alternatives which politicians and the electorate trust have yet to emerge. The risk is that ministers and departments stay addicted to intervention and by doing so prevent the emergence of alternative mechanisms. Nevertheless, the ‘centralisation cycle’ is not inevitable though DfE appears to have made few attempts to break it.

School league tables continue to sit at the heart of the accountability system for education, with new value add and progress measures being included in this year’s tables. Further, free schools are directly accountable to the Secretary of State who has to sign off each new school proposal and has the power to shut schools down in cases of failure. These moves suggest continuation of past trends to have a clear line of oversight over local performance. The unwillingness to let go may be partly due to the perceived success of previous initiatives that were driven by the centre, for example the Labour Government’s literacy drive and its academies programme. But for a government that promised to overcome the ‘infantilisation of the front line’ it’s striking how little has changed. This week’s announcement serves as a reminder of how difficult it is to shift a department away from maintaining a line of oversight over local service providers. Part of the solution is to strengthen the visibility and accountability of local politicians, and to make it clear, possibly when legislation is written, which responsibilities lie centrally and which lie locally. Our publication Nothing to do with me explores these options in more detail. Without doing so, the concern is that this will result in centralisation ‘though the back door’, with departments collecting, synthesising, and acting on local authority performance data. These are interesting times for public sector performance management. The Children in Care and Adoption league tables may be a one off central government intervention in an issue close to the nation’s heart. But they may signal continuation of historic trends to centrally monitor local public service performance. We should watch this space.

Publisher
Institute for Government

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