John’s Idea

A lot has happened at the IDeA over the last few months.  Lucy de Groot has left and Paul Roberts has taken over as interim Managing Director.  My own role has changed and, in addition to existing responsibilities, I’m now leading on the development of the strategy to take things forward over the next 18 months. 

The first stage of this work is now complete.  After intensive discussions at a senior management level, the Board has this week agreed the initial strategy statement.

The strategy is designed to respond to three features of the external environment:

·         the worst outlook for public spending for 30 years;

·         a likely change of government;

·         the growing consensus on the direction of public service reform.

While expenditure on improvement activities is going to be much harder to sustain, and a new set of people are going to need to be convinced of its value, the direction of public sector reform provides the argument for some continued investment.  In particular a new government will still need the assurance that local government’s improvement can be maintained and, in the context of consensus on deregulation and devolution, this assurance can be provided by a joined up convincing proposition on sector led improvement.   Sector led improvement can also be used to justify a reduction in expenditure on both inspection and government directed improvement.

There are six streams of work in the proposed response.  In a nutshell these aim to demonstrate how the Agency, probably much smaller, supports a growing role for sector led improvement.  The unifying theme is an even stronger focus on the core peer methodology pioneered by the IDeA. 

Having established the Strategy we are now moving into an intense period of design and the aim is to present an implementation plan to the Board in October.  A key input into this design will be thinking around social networking and Web 2 and how we can use this to extend further the core peer working methodology.  Without anticipating the output too much, it is essential that whatever emerges takes us quickly towards an organisation which is simpler, leaner and more flexible and even more organically linked into local government.

Apologies for not having posted a blog for several months but now seems like a good time to re-start exposing my stream of consciousness around all things IDeA.