Summary: How to reform the civil service fast stream

The fast stream is the civil service’s flagship talent development programme. It has become a staple of the graduate recruitment market and is regularly rated as one of the top graduate employers in the country. It is now an essential pipeline for getting early-career talent into the civil service – and a key component of the civil service recruitment ecosystem.

But the fast stream has faced substantial turbulence since the pandemic. The Johnson government’s decision to pause recruitment (later reversed), declining real terms pay resulting in the first ever vote for industrial action by fast streamers, and broader changes in the graduate job market have all led to marked fluctuations in application numbers. Those fluctuations, alongside reports of fast streamers either leaving the programme early or struggling to find middle management roles in the civil service after completing it (one of its main selling points), have raised questions about the scheme’s appeal and effectiveness.

This report looks at how the scheme is working, whether it is delivering for the civil service as a whole and those on the programme, and how it could improve. Part 1 outlines the size and shape of the fast stream and how the scheme has changed over time. Part 2 investigates the challenges facing the fast stream as it exists today. The report’s findings and recommendations are shaped by almost 600 responses to an exclusive Institute for Government survey and a series of focus groups involving current and former fast streamers, as well as prospective applicants.

Regaining the fast stream's sense of purpose

Our research suggests that the fast stream needs a clearer sense of purpose and direction. It is, in practice if not by design, trying at once to develop the civil service leaders of tomorrow, plug resourcing gaps and train a new generation of in-house specialists. While these are, individually, worthy goals, we conclude that they have been layered together in a way that creates tensions within the scheme. The result is less satisfied fast streamers and a civil service that does not get the most out of its flagship talent development programme.

In place of this confused purpose, we conclude that the fast stream should explicitly function as a leadership development programme, preparing future generations of senior civil servants. This clear purpose for the programme, and the limits of what the programme is not for, should be owned by civil service leadership, and the scheme’s operating model should reflect them.

There are several ways to achieve this. The programme should be smaller, taking fewer people on each year. Pay for fast streamers should be aligned with their equivalent grades in the rest of the civil service. Secondments should become a mandatory component of the fast stream journey. And recently introduced regional pilots should be expanded to other locations and made a permanent feature of the scheme.

These changes would help address, or make it easier to address, some of the crucial concerns raised by our research participants – from relocation, early departure from the scheme and posting quality to talent management and mentorship. Ultimately they would make the fast stream more coherent and better able to fulfil the workforce needs of the civil service.

Recommendations in brief

• The head of the civil service, working with the chief people officer and permanent secretaries, should direct that the fast stream be explicitly focused on developing future generations of senior civil servants.
• The fast stream should take on fewer applicants each year.
• Departments should be required to provide posting details up front when submitting their bids for fast streamers.
• Fast Stream and Emerging Talent (FSET), the team in the Cabinet Office that administers the fast stream, should work with the civil service professions to tighten the quality assurance criteria for postings and be more specific about the roles fast streamers will be expected to fill over the course of the programme.
• FSET should more systematically use fast streamer feedback on their postings when
  processing departmental bids.
• FSET should require that the standard fast stream ‘journey’ includes a secondment.
• Profession heads should match every fast streamer with a mentor at deputy director
  level in their profession for their entire time on the programme.
• Fast stream pay should be at least equal to the median pay for civil servants at the
  same notional grade level.
• FSET should scrap the relocation expectation on the fast stream and turn recent
  regional pilots into a permanent feature of the scheme.
• FSET should publish recruitment statistics broken down by socio-demographic
  characteristics at every application stage in its annual data releases.
• FSET should report publicly on the outreach efforts it is running and the evidence
  around their effectiveness.
• The civil service should go further in ensuring graduate jobs<i>outside</i> the fast stream
  are well advertised – and start by advertising all civil service roles externally by
  default, regardless of grade.