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Yes, didn’t feel right to personalise it like that. We’ve all met brilliant cogs in the Whitehall machine - far harder to unstick the mechanism itself.

…rather than acknowledge politicians’ complicity in creating an overweening central government addicted to the illusion of control and constantly “chasing the dragon” by adding new people and programmes. I’m afraid targets & deliverology risk accelerating that.

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You can read this one here: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/defaul... with h/t to authors @emmanorris.bsky.social & @petrbouchal.bsky.social

Revisiting the Sure Start example in DfE, or even for the reimagining of our JobCentres as hubs for skills and employment in communities, could yet show the way for ministers to drive a big bold agenda from the centre in ways that are sensitive to place and build broad based support.

And having that personal attachment from actors across the system makes it even more critical to be able to listen & act when people are telling you in good faith it’s falling short. In the rapid scale-up too strong a filter would have killed the signal that the delivery model needed strengthening.

And then outside Whitehall to embody an essential intent about the policy itself. For Sure Start, Tessa Jowell’s warmth and non-judgemental care helped bring to life the promise of Sure Start for local leaders and practitioners that carried through to how they engaged families.

It was an adaptive rather than a fragile solution. But one, as with the London Challenge, where visible and personal leadership really made a difference. First, to champion and protect the policy at its vulnerable formative stage.

Reform lessons are not just about the policy itself but the politics & practicality of making it reality. Sure Start’s brilliance was its simple clarity of purpose as a national policy that allowed room for all of the complexity and messiness of real lives and communities to be addressed in context.

Reminds me of an old boss (head of an Education department) invoking Oliver Wendell Holmes to caution leaders to accept only the simplicity that lies on the *other side* of complexity. Feels like we’ve been living that lesson the hard way over a few years of politicians mistaking slogan for vision.

Metrics for learning and course correction by system stewards in DfE will be necessary, but that’s not the same as reducing a vision for such a complex system to deciding if we want exam results *or* attendance *or* behaviour to be the North Star.

In that context though, jumping into a reductive vision hooked onto some KPIs is as likely to have unintended consequences as rushing to get some policy runs on the board before direction is fully set.

What this kind of response from the sector indicates - as with the initial feedback on Ofsted proposals - is the quite reasonable fear that rather than being gripped at the centre, all the ambiguities and unintended consequences could once again be left for practitioners to resolve in the field.

That’s not exactly ducking “the vision thing” IMO, even if crystallising what policy levers they are or aren’t willing to use to pursue these shifts across the system should come in a white paper.

3) focusing on the ways that all children achieving educationally will be underpinned by them belonging and thriving.

Directionally, the Labour mission has quite a clear vision of a system based around 1) building capacity for inclusion across mainstream schools, in part via 2) more collaborative local and regional systems covering MATs and maintained schools (plus other providers like AP), and…