The Future of the Fast Stream

Should there be a 'Not So Fast Stream'?

The Civil Service’s Fast Stream graduate development programme has changed a lot over the years. This newsletter summarises its history and then reviews a recent report Full Stream Ahead from the Reform think tank.

Please note that I do not regard myself as an expert on the history of the Fast Stream so the first part of this blog may contain inaccuracies - and the whole blog certainly reflects my prejudices which may or may not be soundly based.

Back in pre-history, when I joined the civil service, my recollection is that there were two fast track graduate recruitment schemes. One scheme recruited ‘generalist’ administrators who were then allocated to specific departments. The other recruited future tax inspectors who would be “In Command (of a local tax office) at 30”. I had no interest in becoming a generalist civil servant and didn’t fancy living in London so I applied to, and was accepted by, what is now HMRC.

(My salary was around £1,400 a year and I remember being impressed that inspectors in charge of most offices earned over £3,000. Isn’t inflation wonderful!)

The training and HR support was brilliant - for both schemes. Nothing online in those days!

Having shed my undergraduate dislike of the city, I was transferred to London (Colindale Tax Office to be precise) three years later and became an ‘administrator’ around four years after that. As far as I can recall from that perspective, the first degrading of civil service training in general, and Fast Stream training in particular, was the closure of the National School of Government (previously the Civil Service College) in 2012. A letter from Christopher Jary to Lord (Francis) Maude nicely (and bluntly) explains why this was a huge mistake.

There were further changes in 2015:

• The ‘generalist’ scheme was discontinued and replaced by fast stream recruitment to the policy profession.

• 16 new fast streams were opened up to facilitate the recruitment of a wide range of other professionals.

• successful applicants were no longer allocated to a specific department but became ‘centrally managed’ thus ensuring that their temporary line managers now had much less interest in providing high quality training and other experience.

• successful applicants were no longer offered permanent contracts but, some time later, had to justify their continued employment. (This decision was subsequently reversed.)

The Treasury sensibly opted out and introduced their own Graduate Development Programme which continues to this day. (And it is interesting that HMT has been the only department to buy multiple (and therefore inexpensive) copies of my How to be a Civil Servant for their graduate trainees. Over 6,000 other new entrants in other departments have had to buy it for themselves.)

Now … Reform’s recent report:

The first thing to say is that it is a easily readable and accessible source of information and comment on the current Fast Stream. There’s no point in my repeating it all here. Please read the report! And I am not going to repeat with approval all the many excellent recommendations including better career management, better mentoring and improved training in hard skills.

But it is worth acknowledging here the way in which Reform unearthed some serious criticisms of the present scheme. Here are some extracts from the report:

Placements vary wildly in the opportunities they provide fast streamers [and offer] training which is insufficiently focused on hard skills.

Every scheme promises leadership opportunities within the civil service, though many now specify that this will be within a profession. None focus primarily on the importance of overall leadership and management of the civil service across these functions – and of course the Generalist scheme, which used to serve this purpose, has been discontinued.

There is a growing perception that people can progress just as quickly, or even faster, by not being on the Fast Stream. Many interviewees told us that in the 2016-2022 period in particular, during which the civil service significantly expanded, comparable graduates hired directly into civil service roles at EO/HEO level reached Grade 7 (the grade successful fast streamers are promoted to on completion of the scheme) just as quickly as fast streamers did.

Many fast streamers also seem to be leaving the scheme before completing it, either to take up promotions offered elsewhere in the civil service, or to move into mainstream roles which are more prestigious than those they were posted to by the Fast Stream, or better paid.

One former fast streamer interviewed for this paper said that “of the three best fast streamers” in their peer group, “two left for mainstream HEO and SEO jobs” and another “applied for a Grade 7 job very early”. Another explained that there was a period when they were “essentially on gardening leave for two months” because there were no Grade 7 posts available once they had passed the end-of-scheme assessment. Some even suggested that the Fast Stream is “designed to push everyone into the middle”, and wasn’t concerned about the careers of the most exceptional performers who inevitably left.

Departments are incentivised to ‘bid’ for fast streamers to fill many different kinds of role, since this process allows them to circumvent regular civil service HR procedures to hire people – procedures which are often long and complicated. Interviewees explained, as a result of this model, specific placements often “aren’t given much thought” when they are scoped, with regards to their suitability. Many reflected on unfulfilling, personal experiences of arriving in a department and realising that they had very little real work to do, or that their area of work had been deprioritised by ministers months ago.

Since fast streamers can express a preference for, but have limited ability to directly decide the department, specific role (beyond the profession their stream is aligned with, e.g. Policy) or location of their placements, there is limited competitive pressure for departments to provide a high-quality, fulfilling experience. Hence, the amount of responsibility fast streamers are given, how integrated they are in teams, and their learning opportunities – including their ability to demonstrate leadership – vary drastically from placement to placement.

Interviewees argued that, in general, the quality of Fast Stream placements was random, and roles are not well scoped to provide the high-quality experiences needed to build leadership and management skills. One recalled a particular posting where they arrived to discover their policy area no longer existed, and their main remaining work for the next six months was to “design a poster for the team”. Another said that a colleague in their team was referred to as a “spare fast streamer” because “there wasn’t really a role for them”, in a team which was supposed to be winding down that year.

Interviewees reflected that most Fast Stream training stems from the idea that people mainly require leadership skills (“an inherently nebulous concept”), and that this expectation aligns with a wider government culture plagued by a “tyranny of the gifted amateur”. This leads to a prioritisation of what they said were “abstract sessions” on, for example, “leading in ambiguity” and “commercial awareness”, over training and support to develop hard-edged skills. As one former fast streamer put it: “Most fast streamers were student society presidents or something, they’re presenting to people in their jobs, they don’t need training on presentations. They need hard skills”. Another said that training is “nowhere near as good as comparable private sector programmes”.

[Quoting Michael Gove (then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster] “Too much current Civil Service training is about vapid abstractions such as ‘Collaborating Better’ rather than about what works in classroom instruction or how to interrogate climate modelling or to find out what really goes on in the preparation of Crown Prosecution cases which leads to so many cracked trials”

As I mentioned above, Reform make a number of recommendations that will help tackle some of the problems that they identified. They do not, however, favour reverting to the old system in which fast streamers are given, and spend much of their time in, a more caring departmental home. Their view is that there remains a place for a cross-Whitehall fast stream given that the government wants to see departments sharing best practice and breaking down siloes.

But Reform do recommend the re-creation of the National School of Government in the form of a British École d’Administration National (ENA) - recently renamed and relaunched as the National Institute of Public Service (INSP).

I am much less enthusiastic about Reform’s answer to the concern that the current Fast Stream fails to develop and motivate high performers and was instead “designed to push everyone into the middle”. They recommend that there should be a …

new Executive Leadership Scheme … focused on building cross-functional management capability. The scheme should have a small cohort size [c.40?], be branded as an opportunity for ‘exceptional future leaders’ to join the civil service, and have a separate pay spine benchmarked to elite schemes in other sectors.

This just feels like the wrong way to go. The vast majority of graduate recruits would be identified, from Day 1, as unlikely to lead the future civil service either because they are scientists, statisticians or other non-policy professionals - or because they were not seen, whilst at university, as an exceptional future leader. This would surely entrench one of the worst features of the old civil service that Fulton and numerous subsequent reform initiatives have failed to kill off: a self-replicating, self-confident, inward looking elite, better paid and fast tracked (via ‘suitable’ jobs not open to others) to positions of great power in No.10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. There would be next to no room at the top for a scientist or ICT professional or anyone whose career had involved managing large numbers in regional or local offices.

You would certainly have to have huge faith in the selection process if you were to bet the long term future of the civil service (and government?) on some psychometric and other testing of bright undergraduates. Even the current selection process, as I understand it, weeds out those who (amongst other things) give the wrong answers to multiple choice leadership and management questions. I simply don’t know how we can expect even experienced colleagues to identify the right answers to such questions when so many management decisions, in the real world, depend upon knowing the characters of those being managed, the wider context of the problem, and possibly even employment law. Our executive leaders’ main skill would be passing online exams!

(I was even once on the fringes of a conversation in which an ex-Cabinet Secretary and a couple of ex-Perm Secs bemoaned the fact that they had all tried to help their young relatives give the right answers to online questions, whereupon the candidates were told that their applications would be taken no further.)

Why don’t we just accept that:

• lots of excellent young people already apply to join the Fast Stream,

• unfortunately only a fraction of them can be accepted,

• the successful candidates are a brilliant resource, but

• they are currently poorly trained and poorly managed?

The correct response to those who have justifiable complaints about their training and progression should be to improve the career management of the whole cohort rather than create a Not-So-Fast Scheme for those who are not seen as future leaders.

Martin Stanley