‘Brum’ is the colloquial name for
Birmingham, England’s second city and the largest local authority in Europe. For
many years Brum’s children’s services have been rated as ‘inadequate’ by the
inspectorate Ofsted, whose head has described them as a ‘national disgrace’. BBC news provides a useful ‘timeline’ of the
problems in Birmingham.
Now the city council has decided to turn over
the running of its children’s services to an independent voluntary trust, a
strategy which is favoured by the British government. You can read the full
story in the Guardian.
I don’t think that creating a voluntary
trust is any kind of panacea. And I am pleased to see that Lord Warner, who was
brought in by the Government to try to sort things out in Birmingham a few years
ago, agrees with me. The BBC quotes him as saying that this is a "rushed
decision" because there is “no proven track record” of voluntary trusts
like this being successful in bringing about change.
The main problem as I see it is that there
is no clear analysis of what is wrong in Brum. For years and years people have
been trying to fix things there without really being well informed about what
the causes of the difficulties are. At first senior management was the focus
and people resigned and the Government put in Lord Warner as a Commissioner. He
did something for three years and then he threw in the towel, complaining of slow
progress. Now there seems to be a consensus that the problem is with the ‘model’
and that a voluntary body would do it better than a local authority. But nobody
says why that’s true and it just isn’t clear what a voluntary trust would bring
to the situation that a local authority cannot.
My guess is that poor systems and low
morale in Birmingham result from a long history of change being driven from the
top by people who do not really understand what is wrong. All kinds of changes
are proposed, all kinds of changes are imposed, all kind of disruption is created.
First we have ‘special measures’, then we have a commissioner and now we have a
voluntary trust. What the people who do the work on a day-to-day basis make of
all this is not known. I expect that nobody in authority has asked them. I
suspect that those in authority probably don’t care.
Rather than imposing changes top-down, and
crushing the morale of the workforce in the process, I believe the route to
change has to be bottom-up. To understand what is wrong with an organisation
which is not functioning properly you need to engage with the people who
actually deliver the service, who understand where the shortfalls are actually
occurring, and work with them to gain their insights about the nature of the
problems and their suggestions about how they should be overcome. And you need
to empower people at the frontline to implement improvements which they
understand and endorse. The alternative is a confused and disorientated
workforce who become progressively demotivated by being required to implement
changes in which they do not believe.
A few years ago there was a children’s TV series on British TV called ‘Brum’, which was set in Birmingham. It starred a
little car called ‘Brum’ who was kept in a museum but escaped each day when the
curator wasn’t looking to have all sorts of adventures in the ‘big city’. But
every night Brum had to creep back into his museum and resume his position in
the exhibition. Although he had spent the day ‘brum, brum brumming’ all over
the city he ended up back in the static display.
That’s what they have to avoid in
Birmingham – having lots of adventures but ending up in the same position at
the end of it all.
