Half way through Naomi Eisenstadt’s excellent book Providing a Sure Start, she refers to a meeting with Michael Barber, head of the Number 10 Delivery Unit during the Blair years.

 
Half way through Naomi Eisenstadt’s excellent book Providing a Sure Start, she refers to a meeting with Michael Barber, head of the Number 10 Delivery Unit during the Blair years. Typical of Eisenstadt, she describes her failure,in this case to present the good data that Barber demanded. She remarks on what she learned from that meeting and of Barber’s achievements. Which is how I got to reading his book Instructions to Deliver.
 
 
I must be the only person not to have heard of Michael Barber. His methodology, for managing government targets, described by Treasury mandarin Nick Macpherson as ‘deliverology’, underpinned attempts to transform the public sector in UK. The words ‘impressive reading’ seem to sit well with Instructions to Deliver with Barber and Blair being the most in awe of their achievements.
 
 
 Within a few years Barber and Blair were able to reflect that ‘we’ve done primary schools’. Education as a whole is knocked into shape by page 39. Health, Home Office and transport quickly fall into line. As Alastair Campbell puts it, in a quotation following hard on the heals of one from T.S. Elliot, ‘Deliver. It’s all that matters’.
This story seems to me to an important backdrop to Eisenstadt’s story, a critical insight into what was gained and lost by Blair’s approach to public policy. The Elliot quotation is apposite. It is from the Hollow Men. ‘Between the idea. And the reality. Between the motion. And the Act. Falls the shadow.’
 
 
Push and Pull
It is easy to characterise Blair as presidential and ‘top down’ but as Eisenstadt’s book reminds us it was much more complicated than that. Many Ministers, David Blunkett in particular, came into government determined to give local people a greater say in local services. Sure Start is a testament to this commitment. This fruitless search for a local that by-passed local authorities is being mirrored by the current Coalition Government. Politicians want to devolve, but they also want sufficient control to deliver either promises to the electorate or private passions. Barber gave them that control.
 
 
Blair was also local in the sense that he believed in the consumer not the producer. He felt that parents wanted high standards of literacy and numeracy, good discipline and to be treated with respect. This came from instinct not from data and may well have been right. But it eschewed the centralist responsibility, for a left leaning government especially, to do what parents want in principle but not always in reality, for social mobility, to give the poorest kids the same opportunities as better off kids, if not for the sake of human rights then at least for the sake of our future prosperity.
 
 
Barber reflects on the push and pull options available in the initial reforms of the education system. There was command and control, devolution and transparency -publish reliable data and shame schools into getting better- and quasi-markets -pay those who get the best results. New Labour veered to the first and second options, the Coalition towards the second and third.
But it was in the implementation that push won out for Blair. Government gurus David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler say that administrations have to decide whether to steer or row. Blair gave the instructions, Barber banged the drum and the government rowed. Management guru John Seddon, Barber’s nemesis, describes ‘deliverology’ as ‘bear down and blame’, a remark that, for all the bluster, many leaders of children’s services will recognise. 
 
 
Lost in the mix was any sense of experimentation. The answer was known, so compliance became the only necessity. It leads Seddon to reflect on the work of Taiichi Ohno for Toyota, getting workers on the production line to solve local problems, constantly improving efficiency to the point where a relatively small sewing machine company became the World’s largest manufacturer of cars.
Reading Barber reminded me of Simon Russell Beale as Stalin in John Hodge’s play Collaborators, determined, funny and dangerous in equal measure, a man of the people who nonetheless is in charge of the people.
 
 
Have England’s children learned to read and write?
To an extent, none of us would be too bothered about push or pull if the results were positive. Barber’s work touched most aspects of public policy but I am only qualified to comment on the full on assault on education. Did it work? 
 
 
From Barber’s perspective, undoubtably. There are graphs in the book that prove it. Graphs sit at the heart of ‘deliverology’. But there are case studies also. Hackney Downs, a failing secondary school, became Mossbourne Community Academy, a symbol of Blair’s legacy in education. When I ask my Hackney friends about Mossbourne they recognise it’s acheivements but lament the difficulty of securing a place. Most of them send their kids to private schools.
 
 
What do others think? The most exhaustive analysis was provided early on by Durham professor Peter Tymms, not long after Barber had solved the nation’s education problem. The achilles heal of ‘deliverology’ is that the manager uses his own data to decide on success. From Tymms’ perspective the data are flawed. His independent view took into account 11 sources.
 
He concludes that there were improvements in english and maths results for 11 year olds between 1995 (30 months prior to Blair) and 2000 (30 months post Blair) but that they steadied thereafter. There is a lot of error in all of the data sets but Tymms concludes that the pattern is probably true. But, as every parent reading this review will know from experience, the greatest variation is between schools. This has not changed.
 
 
Tymms likens England’s success to the ‘Texas Miracle’ performed by then Governor George W. Bush. Walt Haney and Stephen Klein’s careful analysis found it was more of a myth, although there were some improvements in Math scores. Coaching to the test seemed to explain most of the gains in Texas. Familiarity with a test boosts scores on average by three to six points.
 
 
The sober look at the effects of ‘deliverology’ would likely produce the same message in all areas. Claimed benefits are an illusion but there were some gains. The health service improved during the Blair years. Crime fell. Early years provision was systematised. Test scores got better.
 
 
It is the ‘job done let’s go fix something else’ mentality that wears. Real world systems are never fixed. They evolve largely according to the beat drummed by the passionate, reforming, innovating people who work in those systems. Toyota didn’t stop when they became the number one car manufacturer. They kept on plugging away at continuous, local improvement, inclusive of employees, driving at best value for the customer. They did not, cannot, will never decide their own success.
 
 
Barber’s world is in the shadow between the idea and reality. We can never be sure what happened.
 
 
Science and Policy
Although Eisenstadt’s work led to one of the major social policy developments of the last half century, her perspective is from a lower level in government hierarchy. Barber looks on down from the top.
 
 
Putting the two books together led me to conclude that the higher one goes in government the less evidence matters. Science was important to Sure Start, in its getting on to the public policy agenda for sure, in it’s creation, to a certain extent, and although the results of evaluation did not alter the policy decisions to expand, they did count.  While I felt the scientific community failed to answer the questions that Eisenstadt and her ministers were grappling with, Barber’s book led me to conclude that there isn’t a science that is right for the cabinet level of politics, for a president like Blair. Higher up, politicians are acting on instinct and gut. The output measure is re-election and Blair got that right three times.
 
 
Barber developed an evidence base that was right for that context. I think of it as evidence as cosmetic. A gestalt is formed and then data is added to pretty it up. This evidence base depends on lots of graphs in which the line rises left to right. It is an evidence base formed by people who know nothing about statistical theory and have scant interest in finding out. Peter Tymms isn’t mentioned once iby Barber, nor are nine of the 11 sources of data Tymms scrutinised.
 
 
The reporting from Barber’s data translates easily into political claims. Within a few years of the education reform Barber was talking about the English primary school systems as ‘third in the world,’ which is just plain silly. By the time he is done with education we have the best teacher training in the world. I asked an UK based international educational expert for her opinion and she said ‘we get a better applicant pool than most countries and add precious little value’.
 
 
Much of this would not matter were it not for the unintended consequences. Barber’s work meant listing the one per cent of ‘failing’ schools and five per cent of ’struggling’ schools, without fully reflecting that there will always be a one per cent or a five per cent at the bottom. Warwick Mansell hit on the phrase ‘the tyranny of testing.’ Most teachers must feel this on a daily basis. State schools are teaching to the test, some better than others. While this may serve Ministers it is at best disputable that it is best for children or indeed for the state’s long term productivity.
 
 
Michael Barber
I don’t know Michael Barber at all, and indeed I know next to nothing about political social policy, the world in which he excels. So I am in no position to comment about him or his work. But the book did indicate to me the way the Blair political administration formed the people like Barber who operated within it.
 
 
The Blair world was both ahistorical while having an acute sense of it’s place in future history. Ken Baker, whose education reforms were essentially continued by the Blair administration gets three paragraphs in the book, just one more than Liverpool Football Club centre back Jamie Carragher. 
 
 
We became very parochial under Blair. There is no mention in this book of Texas and the story of success and failure that the UK mirrored. Finland, a country without inspectors, tests, educational choice and indeed school at all before the age of seven, regularly tops the international education league tables but it too goes without mention.
 
 
And if Eisenstadt’s story represented social policy by women for women then Barbers is male. Another gap in the story -I went over the sections several times without making sense of it- was Estelle Morris’ resignation as Education Minister for failing to meet education targets. She held herself accountable. Barber too offered his resignation. But it was not accepted. 
 
 
Shining through Instruction to Deliver is Blair’s determination not to lose. It is a defeatless language riddled with omission and so shawn of any real narrative. It is a language that relies on new words like ‘deliverology’, The story is about making things happen but it has no ending. This is the vocabulary of the shadowlands between the idea and the reality.