From commissar to auctioneer? The changing role of directors in managing children’s services in a period of austerity

Abstract

This article explores the impact of changing policy priorities on the role of director of children’s services, before and after the economic crisis of 2008 and the election of the coalition government. The role of director of children’s services from 2003 to 2010 was driven by the New Labour imperative to deliver regionally based integrated services, as called for in Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2003). Changing political and economic priorities since the election of 2010 have recast the notion of ‘integrated services’. The Conservative-led coalition has instead emphasised the importance of localised decision-making at institutional level in education and social services. This article reflects on the perceptions of directors, drawing on empirical data gathered from two sets of interviews conducted with directors of children’s services in North-West England between 2007 and 2012. Concerns are expressed about this changing political and economic landscape which has left the role of director of children’s services open to question. Recent reforms in education and health have devolved responsibility for coordinating public services to institutions, potentially marginalising broader agendas about welfare, rights, and so on for children and young people.

Keywords

directors of children’s services leadership austerity integrated services

Introduction

The election of the Conservative-led coalition and the austerity drive of the past 18 months have offered a systemic challenge to local service provision. Changing political imperatives have impacted on the agenda for integrated service provision and changed the context in which the role of director of children’s services (DCS) operates. The role of the DCS was for a long time defined by generic professional activities surrounding the agenda to integrate services for children and young people (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2004; Department for Education and Skills, 2003). The changed conditions and the programme of cuts to public services have, we argue, altered the modus operandi of directors. The role remains despite structural changes to the management of public services at local level.

This article addresses the impact of these changing priorities on the role of director, before and after the economic crisis and the election of the coalition government, by exploring three key questions.

How effective do directors perceive their role has been in delivering integrated working and distributed leadership within their areas of influence?

Given changes in the structure of public services and the differing priorities of the Labour and coalition governments, to what extent can directors still ‘drive change through’ from the regional level?

What does the direction of children’s services look like in 2013 after four years of economic crisis management and austerity in the public services?

In order to explore these questions, this article draws on data from interviews originally conducted with DCSs in North-West England between 2007 and 2010, together with data from follow-up interviews undertaken with DCSs in early 2012. This article reveals the directors’ perceptions of their own ability to deliver integrated working in their authorities through this turbulent period of economic and political change. It is important to acknowledge that there is nothing new in the challenges presented by the Labour government after 2003 or the coalition after 2010. Governments have looked to directors of education and social services to manage profound changes in the content and culture of local services since the inception of local government. This has often involved making linkages across sectors and developing implementation strategies which reach across professional groupings. What follows offers a brief historical overview of the development of the role of director from its antecedents in directors of education and social services.

The DCS role emerged in government policy in England for the first time in 2003 and in legislation in 2004, under the Every Child Matters (ECM) mantle (Department for Education and Skills, 2003). The holders of the new posts in 150 local authorities across the country came to their role from different backgrounds, but for the most part from posts as senior officers in education or social services, mostly with professional backgrounds as teachers or social workers. Many of those in the role of DCS had worked as a chief education officer or director of social services and therefore brought distinctive cultures or professional perspectives and knowledge with them.

Although the creation of the statutory role of DCS was an unprecedented and deliberate move by central government to focus accountabilities and drive closer integration of services for children, there were historical roots that led back as far as the 1902 and 1921 Education Acts, which introduced the appointments of chief education officers (CEOs) or similarly designated lead officers for education. The 1944 Education Act placed a duty on each local education authority (LEA) to appoint a ‘fit person’ to be its CEO (Gillard, 1987). Although there were considerable variations across the country, the postwar period up to the early 1970s was dominated by powerful and influential CEOs (Brooksbank and Ackstine, 1984: 23) with strong educational philosophies, and no hesitation to challenge central government or local politicians. During this same period, the post of director of social services (DSS) was established through the Local Authority and Social Services Act of 1970, following the recommendations of the Seebohm Report (Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services, 1968) and the setting up of generic social services departments in local authorities. The DSS was to be directly accountable to the chief executive of the local authority as ‘the expanding partnership agenda means that Directors have additional leadership roles in cross-cutting initiatives often with Chief Executives and other agencies’ (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Association of Directors of Social Services, 2002: 9).

The 1972 Local Government Act removed the power of the secretary of state to veto local CEO appointments. This was one small indication of the rise of corporate local government and the decline of loosely connected local services, the largest of which was education. Large-scale reorganisation of local authorities brought with it a more politicised environment and the appointment of chief executives to lead with a stronger managerial culture and control. Although the CEO continued to play ‘an active role in determining the outcome’ of even the most significant decisions (Ribbins, 1985: 164), the influence of individual CEOs was fast diminishing. The 1970s has been described as ‘a decade of turbulence for education’ (Bush and Kogan, 1982: 4).

Although the post of DSS was introduced later than that of CEO, the development of strong professional and service identities and of managerial and political challenges to that culture followed similar trajectories. The corporate drive within local government to reduce service-based cultures and loyalties and to integrate services was presented as a means of producing a more effective public service response to local needs. At the time, it produced resistance in education and social services. It may also have created the conditions under which central government could dictate more effectively the conditions under which such service cooperation and integration would operate.

New Public Management emerged during the next 20 years, partly in response to a need to curb perceived professional resistance to change and to introduce a greater degree of order and political control. Bolton observed in 2005 the problematic nature of managing professionals from different sectors. This problem has remained evident since that time (Bolton, 2005). Instead, it is deemed to be more effective for professionals to become or to be ‘recreated’ as managers (Maile, 1995). The incorporation of professionals into management is a distinctive strategy aimed at controlling professionals through normative techniques which involve performance review and benchmarking, continuous quality improvement, appraisal, and target-setting such that ‘a discourse of enterprise is now intermingled with discourses of professionalism, quality, customer service and care’ (Evetts, 2009: 254, 251).

Such was the setting within which the new role of the DCS was promoted in 2004 and upon which its subsequent development was predicated. This was to be a fresh attempt by a government not afraid to impose its political will to integrate service delivery and secure clear accountabilities and to set aside the awkward fit of the professional legacies of the past.

The political and economic context under New Labour and the coalition

The DCS role had been framed by a sense of crisis under New Labour. In 2003, the effectiveness of local service delivery was challenged by the report by Lord Laming into the avoidable death of Victoria Climbie. The report heralded the Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2003) agenda and the Children Act (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2004) from which the statutory duty to provide a director of children’s services arose. Policy priorities came to be dominated by an imperative for inter-agency and multi-professional working, and for joined-up services with the child as the focal point.

These policies bore all the hallmarks of New Labour’s centralised policy-making, driven by the central executive and linked to Treasury-driven economic imperatives of reducing welfare spending. It set down five objectives of policy for all those involved in the delivery of services for children and young people. Each local authority was to establish a DCS who would implement this change. The ECM set down those aims clearly and specifically: first, to improve outcomes for all children and to narrow the opportunity gap for children and young people; second, to improve and integrate children’s services; third, to respond to a perceived lack of accountability and the absence of sharing of information between agencies; fourth, to encourage early intervention; and fifth, to reconfigure services around the child and family. This represented a ‘whole system change in the provision of children’s services’. This represented an approach to governing local services that was redolent with New Labour’s ideological themes of social justice and joined-up governance (Chapman and Gunter, 2009). Despite the echoes of ‘old’ Labour dirigisme in the reform, the new managerial language of ‘distributed leadership’ was employed as a means of ‘responsiblising’ a multi-professional workforce which reached across education in to welfare, health, and policing (Fairclough, 2000; Melucci, 1996).

Priorities for public service delivery in central and local government were to change after the economic crisis of 2008. Policy documents featured a bolder language of ‘new professionalism’ and the promotion of ‘connectedness’ and ‘fairness’ (Maclean, 2009). Labour’s early management of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 seemed to indicate the breaking of the link with the market, a move away from an economised discourse, ‘best value’, and so on which had for so long been staples in the public services. The Excellence and Fairness report talked of extending ‘new professionalism’ to ‘all people who work in public services’ and ‘unlocking the creativity and ambition of public sector workers’ (Cabinet Office, 2008: 26), unleashing the creativity of those who work on the front line.

This would suggest that directors had responsibility for overseeing ‘creative’ and collaborative working in public services. In 2009, six years after inception and despite the unfolding financial crisis, it can be argued that there were possibilities for public renewal in local service management (Hulme, 2010). Since the inception of the ECM in 2003/04 there had been very little private sector involvement in multi-agency working. It is a policy area which is very much focused on public services. There is an involvement of the voluntary or third sector, particularly in child welfare, but the dynamics of policy are very different. Integrated working does not conform to the evidence-informed policy prototype. It cuts across established policy regimes in education, social work, health, policing, and the criminal justice system. While it was centrally driven and controlled in an unprecedented way by directors, delivery involved an assemblage of policies and statutory requirements semi-embedded within professional standards for a variety of professionals in education and human services. This set directors up as a kind of public service ‘commissar’.

After the election of May 2010 political and economic priorities for local services were to be driven again by the ongoing economic crisis, but in a different direction by the Conservative-led coalition, with assertions that the public sector had fuelled economic meltdown. As David Cameron (2011) claimed in the Daily Telegraph, any public service could as well be run by the private sector (cited in Kelly and Dodds, 2012). The government has emphasised the importance of localised decision-making, with recent bills in education and health seeking to devolve responsibility for coordinating public services to institutions, potentially marginalising broader agendas about welfare, rights, and so on for children and young people (for example, see Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012). While the role of the DCS was seen to be instrumental in implementing the earlier agenda for integrated working, the recent shift in priorities has raised concerns about how the role may continue.

A series of local government reviews underlined the significance of this changed role in practice. Faced with speculation that the role was redundant after the slow demise of the ECM, the Munro report (Department for Education, 2011) recommended that the DCS role should be upheld, and that partnership working remain a crucial aspect of the provision of public services, particularly for vulnerable children and families. However, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) and National College survey of 58 local authorities reported that a third of councils had scrapped their DCS role or had plans to split the role or merge it with adult services (ADCS and National College, 2011b). It found that the role of the DCS defined by the Children Act of 2004 could no longer be taken for granted.

Recent public sector savings on front-line services have been mainly targeted on areas such as youth provision, early years provision, and school improvement, where government grants have ceased altogether or been significantly reduced, addressing what the 2010 Spending Review described as ‘reducing welfare costs and wasteful spending’ (HM Treasury, 2010). These changes are reflected in the revised leadership structures being introduced in many local authorities, with new roles being developed and services being moved around the local authority, sometimes across departmental boundaries. The expectation that directors become more strategic and more corporate is widespread and this is changing the relationship between DCSs and their senior leadership teams. Typically, senior officers reporting directly to the DCS are now taking on additional responsibilities, and becoming the key figures for most decision-making at an operational level.

During 2010 and 2011 a number of reports were produced that examined the direction of change for public services. The Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services (2011) reported on the nature of successful leadership for DCSs (in conjunction with the National College) and on emerging priorities for children’s services. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS and National College, 2011a) surveyed DCSs to assess perceptions of the scale and nature of changes taking place in local authorities and how these might impact on the organisation and delivery of children’s services. The ADCS identified two versions of the kind of leadership expected of DCSs (see Table 1), which were acknowledged potentially to create tension and competing demands of DCSs. Lowndes and Pratchett (2012) argue that the neglect of the partnership agenda by the coalition government, driven by defensive approaches to spending cuts, is resulting in decision-making that excludes the wider partnership.

Table 1.

Two Versions of Leadership in Children’s Services.

A. The lead professional	B. The corporate colleague
Modelling front-line delivery	Coordinating resources at the front line
Understanding children’s services	Understanding public services
Directly accountable	Holding others to account
Creating a stable organisation	Flexing the organisation according to need

Source: ADCS and National College (2011a).

Tempered by the language of the ‘Big Society’ (Cabinet Office, n.d.), within which power is to be transferred from Whitehall to local communities, the coalition’s approach to austerity since 2010 has had profound implications for the finances and scope of local service provision and this has had implications for the role of director. The government has seemingly recalled approaches to local government service provision last witnessed in the 1980s and early 1990s. Joined-up ambitions have not been sacrificed, but reduced in scope.

Far and away the most significant change in the way that services are being delivered since the election of the coalition government is the move towards commissioning rather than directly providing services (Glasby, 2011). However, there is still uncertainty about how best to commission services and who might provide them, and some DCSs are expressing concerns about accountability, particularly for high-risk services and quality assurance (ADCS and National College, 2011a).

In 2007, Gains et al. suggested that changes in the social and economic environment and the shifts towards a networked form of governance saw the emergence of ‘facilitative leadership’, which ‘is not about the direct exercise of detailed influence or control over decision-making, but rather about giving direction and then mobilizing the resources necessary to ensure that the vision is fulfilled’ (2007: 12). This gives credence to our suggestion of an evolving ‘commissariat’ role whereby directors, who previously modelled and oversaw delivery, have seen their role transformed. Instead, through the commissioning process, the reality of distributed leadership has come to mean multi-tasking in order to make local service provision more cost-effective, aligned to the ‘corporate colleague’ model of leadership that the ADCS (ADCS and National College, 2011a) identified (see Table 1).

Distinctions between the public and private sectors have also become blurred as policy networks have become increasingly privatised. The role may now be more analogous to that of an auctioneer than a commissar, while the pressure of performativity and accountability has increased through the drive towards sector-led improvements.

In order to explore the changing context in which directors have operated since 2003, our article now offers observations based on data gathered from directors in two rounds of interviews. The first round of interviews, conducted between 2007 and 2010, sought to explore directors’ perceptions of their own effectiveness in delivering the multi-professional work required by the ECM. The second round of interviews, conducted in 2011/12, focused on directors’ reflections on changes in their role since the change in national government.

Methodology

The research was designed with an inductive approach, allowing an exploratory study of the perceptions of DCSs. The data from 2007–10 are drawn from four interviews with DCSs in local authorities in North-West England, selected through purposive sampling from a total of 22 DCSs in the North-West (the sampling frame was drawn from the ADCS website). A second round of interviews was conducted during 2011/12. These consisted of three interviews drawn from the original four DCSs interviewed in 2007 (one had since retired), plus a further three DCSs who had not been interviewed previously, as illustrated in Table 2.

Table 2.

Data Collection.

Participants	Data collection
Participants	1st phase (2007–10)	2nd phase (2011/12)
1	a	b
2	a	b
3	a	b
4	a
5		b
6		b
7		b

Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted, which were audio taped (with consent) and transcribed according to recognised transcription conventions. Qualitative interviews are specifically useful when performing research with professionals (Arksey and Knight, 1999) as they enable room for complex organisational, political, and conceptual issues to be discussed. Using a semi-structured discussion guide that focused on the key research questions allowed the research to gather data on a range of predetermined issues, while allowing participants space to expand and elaborate as required. Thus, the research has enabled a critical and reflexive view of perspectives on the role of DCSs pre- and post-election and after four years of economic crisis management. We do not claim to present a complete view of the role of the DCS, and this work is still ongoing. (Ethical approval was granted by the University of Chester’s Faculty of Education and Children’s Services Ethics Committee and adhered to appropriate ethical protocols.)

After the data were collected, thematic analysis was used to analyse the interview transcripts. Thematic analysis is a commonly used form of qualitative analysis and identifies key themes within the text (Morse, 1993). This is done through a number of stages: familiarisation with the data; first-level coding; second-level coding or categorisation (following critical reflection of the first-level codes); identification of themes; and writing up.

A strong narrative emerged from interviews, from which the coding and categorisation process revealed a number of themes. These were the impact of the ECM agenda and the role of the DCS (specifically in relation to issues such as accountability and implementation), the impact of the economic crisis, and the changing political landscape (with sub-themes of localism and educational reform).

Directors’ perceptions of the impact of the ECM and the role of the DCS

In the pre-election era, it was evident that the role of the DCS was seen to reflect the level of support for ‘whole system reform’ along with the executive power of the role in coordinating public services regionally. The role provided visible public accountability for the provision of holistic services for children and directorial coordination of the work of public employees, ‘modelling’ front-line delivery under the ‘lead professional’ typology. The importance of integrated working and the children’s workforce were identified by participants as integral to the implementation of the ECM agenda, as one suggested:

For me one of the refreshing things has been that people are acknowledging the breadth of roles that can contribute to this … a lot of the [professional] barriers are starting to come down. (2a)

The need for reform to be ‘driven through’ by the role of the DCS was evident in comments from participants in the pre-coalition interviews, particularly in the following.

A lot of development is cultural in nature and I think you have to get the right balance between driving it on but not going too quickly that you alienate everybody. (3a)

You have got to keep banging the drum at all levels of the organisation. (2a)

It was widely acknowledged that the impact of the ECM was envisaged to be a long-term one and that ministers’ views were that ‘it would take at least ten years to get a cultural change’, as one participant commented. The need to encourage partnership and integrated working was considered of central importance and an aspect of the DCS role that was increasingly seen to be under threat from developing policy since the change in government:

I think one of the things that shouldn’t be underestimated is the way that a DCS in an area acts as a primus inter pares with the other statutory agencies and I think without a DCS it’s very difficult to see who would bring the partnership together in the way in which a DCS does. (1a)

One participant talked about how they had ‘created linkages they hadn’t had before’ and this was expressed as a strength in terms of individual working practices between different professional groups on the front line, but also as a demonstrable example of the role of the DCS engendering and supporting stability within the wider workforce:

Their role is a very significant symbol in the way that central government looks to local authorities and their partners to bring coherence to children’s services across the three broad areas of education, health and social care. (1b)

Participants recounted the overriding sense of unanimity across political boundaries in the early days of the ECM agenda:

I found almost universal support for the policy … that in local authorities with senior politicians, very few people would say this is the wrong policy agenda. (1b)

Following the coalition, the ECM agenda itself was described as being quite visibly abandoned, along with the political priorities that drove it. Yet, it is also the case that the five outcomes remain, under what we would term ‘austerity integration’ –in other words, getting people to do more for less, as the following comment indicates:

One of the surprises was that all reference to ECM was expunged. Interestingly, I still find regular reference to the five outcomes for children because of the way in which they’ve developed; they are relatively easy shorthand for looking at what children’s services are about. (1b)

Despite this early ‘universal’ support, however, the liberal rhetoric of social and educational policy masks to some extent the reality that directors are now increasingly overseeing the hollowing out of local services and the privatisation of public policy decision-making networks. Economic crisis and the response both politically and economically have highlighted ideological changes, something that emerges from our more recently conducted interviews.

The impact of the economic crisis on directors’ ability to implement change

At a time of economic crisis, the moral imperative about the delivery of services for less takes precedence. Directors are seen increasingly as having to hold the ring for a variety of providers as coordinators of corporate welfare, much more akin to the ‘corporate colleague’ typology in Table 1. Driving change through is still evident, but with greater emphasis on implementing spending cuts, rather than engineering change in professional knowledge and promoting genuinely integrated services, as the following comment suggests:

In a period of austerity the policy drivers tend to be how you might be able to deliver the same level of service but with less resource. The drive I think now for multi-disciplinary working for agencies working together is for senior managers and particularly for DCSs to see how they can bring that partnership together so that they can identify where the economies of scale are. (3b)

While there may well be similarities in terms of the way that directors orchestrate multiple services, the emphasis has shifted and is now more about developing and understanding public services more widely, and how the provision of services for children can be located across key areas of public policy, while trimming the fat.

Their role involves ‘flexing’ the organisation, which assumes a very different distributed leadership model that is less directorial, and is based on an economic imperative:

We’ve restructured within the council to reduce our senior leadership team. At times when we’re not trying to massively reduce our wage bill we might look at things in a purer organisational framework way, but in the current climate you can’t afford to not be pragmatic. (6b)

Directors themselves have at times struggled to adapt the language and policy imperatives of the ECM to these changed circumstances, as the following comments illustrate:

Distributed leadership is a concept we talk about quite glibly … delivering it is very hard … it makes me nervous, particularly in safeguarding, but we stick with it, and I think we will have a more sustainable set of changes as a consequence. (3b)

There’s an agenda around promoting professionalism … and individual decision-making which I think can only flourish if we distribute leadership and make people accountable for the consequences of their actions … and if you drive things through, make it top-down control etc., you might superficially end up with a lot of markers hit, but is it sustainable? (5b)

This marks an important shift from the direct accountability of directors to a more shared accountability model. The issue of accountability and distributed leadership featured prominently among the concerns raised by directors in the post-coalition interviews, and will be discussed in more detail later in this article.

How the changing political landscape since the economic crisis has impacted on service provision

Few would argue with the difficulties that have emerged as a result of the economic crisis. ‘Doing more for less’ is accepted as good practice in uncertain economic times. However, commentary from recent interviews conducted in 2011–12 reveals additional key factors that are identified as problematic in the ongoing implementation of the DCS role; these are the coalition’s localism agenda and the evolving educational reforms around academies and free schools.

Localism

Opinion around the coalition agenda for localism sees the changes justified by Big Society rhetoric, but lacking in substance, with a failure to present any real evidence base for the localism agenda:

Whether or not localism can put central government close to the heart of local communities I think is hugely debatable. (1b)

The ongoing impact of austerity in the light of economic crisis was identified as hugely influential in terms of the shift from an agenda driven by a directorial DCS role to one based more on the coordination and commissioning of services:

Now it’s difficult to drive that agenda when we’ve got many of the voluntary community and faith sector who are starting to feel the pinch as money dries up[;] so on the one hand you’ve got a policy driver for localism and on the other you’ve got austerity that is actually taking some of the capacity out of that localism agenda. (7b)

In addition, it was suggested that the regional executive role has been undermined, being replaced by a rediscovered ‘Thatcherite’ free local economy for service provision with a strong central direction, redolent of the free economy and strong state approach which had characterised public policy during the 1980s. Some of the concerns around localism stem from the changes that are being evidenced in the extent of accountability, as one participant suggested:

handing responsibility to a more local agenda … if you hand responsibility to somebody without giving them the adequate tools to discharge the responsibility then to me that is an abdication of responsibility. (3b)

The need for central government to ‘have a voice closer to people in the regions’ was cited as something that was now lacking with the abolition of the regional government offices:

National policy is dictated to a large extent by the influence of London and the South-East. (1b)

The emphasis of directors on this regional issue can be added to other aspects of political accountability thrown up by the changed political priorities combined with increased limits on the autonomy of the role.

Educational reform

The second phase of interviews revealed a shift in focus to managing the reform of school structures. If changes in policy implementation at the local level may be subject to political and economic forces, it was suggested that the coalition educational reforms are seen to be wholly ideological, and the most problematic:

If the school agenda goes down the track that Michael Gove really wants it to go down then Local Authorities will have very little to do with children’s education, although the guidance states very clearly that the DCS should exercise their influence in schools no matter what the school is, in order to ensure that children’s education is being properly delivered, but DCSs found it very difficult with academies to exercise that sort of role, because of the freedom that academies were given. (1b)

It has been suggested that the development of the children’s workforce, as part of the wider ECM agenda, was flawed from the outset because of the failure to incorporate educational practitioners. Thus, structurally, schools remained outsiders, something that has remained an issue as coalition educational reform has taken hold. As one participant suggested, the vision of integrated working was diluted as a result:

In a sense from day one part of the vision around integrated working and multi-disciplinary working was also being watered down because pragmatically we wanted to work out how to make a difference without having to change all the systems. (6b)

As a result, there is increasing concern that the continuation of the DCS role may itself be subject to pressures:

The way in which schools might be managed in the future means that a DCS’s influence could be significantly lessened in the way in which they would want to influence school performance, for example. (1b)

For a number of those interviewed, it was apparent that this suggested a number of systemic tensions, as one director commented:

The tension expresses itself in really much more to do with how we manage the local authority relationship with schools. (3b)

Recent work by Farnsworth (2012) and Sinfield (2012) has highlighted the extent to which public service management has come to involve the balancing out of social welfare in areas such as children’s services with ‘corporate welfare’ – managing the interests of those businesses and third-sector organisations charged with delivering much of what was carried out by local government. We suggest that the role of director can be viewed as one of holding the ring, through the commissioning process, in this increasingly complex and privatised network of stakeholders. In this sense, the role is as crucial to the ideological goals of the Conservative-led coalition as the ECM was to New Labour’s:

The academies programme¹ has tensions at that structural level and at an individual level … that really makes it hard to pursue the joined-up workforce agenda. That’s probably the set of linkages that we lost most quickly with the change of government, particularly with the TDA [(Training and Development Agency for Schools)] going and the GTC [(General Teaching Council);] it’s just the general investment in a children’s workforce stopped instantly, because it was replaced with a return to teaching and the rest … and teaching being supported in a different way using a different model. So that doesn’t help joining things up. (3b)

Themes emerging from the data

In the section that follows we explore the significance of some of the themes emerging from the data gathered to date. Our work has sought to address the following questions.

How effective do directors perceive their role has been in delivering integrated working and distributed leadership within their areas of influence?

What does the direction of children’s services look like in 2013, after four years of economic crisis management and austerity in the public services?

Directors’ perceptions of their role in implementing radical change

We have seen that the role of director, despite the particular circumstances of the ECM agenda, retains a strong linkage to the role of director of education outlined in our introductory section. Such a role was always to carry responsibility for education policy implementation. It is tempting to look at the tensions and dilemmas within the DCS role as a classic implementation problem. As we noted earlier, there is nothing new in this, but the ambition and scope of national policy and the pace of change since 2003 mark out the years of change covered by our data as significant. There was a very clear and simple policy agenda in the ECM. Professionals must work more closely together in order to improve outcomes for all children. Yet examples and case studies of successfully integrated delivery are few and isolated (outside some remarkable exceptions). In an era when policy-makers in central government were set on achieving tighter centrally driven policy delivery (the era of ‘deliverology’ (Barber et al., 2011)), there was an absence of a recent policy precedent and a dislocation between administrative structures and the realities of practice on the ground. This is what Cuban (1988) termed ‘loose coupling’. While this model predates the plethora of market reforms that we have witnessed since 1988, it captures the reality of the gaps between strongly expressed policy initiatives and the reality of practice in schools, with the often-documented issues of silos and the lack of trust, a common language, and understanding between professionals. The modernisation of education has not been a smooth path because, as Ball (2007) has shown, there remains an ongoing tension between capitalist accumulation and the regulative state (Chapman and Gunter, 2009).

Accountability and public service delivery

Our findings indicate some skilful management of national policy priorities by directors. As we indicated earlier in our overview of the development of the role, this has always been a key aspect of the role of director and at various points this has revealed considerable skill on the part of incumbents of the post. However, the changes that directors have been asked to bring about during the period covered by the data bring to the fore issues of accountability. Policy has been and continues to be very highly prescribed by central government and very heavily regulated by agencies such as the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), policed by performative management structures. These are very strongly established habits for policy-makers. The structures of governance are firmly in place to maintain policy continuity. Market-driven change and the maintenance of the standards agenda have given a direction to local policy for 30 years. The imperative to integrate services was and remains different. It required systemic change, which a single implementing agent could not deliver, despite the Labour government’s reform of central structures in creating the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Policy has not been delivered with the ‘efficiency’ of contemporaneous evidence-informed initiatives on academies and so on. There was no ‘what works’ guidance for encouraging integration, no blueprint, and no implementation chain (Pressman and Wildawsky, 1984) to ‘drive through’ change.

At the level of practice, implementation was not undermined by the classic ‘street-level bureaucrats’; it was simply a non-starter. Professionals from a variety of contexts were confused about how to adapt to the demands of inter-agency collaboration while operating within existing organisational cultures. Their work is heavily regulated by the policy regimes referred to above, yet they were and remain required to be creative: to forget elements of the ‘what works performativity and to be creative’ in their responses to other professionals.

Directors are faced with a comparable dilemma. They are required to deliver what is seen to be an undeliverable agenda and remain accountable for its non-delivery. The changing role of director, accounted for above, reflects a profound political change in public policy. Years of instrumental policy-making by governments of both parties has had the effect of ‘hollowing out’ policy processes, thus altering the notions of accountability underpinning the director’s role. They have been charged with implementing very major policy change within policy communities profoundly impacted by a democratic as well as fiscal deficit.

Our analysis leads us to believe that the coalition have dressed up the reform of local government with the rhetoric of a transfer of power from central to local government via the ‘Big Society’. Yet, this concept has never been truly unpacked. It remains an evidence-free zone. The coalition’s programmes for government (HM Treasury, 2010) have not offered a meaningful precedent or evidence base for localism. The reality of implementation, though, is about cuts to public spending: 27 percent cuts to local services through the spending review to date. We argue that the reality of localism is very reminiscent of early Thatcherism with its combined emphasis on reducing the local tax burden and Victorian or ‘common-sense’ values.

Within these constructs it can be argued that integrated working and distributed leadership come to be about working together for the moral imperative of reducing public expenditure – what we refer to as ‘austerity integration’. As discussed earlier in this article, the directors themselves have at times struggled to adapt the language and policy imperatives of the ECM to the changed circumstances:

Driving change through is still evident but it is about implementing spending cuts rather than engineering change in professional knowledge and promoting genuinely integrated services. (4b)

Our final aim in the article sought to move us towards a broader question: What does the direction of children services look like in 2013? It is difficult to address such a broad question from the basis of our interviews to date, and as already stated, this work is ongoing. However, implicit in the responses of the directors recorded above is an awareness of a profoundly changed role for the director. This, we have argued, symbolises a profound change in public policy management in England which is still in flux. Directors can be seen to be the local managers of the new network governance, chairing the auction of local services in education and social welfare from the extension of academies to managing service providers in the third sector. In doing so, they compel us to focus on the reality rather than the rhetoric of the ‘Big Society’ and through that to ask a substantive question about the role of local governance in the age of austerity: What is the appropriate role of government in managing the interests of semi-privatised schools and third-sector organisations?

Conclusion

It is remarkable that the role of the DCS has remained since 2003. We have argued that the role symbolised New Labour’s approach to directed centralised change in public services. In creating the role of director to ‘drive though’ integrated working for the ECM, the Blair government came as close as it did anywhere to genuinely reforming government to achieve joined-up ambitions and to develop an apparatus to deliver social change. Equally, we have seen that directors have played a key role in the delivery of the coalition’s strategy to contract out responsibility for the management of education. In this sense, the role of director provides a very interesting example of the changing nature of the policy process. Our analysis reveals that directors themselves have adapted to the very different needs of localised network governance, but that there is an increasing awareness of the limitations of the role and an anxiety about the extent to which they are responsible for the delivery of changed policy objectives. The findings also reveal a consensus between participants on the links between national policy and local priority and the implications of the structural changes we have referred to for their role (or former role). We argue, therefore, that there is a pressing need to debate this issue which has profound implications for the relations between central and local government and the relationship between government and civil society from the bottom up.

Footnotes

Note

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